Bitcoin Forum

why bitcoin protocol cannot use pos instead of pow ?

Because it's an inferior mechanism that cannot even produce consensus (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387588.0). Beyond that, it makes things more centralized as vote distribution is not permissionless; for newcomers to vote, present owners have to give them part of their stash, oppositely to Proof-of-Work wherein everyone has the ability to vote just by spending their energy on mining.

Cryptocurrencies that have adopted it might currently operate normally (in a manner of speaking), but their future's success in decentralization is highly questionable (if their present isn't bad already).

I'll try my best

Simply because with POS, you are trusting whales or people who holds large amount of coins to create a new blocks effortlessly thus making the network much less secure as compared to POW. I can't get to the technical know-how, unfortunately, but the premise is that bitcoin switching to POS isn't worth the risk given how many attack vectors are involved -- this means many different type of hacks or anomalies could happen.

- https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
- https://medium.com/@factchecker9000/nothing-is-worse-than-proof-of-stake-e70b12b988ca

To make it more simple, think of it like the economic side of things where the top 1% have more control over the rules that we live in making it centralised and prone to corruption.

Almost no coding expert is recommending PoS for Bitcoin.
So many Altcoins are using PoS already but it is clearly because devs have more power in PoS by hoarding a large chunk of premined coins, so Altcoin dev's choice is PoS.
Bitcoin is better in PoW, no need to change to PoS.
Now, we can wait and watch, what will be better but I expect many PoS coins will fail.

In addition, PoS is an unfair consensus because rich stakers are getting richer every time.
PoS is just not fair.
In Bitcoin you can always keep a certain % of Bitcoin's supply and it doesn't get diluted.

Proof of work mining requires high energy consumption and has other problems. This is not only in Bitcoin mining, but in all currencies that use the same Proof.
The EU Parliament had proposed moving the protocol from a proof of work to a proof of quota. The reasons explained are the large amount consumed by mining farms with the inability of green energies to meet all the mining needs of energy. There are countries that ban mining for the same reasons.
I am not advocating Proof of Stake because I know this will make Bitcoin more centralized but I would like to know how the problem of excessive energy consumption can be overcome in the long run.

Which we all know are pure alibis. The real reason is control, something they don't have with Proof-of-Work. If they cared about the environment, and their intentions had a purely humanistic character, they'd have grabbed the entire financial sector, which consumes much more than Proof-of-Work does (and is capable of consuming):

But, no politician talks about that. It somehow raises no interests.  ::)

It can't. The network needs energy. That energy comes from difference resources, most of which are sustainable according to the Mining Council (https://genesisdigitalassets.com/renewable-energy-sources-that-will-power-the-future-of-bitcoin-mining/). But, just like nearly anything humans utilize, it requires energy to operate properly.

to turn it to PoS requires forking bitcoin..

guess what. bitcoin has already been forked to PoS
there are dozens of altcoins that are PoS.. look at them all.. all unsuccessful

thus proves how crap it is

do you know why people do not buy air. .. because it costs nothing to make air.. just like the residual cost to make PoS.
PoS coins are never worth much. they have no real cost backing the acquisition of coins created. and so their market prices are near 100% pure speculation hype. rather than backed by a decent non-zero cost value

Ethereum is going to go through a process of rampant speculation. followed by a massive value crash.
yep once people realise they are getting coins for penny costs or zero cost by just staking with a custodian.. they would all be happy to sell at any price knowing that they are making a profit.
and no one would happily buy ethereum for over $1k if they can get ethereum for pennies

when you hear 99.5% less energy COST.. you should also be hearing 99.5% cost reduction. thus 99.5% less market price.

yep if people can get ethereum for penny/zero cost. then people will not want to pay over $1k for ethereum if they can get it for $0.10. so watch the buy demand die

bitcoin is not worth over $12k due to speculation.. its worth over $12k because no miner on the planet can mine bitcoin for less. no one can acquire bitcoin for less.
the reason why bitcoin topped out at $70k is because everyone on the planet could mine for under $70k at the time. and so no one was left to want to buy for more then $70k

..
in shorts its basic economics..

Because it was programmed to work with PoW. (Why can't I charge my old benzin car from the so cool electric charging stations?)

However, as said, one can change Bitcoin code to work with PoS and whoever agrees with the change can use that code, which will work on its own fork of the blockchain.
Of course, most probably the majority will not care about that change (that new coin), which is pretty much proven by the fact the attempts done until now produced worthless coins.

This proves altcoins are crap. Not only Proof-of-Stake.

No, no, no. You're making the same confusion with cost of production and market value. The reason people don't buy air is because it (the supply) is abundant.

The cost of backing the acquisition of the coins, is the staked coins themselves. I'll give another example: Printing paper money costs nearly nothing. A $5 bill costs the same as a $500 dollar bill; yet, they are valuated differently, because the monetary policy isn't down to you to decide. The cost of minting the money is irrelevant, what matters is that you can't alter the supply by your own will.

The short answer is that it could.  The longer answer has to do with game theory.  What I am surprised by is that there hasn't been a big push to fork Bitcoin to PoS.  Even if it failed miserably, it would still likely be one hell of a dividend for current Bitcoin owners that would likely lead to them selling and investing more money into Bitcoin, thus driving the price up for everyone similar to a stock buyback.  That alongside an ETF approval would make for one hell of a bubble.

no. i have made no mention of the market at all
that is where you are confusing things i categorically mentioned the $12k minimum cost on the planet for mining. which is not the market price.
its the under lying store of value that no one will sell below because no one can acquire coin via any method right now below this COST

as for supply.. meaningless too.. thats the realm of speculation of a market above the underlying value store

when people think something is rare they are willing to pay a premium ontop of the underlying value. but if the underlying value is low then the premium above that is low

take a coin called "bitcoin plus" which is only $3...
yep they have less then 200k coin supply but the price is only $3. thats because its PoS with a low underlying cost at the bottom thus all the speculation above it is causing small changes.

..
oh and even if there are 19m coins in the true bitcoin circulation.
in 2012 there were only 11million coins .. yet the price was lower.

thats because the market price has nothing to do with coins in circulation. the market price is dependant on the coins and only the coins deposited into an exchange and not only that. only the allotment of coins actually on the market orderbooks.

simple economics.

that said.. some speculate that because PoS involved locking coins up to stake. it would mean less coins available on market orderbooks thus a supply lack meaning a hype of speculation due to orderbook supply lack vs demand.

but in the end because PoS coins have no real large value cost to back up the underlying cost. then all the speculation ontop would only be a Yx of underlying cost. as there is a limit to how many multiples of underlying cost someone is willing to pay before they decide they will jump into the stake side for cheap coin to sell for profit.

EU parliament or any other government entity doesn't have a say about Bitcoin protocol, if they are making statements they are just making noise for themselves.
Their reasons also had nothing to do with "green" crap at all, otherwise they wouldn't be moving towards using coal again very quickly! They've just been facing an energy crisis which they are trying to avoid while at the same time they have no idea what they are doing.

Any examples?
I know China banned bitcoin mining because they wanted control over their citizens and their finances while introducing their own centralized govcoin.

I like this explanation by Saifedean Ammous, the author of The Bitcoin Standard book. A single football match requires an enormous amount of energy to take place, which includes not only football stadium maintenance, but also broadcasts on TV, advertising, movements of fans, and all the people who would like to watch a match either in a stadium, TV or some pub. The problem is if you DON'T like football or sports games in general, then according to you, all the energy that is being spent on all these activities goes to waste and only damages the environment, nothing else. Yet, other people don't consider energy wasted because football games are fun to watch. The same reasoning can easily be applied to bitcoin or other important innovations or technologies that the ESG mafia considers useless, purposeless, and wasteful. Other people, however, who recognize the value and importance of decentralized unstoppable payments and undilutable savings, don't consider the energy spent on bitcoin mining wasted.

Bitcoin never will switch to Proof-of-Stake because it is designed to be an alternative to the traditional financial system, not its likeness, which Proof-of-Stake evidently strives to become (Ethereum merge is a perfect example of this flawed model).

