Bitcoin Forum

Is there anyway for someone to explain this in not so technical terms, the pros and cons of both of these and what they are?

From my understanding:

POW (proof of work) is bitcoin being mined through mining rigs using computers. The first computer that finds the answer distributes it to the network and it is added to the blockchain and the miner gets a reward. So the proof of work is the computer computation.

POS (proof of stake) is bitcoin being mined simply by owning that coin over an arbitrary amount of time. You hold the coin and get more of that coin, because you hold it.

Is this correct?

Yes, that's correct and simple.

in addition:
Proof of Work (POW) is "Mining" using hardwares like Processors, GPUs, ASICs or even HDD/RAM.
Proof of Stake (POS) selection can be randomized depending on the "stake" which is directly or indirectly based on the holder's total number of coins in possession.

Every POS coins differ a lot in picking/distributing the reward.
Some are using "MasterNodes" that pose as a full node and a non-hashing miner that holds the owner's coins at stake.
Some are simple higher share higher chance which can easily leads to centralization.

You can't mine with a HDD. Neither with RAM only.
A HDD does store data. It does NOT calculate anything. Particularly it is not possible to calculate hashes on an HDD.
The same does apply to RAM. Thats 'just' memory.




This CAN lead to more centralisation than POW, but doesn't have to.
It doesn't really matter whether you stake an insane amount of money to get a big % of the total hashrate or just buy an insane amount of ASICS (for an insane amount of money) to gain the same big % of the hashrate.

In addition to that, there are several major advantages of PoS over PoW. The most important in our opinion is that it's not damaging the environment as much as the PoW, as the whole "mining" process involves the usaging a lot of electricity. There was a research which pointed out that the mining worldwide uses as much electricity as a small country (Moldova, to be precise) and those costs and effects will only go up. On the contrary, PoS doesn't use nearly as much electricity. The other advantage is that for PoS you need to own and "lock" the currency, which means you need to buy it in first place and that points out that you actually believe in the project, as for the PoW you only need a mining hardware and nothing more. You can "mine" a cryptocurrency and sell it right after that, which is just the opposite of the original idea of cryptocurrencies.

Proof of Capacity (PoC) is not the same as Proof of Work (PoW). OP was mentioning PoW vs. PoS.
But this still doesn't mean that you can 'mine' with your HD.

It is more like staking your storage (e.g. lending to others). You are not actively using the space to calculate something.
Thats basically mining through 'staking storage'. Just like you can mine coin X by staking coin X for a timepsan of Y.

There is always ups and downs, But the real question there is which one would obtain more support from crypto individual user?

I simply understand that POW needs technical analysis, while in POS is upon the amount of numbers.

PoW's disadvantage is all the energy use. In a world where most of of energy coms from fossil fuels that is a problem. But PoW has also stood the test of time, we know it is highly secure.

PoS solves the energy issue because there is no computation arms race involved. However proof of stake basically lets the rich get richer. While that is also true in PoW, PoW it isn't related to your share of the coin. In PoS the more supply of the coin your control the more money you get. That's more of a problem that PoW's competition for computing power that is completely outside controlling the supply of the coin. Also PoS works a lot better if no new coins are being generated. Because otherwise the economic inequality of the situation gets even far worse, if the people who have the most coins not only get most of the tx fees but also most of the newly minted coin. That sets up a recipe of the rich getting richer and controlling the majority of the future supply simply by the fact that they have much of the existing supply, which would be disastrous for the economy of the coin. And in Ethereum I believe they announced that the lower limit on being able to stake coins when they get PoS running is going to be 1000 Eth. So in that specific case literally only the very rich (and specifically the very rich in Ethereum) will be able to "mine", which makes the problem even worse again.

PoS also means for mining you have to lock your coins away. So PoS kinda goes directly against it a coin being a payment platform.


Neither one is perfect. They both have big flaws.

If Ethereum would switch to a progressive POS adoption it will make the perfect altcoin scam cycle.
1 Premine with token sale
2 POW
3 Hybrid POW/POS
4 POS
5 Bankrupt

That's so 2013/2014

This is the simplest basic explanation. Proof of Work (PoW) requires more calculation power and right now it's not mineable with desktop/laptop CPUs so, mostly ASICs (for Bitcoin, Litecoin etc.) and GPUs (Ethereum, zCash etc) are being used for mining (actually, calculating the hash nounce value according to the algorithms)

Proof of Stake, requires keeping altcoins in the Wallet and keeping it online (for syncing blockchain) As much as you have the coin, you get reward.

PoS is far more advanced approach since it demands much less electricity. However, this approach is good when it's applied from the first days of project's life. Live migration from PoW to PoS is very painful since it demotivates miners and inevitably leads the project's to its fatal split.

Depending on who you ask. POS is may be a step backward. A lot of stalled projects are POS based which looked good when they started.

I think POS is only advanced with respect to its "greener approach" to mining

With respect to a coin, there just aren't proper POS (and MN) models that work as well as POW models. If you browse the altcoin announcements the few kind of POS models that show up:

* Fully POS, you need to buy the coin with btc/fiat in order to be able to "mine". So you're basically asked to invest money in order to get a higher stake probability. What people don't tell you is that you can very easily be out-invested in this model because of the increasing coin supply over time (you own less coins vs total coins) AND the amount of "big spenders" that tend to increase for staking. This means that you sit with the problem of your network weight decreasing over time.
* Hybrid POW/POS, only rewards the initial POW contributors tbh. But because of the nature of POS, their POW shares gives them such a vast control over the coin during it's lifetime that it will be very hard to compete unless you buy their shares out. And in this case, these POW contributors can choke the supply if they wanted to, which is a form of centralization
* Masternodes I have mixed feelings about. They seem to be a fair approach so far and the coin yields seems to be distributed evenly over the number of MN's in the network. I suppose that this way, the only way to yield more coins is to buy more MNs which seems to be a reasonable ask. For me the key balance here is the collateral required for a MN. Too low and then everybody is a MN. Too high and then there's only a few MN which rewards the early adopters

To me, POS are very weighted towards its whale buyers. MN can be done in a manner that's fair. My main thought principal is that cryptocurrency was always meant for everybody, so some layman with a scrappy old machine would always get the opportunity to mine and gain coins. Yes, there are centralization attempts like mining farms and ASICs (nothing wrong with these btw); but it's not like your old machine vs an ASIC, you can join a pool and still get rewards. And when a coin gets popular, it's increasingly harder to get centralization over it via mining (unless you're XVG LOL); making it more fair than POS.

While I appreciate POS's green concept, it's just that the current currency/financial models feel very biased towards big spenders, which I feel causes centralization.

I think the only fair POS approach I found in a coin, and I am not sure I can even call it POS is with NEO. There, you get GAS from holding NEO even if it's just 1 NEO. And that is something that's guaranteed unlike a POS network which has your rewards as a variable.

I think you got wrong with POS terms, as the coin not get locked, it can be used but the POS means certain part of time you have to hold the coin in the wallet to get the POS coins , it means that it is proof that in the stake time you were holding this much of coin for that you get percentage of coin for staking.

I think both have their own goods and bad terms. In POW you can mine through hardware according to the coin specifications , so it means it will also give you mining expenses. But in POS  you just have to hold the coins in  wallet and according to it you get the coins as per the stake percentage.

Thank you for full answer!
yes, it is right, for example, BTC and ETH have two this alghorithms, because, we can mining its

Bro, not all energy sources can damage the environment. A large scale miner could solely depend on hydro, solar and other clean energy sources without harming the environment. I just think the anti PoW people have problems with something else not really the energy aspect

Hydropower also has a major impact on the environment:

• Blocks fish migrations
• Transform a free-flowing river ecosystem to an artificial slack-water reservoir habitat.
• Holds back sediments that would naturally replenish downstream ecosystems.
• Large dams have led to the extinction of many fish and other aquatic species, the disappearance of birds in floodplains, huge losses of forest, wetland and farmland, erosion of coastal deltas, and many other unmitigable impacts.
• Most reservoirs are significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (a recent study pegged global greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs on par with that of the aviation industry, about 4% of human-caused GHG emissions).

Hydropower can be considered a green solution when compared to coal utilization. But if we could avoid it, it would be better.

But still, PoW is today the only proven attack-safe system in a fully decentralized environment. This is the main discussion. There is no safe, decentralized PoS system yet. What exists are centralized systems that at some point want to create a decentralized autonomous governance authority.

All decentralized currencies today use PoW. All the others are still centralized projects with a large budget for the organization itself to maintain and spend on marketing.

source: IR (https://www.internationalrivers.org/environmental-impacts-of-dams)

I did some edits on your quote and your understanding is correct.

Let me come to Pros and Cons.

POW: It is costly method as you need Hardware(sometimes specialized also)and lot of electricity is used.
         For Network big like Bitcoin, 51 % attack cost is too high but for some new coin where network is not so big (or do not have many miners)
          51% attack  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=332584.0)  can be successfully executed.
         It make coin fully decentralized and anybody is free to mine.

POS: It is cheap method and no specialized hardware is required. Electricity requirement are also minimal.
         One who has large stash of the coin will get big share, making rich more richer.
         If coin holders want to keep somebody out of network they are able to do so by not distributing there coins outside their network.


        

An 51% attack is completely independent from the consensus algorithm (PoS/PoW).
Decentralization also does not depend on PoS vs. PoW. Depending on the implementation of the PoS algorithm, mostly anyone can mine.




It is not cheap, since you have to lock away a big amount of money. It is like receiving interest.




The same applies to PoW:
One who has large stash of money will get a lot of asics (and therefore more hashrate), making rich more richer.



??? ::)

No, leave the scamcoins and their conspiracy theories out of the discussion.

There's no such thing as "pre-mine" that's just the early stage of a coin which only the developers and early adopters are the only miners in the network.
Scamcoins/Shitcoins usually use that as an excuse to their Pump and Dump scam: 50% Premined for future developments, etc.

One scamcoin modus for example: Developers have secretly mined the earliest blocks until they reached a sufficient amount enough to pump the price once it reach the exchanges, when the investors flock in, they will dump the remaining coins in their possession ~dirty profit.

And you've mistakenly identified POS as ERC20 Tokens.

Thank you very much, sir, for your explanation. Sometimes some people really have mistaken and confused. My friend ever asks me why there is a token (erc20) can be mined. After I search on the internet, I found about https://postoken.org (https://postoken.org). What do you think about it, sir?

I do not think Ethereum based tokens are mined. I used to think they are produced alongside Ethereum during mining. Actually they are automatically produced  via smart contract.

I think that everything is about what you can give to the network, in POW you put you computational power, in POS you "frezze" your coins, in a strange way you are giving your thrust to the network, putting your money as a promise that you will keep the coin because you believe in the project, and is like somebody tells early in both if you are rich you become more rich... it's something inevitable

The thing is how prevent tho vulnerabilities of each protocol, and how to create better consensus protocols, remember that exists other alternatives to  POW and POS

If I am not bad I saw a interview with Vitalik Butterin talking about implementation of a Proof Of Stake ( PoS ) on Ethereum blockchain . In my opinion would be great if he could do this . We can save a lot of energy that rigs with gpus require for work.
But that guy who wants PoS need to be rich af :)

It is correct. Though incomplete.
Stake also means active participation by having a node with your wallet (holding your coins) up and running in stake vote mode.
Work is not exactly finding an answer (I would think answer is something that someone already knows). I would say PoW is finding a solution to a problem. A solution nobody knows, and a successful miner occasionally should find it and get a reward for it.

