Bitcoin Forum

Yes, title was inspired from a song.
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I read a post saying POS protocol are less vulnerable to 51% attack so I searched over the net to see any article supporting that statement. I stumbled upon this article from investopedia https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/proof-stake-pos.asp and I was dumbfounded by the opening paragraph

https://i.ibb.co/Fh4Z8pm/pos.png (https://imgbb.com/)

I never thought I would read something that associates Bitcoin with POS. To be fair to the writer, he mentioned Bitcoin uses POW but he did so at the last part of the article. Any beginner would have find that confusing to say the least. There is no doubt that there are more articles like this one on the internet and that's quite alarming to me.


P.S.
If you think there are more inaccurate information written in the above article, please point it out.
If you can also suggest better sources to read, please comment below.

Damn. I expected better from Investopedia; looks like the writer did a few minutes of research and just compiled whatever he read.

Funnily enough, on the writer's profile page..

https://i.imgur.com/Efz60eL.png

What an amateur mistake from a person that "specializes" in blockchain and crypto.

This is a simple illustration of the difference.

https://i.imgur.com/W8WlTFF.jpg
Source by Blockgeek.

He mentioned in PoS that bitcoin can mined or validate block based on amount of hold? Yes if bitcoin utilizes PoS but its not the process. I would love it since my bitcoin will increase  :D. But PoS is worked by staking coin on the ecosystem  by validators and not using any computational work like PoW to earn block reward.


This is a good source from [1]blockgeek for reading and comparing both consensus.

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[1] https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/

I think that's the problem with crypto media in general, you just have to look at the Press (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=77.0) board to see how much ignorance those authors are spewing ever since. We can argue that the market or blockchain technology is very young and there could be mistakes here and there. However, as journalist, they should adhere to ethical journalism, but this is not the case so far.

Non of our concern of which one is more susceptible to 51% attack, bitcoin that uses PoW was created in 2009, we are in 2020. Which means bitcoin is now or will soon be 11 years old. All these time, nothing happened to bitcoin. With the hashes generated by bitcoin miners, bitcoin can not be susceptible to 51% attack.

It is proven beyond doubt, how bitcoin blockchain is the strongest and most secure as it generate the highest hashes.

Be it PoW or PoS, 51% attack can occur if and only if miners mining such particular coin has decreased in number in a way the blockchain is prone to being compromized by hackers. Which means what such link is implying is totally wrong and misleading.

Maybe they were talking theoreticals? Like, they're dumbing it down because most people are only familiar with Bitcoin and nothing else. It also seems like the writer is partial towards PoS, but that might just be because it's what the page is about. Someone could probably reach out to his Twitter if they care enough (lol).


Honestly, I don't think there's enough to write about in crypto to justify their (crypto-specific media outlets) existence. This is part of the reason why they overblow the simplest stuff and make stories out of people briefly mentioning the subject. I could see some of the misinformation being deliberate just to grab some kind of attention.

As far as my experience goes, crypto media and crypto "journalists" are 100% low quality clickbait trash, without exception. There is not a single crypto media "news" site, blog, or whatever, which isn't filled with inaccuracies and errors.

You will get far better information from this forum than from any media site.

True. But unfortunately Investopedia isn't your typical crypto "media site". This site has a quite-high SEO score that it's pretty much an authority site concerning investing(which has a small overlap with cryptocurrencies). They have some good information about investing in general hence why I look at the website quite highly, but damn this specific article LOL.

What a terrible article on the popular site. I can't believe that editors of the site accept such article.

(GUIDE) Masternode, Node, Full Node / Masternode setup with screens.  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5120117.0). That thread is more informative and has better quality than the article on investopedia.com

It's not very obvious. Most of these authors that owns a blog or some other media for publication don't care about the content they put out. They just write for consistency and to keep their blog or media busy. It's so uncool. It's left for the literate on a topic to verify some of it's details. Good job.

I think that binance academy^[1] provides good content that is worth reading, and that many of the lectures that andreas antonopoulos^[2] gives are good sources of information, but always come back to not trust anyone, but rather to search for yourself.
There is another problem, which is that some BCH supporter/BTC haters.
Therefore, even if they have good technical experience, they may present some false information, which is difficult to verify.

[1] https://academy.binance.com/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJWCJCWOxBYSi5DhCieLOLQ

This was my second thought as I couldn't believe they would publish an inaccurate information but it's 2019 and like what mk4 is pointing out, it's Investopedia!


Cheers to that!


To all who provided links, thank you!

Pretty much. I'm pretty sure a information-focused website(especially as highly reputable as Investopedia) can dumb down topics without rendering them as misinformation. They could simply use a statement such as "With Proof of Stake (POS), holders of certain alternative cryptocurrencies.." or something like that.

What's this investopedia?! very misleading. It could be a tiny part for those who understands it but it can mislead a lot of newbies that are just on their way to study about these consensus algorithm.

When there are things I don't understand about investing, I'm checking them out. I'd be careful this time if I ever visit them again, thank you for sharing.

Stopped reading media long time ago when realized that "facts" they are providing are either fake or pointless and useless. You are not getting smarter if read more stupid media and their senseless interpretations of how technology works. That example above shows it clearly, the article will not help you to grasp what bitcoin is or what pos is, because assumtions on which article was based were totally wrong in the first place.

Another example of fake news^[1] where Cointelegraph confused Kyrgyzstan with Kazakhstan. They don't care about accuracy of publishing, they don't know the difference between Austria and Australia, they just publishing nonsense.

[1] https://xive.io/blog/5-cointelegraph-got-it-wrong

Sure, of course. But I've been personally a fan of Investopedia when I was new to finance and investing in general; when I was initially doing my research. Their articles are pretty great and easy to understand while being decently short enough. Hence why I was surprised when I saw this specific one concerning PoS.