This is not how it works. If you fork bitcoin, and create say Bitcoin Cash, and somehow it rises in value, it's because instead of demanding BTC, some people demand BCH. Demand is transited to another asset, and selling later that and buying back BTC won't make a difference.

Didn't say it's the market value, but the cost of production. Price = Cost + Profit, agreed, but it just not works the same in currencies, that's true for products whose supply can change by anyone. Proof-of-Work goes to the same basket. On the other hand, Proof-of-Stake doesn't. You can't print ETH without paying a present owner, therefore you can't alter the supply which is what drives the price.

So, by that you conclude that supply is a pointless measure? Not that there was minimal demand back then? Come on franky, it doesn't go more simple economics than that.

The fact that this is still a running argument shows that no matter how unsure one is of what they are saying, if they confidently repeat it and use the media to spread the propaganda, it would become an issue. This is a part of journalism which has always puzzled me.
The only reason the EU parliament or any other government parastatal is interested in the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining, is that if they keep pushing the narrative that it is unsafe for the environment, more people may move away from it, and they can force a protocol change, which can be more easily controlled.

Most governments do not give 2 cents about climate impact.

It is not a problem which needs to be solved, and mining is already majorly run on sustainable energy as it is now.

In my own understanding, PoS is just simply a display of runnings under centralized system whereby you depend on others to secure your coins, they are the whales and the developers, while in PoW, you get the reward for your mining as what you earned directly from solving complex mathematical equations, although this may be high energy demanding than PoS, but there's justification in receiving mining rewards and you don't have to depend on centralized whales as in PoS, I don't see any reason for changing bitcoin mining from PoW to PoS because that's one of the edges bitcoin has over altcoins.

This is about how we trust the "book-keepers" and admins of transactions, how you have trust in a decentralised system. PoW forces the book-keepers to expend energy in a digital lottery where they try to guess the right number, competing against all the other book-keepers who are guessing as well; if a book-keeper tries to censor transactions, but fails to guess the right number for the block, their energy is wasted, and the transaction can get through any of the other book-keepers who aren't censoring anyone and happen to guess the right number.
That random nature of the contest, and being forced to expend actual "work" that costs something to do, is how you get trust decentralised.

Bitcoin won't use PoS simply because the consensus algorithm only benefits the whales. Those with large amounts of money will be able to control the BTC blockchain with their stake. In other words, changing from PoW to PoS would mean sacrificing decentralization in the long run. Even Ethereum's developers acknowledged that the ETH blockchain will be less-decentralized with PoS. Yet, they've decided to go forward with the change in order to make the ETH chain cheaper and faster to use for dApps. It's a smart contract platform after all (not a single purpose chain like Bitcoin).

If you want people to use your platform massively for decentralized applications, then you'd need to adopt a consensus mechanism that prioritizes scalability above all else. I believe the pioneer cryptocurrency is fine as it is, even though many haters criticize its "high energy" consumption. Many altcoins are already switching to PoS due to "environmental concerns", so I wouldn't be surprised if BTC remains as the "only PoW coin in town". Just my opinion :)

yep i do agree with what u saying, the idea makes bitcoin to PoS happens all the time.

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i mean PoS is very efficient compared to PoW but every consensus has their challenge. like right now that happen to ETH to completely migrate to PoS and it was not easy task it take a multiple year from idea into reality and of course not everyone gonna like it too

The only consensus algorithm that has proven its reliability is based on attaching evidence that energy has been spent and the effort has been put to make a block valid for everyone else. In PoS and other flawed "consensus" algorithms, there is no way to determine which block is valid and which isn't because there is no connection to the real world whatsoever. Maybe it is more efficient in the sense that almost no energy is being spent to produce a block, but that also means that a block itself has little to no value. The main goal of having a consensus system is to make everyone in a system agree on some "true" statement, which is only relevant for a system in nothing else. In the PoW algorithm, the truth is spoken by those who have proven they have a right to make a statement, and this right is always temporary, whereas in PoS if you have invested enough money, you get permanent voting power. The former system is competitive and objective, the latter is oligarchic and highly subjective. Hence, in the latter case, it is slowly but surely moving towards centralization of power and inevitable takeover by those who happen to have more power and money.

It depends on how you define "efficiency". PayPal is even more efficient than all of these algorithms that are introduced in the crypto community. We use PoW because it is secure and it provides the decentralization and immutability that we are looking for. PoS is providing none of that specially in shitcoins like ethereum that have 72 million premined coins.

Government should fund green energy directly. If all power is from green energy, we can prevent climate change.
No need to ban PoW.


Can you please stop copying my text?
You have it copied from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5410782.msg60802859#msg60802859

PoS often sacrifices decentralization/censorship-resistance for high performance and cost-efficiency. The only reason ETH chose to become a PoS cryptocurrency is because it needed to scale to millions of users worldwide (especially when it's a platform designed for "decentralized" applications). It wouldn't be possible to achieve high transaction throughput with PoW, because of the time it takes to produce blocks. Bitcoin will never sacrifice its decentralization in favor of a new consensus algorithm which aims to increase scalability of the Blockchain network but would also centralize the same as whales will be able to gain all of the power. In a PoS system, the rich become richer, while the poor, poorer. That's the way it works.

Bitcoin is open source anyways, so there's nothing stopping someone from coming up with a hard fork that would use PoS on top of PoW. Most altcoins are heading towards the PoS direction, so it should only be a matter of time before Bitcoin remains the only PoW cryptocurrency on the market. ;)

Hey I don't get this. Can you explain it to me? So to mine one Bitcoin it takes 12k worth of ... what? This is a legit question, not trying to be sarcastic or anything. I just don't get it, why does it take 12k to mine Bitcoin? So does this mean that Bitcoin price really wouldn't fall below 12k?

right now the network is about 210,000,00thashs of mining rate.
each asic is only Xthash..
that is about 1.3million asics operating 24/7
where there are only 6.25btc roughly on average every 10 minutes or 900 coins a day on average.

if you work out the time for 1 btc. and how much electric them over million asics and their hardware cost it requires to mine.. (at the cheapest most efficient amount on the planet) for the time to mine that 1 bitcoin.. you work out that it costs that (low) amount to mine 1 bitcoin..
because yes math...  math is great like that..
if you have only a small amount of hashpower it takes longer to mine enough shares of rewards to total the same 1bit which works out at the same cost (if the variables dont change)

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that estimate is like the lowest known way to get the cheapest btc (for those lucky to get the coin for that price)

no one wants to sell for a loss
and if there are people with higher electric.. like in hawaii where it would cost them $80k+ to mine.. they would prefer to buy bitcoin at any price below $80k rather then mine at a loss..
(they are stil very very happy with the $20k-$24k amount this month)
so its market economics. if only a couple people can sell and profit at low number, but the average market is at $20k. and some people cant mine for under $80k
there are alot and i mean alot of buyers willing to pay anything at different amounts.. above (low)
and no one willing to sell below the (low) this the low becomes a wall/ a support. and stopping point of where sells dry up, IF it ever went town to that amount

thus this (low) amount which is the current whole planets lowest amount people can get bitcoin for.. thats the 'bottom'

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yes bitcoin cost is actual real world costs.. its not something that can be got for free. there is a cost in one way or another.. thus the bottom is non-zero.  
there is a limit to how low it can go at current variables.. where everyone just gives up trying to sell because sellers run out and too many buyers are eating up them sells before it gets close to the 'bottom'(low)

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bitcoin would literally have to break. where utility/desire dies, and everyone just wants to escape even if everyone makes a loss escaping. for the price to tank right down, breaking the economic low of sane value and market economics,  to near zero,

I disagree. PoS doesn't really solve the scalability problem at all.
Not to mention that the main reason why they are moving to PoS is because they know that miners are not going to continue mining a shitcoin that can't gain value over the long term but could have increasing difficulty. Also PoS means those with the highest amount of this shitcoin (like the 72 ETH they premined) would be paid a lot of money for doing nothing.

You are confusing the difficulty in Proof of Work with block size. They are not related. The block size is the factor that limits scalability.