Thanks for you question though :)

How does POS help with transactions though? With POW the miner checks to see if the transaction is legit and not a double spend. With POS is the person staking their coin, verifying the transaction?

Great writeup. I'd also just want to add POS also encourages holding

Trying to get around PoW is like trying to cheat the laws of the universe: you just can't.

Every other model has been already been refuted. Google "nothing at stake", there have been disasters before in PoS coins like NXT.

DPoS (deleted proof of stake) should bring alarms to experienced people in the field... "delegates" is the last thing you want in a decentralized system.

All these other coins like IOTA, Byteball etc.. simply aren't safe enough to trust $millions worth of anyone's wealth at.

I wish we had something cleaner than PoW, but the raw power used in the BTC network is what makes it insanely secure. The only risk is % of hashrate centralization as we know, but that is something we have to deal with.

Agreed, In POS more you hold, more you get in stakes.


First ,get your concepts clear, POS is not mining.
For 51% attack, if you read the URL topic, you will understand that. For 51% attack in POS, I need to hold 51% of coin. Should I attack the coin in which I am the majority holder. Ok Give me an example in which a POS coin suffered or threatened by 51% attack.


Mining is not profitable for every coin.Even profitable it took time to break even. Coin you are mining now changes it algorithm then all your mining equipment will become useless on very next day. With POS , you do not wait for break even time.  
What do you want to say mining equipment's are cheap?

If coin forks itself and start using new algorithm then  all the ASIC will be worthless.
 

Don't Mind, I am just saying if coin creator and his group of friend decided that they will keep all the supply and do transactions between them only , then no body else will get the coin.(Hypothetically possible).

No, PoS is not mining. PoS is an consensus algorithm. But there is a process called mining.
You should read my post more carefully. Mining is achieved via staking (Makes sense, doesn't it ?).

Mining does not mean to dig bitcoins out. Mining is the process of creating a new block and adding it to the blockchain (irrelevant whether PoS or PoW).
Mining does (logically) work differently in PoS compared to PoW.




Creating a hardfork is a senseless argument to bring.
The same can be applied to PoS: 'If coin forks itself and start using PoW then..'. Rubbish.




This does only work if the 'coin creator' and his group do not share any coin from the beginning (i.e. from the first block). This would be similar to a private chain/fork.
A small stake outside of the group would enable people to generate more 'outside of this group'. How is this either a pro/con regarding PoS ?

If it is a 'private chain': Who cares? Only the small group could care. Noone else would care about this coin.
If its not a 'private chain': It is not possible to achieve it in this case.

It is irrelevant.

This is simply incorrect, who taught you this cr*p? POW and POS is a blockchain consensus mechanism.

In a nutshell:
POW = block validator is the one who provide most of the work (which is computation power)
POS = block validator is the one who provide most of the coins at stake

That said in POW if you have 10x more hash power, you will be able to validate 10x more blocks. In POS if you have 10x more staked coins, you will be able to validate 10x more blocks. Here's the thing, actually POW is also a POS because you're staking electricity to generate such hash power. POW is considered superior because you stake thing (electricity) outside the system into the system, not like POS.

Full explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W_3AQrQEOM

Correct me If I'm wrong, If bitcoin doesn't use PoS then what about the bitcoin's hardforks? Do they use PoS because we can earn the same or half amount of hardforks if we own an equal amount of bitcoins? Enlighten me

It has nothing to do with PoS, a Bitcoin fork is simply a copy of Bitcoin blockchain up to block x.
For example Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin chain from block 478558. That means at block 478558 if you have coins on BTC chain, you'll also have coins on BCH chain. (CMIIW)
Some so called "bitcoin fork" need to generate coins from genesis block due to technicality, they'll take snapshot at block x then airdrop it. It might be 1:1 ratio or others.

If the coin uses PoS, then you can get a reward for possession these coins. for example, you have 10 000 xem coins and you can earn rewards for using those coins. Reward only in XEM

If you do not go into the details, then you are absolutely right.
But there is one thing, with POS mining your wallet should always be open (running on the computer and not being closed), and you can not use these coins either. And accordingly each coin has different rewards.

I think that the advantage of PoW over PoS in large scale implementations is indeed the fact that it uses raw processing power (translated in hashpower) and electricity; this way, the coin gets a real value, being backed by the amount of energy and equiment involved in securing the blockchain, while making it more resilient to larger attackers such as nation states.


Every complex system has trade-offs, but for the moment PoW has shown its advantages in open, permissionless blockchains due to the robustness of the consensus protocol and its inherent simplicity that greatly reduces the attack surface.

Actually, as far as I know, in Bitcoin there are already implemented some mechanisms that can detect network partitioning; the downside is the fact a large portion of the hashpower is geographically located in areas susceptible to network partitioning behind strong firewalls - this can affect decentralization because not always the longest chain/with most accumulated hashpower is the *true* chain, as one can remember what happened in early 2013: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/

A lot of people argue that POS is better in the sense that it doesn't contribute to to making climate change worser than it is. I think both POW and POS has its ups and downs.

The problem is that there is a misconception about PoW impacting the climate on a large scale. For example, mining gold and other ores can be much more energy intensive; more insights you can get from this article (several months old): https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-04/bitcoin-vs-gold-which-ones-bubble-how-much-energy-do-they-really-consume although there are other reports with more recent information on the internet

I would like to bring this twitter post from Hal Finney into the discussion: https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538

"Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation"

Please note the date of the tweet, 27 Jan 2009.

I have some confusion, What types of attacks are getting discussed here for which it is easier to attack POS then POW (leave bitcoin network when giving example of POW).
 I think if a big miner decide than all the newly started POW coin can be easily attacked by the raw mining power.

A newly started PoW coin can have a different hashing algorithm implemented; for example, Bitcoin uses SHA-256d, Litecoin uses Scrypt, Ethereum uses Ethash, Dash uses X11, Zcash uses Equihash, and so on. The attack depends on your hashpower with regard to a specific hashing algorithm.

I will suggest to talk about in this way

POW vs. POW asic vs. POS

cause, for me, the real POW, decentralized is not asic, but the rest

I agree, this type of attack is feasible. Even POW takes the longest chain automatically then what will happen to transactions in other chain?

Are they will be automatically reverted because longest chain do not have any information about another chain so for it they never happened.

If chain fork automatically due to these circumstances then it will be blow to that crypto currency  because the transaction are non reversible and it will mean Merchant on other chain sell their goods for free.

Transactions CANNOT be reverted under any circumstances. If they are broadcasted, they would eventually be confirmed or invalid (if the inputs gets used in another transaction). Obviously, it won't disappear or anything; else no one would be using Bitcoin.

When the client sees another chain with a longer proof of work, they take the transactions in the orphaned chain and put them back into the mempool. For miners, they will include the transactions in their block. They are treated like a normal transaction.

POW provides complete decentralization of power and control over the distribution and implementation of major technical and economic changes in the network. But investment is more in this system. And energy consumption is also high.
POS If the Proof-of-work is based on mining and computing power, the Proof-of-stake derives from actual holdings of the cryptocurrency. It has high speed, less time consuming and less costly

Surprise, surprise. POW does not provide decentralisation of power and control. The power and control of anything can still be centralised with a few entities, if they have sufficient resources. POW is merely a way to distribute coins and to secure the network. POW does not make it such that everyone has to follow what the miner says.
The speed for POS and POW is the same, if the parameters of the coins are the same. You forgot to list the disadvantages of POS. Did you even read the thread?

POS: You have to proof you hodl
POW: You have to proof you worked

POS: is a try to create a cost/opportunity from nothing . You can generate infinite parallel chain for free.

In example, there is a conflict between history A and history B, with POW you CAN'T confirm both histories, you have to choose one. So the longest history win.
with POS you can confirm both histories at the same time at not cost.
so to solve this you need a social meta-consensus making POS not necesary  at all.


POS security is based on some kind of punishment making it more similar to LN than blockchain. With the difference that LN fail only affect a local environment, a POS fail affect all the global environment.

Of course, there are things that affect the enviroment more then miners, but it doesn't mean that this is not a problem at all. Why should we turn the whole planet into one huge mining farm, if we talk about mass adoption of crypto? I know PoS also has so many cons, but now we actually see a new proof-of-anything algorythm in every other project, so we shouldn't look a PoW and PoS as at two polar opposites, like black and white.

BTW, the OP may want to check this for more technical details: https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf

Hmm, you seem to be confused and think the nothing at stake mythology is a real problem.
Standard PoS wallets don't Multi-stake, meaning your n@s myth can't currently even be attempted.

If someone did waste their time and make a multi-staking wallet, it would do nothing but waste endless amounts of ram and processing power and energy attempting to stake multiple chains versions simultaneously, essentially becoming closer to a wasteful proof of work than an energy efficient proof of stake.
Example: The more blocks you try and run in parallel the more resources you waste.
Their is zero benefit to even attempting it, which is probably why no one has even bothered to write a multi-staking PoS client, years after the myth was spread

Additional examples:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1709776.msg17135430#msg17135430
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1709776.msg17136990#msg17136990
 

https://www.reddit.com/r/NXT/comments/2sewhu/nothing_at_stake_attack_researched_and_deemed_not/

FYI:
The Longest Chain with the Highest Difficulty wins in Proof of Stake as well.
With Proof of Stake , however the number of coins per block and the target speed help determine the true difficulty for a Proof of Stake coin.
hashProofOfStake <= [Coin-age] x [Target]   
[Coin-age] = [amount of coins] x [days in stake]   
   
Target is the difficulty adjusted # to make sure the coin meets it's rated block speed.
More blocks staking means higher Target #s.

PoS coins that removed coin age are
hashProofOfStake <= [amount of coins] x [Target]   


FYI2:
Your Comparison of Proof of Stake to Lightning network is flawed.
Lightning network is nothing more than an offchain payment system, ie: LN Notes/IOUs for redemption of segwit coins or basically Centralized Banking 2.0
(Any Coin that activated segwit could work on LN, such as litecoin or groestlcoin. Like most offchain systems LN is not limited to bitcoin.)

Proof of Stake is a energy efficient Consensus Method for determining the next block chosen.

it's correct, but:

The core of the POW <proof of work> algorithm is the computer power resource. More energy is needed for the computer system to get the best answer. If you look at the ecological aspects this is not at all beneficial. Mine workers use too much energy and cause bad effects on the environment.

POS <proof of stake> is considered to be a fairer system than proof-of-work when everyone can become a miner. No matter large or small, the scale of exploitation will be linearly proportional to the number of shares held. This encourages the community to engage in transactional verification, increasing decentralization and democracy.

Is this debate still going?

PoW is more secure than PoS;
PoS is faster and cheaper than PoW;
Since PoW is very expensive, there will be an only small amount of PoW coins;
There is no PoW vs PoS, each has a different purpose.

Anyway, PoS "nothing at stake" and "long-range attack" are real problems, not a myth.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22nothing+at+stake%22&pws=0
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22long+range+attack%22&pws=0

Just like PoW "51% attack"
https://www.google.com/search?q=51%25+attack&pws=0

Exactly why do you think a Nothing at Stake is an issue.
Exactly what damage do you think it can do, so I can tell you why you are mistaken.

