Bitcoin Forum

I was wondering how to interpret PoS difficulty? The output of getdifficulty from the daemon gives out some numbers, but exactly what do they mean?

I can understand that it probably means the higher it is, the higher the percentage of coins that are staking, but any way to quantify it to a percentage number, or at least to compare different PoS coins together with some quantification?

Also, what does "search-interval" mean?

BlackCoin:

CinniCoin:

AsiaCoin:

It seems like it's a variable to keep the block time independent of the number of coin who are staking, same as PoW difficulty, so in theory it should be able to somehow provide some sort of insight on how many coins are staking, same way as PoW difficulty can provide insight on the overall hashrate of the network. I just want that connection between the difficulty and the number of coins that are staking.

Thanks :)

Proof of stake is not a good idea. Say you choose the longest chain based on stake hashing. And Current hashing is 0.5% of total coins. Say an early adopter had 5% and sold. Now he can come back start from the point before selling and produce a chain his 5% coins hashing a stronger chain. How do you choose between the two? On the other hand pow needs computational power to outperform the total computation that costs money to do that. In pos there is no cost to create to create a parallel chain.

 Also for small transactions that needs transactions to be instant one can keep trying to double spend without losing his stake and thus actually there is nothing at stake.

In addition all pos coins have a very bad distribution of coins since they are created quickly making things worse

Some discussion also here.   https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=558316.msg6501774#msg65worse

There are countless criticisms in many posts if you search

My question is academic, I just want to know what PoS difficulty variable refers to :)

I know the criticisms of PoS and a comparison of other features of PoS vs PoW was not really my question. Thanks anyway for taking the time to respond and the link too.

From
http://www.peercoin.net/minting

Your stake is calculated from this coin age, measured by last transaction, and multiplied with the amount of coins (time * coins).

Not sure if the variable you refer is exactly that number

Thanks, but again, that's the most obvious thing. I clearly wasn't asking how someone's stake is being calculated.

Thanks anyway, anyway.

From the code it appears that the search-interval measures the time it took to generate last block, i.e. it is the difference between the last and previous blocks generation times rounded to an integer.

In your last example the difficulty was higher, so it took approximately a second to create a block.

Thanks man. Any idea how to make sense of the value of PoS difficulty, the same way that we can make sense of PoW difficulty?

The documentation is a bit sparse and I'm too currently trying to wrap my head around PoS,
but I believe that it is just like you said, the more wallets there are minting, the higher the difficulty.

I suppose you could compare between coins by relating difficulty to the number of connected peers.

edit: I just wasn't thinking here.. Here's another attempt:
Since in PoS the amount of consumed coin age takes the place of total work done by the chain, one
might try to read that amount and relate it to the total money supply to arrive at some figures about
the "minting power"

Thanks. That what I thought basically. I was looking into the source code to make sense of how it's calculated but couldn't really understand it (I'm not a C++ developer).