Exactly. They know that over the long run, miners abandon their useless coins which is why they are trying to find an alternative method of keeping their coin artificially alive.

You cannot sacrifice decentralization if the project has already achieved decentralization because this is how decentralization works! The reason Ethereum was able to switch to another consensus mechanism (though PoS is clearly not a consensus mechanism since you cannot come to consensus by only referring to internal processes that depend on the existence of consensus - circular logic that leads to nothing but an inevitable capture and centralization) is due to the fact that it has never been truly decentralized - developers and founders of Ethereum have had enormous power over the protocol and always could dictate its course and development. The main reason they unilaterally "decided" to shift to PoS is that this way, they can enrich themselves more quickly and efficiently and gain even more power over the project's fate and perhaps over the monetary system itself. Scalability is not their concern, and Vitalik Buterin claimed many times that PoS itself has nothing to do with the speed of transactions and that additional improvements, such as sharding, need to be implemented to make blockchain more scalable. The problem, again, is that sharding makes blockchain even less decentralized because it incentivizes users or stake maintainers to keep only their "part" of the blockchain and trust others with keeping other parts of the blockchain in a correct form. PoS is terrible, PoS with in-built sharding is even worse. Bitcoin doesn't need all that: it has gotten layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network which, among other things, doesn't make the underlying layer less reliable and less decentralized.

What you are missing is that they do not have "control" they have influence. There is a huge difference between those two. When they want to switch to this protocol, they had to provide something to people like a voting and people did moved their money there enough, billions moved there, and that is how they were manage to get the greenlight to do it.

You assume that they just wanted to do it and did it all without any pushback, and there was absolutely nobody that created a counter argument to why we should stay with PoW and built a chain or at least kept the current one and attracted people there. Whereas when PoS was announced, everyone went mad. Hence, it is not a shock that they could do it without any pushback.

I honestly can't see the difference between those two because if you have influence in a network that is supposed to be decentralized and free of any elite groups able to dictate what needs to be done, you can gaslight less technically competent users and convince them that all changes you propose and make are actually good for them and the protocol as a whole. In my view, it is just synonymous with having control over people's minds. Moreover, you are talking about voting and other democratic terms, but you must have forgotten that in decentralized blockchains, people vote with the software they are running - full nodes. You don't need polls on Twitter or something like that to express your opinion regarding changes in a consensus mechanism: you merely install a piece of software that enforces certain rules with which you agree. The problem is that in Ethereum no one, except for big companies, runs a full node, and therefore, ordinary users don't have real power to influence the fate of a project. Instead, big corporations like Amazon, Infura, Alchemy, Circle, etc decide whether to switch to Proof-of-Stake or not, whether to give users access to certain smart contracts, and so on. Users have neither the right to vote nor the power; they are at the mercy of these big corporations controlling nodes, developers making changes, and governments regulating everything.

Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake for very simple reasons.
Increased Security
Increased Transaction Capacity
PoS Holders can finally participate in Network Security increasing Decentralization higher than the previous few mining PoW pools,
Energy Use of the PoS network will decrease by over 99% verses the old Proof of Waste model while allowing onchain transaction performance to increase.
* Note this also increases financial incentives to run Full Nodes, a financial incentive that is severely lacking in BTC PoW model.*

Governments have been warning of Bans on Proof of work mining for years.
China has implemented their ban.

And whether you want to believe that the PoW ban warnings are mere fud, or actually because energy resources are not unlimited,  
the fact is, as China proved, PoW mining can be banned.

Ethereum no longer has to be concerned with the security danger of the world governments banning their network model.

However since Bitcoin Developers and community have decided to stick their collective heads in the ground,
and pretend the government ban warnings against PoW does not exist.

The only real question , is what will happen to BTC when the Governments all ban PoW mining.
It is not an IF, but a WHEN.

* My guess is the ban takes effect forever freezing all bitcoins in their collective wallets forever, and
even those willing to sell will be unable, as the price verses fiat will literally go to zero overnight.
It will be a financial bloodbath like most have never seen. (Even Faster than the Tulips Crash)
But before that happens ,
ethereum will take the #1 spot on CMK,
and btc holders will have very little time after that to cash out or just go down with the btc PoW ship.

FYI:
The decentralization myth of PoW has been B.S. ever since the ASICS took over.
Only the rich elite can afford to mine BTC, their is no decentralization if the common man can not participate.
Anyone that thinks a mere 4 BTC PoW mining pool operators are decentralized, well beyond gullible is an accurate evaluation.   :D

FYI2:
Anyone not paying attention to the rising price of energy across the Globe, is going to be in for a rude awakening this winter.
Don't be surprised when PoW mining is banned, because the people need that energy to keep from freezing to death.
Europe is already rationing power, expect PoW mining permanently banned in Europe before Feb15th, 2023.
US Government will Ban PoW mining by Jan 2024 or the Texas Power Grid will Collapse under the strain.  8)

That's certainly true, mate. Developers have a high concentration of power within the Ethereum project, yet they claim the Blockchain is completely decentralized. There's a lot of focus on ETH creator Vitalik Buterin, so anything he says or does can either negatively or positively impact the project itself. Not like Bitcoin whose creator and developers are unknown by the general public. In order to achieve true decentralization and censorship-resistance, there must be no personally-identifiable information of the project's founders and/or developers.

One thing for sure is that PoS will only make matters worse as developers and big whales will be able to control the Blockchain to their own will. The little guy will be completely out of the system, making the PoS coin no different than a corporation or any ordinary central bank. It's a pity since this shifts us from Satoshi's original vision of decentralizing everything. People are free to choose their own path, but Bitcoin will always remain a PoW cryptocurrency no matter what. Who knows if BTC becomes the only PoW cryptocurrency in existence while the rest switch to PoS? Just my thoughts ;D

It's possible; however, this is a non-starter and a no-go, not happening.  Changing from PoW to PoS would be a major fundamental violation of the foundation of Bitcoin as well as blasphemous.

I'll answer the question from a different perspective (by the way I agree with most here that PoW is way superior to PoS, but there's a much better megathread for that (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387588.0)).

Let's consider the scenario the Core developers, from whatever inexplicable reasons (a "vision" changing their mind, a chip implanted from governments or another weird conspiracy, haha), decide to implement PoS - very similar to what Ethereum is doing just now. So they prepare the upgrade for block X.

Would everybody upgrade? Well, those which certainly won't, are the miners. First, they probably are unhappy with the change. But second, they have nothing to lose if they simply stay with the old client, as they can't generate blocks (by mining) with the new version from block X on.

If enough miners continue mining to prevent the block time becoming too long and persist so until the next difficulty change, then the original Bitcoin chain will persist.

In this case, basically BTC-PoS, "technically" spoken, would become a hard fork of Bitcoin, very much what BCH is now. The only difference to BCH is that it would be endorsed by Core, but it's still a departure from the original Bitcoin protocol.

Maybe Core reaches a consensus with most major exchanges to just "consider BTC-PoS the 'real' BTC". Maybe many governments ban PoW (it's difficult to ban it outright as you can't ban "hashing", but they can do things like a ban PoW coins from exchanges, like the EU proposed for some time). Thus the BTC-PoS chain has a good chance to become stronger than BTC-PoW.

But there is a group which I estimate pretty big which will continue to ignore the update to PoS: all the Bitcoiners who believe that only PoW provides true decentralization. So BTC-PoW would probaly never cease to exist. If governments ban it, they'll set up exchanges in places where it isn't banned. Or use P2P and atomic swap methods, or simply using it, exchanging it for goods and services.

Even with ETH this is likely to happen - ETHW (EthereumPoW) is preparing its fork (or "refusal to upgrade") and its already traded on some exchanges. Although as some have noted, Ethereum has already a high centralization degree, so PoS will be embraced by more Ethereum folks than Bitcoin folks.

Another thing: If Bitcoin's PoW changes to 100% renewable energy, then there isn't any argument for PoS left at all (at least for Bitcoin). This would be a heavy blow for PoS coins - most will probably disappear. So Bitcoiners should do everything, even if it's impossible to enforce at protocol level, to make 100% renewables happen.