(You apparently did not bother to read : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3789535.msg42945673#msg42945673 )
Only a few posts above your misinformed post.

There are NO Multistaking Proof of Stake clients.

So without that it is literally a MYTH!
Sorry to have to break this to you , Your Imagination is not Reality.

Reading is really not your strong suit, you did not even read the 5th link in your own google post above.   :D
Which States: Nothing Considered: A look at Nothing at Stake Vulnerability for Cryptocurrencies
https://pivx.org/nothing-considered-a-look-at-nothing-at-stake-vulnerability-for-cryptocurrencies/

---

There is no proof PoW is more secure , only more wasteful of electricity.
Chinese Mining Pools had ~70% dominance for over 2 years now in bitcoin,
they could 51% attack bitcoin at any time (still can), they choose not to, but that was not security, just greed that stopped them.

Speed and price of a coin are not determined by whether they are PoS or PoW.
Speed is determined by coded blockspeed, and price is determined by markets.

The code decides how many coins their are , not the consensus method.
example
Diamond PoS coin has less than 5 million coins.
NewYorkCoin PoW coin has over 134 Billion coins.  

* Bitcoin 21 million coin limit is nothing more than a number in the code of when to no longer give more block rewards.*
* Developers could change it at a moments notice and if people updated , it would become reality. *

It is not how we discuss attacks (in this forum at least), we don't say this or that vulnerability is imaginary because it has not been carried out by a hacker or an adversary. A protocol should maintain its consistency against any hypothetical attack.

Really? This is what you and your bible got? A 'wide distribution' of staking power? And how is it possible to have such a distribution? There is no guarantee.
Actually socio-economics suggests pyramid like distributions of wealth and power in which top 1% of stake holders own +30% of the total wealth and top 20% control 80%, ...

PoS is not a new idea. We have PoS in its ultimate (and failed) form right now:
Traditional banking systems and fiat currencies are PoS based, they resemble what PoS is going to offer: a subjective store of value, centralized in shards  of big stake/money holders (banks) which are coordinated by a central entity in charge of clearing inter-shard transactions and inflation.

Look here aliashraf , to even attempt said attack, requires a Multistaking PoS client.
There are none!
Therefore a N@S attack is pure imagined theory , with no basis for concern in the real world.

Tell me what is it you fear so much about a theoretical N@S attack, and I tell you why you have nothing to fear.

Because I explored it as a threat and every time it came up as a non-event.
It either negated itself or had no real effect during every scenario people threw out.

So what is it exactly you think an imagined N@S attack could do?

---

Your confusion is sad.

Proof of Stake is a Consensus method.

Banks make money by growing debt and loaning out money they don't have, therefore using debt as money creation.

Proof of Stake does not use Debt, it is more like an agricultural product, you need some to grow more. There is no debt in the system.

The Banks use fractional reserves to rip off the masses,

In Proof of Stake you either own a coin or you don't , there is no debt and their is no fractional reserve shenanigans.

You might want to study up on the Goldsmiths that became the 1st banks, to end your personal confusion.  ;)

Muh,

If you want some reward > work for! PoW


Meh

If you already have too much wealth, let it work for you and get richer.  PoS



Why on earth Vitalik wants the latter, now he is fucking rich?


PoW has just too many unforeseen external risks, nahh, he does not want to get decentralized by these again...


PoS = proof of shit

Sounds like you need to stick with fiat.  ;)

If you see no N@S attack, it is because PoS coins don't worth such an attack right now,. One shouldn't be fooled with billion dollars market cap index, no PoS coin can be cashed out more than few million dollars without a significant price drop.

No, yours is sad, imo. The whole 'thing' you call it stake is nothing other than debt, a continuously growing debt that accumulates primarily in the hands of top 1% who are the ones in charge of everything. When such a system is supposed to act in large economic scales the big ones will have no choice other than loaning fractions of their coins to ordinary people and businesses for these loans they should evaluate credibility of their customers, take mortgages, ...

The existence or not of a "multistaking client" is irrelevant (there could be multistaking clients, hidden on private hard drives, that are carrying on an attack right now ;) ).

What is relevant, however, is that the incentive for "multistaking" is extremely small in most current PoS coins. Most Peercoin-based coins pay out a coin-age-based reward, limited to the percentage of your stake per coin-year. So it doesn't really matter if you find two or ten blocks per year if you're continuously staking, because you always only can get this percentage, e.g. 1% per year in Peercoin.

Coins with transaction fees as rewards, like NXT or NEM, or coins with a difficulty-determined reward (mimicking Bitcoin) are more vulnerable to multistaking (and therefore for N@S-based attacks), because in this case you really get more rewards if you stake on every chain that appears because it increases your chance to find more blocks. The reason there is (probably) no multistaking in these coins is, in my opinion, that the transaction fees are too small and most staking/forging in these coins is done by big whales which have no interest in devaluing their coin stake.

I also don't agree that PoS "was only not attacked because you only could cash out a few millions." A few millions are enough to incentive a hacker - if an attack was easy. If an attack is hard, then PoS is doing what it needs to do - it seems to be harder than to attack a Bitcoin fork (http://fortune.com/2018/05/29/bitcoin-gold-hack/) with a "market cap" in the same order of magnitude than NEM or Cardano. ;)

I also think the "bank comparison" is a bit apples and oranges ;)

(My stance on the question: PoW is more secure, while PoS may be secure enough for a cryptocurrency, and in this case its smaller energy footprint makes it a more efficient and cheaper system. But I really don't like the amount of ideology and tribalism popping up when this topic is discussed - it's as boring as the bigblock/smallblock discussion.)

I was just mentioning that these coins worth practically an order of magnitude less than what coinmarketcap reports and for an attacker, stealing a fraction of such a coin is not enough incentive.

Plus, 'bank comparison' is to the point: The whole fiat currency and banking system is based on the same subjective idea of money and interest that PoS is based on. The thing is banks are matured while PoS is not.
For instance banks have implemented sharding (Vitalik's dream) already: operational banks maintain their 'shard' of the ledger because they have deposited enough stakes in the network.

Yes, I understand that. But even if  all the capital you could extract from e.g. NEM was an order of magnitude lower (e.g. 100 millions USD) a fraction of that amount (even a couple of hundreds of thousand dollars/euros) would be enough to provide incentives for hackers if attacking it was easy. BTG, which has a similar market cap and thus its "real worth" may be in the same order of magnitude, was 51%-attacked with mining hardware, so the attack wasn't cheap or trivial. So what's the difference? Why is BTG (PoW) attacked and NEM not, when both are "worth" about the same amount of money?

I'm not saying that NEM is more secure than BTG (I'm not particularly a fan of NEM because its algorithm can lead to blockchain bloat if it gets used massively some day).

My point is that it's not trivial to attack PoS currencies. There is a good amount of social engineering required - to trick the majority of PoS users into an attack chain is probably very similar in difficulty to trick the majority of Bitcoin websites (including bitcoin.org) into distributing wallet stealers named bitcoin-qt.exe.

PoS "stakers" do not receive amounts for doing nothing. They do some work validating blocks. The reason why PoS rewards are usually not fixed but percentages of your stake, like an interest, is related to what I explained to Zin-Zang above: to dis-incentive the "multistaking" behavior. And it achieves that "the rich" do not get richer in a disproportional way.

OK, this comparison is actually interesting, but I still fail to see that the goal (reason to exist) of PoS coins is similar to the goal of current banks which - like every for-profit company - are existing to enrich the shareholders of one of the "shards". PoS is structured like it is because stake, as a "scarce resource" on the blockchain, is a relatively "low hanging fruit". But the goal is to achieve a "currency" for transactions, without the energy use of PoW.

Other scarce on-blockchain "scarce" resources have different flaws (e.g. NEM's transaction activity/stake combination) or directly cannot be used for consensus finding (e.g. address or even node count, because of sybil attacks). The only exception I know is proof-of-burn, but it is to insecure as a "standalone" model, it needs proof of stake or proof of work to increase its security.

@d5000
Although I have things to say regarding your post, I deliberately focus on the last part:

Our 'stakers' will eventually join pools to get rid of availability requirements and such a pool acts just like a bank.
Being a currency does not matter, being a new class of currency matters which PoS fails to get even close.

Stake/Reputation whatever follows power distribution law and is centralized by nature. Both operational and central banks are central stores of money/stake/reputation and it is why they can efficiently process thousands of transactions per second.

Efficient transaction processing is achievable when it is  centralized and yields zero cost. No  matter what is the name or the underlying technology, a centralized zero cost monetary system is nothing much different than a banking system. Lots of banks are considering blockchain technology for fault tolerance and availability issues, this doesn't make them a new monetary system or part of such a system.

Blaming PoW to be energy consuming and hence not environment friendly is ridiculous.
Maintaining the security of a decentralized consensus based monetary system is one of the most important and useful ways ever for consuming energy, imo.

I agree that pools are undesirable in PoS, not only from a "moral"/"decentralization" perspective, but also because of security risks, and thus I don't really like LPoS ("leased proof of stake"), DPoS and similar approaches.

But there are currencies with the explicit goal to make it difficult or impossible to form staking pools - for example, Peercoin's approach is to make "stake pooling" impossible without trust (a pool would need access to the private keys and thus to the funds). In this model, pools would be similar to "Bitcoin banks" like our current exchanges and online wallet providers. These service providers are not really desirable in a cryptocurrency ecosystem, but I don't expect them to go away soon as most people are simply too lazy to look for decentralized alternatives.


Where is, in your opinion, the difference between centralization in the form of staking pools and centralization via mining pools? Power distribution law cannot be fully avoided in monetary systems, from all what I know until now. It seems the "holy grail" hasn't been found here, and maybe a perfect, not-centralizing cryptocurrency is simply impossible.

In my opinion there are graduations of centralization in PoS and in PoW currencies. PoS requires minimally more trust ("weak subjectivity", as Vitalik calls it), but the difference is not too big, like I've tried to show with the bitcoin.org malware example.

(I mean to remember that you proposed a PoW model which makes pools impossible. This would be a great improvement, of course, but a centralizing tendency which favours big mining farms because of scale effects would still persist.)

Not if there is a better/more efficient way available. You're probably underestimating the power required by mining if Bitcoin saw mass adoption. In my opinion, that can only be viable long-term if, as I already wrote, miners ran 100% on renewables and didn't compete with the rest of the electricity demand.

The availability requirement is inherent to PoS of any flavor and Peercoin can't do anything about it. Once a stake holder has to choose between security and profit, the latter is the choice or simply migrating to a coin without such a constraint.

For PoS, being rich is enough to be rewarded for PoS you should spend to have gains.

Centralization via mining pools in PoW sucks but it is avoidable and I have proposed Proof of Collaborative Work, PoCW in this regard, as you mention.

Power law distribution of wealth in PoS directly leads to centralization because of availability dilemma but for PoCW , it just ends to large mining farms which are not the same as  mining pools because they don't take the control of other people's resources.

As a crypto geek, I believe in two very primitive axioms: Resistance Axiom and Decentralization Axiom.

Unlike what commonly is supposed, these are not design goals or agendas, what we want or try to achieve (perhaps relatively), instead both axioms are about the feasibility of such design goals.

