Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin has this "governor", if you will, for the speed at which blocks come out by using difficulty.  In POS land, how does this work?  How do they prevent staking over and over with lightning speed?

coinage and difficulty aswell probably

It's magic  8) I love Proof of Stake

You can only stake coins over a certain age, and the age gets reset after you stake. The difficulty can sometimes go too high and result in finding the next block taking far too long. I remember it took hours to find a block on one POS coin where the difficulty had got too high. I think a whale with a massive amount of coins had staked them all at once and pushed the difficulty up.

Now sure if I am correct, but here's how I understand it, overly simplified.

POW

You try to find a specific SHA hash by giving "random" input to a function. The faster you can run these calculations, the more possibilities you can test, and the bigger the chance of finding an input that is "correct", resulting in a mined block.

POS

Some hash is calculated from your account and the previous block. This never changes until a new block appears. For testing if a block can be forged, another input is the current unix timestamp, in seconds. Since the resolution of the timestamp is one second, the input parameters only change once per second. There is no gain by asking "can I forge a block?" faster than once per second, as the result is the same.

It's a different game. It's no longer a matter of trying lots of different possibilities to guess a correct answer. It's a matter of having a pre-computed number unique to your account, and then just waiting until your unique number, combined with the unix timestamp, matches the required difficulty.

Thanks for that summary.  So does this encourage people splitting their coins into a myriad of addresses for a higher likelyhood of an address being able to forge, or is this prevented somehow where forging is a percentage of the address balance that "wins" the block?  I guess I'm not understanding how difficulty is calculated in PoS.

It depends on the specifications in the Proof of Stake. Most often it is better to have your Coins merged into larger Blocks so that they Stake sooner but some Coins also have limits on the amount you can receive as a reward in order to encourage holding smaller Blocks. Best to check though the Coins main.cpp file in it's Github and look for GetProofOfStakeReward

Coin age is out-of-date.

Which one serves the user/buyer/holder 's interest better ?

Thanks

That's a good question, one that you will have to decide for yourself. :)

@OP

The POS idea that "The chain is secured by stake".

But there are at least 3 current implementations on how this is achieved, each with a different answer to your question. Coinage only relates to Peercoin and its clones. Nxt has a different system. And there are others out there.

Do you have a particular interest POS coin in mind?

Some Bitcoiners favourite hobby is inventing a bad POS system in their heads (one that usually doesn't exist), and attacking it and claiming POS can't work. They don't take the time for little things like understanding the details  :D

I'm merely curious.  I was reading up on some PoW vs PoS information and I realized I didn't fully understand how PoS worked.

Nxt's POS algo is hard to explain in short bursts

One of Nxt's core devs, Kushti (Alexander Chepurnoy) has written a series of 4 short articles aimed at none programmers. To understand how Nxt works.

It starts basic and builds up, Nxt has multiple things happening at once.

Links:

Part 1: http://chepurnoy.org/blog/2014/10/inside-a-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrency-part-1
Part 2: http://chepurnoy.org/blog/2014/10/inside-a-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrency-part-2
Part 3: http://chepurnoy.org/blog/2014/11/inside-a-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrency-part-3
Part 4: http://chepurnoy.org/blog/2014/12/inside-a-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrency-part-4