Their is no 100% renewable energy, that is a ridiculous myth spread by people unwilling to accept the fatal flaw in PoW.
Droughts have shut down the majority of hydro power across the globe.
Solar has always been shit, with only 4 max hours of energy produced per day mainly in the summer.
Governments across the world are already rationing power and we are not even in a full winter yet.

Bitcoiners don't have to change to PoS, it can just be banned and die ,
because that is where the continued ignoring of reality is going to take it.

No worries about ethereum , because they evolved to solve their energy foot print ,
while btc community has devolved into continuous ignoring of their energy waste.

FYI:
The technical innovations in onchain transaction capacity /smart contracts / energy efficiently / users securing their own networks,
have ensured Proof of Stake has a long life ahead of it.
Proof of Waste, however will be banned because the people of the world just can't afford to waste the world's limited energy resources anymore.
Ask any sane person, do you want lights, refrigeration, Air conditioning , Hot Water, Heat,
or
would you prefer your friends die in the cold and dark this winter, so some jackass can waste all of the world's energy mining a useless bitcoin.

there already are many bitcoin PoS so if governments want one. they can go play with them right now.

to actually cause the real bitcoin to be obliterated where users just use a forked pos coin. would require it to be impossible to solve blocks on bitcoin. this would be the same mechanism of ethereum.
basically, have everyone use an implementation for PoW where every difficulty adjustment increase by 75% EVERYTIME, no matter what..  so that it becomes too difficult to solve blocks intime and never able for asics hashing power to catch up. thus stalling blocks.

i dont think anyone would agree to accept a bitcoin implementation release that allows this where the difficulty of bitcoin PoW is forced to exponentially increase 75% every fortnight. while also releasing a PoS fork to offramp utility too

breaking bitcoins fundamental rule of difficulty (2016 blocks a fortnight, which is the bases of the halving at 210k blocks per 4 year, which is the bases of the 21m cap by 2140~)
is a breach of the protocol. which then is a breach of the immutable rules that made bitcoin a trusted currency in the first place.

once you start messing with the consensus rules/fundamental rules that should never change. it then makes the coin then not a trusted store of value/trusted network of peoples value

First reason is that it was started with pow mechanisms and to change it to pos most of the core miners have to agree on it. Secondly ther is a very large debate regarding which method is better some argue pos does saves a lot of energy but a lot argue that it's not a valid consensus system also a person entering at a initial stage will always be better off as compared to someone who enters late when price has already skyrocketed. Due to these reasons bitcoin cannot move to pos.

PoW miners don't have to agree to anything,
all that has to happen is the developers update the code.
If BTC converted to Proof of Stake , it would finally give people a reason to run a full node with a full history always back to the genesis block,
instead of that pruned PoW node nonsense that will eventually cause the destruction of BTC by losing the blockchain history.

The Miners wanted larger blocksizes, the developers aka blockstream refused them and shoved segwit in instead.
Once a few more Bans take place, it is evolve or die for btc.
Staying a useless waste of energy that btc currently is , won't be allowed in the future.

The debate that btc community is hiding from,
is what will happen to btc,
1. When the energy is no longer available at the current supply.
2. When the Governments just outright ban it for wasting energy.

Evolve or Die, that is btc only options.

I don't want to derail too much, but things like "the tropics" and "the southern hemisphere" do exist. I heard a lot of people live in these strange places. There is even energy there. Am I wrong? ;D (i.e.: regional problems != "the world" - for example, I'm living in a region with lots of hydropower and after a long drought over the last years, in 2022 the reservoirs finally could fill again and increase to full power due to above-average rainfall. They're also increasingly adding wind and solar to the mix.)


I don't say PoS has no merits at all, there are even reasons why altcoins can indeed increase their security by using PoS, because a 51% attack is a real danger for them. Even Ethereum may have considered the problem of GPU botnets when they decided to switch, as gamers have more hashrate than the ETH network, so if a substantial part of them united (voluntarily or due to malware), they could attack ETH.

But regarding the strongest blockchain in the world, Bitcoin, there is no reason absolutely to change. You need always "weak subjectivity" for PoS, and thus it's simply inferior, as BlackHatCoiner already explained.

And no, onchain capacity is not directly related to PoS, also something already mentioned by others here. Some special solutions like the ETH sharding concept depend on it, but there are alternatives like LN and sidechains which work well with PoW.

This is a misconception. People who have at least some understanding of the technology believe that so far there has not been any proposal that can provide better decentralization that PoW. And we know for sure that PoS provides no security or decentralization.
But we are all open to proposals that can provide a better algorithm.

This is unlikely because of the minefield that the centralized authority has left in the code. In other words if the miners were to decide to remain on the main chain (like ETC aka the original ethereum) they would have to perform a hard fork themselves to defuse those mines!

I disagree. PoS is there to ensure shitcoins that can not attract miners (to provide security for they dying chain) remain alive. Take ethereum for example, when they switch to PoS even if everyone abandoned it they still have the 72 million premined coins and can ensure its survival. But if they continue on PoW, as miners leave the hashrate drops and it becomes susceptible to 51% attacks and their 72 million premine can not help them there.

Their arguments against bitcoin also has nothing to do with energy, they are just using that as an excuse since someone started the FUD a while back and it worked.

Perhaps many crypto assets use a consensus mechanism to verify the validity of the information added to the ledger. It can prevent double spending (sending two transactions with the same token). In addition, consensus can also prevent invalid data from being added to the blockchain.

The emergence of PoS is still relatively new when compared to PoW systems. Therefore, it is not surprising that PoS has not been rigorously tested. By default, PoW prevents the blockchain from forking or forking. If the blockchain is forked, miners must decide which chain to support. The reason is, if miners continue to support both blockchains, then they will have to share their computing resources.

I'm of course referring to the current situation - i.e. PoS has the problems it has, and they weren't solved so far (with "pure" PoS they're also unlikely to be solved, due to the problem of "usage of onchain assets to determine the longest chain"). Thus if Bitcoin was now forking into a PoS and a PoW version, I believe a lot of those Bitcoiners who value decentralization would stay on the PoW chain (and sell BTC-PoS like they sold BCH).

If an algorithm appears which really provides the same decentralization, openness and consensus degree that could change. Maybe something in the proof-of-capacity algorithm family, although this one uses lots of materials and thus energy (in the production process), but the ecologic balance may be slightly better. Current PoC algorithms however suffer from a couple of similar nothing-at-stake problems like PoS, but they may be solvable as "external" resources are used to determine "validation capacity" (i.e. what "hashrate" would be for PoW).

Yep, there may be technical difficulties. But I believe ETHW probably will survive, and maybe become a top-20 altcoin like ETC.

This may work for a while, yes. But once the whole "eco"/"energy"/"climate"-story doesn't attract people anymore, because Bitcoin becomes eco-sustainable itself, then they would probably be doomed in the long term. They may stay alive but with a much lower market cap, and once somebody found an exploitable attack on PoS (which are for sure possible, only they are quite complex) they'll be history, or at least not relevant anymore.

And users run that code. Don't forget this, it's a crucial part. Developers can code whatever they like, but it's down to users to run that code.

What does the mechanism have to do with running a full node?

And the users. The users refused them.

Or just leave it with a neutral mechanism that works perfectly since block 0.

Because Bitcoin isn't altcoin. Bitcoin isn't pre-mined and can't stake. Why Satoshi didn't use PoS that he knows only. But I am pretty sure if it was PoS then Bitcoin won't become that level. And of course, PoS pretty much looks centralized or semi-decentralized. Most are become shit coins those using PoS lol. And you know Bitcoin doesn't have any further chances to divert it to PoS technology.

Are you saying the users would prefer to stay poor and not stake?
Seems you are insulting the btc community with that statement.




PoS Node earn , PoW Nodes don't,
so their is more financial incentive for more people to run full nodes with the complete history.
Just as you have more people show up to work, if you pay them.  :D
Scary that has to be explained to you.