Axiom of Resistance is about state/government control:

Axiom of Decentralization says:

Axioms are not backed by any kind of proof, they are primitives. Anybody who has doubts about the feasibility of resistance or decentralization is not a member of this movement and his/her contribution to the system is probably poisonous, imo.

Proof of Collaborative Work is an outcome of my deep commitment to decentralization axiom, I'll do my best to make it happen as an evolutionary improvement in bitcoin but no matter what happens next, it has already proved to have enough strength as an idea and a proposal to maintain its integrity against criticism and objections.

And it is so encouraging:
Now we have something to say about the bitter experience with pooling phenomenon in bitcoin and PoW and maintain our deep belief in the feasibility of a decentralized PoW system.

I believe only in the physics of open dissipative economical systems and their inherent operational risks that are nicely working against any centralization in open PoW consensus.

PoS is many dimensions smaller and crap, and no real new achievement btw.


 ;)

There are solutions where the availability requirement is solved without needing pools. I mentioned Peercoin because their approach (called "multisig minting") would do just that: allow a node to stake online without requiring high security measures, because the private key is not exposed. That would allow stakeholders with profit in mind to simply "stake" with a cheap VPS or a basic device connected 24/7. (I don't think you can call 1%/year a real "profit"). In this case, combined with a coin-day based reward approach (e.g."percentage per year") a pool wouldn't make any difference for any participant with significant stake.

(I guess with "availability requirement" you refer to the requirement for a node to be online most of the time, to be able to compete for block rewards. If not, please clarify.)

If the farm operators become too large (Bitmain, for example, is not only a pool but also a big farm operator) then the centralization problem persists. The centralization problem, in my opinion, is only partially due to pools controlling miners' resources. It's more related to the influence of single operators in relation to Bitcoin's power ecosystem, as they could threat to censor transactions or (if they're not big enough) form a cartel.

Your PoCW proposal is very interesting ... I've just begun to read it. But it is only one step.
Axiom of Resistance can be achieved by PoS, as there may be some centralization but there is not one, but typically multiple "dominating" operators (=big whales), and once they're distributed well enough, there's no possible government control. You're right that the control of the system by the "majority of participants" is very difficult to achieve with PoS, but combining it with other approaches like Proof of burn may do the trick.

there is pow and pos in both it and socioeconomic context,

i am afraid these IT freaks and their IT concepts of bitcoin be it pow and pos will only create zombie like sects and mlm system that in the long term wont be taken serious anymore.

people will get tired of them, as they are only constantly seeking to extract more capital

This may help:  https://medium.com/@jaybny/on-proof-of-skill-6af149f45ce8

That sounds about right! Solely running on PoS takes away real world costs and encourages hoarding where at least with Hybrid PoW/PoS there's still electricity costs incurred for mining new tokens. And despite the energy requirements to mine BTC, PoW is what helped turn Bitmain into a billion dollar company and inspire the innovation of new mining hardware.

Some new projects (wink wink) begin from step 3.
The motivation seems to be: attempt to achieve better distribution than NXT did (giving all stake to a half dozen close friends);
50% chance of successful attack requires 50% of hashrate and 50% of stake in hybrids.

I don't believe you can manually give people the coin supply as the developer sees best fit, hoping that is egalitarian enough that no big whales sitting on fat sticks will be formed. I think this is delusional. On a long enough timeline, elite factions of people holding massive amounts would arise, then all they have to do is sit on their ass and command and conquer.

With PoW, at least you have to work hard to keep your monopoly going. We give Jihan a lot of shit because he is a bit of a cunt, but to be frank he works hard in his business, it's very competitive out there.

In PoS the Jihan equivalent would just be able to sit and keep getting mad stacks of staked coins.

PoS just doesn't feel right, there are some interesting experiments out there trying to remove PoW from the equation but I wouldn't count my money on it for the long term.

I currently tend to agree here, and have mostly moved away from (PoS or PoW) coins that were distributed in an ICO (with very few exceptions when the concept is very interesting). That's why I consider PoS must be combined with another mechanism to distribute the currency units. Like Peercoin or Decred do with their hybrid PoW/PoS systems, and at least in Peercoin, you won't get rich or even "richer" sitting only on your coins because the PoS reward is really low (1%/year).

Proof of Burn and Proof of Capacity/Space are another two interesting algorithms to combine PoS with. Both suffer from some of the same drawbacks of PoS (both have a Nothing at Stake problem of varying degree) but they are open for validators from "outside" that don't hold a big "stake" and also don't simply reward "sitting on coins". In contrast, NEM's Proof of Importance seems to be little more than a failed PoS extension - maybe with good intentions (encourage usage) but bad consequences (potential blockchain bloat, useless transactions).

Agree with the comments above. The problem with PoS is that the reward is far too high for the "work" done. I mean in PoS system, wallets with stacked coins still perform the block creation but don't require that much computation power. In this case, maybe Peercoin as d5000 said, will get away with it since the reward is very low. Hybrid PoW/PoS might work if the reward is fair between PoW and PoS validators, but usually, this tends to favor PoS. This situation may explain:


Nakamoto PoW uses electricity for computation power to mine a block. It doesn't mean that the system cannot use other "work" to create a block. And in order to this "work" to be successful, users/"miners" must perceive the reward as fair. Maybe it still requires "outside" element, or not?

I analyzed a new recently released coin Metro: the distribution seems OK but probably far from ideal (NXTers got 10% of max supply for their Jelurida license, but all premine is time-locked and released gradually with each PoW block) and there will surely be miners who got a lot of coins while the difficulty was low.
They will not be likely to become pure PoS as their sidechain idea (main application) is based on PoW contesting periods, inspired by Blockstream. At least not likely in near future. Either pure PoS or replace PoW component with something "greener".
They also have PoS block bloat since DEX will be the 1st application of sidechains, and thus PoS blocks are very frequent without pruning implemented yet.
When DEX starts, you might become richer (according to them  ;) but not by just sitting on your coins - rather you need to spend gas in Ethereum Classic and Ethereum networks and feed blockchain data in both directions (and also between whatever smart contracts can arise to prominence, e.g. Rootstock) but for that gas you get transaction fees for withdrawals, in ETC/ETH.

Goto physiscs, if you need to define 'work' / energy.

You need work to keep order = security over time

So security is a time function, that needs energy input every second (similar to your firewall that needs work to stay secure all second / protect against hackers trying to hack you every second - their little PoW!).

PoW is THAT firewall.

PoS is shit.

There is something that feels very cheap about having to wait for some guy in a forum deciding when to release the next batch of coins, feels like a communist on top of the pyramid.

The automated, predictable algorithm of Bitcoin is much more elegant. It's open for competition, whoever gets the most hashrate wins and this means putting in the work.

As far as PoS + something else combos, im not impressed. All of the present models can be gamed at cheaper cost than Bitcoin.

I remain open minded when it comes to something new and groundbreaking but for now anyone thinking any of these coins can flip Bitcoin is insane.

That applies to all altcoins, including big PoW ones like Ethereum ;)

A PoW/PoS combination has the advantage that while the "predictable attack cost" is bound to the PoW hashrate, there is a "plus" of security coming from the proof-of-stake algorithm which doesn't cost additional energy consumption. The hard part is to quantify this "additional" attack cost - PoS coins are more vulnerable to social engineering, bribing and similar attack strategies, which normally should be expensive, but there is no way to calculate an attack cost based really on "hard facts".

I don't believe that any coin - neither PoW or PoS - will "flip" Bitcoin in the short to mid term. But nobody knows what can happen in 10 or 20 years. In theory, Bitcoin can also "enrich" its security algorithm with PoS, PoC, or PoB - but this would need the approval of miners and/or big economic nodes.

Yes, I included altcoins that are PoW too. We have had many PoW coins being 51%'ed lately. Bitcoin Gold included. Then Verge and some others. The next one is Bitcoin Cash. I believe we will see something interesting happening in september with the spam attack that Bitpico has planned for BCash. If they are legit and not paid by Roger Ver to simulate a failure of the attack, then it should work and BCash should collapse somehow, who knows if some funds get moved against owner's will.

No matter what algo are you using, electricity is limited, and most of it will go to Bitcoin. Then non PoW models or combinations of it don't make me feel any more secure. They usually involve "delegates" and stuff like that which is a big red mark for me. The net result isn't more protection that I can see.

PoS options (including hybrid forms) are off the table for obvious reasons but PoW itself should be treated cautiously as well. I understand it has been a long time and centralized mining apparently bitcoin has not been destroyed because of it but taking a deeper look at recent events with so-called scaling debate and the delay in adoption of SW which I believe damaged the reputation of bitcoin, pools are to be blamed.

I go even further and suggest the situation with mining pools to be the most fundamental factor behind the definite slow down in bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption.

So, I believe it is not about how PoW is better than PoS. Rather it is about how PoW could be better than bitcoin.

Sorry, I still don't understand your words. How can you say PoW is better than bitcoin while bitcoin itself uses the PoW protocol?

Regarding this PoW and PoS, I feel that I have their own advantages, and even though PoS is a newer protocol than PoW, it cannot replace it completely. Then regarding this PoS, I am very interested because there are many systems, one of which is the master nodes. Maybe I should discuss it in another thread.

Simple! Bitcoin implementation of PoW, is the first version, an experiment and a proof of concept as far as I can understand.

I mean, come on! How is it possible at all, a complete revolution just with one shot  ???

The unfortunate coincidence of bitcoin getting popular and becoming a high stake game with Satoshi's disappearance  caused it to become rigid and resist evolution, obviously, but it doesn't change the fact that it is nothing more than a beta version of a proof of concept for PoW.

Proof of concept for PoW, not for cryptocurrency I have to emphasis as I see most people are not used to re-think everything and just follow the media.

According to their story: 1-Bitcoin is the ultimate form of PoW, 2- PoS is an alternative, much modern approach to cryptocurrency as a decentralized, public and permissionless system.

Both claims are void:
1- Bitcoin is not the end but a beginning for PoW, 2- PoS is nothing new, it has been around as reputation systems and has failed its mission because of its subjective nature. There is no way to publish money, a justifiable legitimate way I mean, so it doesn't deserve to be considered neither an alternative nor a modern approach to cryptocurrency.

Actually due to the energy wasting failures of PoW , Bitcoin is doomed within 5 years as the energy requirements are growing exponentially.
Your belief that Proof of Stake is failing is just plain wrong.
Currently it is the only one not draining the energy resources of the planet for wasteful attempts at being a global payment system.

The only real problem with Proof of Stake system is the ones that inflation rate is just too high.
That issue is easily mitigated by going to a ultra low inflation rate.
Like gold, the reason it value held over time was the expense/ hardship of getting the ore limiting the new amount, therefore keeping a low inflation rate,
by moving a PoS system to an ultra low inflation rate, we mimic that process.

I'm aware that you are a fan of PoS, an enthusiast, but this "energy wasting" argument won't help your faith, believe me.

First of all, energy is not wasted in PoW, it is the only objective way to keep a system secure and the way I look at it, the energy that network consumes now, is one of the most decent use cases for electricity ever:
setting people free from feds, preparation phase for such a freedom, at least.
I prefer not to use my car rather than turning my miner off when it comes to conserving energy because of its environmental consequences. Remember, the most reckless move  against the planet was Trump withdrawal from Kyoto Protocol. Defending the planet is a political movement with bitcoin in its heart.

Secondly, your speculative argument about energy demand of bitcoin "growing exponentially" is absolutely wrong. Bitcoin demand for energy has reached to its pick growth rate and it won't go much further in mid-term and will decline in long term because of a few important factors:
1- Moore law that is promising for more efficient devices.
2- Halving that de-incentivizes wild increases in hashpower. Unlike bitcoin-as-gold proponents, I believe transaction fees won't go that high, to put it more correctly, I think we should improve to have both tr fees and block reward very low.
3- Economics, that proves any exponential growth in the society is temporary and reaches its equilibrium state very soon as there is not enough resource to satisfy such a growth anyway.
4-... you say.

There are again a few more real problems with PoS:

1- It has no measure to tell us who deserves how much stake and why?

2- It is eventually a computerized version of fiat currencies, banks, interest rates, ... with obvious lack of Resistance Axiom, which is the main driving force behind cryptocurrency movement.

3- Its consensus algorithm (any variant), is basically subjective, based on a compromise between people about the distribution of stakes. It is inherently defective because of this subjectivity. Historically we had this idea in reputation systems before bitcoin and with no significant outcome.

4- ... I can say more.

The energy deficit is subjective.
Let me remind you how the futurists of XVIII century were projecting forward the growth of cities: that as a result, streets will be thickly covered in horse manure.
This carbon dioxyde argument against technical progress sounds very familiar, isn't it?
The Earth will be heated a bit more during next 10 or 20 years due to reduced solar activity (as it's inversely correlated to the climate warmth) but then we will start to cool down. So why not have Bitcoin and PoW for another 30 years just to keep today's temperatures around.

And no, carbon dioxyde is not the primary cause of "greenhouse effect" - the primary cause is methane, which we produce a lot because of our derelict habit of eating meat.

People like Trump who do not care, typically eat meat too much as well. Just look at his fans.  ;)
Methane or de-oxide carbon production and emission is what humanity should take care and control of, it is indisputable.

Bitcoin energy consumption is not the primary target for energy conservation tho, we have a LOT more fields to conserve electricity in.

Amen to that!

Unfortunately, Trump cannot set a good example of conservationism.
USSR had this historical chance to force vegetarianism or even veganism (it only needed to borrow it from India properly,
with spices and science of ayurveda - which of course was counter to the state ideology!) on its population.
Alas, we had Khruschev who did his PR by promising "catching up and getting ahead of America in production of meat and milk" (how stupid...)
As the result, late Soviet Union had de-facto veganism with people surviving on potatos and pasta without spices or ayurveda or beans or nuts etc. which was ugly as hell. I remember those times with shudder of disgust.

LOL, you confuse faith with Logic.

Your conclusion is false, the energy waste has not secured bitcoin it is dooming it.
1.  The Chinese Mining Pools have had a ~70% domination of bitcoin for years now.
     The only security in bitcoin is what they grant you nothing more.
    
2.  The energy waste means that future miners have to request permission from government regulators to allow them to increase capacity.
     If the Governments approve these energy requests of miners, they can use that as a way to coerce their approval or disapproval of transactions.
     Making bitcoin another government minion no different than banks.

Just to clarify Bitcoin Security is provided by the Chinese Miners Collusion not the energy waste.



Answer to 1.
The amount one owns of the coin and the original code defines how much they stake and who earns.
And hopefully one research that code before buying.

Answer to 2.
All blockchain crypto is a general ledger that is the only thing they have in common,
Fiat is controlled by governments, PoS Crypto are defined by the code and therefore outside the control of those government elite.
Banks make up money out of thin air based on debt which they worsen with fractional reserve nonsense,
Crypto has a defined amount, with a defined growth, with ZERO DEBT built into it and No fractional reserve shenanigans.

FYI:  ;) (Excluding Tether of course since Tether is running a fraction reserve scam claiming 1 to 1 with the US$)

Answer to 3:
The only thing we agree on is PoS is a method of consensus.  :)
Ownership of everything is subjective to personal & group compromise, why this bothers you is strange.
IE:
You own apples and the guy down the road owns oranges,
You both exchange apples and oranges with each other , but the exchange rate is defined by the community preferences of which they favored more at the time of exchange. That is what you have to live with if there is more in the community than just you.
The value of any item is defined by how much others are willing to pay for it.
  

Hmm didn't know there is inflation in PoS coins - I thought once they leave the hybrid phase, tokens are just redistributed in transaction fees
like in Next.
What is Zeitcoin based on? I didn't find the source code on their website.

The interest generated acts as inflation,
by forever increasing the quantity of coins it always guarantees their will eventually be a lowering of value per coin,
if the quantity consumed does not exceed the quanity of new coin, the price per coin will eventually fall.

Most PoS devs give a coin 5% or higher , trying to mimic old saving account rates,
the problem with that is the bank were able to do so by giving loans at higher rates on that savings in the form of credit cards & other loans at over double or triple the savings rate. When a Crypto coin gives out a rate, they have nothing but consumer demand to try to nullify the increase, which over time can't sustain high rates forever, and then the price drops begin.
Which is why Satoshi built in bitcoin a forever decreasing number of coins generated per block every 4 years, until the miners no longer created new blocks but only make money by processing transaction fees only.
Which causes further problems : http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf


https://github.com/zeitcoin/zeitcoin
ZEITCOIN is based on peercoin originally, peercoin is still a hybrid running PoW & PoS.  https://github.com/peercoin
ZEITCOIN dropped PoW after the 1st two months.
Peercoin PoS design destroys all transaction fees as a way to offset their inflation from staking.


Last year Zeitcoin moved to an Ultra Low Inflation rate of .0005% yearly, even if the entire network were staking less than 500 new coins could be created daily.
So our Proof of Stake is purely for consensus at the present time and all of the transaction fees are currently burned.
The plan is in the next few years to no longer burn the fees but grant them to the block staker in addition to the ULI.
That is some ways off and for now the fees will continued to be burned.
* To offset the concerns raised in the pdf on randomwalker on transaction only coins, our coin will always and forever have the ULI reward.*

Due to the extremely low energy cost needed to run a Proof of Stake network ,
ZEITCOIN can run a network that outperforms bitcoin in transaction capacity , transaction fee prices , and speed, at a fraction of their input costs.
It is only a matter of time before the public becomes award of these improvements and acts according.
If you want more info
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=487814.0
  
FYI:
Nxt was a custom PoS implementation, including the ability to create other tokens on their network .
the normal standard of the majority of PoS coins is based on peercoin,
the developer of peercoin Sunny King was one of the original creators of Proof of Stake as a consensus method.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-history-and-evolution-of-proof-of-stake

The problem with new systems is reaching the critical mass.
Only the largest PoS by capitalization will be considered secure, or most secure (similar to PoW in terms of hashrate).
But hashrate is physical, whereas exchange rates are subjective and can be manipulated
(that is the reason why capitalization needs to be big).
People will also look into distribution - and if they see 80% belonging to founders
(as is often the case) they will let such opportunity (to buy those coins) pass.

Centralization of PoW  mining by pools sucks. Although I've proposed an improvement to replace 'winner-takes-all' approach with 'contributor-takes-share' (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438334.0) to fix infamous pooling pressure in PoW, I have to acknowledge this as a flaw for current implementations of PoW.
But you are taking advantage of this issue, too much:
1- PoS systems are vulnerable to this threat in a higher order because of the availability dilemma. And in PoS it is even worse because they need to lock the stakes for a long period and people can't move easily between these "banks".

2- The very fact that despite the situation with pools, we have bitcoin with $110+ billion market cap, speaks for itself. Pools, are bad and yet PoW is that good to survive and get even stronger, why? It is because of the beauty of PoW, its objectiveness. Some people think it is because of bitcoin being popular and using its premium as the first crypto, they are wrong. Bitcoin is big because it is highly secure.

3- Through scaling debate in bitcoin, we learned lessons among them we discovered the importance of users. SegWit adopted by a UASF, i.e. it was enforced by users and not miners. Although Jihan Wu was controlling a huge share of hashpower (he still is) he failed dictating his agenda.

Conclusively, bitcoin is secure because to do anything harmful to it you should invest a lot and consume a lot and risk losing everything because of huge hashpower requirements and large user base that simply ignores your unfaithful messages.

This is absurd.
Miners don't get permission for electricity, they buy it! In subsidizing countries, it makes sense but not all over the globe! It has been a decade and bitcoin has been popular for at least 5 years and miners are doing their job.

If it is about your false prophecy about "exponential growth" in electricity demand of mining, I have already refuted it. There will be no growth in middle term and we will experience mild corrections in long term (my prophecy).

Really?  :D
In PoW coins are generated and granted to people because they are consuming resources to become qualified for such a grant. In PoS we have a subjective credit that is inflating with almost zero cost.  It is just like any other subjective article, nothing! You put no-thing in stake to get more no-thing and you wish people recognize your no-things as a medium of exchange. hmmm ... sounds familiar, Feds do this with USD on a daily basis, don't they? Sure they do.

No, it is not an answer. Having a GL does not make them all the same.

PoS coins are made out of thin air just like fiat, there should be banks of stakes to guarantee availability and hence income. These banks will sooner or later, shard transaction space for scaling purposes and eventually have to be regulated under a clearance protocol for their intra-shard transactions, etc. Nothing new.

As for lending and extra-income, they will figure out a way for this. e.g.  borrowers who suggest an interest rate higher than the network could look tempting enough for our banks of stake.

Again It is not an answer. Other than fiat currency any resource has a value determined by the amount of average labor needed to produce it and has a price determined by the balance between its respective supply and demand. It is true for every single good everytime and everywhere other than fiat currencies as I mentioned above. And you are introducing another 'thing', a PoS coin, that has no value but has a price while we have such things right now and they got names: USD, Euro, Pound, Bulivar, ...

The only resource in the world that its value is based on a compromise and not on labor is fiat.  

We can agree that the more confirmations the more secure a transaction,
however this is a condition of both PoS and PoW.

The only real implementation of banks in the cryto world is lightning network.
Banks used to take gold deposits and use their own notes to transfer representations of value.
Lightning Network takes Bitcoin deposits and uses their own custom ledger to transfer their representation of value.
Only LN meets the specifications to be called a Bank.

PoS & PoW onchain transaction transfer the actual value, not a representation of the value like a Bank or LN.
PoS & PoW onchain transactions do not allow for the possibility of a fractional reserve system onchain.
PoS & PoW onchain transactions do not use a debt based system (like Banks) that guarantees their is always more debt than quantity of coins.
Therefore neither PoS or PoW onchain implementations fit the specifications of a Bank.  :)

Your conclusion on bitcoin being secure because of the risk to the miner wealth if they damage it, is false.
You have a incorrect assumption that the miner is totally dependent on only bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash has changed that conclusion for the following reason, Bitmain has stockpiled more bitcoin cash than bitcoin.
They have mined a large % of bitcoin cash, kept all of their bitcoin cash from the original fork, used a % of their bitcoin profit to buy more bitcoin cash,
taken bitcoin cash exclusively for their new miners, because of the following they have a direct financial incentive to replace bitcoin with bitcoin cash, their profit windfall would be staggering if bitcoin suffered a failure or price drop that made bitcoin cash more popular.
All they have to do to achieve this , is keep stock piling cash , and start cashing out all of their bitcoins on their mining operations, at some point they make bitcoin cash price match bitcoin and the rest of the miner join in leaving bitcoin to fend for itself with no miner support.
Bitmain would gain untold riches from carrying out such a plan, so old bitcoin is no longer secured by the miners , as the larger profit can be made elsewhere.