Nope,
Blockstream refused them, and used the threat of switching algo to one that would brick their ASICS.
Which many here supported blockstream , because they hoped they be able to mine and earn BTC,
Funny that carrot was used when it served blockstream purpose to add segwit (so they could make money off their 3rd party network such as LN or Liquid),
and completely demonized when PoS would allow the btc full node operators to earn,
then they could drop that stupid pruned node nonsense, which on it own, is a threat to the loss of bitcoin history.



Your work perfectly delusion , is just that a delusion.
You have a coin network , with no real increase in onchain transaction capacity, no improvement in onchain transaction fees,
a network that increases the energy bill of any people unfortunate enough to live nearby,
including the problems caused by increasing rolling blackouts.
The extra energy wasted gives nothing back except wasting more energy.  :P
And the funniest thing the Government Officials are warning the BTC community of the coming PoW bans for years,
and the BTC communities keeps trying to explain how it is not happening, completely avoiding fixing the Proof of Waste network btc has become.
Don't want PoS , fine, design something else that works without causing the entire power grid to collapse.
Or
Wait for the PoW Ban, sad for the people that invested, but the people need energy to survive, so PoW has to die, and BTC with it.
The People can live without BTC, but they can't live with it, if it sucks the grid dry.

---

BTC community is literally a cult,
All one has to do is read the development forum,
to see the same batch of btc cultists shoot down any ideas not approved by blockstream.

Really, what proposals?

Please explain what proposal allows you to keep Proof of Waste, without eventually causing a grid collapse.

Hard to predict these things considering the centralization behind ethereum and the power they have.
I still remember how Poloniex (a rather big exchange at the time) caught ethereum foundation red handed trying to manipulate ETC market using their premined coins after the fork, dumping it on the market crashing ETC price.

No. Only an idiot with 1-digit IQ could conclude that. I said the users don't run whatever the developers code. They run code accordingly to their benefits.

There's no financial incentive to run a full node with Proof-of-Stake, same as with Proof-of-Work. The incentive comes from staking. The incentives of running a full node are simple: Privacy & security.

And users didn't want big blocks, but you'll keep whining about Blockstream, so no point in having this conversation.

You're a meat and drink for the ESG agenda. Fortunately, most people have a better reasoning than you.

Hilariously I saw an article this week about how Buterin was saying he was worried about Bitcoin because it is proof of work, saying it can't sustain itself and it will be easy to attack in the future. Just shows that all the founders of centralized blockchains are just out to promote their own thing. Now that Ethereum is moving to PoS Buterin feels the need to try to flip the reality and claim that PoW is insecure while PoS is better lol

I don't have anything against PoS. It is better for centralized blockchains (so basically it is better for Crypto) because it is more efficient and if you are a company with a centralized blockchain or at least a only partially decentralized blockchain you don't care about the weaknesses of PoS because you're trying to build apps not money. While PoW is infinitely better for the one highly decentralized blockchain, the one cryptocurrency that is global money - Bitcoin.

You move to PoS either because you need greater centralization or because you failed to achieve enough security through PoW because PoW is pretty much a winner take all system - as Andreas Antonopoulos once said, the world only needs one PoW blockchain, and that's Bitcoin.


As to the OP's question why Bitcoin won't go to PoS. Because (1) it would be very complicated and dangerous, (2) it is entirely unnecessary, (3) it would likely destroy the entire power and importance of Bitcoin, turning into just another crypto rather than a global money, (4) Bitcoin's PoW provides a lot of benefits to society which would completely disappear if it switched to PoS, and (5) nobody in Bitcoin wants to do it because of the above reasons and so there is zero chance it could ever happen.

Nope,
their is no financial incentive to run a PoW node.

PoS Nodes need the full blockchain, so more security than PoW pruned nonsense,
PoS Nodes Stake & secure the network and therefore earn, PoW nodes don't earn & they only waste energy.

Look, we all know you are a bitch for blockstream,
why don't you ask them to pay you more,
so you can afford to actually take a class where they can explain to you , why PoW is shit.  ;)

Unfortunately he has been doing this for a long time trying to make his malicious hard fork look legitimate so that the foundation can make money for not doing anything except holding the premined coins.
This is exactly why we have been seeing a lot of PoS topics pop up about bitcoin for the past year (more or less).

Specially if their blockchain is not immutable. After all they can easily roll back blocks again at any time they wanted.

Okay but what about the problem with POS of making currencies more centralized? A person who has bought more cryptos in the initial stages or one who has large BTC holdings from start will always be the highest earning validator and no matter what I do to enter at a price of 30k I will not be able to match their holdings, therefore, they will always be ahead of a newer validator which is obviously pretty bad. And I am not even mentioning about the thesis on how POS is a far less secure methodology than POW because that can still be told debatable. I am not saying POW is the only way but so far POS isn't that secure to shift bitcoin on that.

There's no financial incentive, but you make it sound like there's no incentive at all, which is obviously not true. People run a node for security and privacy, and that's what they will always do regardless of which mechanism is supported. The fact that you're being forced to run a full node, so you can stake, just doesn't rime good.

Also, staking to a pool (just as mining to a pool) doesn't require to run your own full node. I had tried to stake some ADA once, and no full node was required; just a closed-source, centralized Exodus wallet.

I wouldn't make this question to a scumbag like that, but if you want to continue: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387588.0

disclaimer: do not respond with more "let devs do anything"(you wearing the human loyalist hat) and instead think about the bitcoin protocol(wear the bitcoin network security hat)
the bitcoin network protocol, and its nodes should be ensuring that devs cannot do anything they like, to change the network at their whim/choosing.. unless the majority truly ready to validate and verify and all data, whereby then the feature activates/is used

proper consensus is that new features do not activate until its deemed safe to activate when majority of users are using software compatible with new feature to fully recognise, validate and verify new feature. then it activates.

however by a quirk of trickery. devs can now make changes without the users having to run the updated code to be able to validate/verify it. by treating new features as 'valid' without doing the security checks on the data, meaning those nodes are not fuly validating/securing the network. .

devs can mandate a activation by forming a group of economic nodes (notable merchant services/exchanges) to reject blocks/relayed tx/not relay to peers unupgraded, etc who are not flagging for the feature, even if those economic nodes do not themselves even have the validation/verification code required to check the new feature, after mandated activation. or during the vote process

accepting unrecognised format (or those that have been stripped of unknown data) as valid by default.
is not the same as default validating/verifying all data.
..
there are many backdoors and bug implications of allowing new formats and new features to be added without first ensuring majority of full nodes are able to actually verify and validate the data

What you are intentionally ignoring is that anybody can do that, they can create an alternative chain that rejects anything that they consider "invalid". The important thing is reaching majority, otherwise a minority group creating such forks become altcoins like what bcash did and they did have "a group of economic nodes" with them.

Perhaps because it would be humiliating to Buterin if he admitted that PoW blockchains are just fine (ignoring the hysteria about power consumption, which is what it seems to be - hysteria) and that a PoS upgrade was never really needed for Ethereum's survival.

All it has accomplished is demonstrating that they will allow [international] governmental interference in their blockchain.

Ok,
The problem with the centralized argument is simple.
Say you had a large holding of 10000 bitcoins, all the way from 2010.
In 2022, you missed the $60K peak, and decide you need to buy a house and new car , and pay for your 3 kids college fund,
oh and don't forget you are buying clothes , food and utilities every month so you sell however many btc it takes to afford what you need.
You see , you can't just run to a vendor and say I have this many bitcoins and I am going to keep them and you give me your service/product for free,
you have to sell the btc for fiat or give the btc to the vendor to get what you want.
The only difference if btc was PoS, is you can sell the stake interest to slow down your decrease in btc quantity.
The lack of understanding is this : Staked interest for most coins is lower than 4% yearly, and you get taxed on it,
which means for your number of coins to grow , you can't spend any,  
this also means that the coins everyone else owns is not also staking, so you can see how flawed your thought process is on centralization.

A simpler way to put it , in your flawed concept of interest and centralization,
someone could open a savings account of 5%, and within 100 years completely own the US$ currency.
I hope you can see how wrong that is now.
Because it assumes, you never have to spend any, it assumes no one else is staking, it assumes that taxation is not lowering your %.
This is why the myth that PoS cause centralization is pure nonsense, because in reality those above assumptions don't happen.