* If you want to fix PoW, you need to remove the energy waste & block the pooling of resources so that individuals will always be part of the system.*
* Due to coin age included in PoS, and the fact that PoS coins are disabled for period of time before allowing another stake, it gives an individual with lesser amounts the ability to stay relevant in a PoS network*  :)

When you examine the underlying structure of PoW verses PoS,
the following comes to light:
PoW is a combative system Winner take all design, as miners compete for every single block, meaning the richest will always be the strongest.
PoS is a cooperative system design, as when one block stakes , those coins are offline for a specified time and no longer competing for a block, which means that coins from other members are required to stake to reach the # of confirmations that will again allow that block to stake.
In PoS , You literally need others to be staking and securing the network until your coins are again eligible to stake.
 



Read the following to understand , it is not absurd my friend but a reality.  :)
Miners will need permission to buy electricity.  :P
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/canadian-utility-halts-processing-service-requests-from-cryptominers/525438/
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/bitcoin-backlash-as-miners-suck-up-electricity-stress-power-grids-in-central-washington/
https://www.theolympian.com/latest-news/article208635474.html
https://www.chelanpud.org/docs/default-source/commission/bitcoint-mining-prompts-utility-rate-hike---data-center-frontier-feb-2-2016.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2018/03/25/bitcoin-mining-triggers-backlash-from-electric-utilities/





PoW consume Massive amounts of Electricity.
PoS consumes a tiny fraction of that amount of electricity.

Both provide the ability to make transactions, PoS is just more energy efficient than PoW.
IE:
PoW is a Car that has a gas mileage of  1 mile per gallon.
PoS is a Car that has a gas mileage of 1000 miles per gallon.
Therefore to go 1000 miles in the PoW car require 1000 gallons of gas.
While in the PoS Car going 1000 miles only require 1 gallon of gas.

Both PoW & PoS get you to the same place , however PoW wasted 999 gallons of gas to do so.

* In truth , the ratio of energy waste in electricity is much worse in the millions or higher instead of a simple 1000 ratio. *



I was saying that GL, was the only thing they all had in common, I was not implying it made them all banks.

PoS coins are not made out of thin air, they were generated by Electricity, Program Code, & Time, no different than PoW in that aspect.

Debt can be added to an external offchain system such as LN, but can not be added to an onchain system in PoS or PoW.
Debt requires a representation of value , onchain system are the actual value and therefore onchain debt is impossible with the current designs.



As far as # 3 went, we seem to be agreeing more than disagreeing .  :)
I would state that a PoS coin is a resource and that it's inflation rate and usage would determine it's price.
A PoS coin value is tied to the quantity of coins and it's usage, while the Fiat based currencies are tied to nothing, except promises of government officials.
Just as ASICS requirement gives PoW coins value in your mind, because it allows new coins to be generated and transactions to occur,
PoS Coins themselves generate new coin and make transactions occur without the unnecessary energy waste of PoW.
 
 

@Zin-Zang

AFAICS, this conversation is becoming too chaotic, I suggest you choose just one topic, like energy waste of bitcoin (your terms) and simply prove my arguments about the irrelevance of your claim, wrong. Although I've clearly stated everything necessary in this regard for your convenience I try to make another brief argument here:

1- Bitcoin and PoW generally, consume energy to keep the network safe against unfaithful behavior of malicious participants. It is irrelevant to call it a 'waste' because it is one of the most useful use cases for energy ever: decentralizing money.

2- The coins generated in PoW, have objective value because they have been produced by consuming resources like any other asset (other than fiat currencies). PoS generated coins are just like fiat, they come from nowhere and have no value.

Now, in just 2 short paragraphs refute my arguments above.

OK,

1. Your conclusion is misplaced, because energy consumption does not keep bitcoin safe.
IE: ~2 years ago Chinese Miners gain ~71% control of bitcoin mining, the energy required to run bitcoin has increased dramatically in that 2 year period,
      it is no safer now than then , and the argument could be made it is less safer as the Chinese miners are running a 2nd coin to switch too.
Shorty put : Bitcoin Security is dependent on the Continued Chinese Miners Collusion , energy spent is irrelevant.

2.  PoS or PoW coins value is perceived by the price the public is willing to pay.
With PoW coins, you have a higher baseline price because of a psychological floor due to the input cost needed to produce a bitcoin today.
However the majority of Bitcoins were mined at much cheaper prices than today's rate, so that promoted myth fails to hold water and is a falsehood.
The amount of resources going into a product do not guarantee a higher price.
IE:
Make a Car out of pure gold , it cost to purchase would be immense, however due to the weight , it would be crappy on gas mileage and a prime target for thieves, as such the majority would shun it as wasteful and pick a car with better gas mileage that was more affordable.

Shortly put : PoS & PoW coins are both created by using electricity, program code, & time to create said coins.
It is just that one requires less resources to be created and used.

 :)        


FYI:
Another good example of the amount of resources going into a product don't guarantee a higher price, is the US Penny.
It costs the Government more than a penny to make a penny, but yet when you spent it , it is only worth 1 penny.


 

So you believe bitcoin is not secure, but it IS.

I think you are right about centralization of mining but, the fact that despite this bitcoin has remained secure shows the strengths of PoW.
Value is one thing and price is another thing. Value is determined by necessary labor for the society to produce a commodity but price is determined by supply and demand. Value is fundamental for price not the price itself. You need to check economics theory of value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value).

Fiat currencies are the only exceptional commodities that have no value but a price! This is why this movement, cryptocurrency is morally justifiable and fair. Fiat is fake commodity just like slavery: An slave is not a product of labor in a society but in some points of the history (even modern history) they got price and were/are exchanged ruthlessly.

PoS is just a computerised version of such a fake commodity. It is produced out of thin air.

Code and time are irrelevant and the electricity for PoS.

A printed money takes time and labor to be produced and still we don't hesitate to say: It is produced out of thin air.

Bitcoin never ever use PoS...

@aliashraf

It seems we are at a impasse.

Therefore Time and the Reader can be the final arbitrator.

Good Luck with your PoCW.   :)

After doing some research I found out that:

Proof of work (PoW) requires proof that work of some kind occurred. In the case of Bitcoin miners are required to do this work before any of their blocks is accepted by others. Using miners to solve the blocks and get rewards from this work.

Proof of stake (PoS) requires users that have a high stake at the currency (i.e. hold a lot of coins) to determine the next block. This has a high risk of some party achieving monopoly of the currency but there are several methods to prevent that (by allocating random stakeholders to agree on a new block, and others). Get reward from holding as much coin.

There are some pro and cons from not only PoW but PoS. PoW may consume a lot of electric energy but fair for everyone because they work hard to get reward based on it "Nothing ventures, nothing gains".

In conclusion, I support PoW.  :-*

That is true for PoW as well. Some people just buy a lot of GPUs/ASICs to get maximum reward. In PoS, instead of buying mining equiment, they buy the coins/tokens.

I definitely think that proof-of-work is going to be phased out soon, though proof-of-stake isn't much better, they all require specialist hardware in order to run their networks, which is not something we should implement for later generation blockchains, a waste of energy can't be the best way to secure a blockchain. I notice that the major blockchains are starting to shift towards POS as it's definitely more environmentally friendly than POW, but it also increases centralization and the risk of a vector based attack so we should look for even better alternatives in future.

If you see behind the curtain you d notice that only big bag holders are proposing (their) PoS.

I know not a single (reasonable) PoS that started like the original Bitcoin with PoW.

This is also exactly the thing when you try to get SEC compliant. PoS will stay nichy and go away.

DLTs are the best vector to make any pos redundant.

Peercoin started very much like the original Bitcoin.
It is hybrid PoW+PoS. At the start it was even PoW only for a moment, until PoS kicked in (until enough coindays were gathered to start minting)

ZEITCOIN , and almost all Proof of Stake coins in 2014 and earlier all started with a month or so of PoW only.
Those coins either dropped PoW completely or stay a hybrid of both.
ZEIT was going to stay a hybrid, however a flaw was discovered running PoW with PoS,
so they just dropped the PoW as it served no real function anymore after the initial birth.  

When the ICO craze started in 2015 , is when new PoS coins fazed out all PoW mining even from coin creation.

The input costs to maintain a PoW network continue to grow at an exponential rate.
Bitcoin requires millions of dollars of electricity to feed it's wasteful energy appetite.

Proof of Stake networks can run on an input cost of less than a few $1000 every month, and our input costs are constant verses PoW wanting more every month.
PoS can match PoW performance without requiring millions of money wasted on energy every month.

Which is why Eth is moving toward PoS and dropping PoW,  
Bitcoin PoW will just continue to centralizes control until it is no different than Government controlled fiat.

Proof of Stake will outlive Proof of Work.
Because it is sustainable and millions of times more cost efficient.  :)


FYI:
@hv_  you are a bitcoin cash bagholder, so you pointing fingers is silly.

I have refuted this claim more than once. Bitcoin energy consumption is determined by both network hash rate and efficiency of the miners. The latter improves through time because of Moore's law and the first won't grow exponentially because of negative impacts of halving and price corrections that de-incentivize mining.

I could say, in mid-term we would be experiencing a significant drop in electricity usage of bitcoin network and in long term this figure will be many times lower than what it is today because there wouldn't be  enough issuance of new bitcoins.

In the current state of its development, bitcoin network is producing a commodity and like any other production process it consumes resources. In the future when this issuance/production is significantly dropped the energy consumption will drop comparatively.

PoW doesn't require energy explicitly for transaction processing. In my design of PoCW I have inserted a hashcash like feature to the system that allows wallets to take part in the security, such that in each halving this role becomes more important and eventually would be the dominant factor for securing the network. It is just one example of many possible improvements in bitcoin for confronting zero-issuance situation.

PoS alternatives are focused on transaction processing and remain silent about the issuance problem. Inflation in PoS is morally unacceptable and economically void. It resembles fiat money inflation. Even hybrid PoS coins are the same as long as they have issuance of new coins based on stakes.  

A PoS system without issuance is nothing more than a second layer protocol for bitcoin (one may suggest to understand LN as a PoS network on top of bitcoin) and with issuance, it is just a scam no matter how big and popular it is, it is a scam just like USD.

Ethereum community is a good example of how a decent ecosystem could be corrupted by PoS ideas:
Right now their big stake holders (Buterin and his Foundation on top) are imposing their short term interests regularly by adopting frequent hard forks to intervent issuance of ETH.

A coin, more than 75% pre-mined, now is actively politicized by the big shots to bump its price by any means and in the best interests of coin/stake owners.

Now, before PoS, they have trouble with miners because they need security which is still provided by miners. Once this coin is PoSed you will have a mafia on top of the system who is in charge of any critical decision including inflation rate without any objective factor to keep them on the track.

Any honest observer understands what I'm saying about the situation with Ethereum and the misery PoS infection has brought to its community and the inevitable failure of it in the near future. The failure that has been signaled already and is based on the subjective understanding of cryptocurrency that PoS enthusiasts are infected with.

According to this subjectivism, crypto is about solving a problem, monetary system, by means of computer and communication.
A reputation based system is what a junior programmer re-discovers every single day he feels confident enough to tackle this problem. Before bitcoin they were mainstream and now they are back in the name of PoS.

No matter what is the label, they have failed and will fail not because of this or that design flaw but because "monetary system" is not a problem to be solved, it is a socio-economic phenomenon that should be re-built. It is what PoW and bitcoin have managed to do, they have built a new monetary system by consuming energy and resources.

You argue that bitcoin energy waste enhances its security, which we disagree , but not the point I was making in this context.

The Actual Costs required to maintain a Proof of Stake is only the energy cost of its nodes.
Which is less than $1000 per month.

The Actual Costs required to maintain the Bitcoin PoW network , require warehouse rentals or purchase, costs of new asics every 1 - 2 years, and a monthly electricity bill that is in the millions of Dollars range every month.

Proof of Stake costs maintenance is fairly constant where as Proof of Work continues to cost more to maintain.  :)

---

Actually in this , we have an agreement.  
(I would include high inflation PoW coins in the morally unacceptable and economically void statement.)
High inflation or Interest in Proof of Stake coins is a problem, and printing of free money to the few is always a recipe for trouble.
Which is why ZEIT moved to an Ultra Low Inflation rate of only .0005% per year.

Bitcoin makes 1800 new coins per day
ZEIT makes less than 500 new coins per day after the ULI was activated.   ;)
And currently burns the transactions fees.

We made Proof of Stake what it should be, a consensus method only for securing the network, not a free money press like high inflation coins.


FYI:
Inflation rate is determined by design specs and not consensus method, as many PoW coins grow in the millions per day.
IE:  
NewYorkCoin is one example of a PoW coin that inflation rate is destructive.
While PoS coins like Nxt, have zero inflation rates, relying on transaction fees only.

Pos is fundamentally the same as buying a cd from a bank..

And no protections that a bank offers.

So interest is higher for the pos coin then the cd.

Pos = crash and burn

IMO, Bitcoin (POW) "IS" secure because government hasn't really try to take down the network yet. Any hardware related consensus mechanism will be overtaken by government in the future, just because they have the most resources.



What about Proof of Transaction? I am in this new project (http://taucoin.io) that created a new consensus mechanism, it seems to be an alternative from POW and POS. For anyone who is interested, there is a Proof-of-Transaction debate bounty (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4907712), debating to be the best consensus mechanism.

You just cannot argue with this kind of users, they have an agenda, which is to shill whatever coin they bring to the discussion.

---

Let me introduce my newest consensus mechanism:
Proof of BullShit (PoBS).
PoBS VALUE is in the amount of BS spread across the bitcointalk forum.

PS: To determine something is secure, it needs to be attacked, or worth to be attacked.

from http://adamierymenko.com/decentralization.html

I think this reasoning (that is, doubting PoW value like that) is wrong. The problem of "conventional banking" is not in said overhead.
It's wrong to compare an average bank electricity consumption, plus it's workers salary with Bitcoin/PoW alts consumption.
Fractional reserve banking is setting the rules for economy and politics that benefit bankers, and damages everyone in the course of that.
Fiat money exist as debt, so whoever has better "credit rating" can go deeper into debt and benefit from inflation, or from devaluation of his currency towards the reserve currency, currently USD.
So called credit rating is under gross manipulation by powerful interests. This leads to the clusterfucks like in 2008.

Also, debt pays interest, and here we have more manipulation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression
This siphons money from workers who hold deposits or bonds (e.g. indirectly in pension funds) to the shareholders, who are already rich.

Conventional banking costs humanity much more than meets the eye.

So no, we are not "paying" for PoW factual electricity/equipment amortization more than Bitcoin deserves (that is, spending electricity that could be used to make fresh water out of oceans and for other worthy purposes). We pay exactly as much, taking into account both the real promise and all the hype, which might turn out to be true in the end. PoW draws as much electricity as free market allows, with admittedly some regulation in some places getting in the way.

To illustrate my point, let's go to Western Hemisphere before Columbus.
There were tribes who used cocoa seeds as money, those who used shells of a certain river mollusc as money, and tribes who used a novel form of money, woven baskets.
A physicalist would argue that only cocoa can be money, as you can consume it also as non-money.
When a tribe wants to switch from shells (the phrase to "shell out" is from exactly this history) to woven baskets, some people may argue:
But shells require so much less labour! You just go to specific river and harvest them.

The problem is, the specific specie of shells that is deemed "money" grows on specific river, controlled by specific tribe, in full analogy with banksters.
Whereas PoW baskets can be woven by anyone with free time and necessary skills.

@byteball

Right to the point. kudos  :)

I have said it more than once:

No way. There are exactly 0, zero other coins out there that can outperform Bitcoin's pure PoW approach specially as a store of value, and probably not any of these other projects, be it PoS, or any of the more exotic variations, may not deliver a better solution than a second layer solution on top of Bitcoin's POW blockchain when it comes to day to day payments.

Some are trying hard and they will basically be competing against Bitcoin's LN. Will you trust their project above LN to pay for a coffee? will you even bother going into another token at all? that we'll have to see.

Lets not get too complacent.  I remember a time when myspace was the dominant social platform, I remember a time when VHS was the preferred media format, I remember a time when the simpsons was still a good show.

The point is lets not pretend that a new coin won't come along in the future and dethrone bitcoin.

"The future"? Both variants are pretty much standard since 2013 or so ;D

Well, you're of course right, but there are also other examples:

- Google - dominant in its category since the early 2000s (~15-20 years)
- Microsoft/Windows - dominant since the early 1990s at least (~30 years)
- Coca-Cola - dominant since the 1950s ? (~70 years)

Bitcoin is dominant, basically, since 2009. Almost 10 years.  Myspace was dominant only for 5 years, so Bitcoin is already doing better. ;)

The reason why I don't see much competition for BTC, in the short term, is however that almost all other coins are following a centralized or semi-centralized paradigm which won't attract most people attracted genuinely by Bitcoin. (I heard that Dash is about to declare insolvency, for example. That won't happen to Bitcoin ;) )

(And since I heard about the 0,02 USD/kWh solar plants in Mexico I suspect that PoW can be sustainable. It may be not ideal, though.)

Bitcoin doesn't eliminate banks. Banks are the ultimate liquidity providers to enable capitalism. FRB evolved because the demand for money exceeded the supply of gold. Should Bitcoin become the dominant currency of the world, banks would need to apply FRB to it as well to help control the price or risk massive waves of bankruptcy in a deflationary event. The alternative is banks won't touch bitcoin. Without demand for bitcoin investment capital, it will likely always remain niche.


While true, there is nothing special about PoW in this regard. Any decentralized currency combats these problems.


Historical savings interest beats inflation. It is only in the last decade or two that basic savings interest has not kept up with or exceeded inflation. The stock market will generally always meet or beat inflation as long as an economy grows as it is automatically indexed to inflation by the investment of inflated currency thereof. The "theft" via inflation is highly dramatized. It is government spending (and other interference) that causes a misallocation of resources, not inflation. In the case of the 2008 crisis, it started as pressure from the US government to the banks to issue more mortgages to less qualified people, distorting the checks and balances of the system.


You mean anyone with custom, production monopoly-prone specialized hardware.

Well, not exactly. Ethereum and many alts are still mined using normal GPUs, also suitable for gamers or genome microbiologists.
I view them as spare liquidity reservoir for Bitcoin.

On PoW/PoS hybrids.
I don't know about Decred (their "foundation tax" from mined coins taken forever seems fishy to me) but in Metro based on NXT plus BitcoinJ-like PoW they seem to have an interesting proposition. NXT is example of PoS system without issuance, but with bad initial distribution since they never had mining, or even an ICO.

PoS-produced blocks of Metro are very frequent, like dozen per minute, so it enables LN-like applications and decentralized on-chain exchange working faster/cheaper than Etherdelta. Whereas PoW blocks are once per 10 minutes like in Bitcoin.
Both Bitcoin (via RootStock, MainNet since Jan 2018) and BitcoinCash (in Jul) already enabled smart contracts on their pegged tokens, thus Metro is able to become a sidechain to them.

Too bad Metro took as their codebase NXT (former BitcoinNext, BCNext) with accounts system like in Ethereum, I guess they would be better off taking BitcoinJ or similar Java implementation of Bitcoin as codebase adding blind shooter PoS algo.
Obviously, Java gives advantage over C++ that programmers are plenty, and NXT has plugins architecture which enables to implement sophisticated additional features, whether in NXT or in it's "clones".

Whether all this will be better, worse or complementing LN, it's hard to say right now.

I was listening the Epicenter podcast (which I suggest to listen to), Anthony Lusardi of the ETC foundation was talking about this.

Essentially, PoW is a tried and tested concensus mechanism. You just have to look at the security of Bitcoin to know whether it works or not. Are there problems in PoW? Yes. It's inefficient and wasteful in terms of energy consumption and does not align itself with greener and more environmentally friendly drives (this is actually important and for some, crypto in general is just a no-go area simply because of the mining farms). It is however the longest running consensus mechanism and it is supposed to allow natural competition - you can join the network and get mining rewards. Obviously, it comes with its own problems of centralization, mining mostly occurs in China. Why? Because electricity is cheap and they make the miners.

To go back to PoS and to the point made in the podcast (i'm pretty sure it was in the one about ETC). Imagine a scenario where you had a majority stake in the network. Obviously that would also lead to proplems of centralization because of the higher proportion of coins you actually own for a given network. They will be worth a certain amount to the staker so they wouldn't want to give them up. The problem is, they might be worth even more to a potential buyer who wishes to "purchase" the network by purchasing those coins from highest holding staker. It might be less wasteful that PoW but it doesn't solve any problems of potential corruption.

You are completely right. I was having a same discussion with a colleague of mine about this the other day. The thing I see happening is that because bitcoin was the first ever implementation of blockchain technology, it is has gained a lot of fame and money. The fact that there are several coins/tokens out there, far better than bitcoin, people won’t actually want to convert to bitcoin as they have created their own cryptos.

I strongly believe that some other coin will dethrone bitcoin sooner or later. It might not actually dethrone it but it’s impact night greatly impact the value of bitcoin negatively.

It's a bit similar to USD: everyone knows that USD is doomed, but other fiats are depreciating towards it, so you have to use USD if you want to be in fiat.
My feeling is that alts will further depreciate towards BTC as a whole, since there are so many of them, new arrive every day and you cannot predict the winner.
And even though in the end BTC is doomed, there's no safer option than to be in BTC if you are in crypto.

All of us are waiting for the SEC to allow ETF. If this happens, bitcoin will become the most liquid crypto currency in the world.
Most of the asics continue to be produced for the bitcoin algorithm.
Competitors:
The ethereum has a lot of problems because of the huge number of tokens, and the process of releasing new updates is constantly postponed.
Ripple was recognized by SEC as securities. Against Ripple filed a class action.
About the TON of little news lately.
I do not understand what crypto currency will be able to take 1 place

I cannot believe you really believe that. Hahaha.

The worst is you believe that POS will replace POW. Staking is costless, and whoever "maintains" the network can retain that power forever. Why should we give them that right?

In POW, miners' ASICs depreciate, mining have costs, and this gives opportunities to new miners to enter, process, and validate blocks.