BTC PoW node offers no security and no privacy.
Where do you get that nonsense.
Let me guess blockstream tutorial.   :P

BTC is an open blockchain, nothing is hidden, their is no privacy that a little cross referencing won't utterly uncover.
Security in PoW is provided by the miners hashrate, nodes provide no security of transactions.
Non-mining nodes do absolutely nothing except provide history, no security, and pruned nodes are a security flaw just waiting to happen.

When you stored ADA on Exodus , you were storing it on an distributed Exchange,
Exodus runs the full node with the entire cardano history so you did not have too.

Since you admitted to using a staking coin, don't you have to turn in btc cult card now.  :D
I mean at least you have to quit using the btc cult handshake at dinner parties or be seen as a blasphemer.  

---

PoW has always been insecure, it just took some people longer to realize it.
PoW is unable to achieve transaction finality, algorand PoS design does transaction finality after 4 seconds.
Transaction Finality means you don't have to keep waiting for additional blocks to secure your transaction.
PoW flaws are 51% attack, insane ever growing power usage with no performance increase, a mere 4 mining pool operators securing your transactions.
4 people to secure a PoW network, shows the lack of IQ that PoW supporters continue to ignore 4 people literary own all of btc ass.  

One would speculate if PoW were really worth anything at all , why are none of the new coins using it, but avoiding it like the plague.
The true reason all new crypto development is everything but PoW,
kind of shows the people that design crypo security have all realized that Proof of Waste is shit and a dying tech.  ;)

So when the worldwide PoW ban occurs, btc & maybe litecoin (if they don't die earlier) are the only coins that are affected.

what you are forgetting is.. (or coerced to script speak old scripts of 2017 about misguided events)

how there is code, blogs posts by core devs and actual block data that show that those supporting segwit but not ready to verify it in june-august2017 were the cause of the split (yep core devs admit to the mandatory tactics and the NYA).. there is no point in you trying to change history if the core devs now admit to it. becasue you are just trying to create drama again to cause pages of debate trying to denie history until you think people will give into old stories of crap
the blockckdata shows the timeline of events. the blockdata does not follow your outdated fantasy version of events

as for explaining what consensus is..
consensus = having an idea, majority agree with(consensus: agreement, use a dictionary please!) where THEN the activation happens and because majority had the code to validate/verify at the vote.. there is no split. (consensus is and should be voting when majority agree and ready to verify/validate .. its called protocol security!)
if majority dont like the idea or not ready to verify/validate it.. it does not activate.. its that simple. no activation also means no split
in both cases a consensus activation or not.  does not result in a contentious split!!

when you talk about splitting the network. thats not consensus. thats a contentious fork or standard altcoin creation.. ..
anyone can make a fork anyway/anytime/any reason.. that has nothing to do with consensus

core loyalists however changed the rhetoric and tried to imply consensus is about splitting networks and throwing off objectors as how they view consensus was designed,
their version was where even without having the validation/verification code . they would/have/did activate the feature by simply rejecting anyone that didnt flag for it.
even if those flagging for it, were not al ready to validate/verify it/create segwit tx's.
their activation was not about users that had the code to fully validate/verify/create segwit transactions. it was just a request to change a certain bit in the block header. that decided who stays vs who goes.
(that is not consensus)

thus if a considerable amount didnt want the feature, those would become an altcoin. whereby leaving a weak network activating segwit pretending to have 100% support(reality not possible to get 100% but core faked it)  then there was a mad rush to then get exchanges and explorers and custodial services and litewalets and merchants to then actually download it.
(EG blockchain.com flagged for segwit but didnt implement it fully until well into 2018)

again
they mad rushed to change the block space rules and fee policy rules with cludgy code to make legacy more expensive and seem less useful.  but knew there was not enough nodes to support the segwit transaction format, which is why they didnt release the wallet part until 2018

please dont use some chummy loyalty buddy group or social media as your source. read the code, read the bips, look at the block data. use the stats.

yep they had to strip data and treat that stripped data 'as valid' even if those nodes on the network couldnt even verify/validate segwit block data.
it was a massive protocol bug risk and exploit/bypass of good security

data is available.. go research

but the emphasis is simple..
consensus activation is about coming to an agreement by having nodes running software that is ready and fully capable of verifying and validating it.. to then activate when the network is fully ready and able to validate and verify the new rules should they activate.
consensus is not about fork creating, altcoin creating via contention and mandatory activations. where even after activation not all nodes remaining were able to verify/validate the new rules..

please dont respond if your going to defend devs ability to change the bitcoin network and ignore the network nodes readiness/ability to verify/validate. by simply throwing those not ready off the network

---

now with that all said
if economic nodes (exchanges/merchants) want to have a PoS coin(influenced/coerced by regulations).. they can go make a altcoin.

however we need to obide by real consensus. not the 2017 crap rhetoric/mechanism they used..

where we dont get into another situation of another controversial/contentious mandatory split event.. where businesses(economic nodes(2017 NY agreement equivalent) collude with the core devs they paid(2017 blockstream dev code writers of the mandatory split)to flag an event of forcing Pow(objectors to pos/normal unupgraded nodes) into an altcoin, leaving those that did flag(pos supporters) declaring pos as btc

PoS is flawed by design. Not only it enriches whales, but it makes the Blockchain more centralized. All of the buzz surrounding PoS is the energy-efficiency compared to PoW. But the latter can also be energy-efficient if miners rely on renewable energy sources. Most altcoins will turn themselves to PoS, as it would benefit exchanges and developers more than anyone else. Bitcoin will never become PoS for many obvious reasons. I'm glad the community prefers to keep it that way for the good of the BTC blockchain's decentralization. Who knows if BTC remains the only PoW cryptocurrency on the market? Just my opinion :)

That is true. Flaw by design because it can be manipulated by huge staking weights that is proven with small blockchain networks. If we naively assume Ethereum network just too big to be hardly controlled by huge stakers, that is not correct.

Please take into account that over time, new generations of ASICs are more effectively and beneficially in energy consumption and hashrate it can produce. In addition, with time, miners have gradually switched to new electricity resources and they aim at cheaper as well as more environmental friendly, renewable resources.

Anyway, take this discussion to look back at what satoshi wrote 12 years ago.
The Proof of Work algorithm and the finite total supply of Bitcoin has pros and cons. It will not have an ending in between great success and failure. Just ends in one way or another. If Bitcoin price can keep jumping into another high level after each halving, miners will keep mining because they will still have profit. That in turn will make the Bitcoin network becomes bigger and bigger as we have been witnessing last 13 years. Else, miners will abandon and Bitcoin network will become less secure and even a dead one.

I know about difficulty retarget after each 2016 blocks but what satoshi wrote is true.

This seems to be the right answer.

Exactly. PoW may not be perfect, but it's the best thing around for the preservation of decentralization and censorship-resistance. Governments are still against PoW mining, not because it "harms the environment" (which is false), but mostly because they don't want to lose control. They want to prevent as much people as possible from using Bitcoin as an alternative to existing Fiat currencies.

By pushing cryptocurrencies to switch to PoS, governments will be able to make them centralized. We cannot let that happen for the sake of crypto/Blockchain tech. No one knows what the future holds for Bitcoin, so we can only hope for the best. Just my thoughts ;D

Bitcoin is not the only project using POW so far, but the only thing the government is targeting is bitcoin, it shows that they know they can't control it, and they don't want to see it grow to threaten their power, not because POW is a waste of energy and a major cause of global warming.
Indeed, we cannot know the future of bitcoin if the government really wants to get rid of POW completely to secure their power, but let's hope it can last and will not be changed.

Actually when a PoW ban is passed, it will ban all crypto using PoW not just BTC.
Right now BTC & LTC are the main one, doge has a roadmap to evolve to PoS.
So really only 2 coins out of the top 20 on cmk will be banned.

Want to keep PoW, find a way to lower it's energy waste.
New PoW algo that blocks ASICS, or regulate how much energy PoW miners can use, or only mine 4 hours out the day.
Any of these allows the wasteful PoW to continue, or just do nothing and wait for the Ban to end PoW and the coins that want to hold onto it.  :)
Or
Continue in the Delusion that proof of waste is not going to destroy a power grid, and pray nothing happens because the governments are just being mean to btc.  :P

It is true that no one can control bitcoin, even large countries cannot possibly control bitcoin.
While bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that does not have a holder behind it, so no one controls bitcoin itself, even the price of bitcoin cannot be regulated.
Unless someone is able to massively adopt bitcoins with at least more than 60% of the bitcoin supply he holds, however I think it is very unlikely anyone can adopt more than 60% of bitcoins.
While it is noted that the person holding the largest bitcoin is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of bitcoin itself.
However, no one knows whether satoshi still exists or not because the name satoshi is a pseudonym and only a certain handful of people know the truth about satoshi.

Mining bitcoin or coins using POW is to make a profit, that is to create benefits and contribute to the development of society, so I do not consider it a waste of energy. The bitcoin mining industry is like other industries, they consume energy, but they all create value for human use, so they cannot be called wasteful. Bitcoin is not profitable for you, but it has benefited many people and helped many people have better lives, and when people's lives are better, it will improve society.

I don't know what world you're talking about, but the world I live in still doesn't have too many countries banning POW, because they know the real benefits of using bitcoin.

No one can control bitcoin is true, but I doubt when you say bitcoin price is not regulated. Although bitcoin is decentralized but bitcoin price is being listed on centralized exchanges, so price correction is possible, as long as the government really wants to crack it down, then bitcoin price regulation will not be too difficult for them.

That's what I'm afraid, once the regulation is in place, the government will intervene in the market, in addition to controlling us, they can also adjust the bitcoin price to their will.

What's the reasoning behind 60%? And what power does that grant, other than financial?

When the government intervenes with regulating prices, it does it to either protect the consumer or the producer, and it does it to the former for products that have inelastic demand. Bitcoin doesn't have that, it's quite oppositely seen as a luxury product by most. As for producers, I'm quite sure governments aren't going to ever pay part of miners' expenses-- nor should they.

Also, bitcoins are everywhere and nowhere. Good luck on catching violators.

I still can't understand how they say that Bitcoin with its POW causes global warming because the device for mining it uses fossil energy to run, even though bitcoin mining only impacts 0.1% of world pollution and air pollution caused by coal-fired electricity generation is much bigger compared to Bitcoins. It seems they turned a blind eye to the facts before their eyes and let it go. They're just afraid that the adoption of Bitcoin is getting massive and they can't control it any further, so they raise issues like this and make a lot of people think that Bitcoin is one of the main culprits of air pollution, even though it's not.

leg-end
i understand your PoS adoration is the principle of "free money" where you want speculated value without any real cost upfront

we get it you dont care about security you just care about your personal greed

however PoW does provide security and the cost of that security then backs the coins value.

i know you want to have bitcoin cost at a penny per btc while speculating at $15k+ where you dream of your get rich quick scheme.. yes thats why you now promote a "new bitcoin pow thats anti-asic"

by now suggesting a new lower cost bitcoin PoW algo.. you are again not recognising the value of Pow. and also by changing algo just delays the competition where people just run multiple "rigs" to compete. causing the cost/value to rise again.. solving nothing over all
in short your dream of "the good old days of GPU mining coins for pennies" would last... 3 months before it changes to high competition high cost..

going to GPU just reduces the hash per kwh.. for a couple difficulty cycles(fortnights-months)
eventually people will just have multiple GPU where instead of 2m asics at 3KWH
people end up using 20m GPU at 300w each = yep easy math 2m 3kwh.. but with less hashrate meaning less security.. thus again not solving anything

asics solve things they make the hash per kwh more efficient.
yes if we lived in a GPU only crypto era.. you would be the one asking for ASICS to be invented to bring the cost per hash down(if you cared about security and environment)

..
we all know all you really care about is your malice and "missing the boat" that you cant mine a coin for pennies. and also be in the market for thousands

we know you want to "mine like its 2010" while "market like its 2021" and thats all you care about

So you are saying that the mining device are the ones that must be blamed here and not bitcoin directly? But, these devices are still mining Bitcoin so BTC is involved here. There are still miners who are now using a clean energy for mining like solar, hydro and others and there's also big companies like shell who want's to push these clean mining.

This must be our hope to make the name of Bitcoin clean again and maybe after it, a lot of countries or people are now going to adopt it. If the problem isn't about mining but if it's about bitcoin being decentralized then I am afraid that the bans and discrediting towards Bitcoin are still going to remain. It's not possible anymore for BTC to become centralized.

bitcoin is greener then some pretend

majority of asic mining is done in large asic farms on very good electric contracts with power companies locking in xxGW deals per quarter

these contracts are majority with renewables
however some "anal"(half assed analyst) claims the numbers are lower by fudging their data set with "guestimates" "assumptions"

bitcoin is more efficient on watts per thash then some pretend

the agenda is simple. say its bad, use very bad math, made up guesses and assumptions, create a regulation or campaign pretending it will help change the results.. then reveal the real numbers later and pretend you changed things with a lame "look mom, look what i did"

https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/methodology
amounts : words mentioned
40 : estimate
27 : assumption
15 : average
 8  : best-guess
 4  : assumptions
 3  : hypothetical
 3  : theoretical
 1  : approximates

---

just looking at energy usage using better math
the 2 main asics of bitcoin (low efficiency high efficiency)


140 for 2.88kw (21watt per thash) - efficient (low power per thash)
250 for 5.2kw (21watt per thash) - efficient (low power per thash)

95 for 3.25kw (34watt per thash) - inefficient (high power per thash)

so network is lower bound 222exahash recently
so network is lower bound 267exahash recently

lower bound 4566857142watt (low power low hashrate)
upper bound 9134210526watt(high power high hashrate)

result:
lower bound 4.566Gw/h
upper bound 9.134Gw/h

yet they "guestimate" 5-15gw/h

Of course. But I believe Bitcoin will eventually become the only PoW cryptocurrency, as altcoins face heavy pressure from mainstream governments. The vast majority of them switched to PoS, so I wouldn't be surprised if PoW chains like Litecoin and Dogecoin do the same sometime in the future.

The goal of the government is not to make crypto "carbon-neutral", but rather centralize it for their own benefit. Switching to PoS will give the power back to the government. I'm sure BTC devs won't let that happen, for the sake of the network's decentralization and censorship-resistance. The future is widely unpredictable, so we can only hope for the best. Just my opinion :)

PoS fails in its eventual need to custodianise to syndicate(combine value) the stake to meet the thresholds. making places like coinbase a central point of failure of PoS (as we are seeing with ethereum that is highly staked and custodianised in coinbase

Exactly. Due to the flawed design of PoS, big exchanges holding large amounts of users' funds will be able to dictate which transactions go in or out on the Blockchain. It's like giving the power back to traditional banks. A better approach would've been to use a hybrid consensus mechanism (PoW + PoS) that would help keep a balance between decentralization and performance/cost-efficiency. Something like how Peercoin does today.

I don't think Bitcoin will ever change its PoW consensus algorithm, especially when it hails itself to be the most decentralized cryptocurrency in the world. It's fine just the way it is. Governments won't like it, but Bitcoin really doesn't care. I won't be surprised if sometime in the future, BTC remains the only PoW coin will the rest switch to PoS due to fears from getting scrutinized by the government. Who knows what lies for the entire crypto/Blockchain industry? Just my opinion :)

simply put if coinbase held most stake.. users would not like to oppose a coinbase proposed algo change, because opposing it means stake is lost.. users wont want to sacrifice their stake to avoid a bad proposal. thus a bad proposal becomes what people follow to keep their stake in play. and thats another reason why PoS fails

And then it can be spurned as a "company decision made by the board of directors" which in fact is a masquerade to them becoming the final arbiters for decisions on coins like Ethereum. Nothing Vitalik and Co. can do about that.

leg-ends real/main qualm against bitcoin PoW is bicoins expense to mine it

he thinks if he can get it to be pennies per coin he can get rich, not realising the bitcoin value:market rate would correct down also. thus just bringing things back down to 2010-12 levels of value speculation
(ethereums value has rescinded by 20X and its speculated price is being artifically held up via bitcoin arbitrage, and has yet to have its correction.. but will)

however also changing to a new PoW (GPU) is not going to cause rapid correction to 2011 levels of value/price and then a lengthy 4 year growth correction and then go back to 2014 levels and another 9 years to get to 2023 levels

a PoW change back to GPU would simply cause a 6 month value crash and then new asics come back into play getting value back to todays levels within 18 months

so whats the point of both.. they both wont make leg-end be able to become an player/hash competitor to make thousands out of pennies for very long. ..

his qualms are not actually about environment. thats just his silly motives to hide his true desires

I will give you a fun fact:

Bitcoin is decentralized and using Proof of Work protocol, while Ethereum is centralized and using Proof of Stake protocol, why does Bitcoin's fee is more cheaper rather than Ethereum? Ethereum is created out of thin air and the supply isn't fixed, the fee should be cheaper since it's not scarce and not really valuable.