Just posted in the other PoS v PoW discussion but thought I'd share here too  ;)

We just ran an interview with Eric Voskuil (https://twitter.com/evoskuil) to gauge his thoughts on the future of bitcoin (Resist or Die: How to Secure Blockchain's Future) (https://cbet.ly/2ICFkdb)

"PoW is neither unfair, unsustainable, nor unviable, [it] is a necessary aspect of securing any Bitcoin design. Internal systems (i.e. Proof of Stake) cannot be censorship resistant. Once the censor has controlling stake (which cannot be prevented) there is no way to unseat it.”

What do you think?

Ronnie @ Cloudbet

In some designs with a "dormancy period" (stake used for minting becomes "dormant" for a large portion of blocks and doesn't participate in minting), as far as I know, you need a large supermajority of the stake (66%) to be able to censor transactions. While an attacker with less stake (e.g. 51%) could try to orphan all blocks found by his competitors, at some moment his  "active stake" would be so low that no client would follow his chain for several blocks, and the attacker won't be able to install his attack chain as the consensus chain before the "reorg limit" has passed.

Apart from that, a ETH/ETC-style hardfork could be a measure of last resort.

@d5000 Thats a really interesting idea that I haven't seen before, it seems like a pretty reasonable way to reduce the chances of a single node taking full control of the network.

Do you know of any projects that have deployed (or are planning to deploy) this design? I’d love to do some further reading!

One point that’s been brought up in regards to PoS is the idea that the ‘controlling stake’ wouldn’t be as desirable, as the value lies with the other participants in the chain having trust in the system - if someone gained a controlling stake and started to act against the best interests of the chain, and given the countless offerings in crypto today, people might just decide to move elsewhere, effectively de-valuing the stake held by the ‘controller’.

I'm still not completely convinced and am leaning towards PoW if the vulnerabilities of PoS can't be solved in my personal opinion (not speaking for Cloudbet or any other employees).

Thanks,

Ronnie @ Cloudbet

The "dormancy period" exists in all Peercoin-based currencies.

However, to be more effective against censorship, it must be combined with a "reorg limit" (clients would not follow reorganizations of more than X blocks, so the attacker sits on a worthless chain). There are only a few currencies that combine both mechanisms. As far as I know, Blackcoin is one of them.

It should be clarified however that these mechanisms do not prevent double spend attacks based on the Nothing at Stake problem. An attacker with 51% of the active stake could always generate a chain long enough to trick other nodes into accepting a double spend.

This is true, and has been analyzed under concepts such as "altruism-prime" (Vitalik Buterin).

But unfortunately there are possible attacks where this game-theory-based mechanism would not work - e.g. if the attacker is able to short sell a large amount of the coins, attacks the chain, and then profits from the decreased price.

Yes, I also think PoW, as for now, is superior. But PoS may "just work", above all in mature currencies with a decent distribution, or alternative with a group of "benevolent" whales, when it is extremely difficult to exploit Nothing-at-stake.

What makes a "decent" distribution? Plus how do we know that the original people who received large stakes in the network will sell their coins?

Staking is costless, why should the Jihan Wu of POS be given the right to retain power of an economic system forever?


We should trust them?

In my opinion, a decent distribution has two components:
- No mega-whales - that means, no entities controlling more than ~10% of the stake (those that could launch an N@S-based attack alone or cooperating with few others)
- A large group of at least ~1000 larger investors - people that really have something to lose if the coin's value fell to zero. This is important because only if larger investors exist, "altruism-prime" works.
I believe no PoS coin currently meets both requirements. Bitcoin is beginning to show a "decent distribution". Maybe also Ethereum. But a PoS coin which achieves some adoption out of the "pure speculation" market (e.g. when it's really used as "cash") should be able to reach a "decent" distribution relatively easily. The problem is that almost all altcoins (also PoW coins) are used 90% for speculation, and this leads to the problem of exchanges that become mega-whales.

I'm critical of PoS coins distributed via ICOs, just because of the problem of original stakeholders which may become too powerful (it's impossible to control them). The best way, in my opinion, is the Peercoin way - use PoW to distribute the initial stash of coins.
What you mean would be a "mega-whale" (see above) which I consider harmful for PoS coins. PoS communities should do everything in their power to avoid that one entity achieves more than ~10% of the stake. Often those mega-whales are exchanges, so a possible measure is to take care that no exchange dominates the market. Again, "usage as cash" would automatically lower the importance of exchanges.

I share your skepticism here, but some coins seem to just work because there are mega-whales that would lose everything if the coin fell to zero. The most obvious examples are DPoS coins like Steem. Technically the "benevolent" behaviour of the whales could be justified by game theory, but in coins with "delegation" mechanisms there is too much trust involved and social engineering could be really catastrophic. The "decent distribution" alternative is way better.

Well, either banks can apply FRB using Bitcoin as "reserve currency", or there could be alternative to banks represented by alts. Obviously, alts are not mature right now for that, but that doesn't preclude them from solving the power vacuum problem in the future (I mean, more broad power vacuum problem than Bitcoin alone already has solved).

But why should we grant the originators of a POS system to be the perpetual maintainers, validators, stakers, the forever receivers of incentives of the network?

Distribution is not the problem. The fact the staking bears no cost is the problem.

There is no reason why the developers ("originators"?) should receive a "stake" initially. What you refer to, probably, is that even with a PoW "distribution" period, there is a high probability that the "originators" participate actively in mining in the first phase, and this way, ensure a "perpetual influence" (like it occurred in Steem).

A possible solution is to offer PoW always as an alternative algorithm, like in Peercoin, so always new stakers are allowed to enter the distribution via the "PoW door", or add other algorithms without the "perpetuality" problem, like Proof-of-Capacity/Space, or Proof-of-burn. These two mechanisms share the energy efficiency (at least not high costs), but they require permanent investments by the validators to ensure their influence.

In my opinion, an underestimated approach is to combine PoW, PoS, PoC/S and PoB. I'm a supporter of the (very small) Slimcoin altcoin which already uses three algos (PoW, PoS and PoB), and that seems to work fine. A four-algorithm coin would be even better - at least two thirds of the blocks would be generated with methods where no "perpetual" power is possible.

There is no perfect algorithm. You always will face some sort of "injustice" or tradeoff. However, I think people over-estimate the influence or power of the validators. The real challenge for a cryptocurrency is to gain acceptance as a "means of payment" with respect to other payment methods. Once they are accepted as a payment means, then the market will be always open enough to ensure a high "movility" of the coin/stake ownership.

The reply does not satisfy me. Anyone can say the answer is a "more fair distribution", or an initial POW phase, or something else. But that doesn't change the reality that large stakeholders are granted the power perpetually, they will be richer because their stakes increase at no costs, and because of this they can dilute the small holders.

If we have a coin with a combination of PoS and another algorithm like PoW, PoB or PoC, and the PoW/PoB/PoC rewards are higher than the PoS reward, then the stakeholders - big or small - over time lose shares in comparison to the total supply.

This is fairly typical for PoS hybrids (with the exception of the "high stake coins" like Highcoin, which in my opinion are nothing more than HYIP schemes). For example, in Peercoin, the 1% per year reward stakeholders can get when they find the maximum amount of possible stake blocks, isn't enough to compensate losses due to supply inflation (I believe Peercoin had about 4%/year due to PoW rewards).

So in this case, I consider the problem "solved".

That depends, again, on the algorithm. In coins like Peercoin, where the reward is proportional to the size of the stake, big holders are diluting only very small holders - those that either do not mint at all or hold so few coins that they don't find blocks.

This is not so for non-inflationary PoS, like NXT. A hybrid of NXT + PoW has a good chance of achieving a good distribution:
10% of max supply are given (Jelurida Public License requires that) to NXT holders, that admittedly, mostly consist of few whales;
x% of max supply is given to founders;
the rest (up to 90% max supply) is issued gradually over time to miners or other value contributors, not to original stakers! Original stakers and miners who become stakers only get transaction fees.
So initial whales are diluted over 5-15 years time.

I know POW, POS hybrid coins could work depending on the implementation, that's why I invested in Decred. But I would like someone like Gregory Maxwell or Achow to comment on this for enlightenment's sake.

What is your opinion on Decred?

As far as I know, they consider the "Nothing at stake" problem to be too severe to consider PoS an alternative for PoW, and that's why they aren't participating much in the debate anymore. I wrote already that I consider that we need more research on that. The PoS detractors are maybe right, but until now, there are PoS coins that "work" for years now, and nobody really was able to exploit the weaknesses - only in a handful of very small coins.

I like the model a bit, and I own a small quantity of them, too. What I did not like is the high proportion of the premine that went to the developers (50%). They justify it with the cost for development work, but Bitcoin and many other coins had development work too and it was done "for free".

Yes they "work". But the large stakeholders are granted the power in the network in perpetuity, and without costs. What kind of an "economic system" would that be?


The premine was not given away for free. The investors and the developers spent $415,000 to start the project, in exchange for some DCR from the premine. The rest of it went to airdrops for contributors.

Energy consumption is not a technical deficit; PoS has plenty of problems. Read any decent research paper instead of getting information from Coindesk et. al.

PoS is completely unnecessary; the main people shilling hard for it are uneducated shitcoin bagholders.

Cat 'members the nothing at stake problem.

In my understanding of what POW and POS are! I would pick POS (Proof Of Stake) over POW(Proof of Work)! Since proof of stake requires less energy interms of mining, and the fact that some think it is more secure! I would go with it! I don't know of any manipulations in staking as I do of POW! Any hardware is good to go for staking! Mining however needs specialized hardware which in most cases are very expensive! You can stake on the smallest unimaginable Raspberry! I have heard of mining bugs and all of that but not staking bugs! If Anyone knows what I don't as regards the two (POW and POS) I am happy to learn from you!

Pure PoS equates to charging for sublicensing property rights to code. PoS with an ICO is slightly better, but not by much. Just dilutes the whales initially a bit.
NXT is an example.
1 Gigatoken appearing from nowhere, distributed to a few whales. Only small number of tokens in real circulation,
thus overvalued capitalization: multiplying price of small number by very large number. Similar to forks of Bitcoin where too many tokens do not move, but without further mining.
The only value of them: rights to the code, requirement to distribute 10% of forging tokens in any clone.

Whereas in PoW we have reified (sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently - for die-hard HODLers, fundamentalists and those who lost their wallets) capital of mining equipment, specialized skills and irrecoverable dissipated electricity.

Proof of Work:

Imagine a running race in which the whole of this forum is taking part in. So, Now the advantage in this running race is the kind of shoes you have. If you have a very very good shoes you could run and finish the race as soon as possible. The chances of you winning the running race depends on how good your shoes is and that is it!
Now imagine you've won the race and there is a board of which has a list of all the races that is ever been won so as you're the winner of this race you get to place your name on the board and everyone would be notified of it. Once you're done you would get a reward which is the incentive for you to take part.

Proof of stake:

Now, In proof of stake the scenario is a little different. Here, You would bet some money and gain a chance to run alone and the chance of you getting selected depends on the amount of money that you have bet. There's a caution to this process!, If you're caught cheating your money would be slashed off.

The advantage of selecting one person here is saving the amount of money that is being spent of shoes. There is no point in spending money on shoes if you are not guaranteed to win.

Shoes= Computational Power
Reward= Bitcoin or ether
Running race= Mining