Expensive fee is nothing new for a coin has huge market cap and volume, altcoin's fee is cheap because not many people adopt it.

Interestingly enough a couple of years ago the Chinese government released a list containing a handful of cryptocurrencies which they referred to as "trusted" and basically good cryptocurrencies. In that list you couldn't see bitcoin but you saw ethereum on top of the list!

Of course Bitcoin isn't on the list. China doesn't like it, especially when it's a decentralized and censorship-resistant cryptocurrency. With Ethereum, that's no longer the case due to the fact that the network made the switch to PoS. If China or any other country want to control ETH, all they have to do is go after centralized exchanges. After all, these entities will be the ones staking most of the ETH on the network. If they control the exchanges, they can control ETH.

I cannot say the same about Bitcoin, becuase it has a different consensus algorithm. By being a PoW cryptocurrency, anyone can secure the blockchain with their mining hardware. Exchanges can't use customer funds to perform decisions on the Blockchain. They will need to set up a huge mining farm that will be able to mine 51% of the blocks if they want to control BTC (which is very unlikely they will be able to do this). Believe me, PoS is nothing more than an agenda for governments to control crypto/Blockchain tech. It's all disguised as "protecting the environment", but the truth is that governments are pushing devs to turn their coins into PoS so they can control them (centralization). Who knows if BTC remains "the only PoW coin in town"? Just my thoughts ;D

I don't even think it is that. Governments (meaning: politicians and central bankers) are against PoW simply because they don't understand it. They are reading the same sensationalist headlines about energy consumption that the rest of us see. These people aren't enthusiasts who take the time to actually educate themselves on Bitcoin and mining and PoW. They just read headlines about Bitcoin using X amount of energy and producing X amount of carbon and they don't never get beyond these surface level statistics. They don't understand the reason for the mining, and they don't understand that the people who are writing the articles or reports they are reading don't know anything more about PoW and Bitcoin mining than they themselves do.

PoW simply has an optics problem. If you don't know what you're talking about and you just look at the amount of energy it uses, yes it looks very bad. If you do know what you're talking about then you understand the reason for the energy use and why it is beneficial to society for a number of different reasons. Just like if you had no idea what computers did and how they helped society but all you knew was how much energy they used globally anyone (at least anyone who gives a damn about the environment and the well-being of society) would be outraged. It's just pure ignorance on the topic that causes people, politicians or anyone else, to hate PoW and think Bitcoin should switch to PoS. I mean the very fact that they believe Bitcoin CAN switch to PoS, or the fact that they think if Bitcoin doesn't then just another crypto CAN and SHOULD replace Bitcoin shows that they have zero specific knowledge on the topic of Bitcoin and Crypto.

I very much doubt there are many politicians or even central bankers that understand the difference between PoW and PoS other than one uses a lot of energy and the other doesn't. So I doubt much or any of the opposition to PoW is because governments want Bitcoin to be weaker through PoS. It's just the optics of the energy use that is the problem.

PoW doesn't have an energy problem. It has an optics problem. And because of that optics problem there is so much misinformation that has been spread about PoW, which makes it really easy to think PoW does have an energy problem. The answer to PoW's problem is simply educating the public and politicians about how PoW really works and why the claims that it is wasteful are nonsensical.

PoW mining can be as green as PoS. It's just that governments don't truly understand how it works. Either that, or they're doing it on purpose to keep as many people away from Bitcoin as possible. We all know the government doesn't like Bitcoin because it's decentralized. The vast majority of crypto projects switched to PoS out of fear from the government. Not because they wanted to. This is bad, because PoS effectively makes the Blockchain centralized. In fact, the crypto industry is much more centralized now than what it was a couple of years ago.

It's likely Bitcoin will remain the only PoW coin in existence, while the rest turn themselves to PoS. I'd be suprised if someone forks BTC someday to create a PoS version of it. But that I doubt it will gather significant attention from investors, especially when it will be a "Bitcoin clone" with another consensus algorithm. The future is widely unpredictable so we can only hope for the best. Just my thoughts ;D

why the Bitcoin protocol cannot use PoS instead of PoW is because it would require a major change to the fundamental design of the bitcoin network.
Bitcoin's PoW algorithm is a key part of its security model, and any change to the consensus algorithm would require a hard fork, which could create a separate and incompatible blockchain

Because of two reasons at least for me

1. Because consensus switches like these are expensive and not even guaranteeing ease of access and cheaper and faster transactions, and;
2. Because Bitcoin just wouldn't work as a proof-of-stake, let me explain.

Bitcoin as a currency is flawed, with so many attack vectors that could very well be abused by the people with half a mind to control it. With PoS, you are centralizing the control of the whole network, which could easily become a target for massive attacks and hackings.

Also, you're putting the whales at the forefront of control with PoS. In PoS, the voting mechanism is determined by who owns the most coins, and only by then will you be allowed to cast a vote, this is why it works for altcoins, because devs could very well control the circulation and make the team own the most coins out of everyone, whale or not. Bitcoin doesn't have that liberty, so if you switch to PoS and have the whales control bitcoin, you're giving them nigh-omnipotence over the coin. At least with PoW, everyone could have a say, just contribute a little by expending energy for mining and you're good, in PoS, this will never work.

Oh not this topic again!

Bitcoin does not need POS and will never implement POS! Look at what happened on the first day of Ethereum becoming POS: over 46% of all Ethereum POS nodes were owned by simply 2 addresses. Do you understand the danger ETH is in right now?

Its basically a centralized blockchain at this point, meaning a small group/ a few individuals have total dominion over the ETH blockchain. Do you really want this to happen to Bitcoin? To become subverted of control by rich and powerful individuals?

We need to make sure that Bitcoin remains truly decentralized. Otherwise it becomes a CBDC. Which is why the governments are shilling so hard with their bullshit environment protection narrative.

Seems like you've seen one too many topics about this lmao. But yeah the main narrative that these PoS visionaries put out is that "bitcoin would be faster if it was running in PoS" when the truth is, if bitcoin wasn't running efficiently in PoW, it wouldn't be different if it were to run in PoS, it's still going to suck. The worst part about this is that bitcoin would be at the mercy of the whales in terms of computing power and data processing. Bitcoin is great as it is right now, the transaction problem is definitely pesky but over threats of a network wide shutdown due to hacker attacks, and whales controlling the whole ecosystem? Yeah transaction problem please.

The "deep state" wants Bitcoin to switch to PoS just to become a centralized coin. Only then, they'll be able to do whatever they want with it. Exchanges usually hold most of the coin's supply (customer funds), so they will have absolute control over a PoS-based blockchain network. Consider how ETH is now manipulated by big players in the industry. This wouldn't have happened if it remained a PoW coin where anyone with a GPU could contribute to its decentralization.

For this and many other reasons, Bitcoin will never become a PoS cryptocurrency. I wouldn't be surprised if there's another hard fork related to BTC that would use PoS as its consensus layer. Ultimately, the longest chain (BTC) will prevail while the new one will quickly fade into oblivion. Who knows if BTC ends uo being the only PoW cryptocurrency in the world? Just my opinion :)