Bitcoin Forum

PoW vs. PoS should be an important topic, when reviewing a coin.

Pro and Contra Pos vs. PoW

Quite contrary to PoS, PoW is very hard or almost impossible to compromise. Not so for PoS, where more attack vectors can be found.

For example, PoS can be abused by rich stakers. Many PoS projects have a so-called pre-mining of coins allocated to the team and the team can abuse such pre-mined coins to gain influence about project decisions.
A large pre-mine is making a project centralized in many ways and devs can gain much influence by staking a large amount of PoS coins.
PoW is not having such issues.

A similar problem is called "nothing at stake", where attackers benefit from no cost to stake ETH or similar PoS coins. Should a fork occur, no matter if the fork is a friendly, accidental or a malicious attempt to rewrite history and reverse transactions, it’s a given strategy for any staker to stake on every chain. By doing so, he will get a reward no matter which fork will succeed and he will have no additional cost to do so.
In PoW, such a problem is not happening because PoW always means work (spending electricity) needs to be done. A cost occurs for every miner and he can’t mine on multiple chains because mining of a different chain means an extra cost.

Do you have more reason against / pro PoW / PoS?

POW has attack vectors.

clogging the mempools with ordinals and hashrate manipulation is being done as I type.

I am a fan of POW not pos but POW has flaws.

POS is simply a terrible idea 💡.

You are right, ordinals spam has proven to be a big issue for Bitcoin and tx fees were very high when it ordinals was very famous.
I hope it will stay like right now because transaction fees are back to normal.

For such crap like ordinals, inscriptions and similar baggage I'm really grateful for shitcoins to exist. Having such a mess on Solana or Ethereum is a big benefit for Bitcoin to stay as far away as possible from getting overloaded by such spammy activities.
And no, I'm not a friend of Shitcoins but here, no one can deny that shitcoins are not beneficial by absorbing a large part of spam.  ;)

Ordinals has nothing to do with the consensus system a blockchain uses.


You have this backwards. It's beneficial for ordinals and inscriptions to take place on Bitcoin instead of other chains because these transactions pay fees for higher hashrate security.

POW despite how it has been proven to be very secure doesn't mean it applies to all coins.
Bitcoin isn't the only coin that uses POW, there are others but unlike Bitcoin they don't enjoy higher hashrate.
BCH is a POW,  copy cat of Bitcoin hoping for improvement but sacrificed security for speed.
POS is centralized so not a fan but we should be aware than a coin using the consensus POW doesn't make it better.
This two consensus are popular for a permissionless blockchain and not a permissioned one which has IBFT and PBFT as their face.Yes I won't deny the increase in security but like in economics I believe the opportunity cost is too high.
Is like sacrificing a head to get a complete body armor not just an helmet.
I believe there should be balance and shitcoins are helping with that
The hashrate Now doesn't have to be exaggerated we can't sacrifice applicability for full security.
Whats the essence of owning an asset if it becomes too illiquid.  

There is one more major issue with Proof-of-Stake. Stakers can hold a piece of the "pie" forever. In Proof-of-Work, if you own 1 EH/s, then you own 0.1% of the hashrate, hereby 0.1% of the "pie". However, if more miners join, and hashrate increases, then your fraction of the pie gets less. You cannot indefinitely own a constant fraction of the pie, as opposed to Proof-of-Stake, where owning 1% of the staked coins gets you always 1% of the votes.

There is absolutely no relation between Proof-of-Work and clogged mempool.

I don't think so because PoS is not a new algorithm. It was created many years ago and it was proven to be fundamentally flawed as soon as it was introduced. In other words even though PoW is not perfect but because PoS is a known flawed protocol there is no reason to compare it with PoW that is working fine.

Spam attacks such as Ordinals can be executed on any cryptocurrency that has a blockchain and blocks that has a cap regardless of how those blocks are found.

Both PoW and PoS have their merits and drawbacks. Choosing the right consensus mechanism depends on the specific goals and priorities of the blockchain project. The future might hold hybrid models that combine the strengths of both approaches.

PoS supporters argue that PoS has some benefits over PoW, especially regarding scalability and transaction speed. However, many PoW supporters argue that PoS, as a newer technology, has yet to prove its potential in terms of network security.

Since you post it under Bitcoin parent board, i'll just say that there's almost no chance Bitcoin will switch from PoW to PoS. Aside from everything you've mentioned, it require hard fork which usually flat rejected by Bitcoin community.


Or rather, it's only beneficial for both miner and exchange. Miner earn more BTC from high TX fees, while exchange have excuse to increase their withdraw fee even though only fraction used as BTC TX fees.

PoS mechanism is indeed to process more transactions so that we can compete with the fiat payment processor then only crypto can become preferred payment system all around the world. PoW is good but it depends on the blockchain itself for the security parameters and any new project will surely be based on PoS because they can't able to get community like what happened with Bitcoin.

Your arguments don't hold with new coins. Because especially new smaller PoW altcoins have been traditionally vulnerable against 51% and often controlled by few pools.

And let's stop glorifying miners, because it's not pure ideology. It's happening only because of valuable incentives. Miners aren't really there because they support community, they are working as long as they can dump their coins for more value then they used for mining. Most of them don't really give a crap what chain is ideologically worth supporting, but what's worth mining.

And when you are saying that PoS can be abused by rich stakers, you don't explain how slashing would make it very costly for them. And how is that centralization even different from PoW coins being controlled by rich miner farms? Rich farmers get the coins by investing to electricity and mining rigs. Rich stakers invested directly to to coins (or tokens).

Why couldn't these both PoW and PoS just coexist?

I finally found someone who got the balls to say the truth and not a one sided person. Anytime you decide to speak about some flaws of Bitcoin, people want to hate you because you are taking bad about Bitcoin but that's not. Bitcoin isn't perfect and so is any technology that has ever existed, there are one or two things that must be going wrong in that tech and Bitcoin isn't an exemption.

You see this ordinals and encryption of meta data debate, I'm very sure that this exploit of the Bitcoin protocol is done by some miners because so far,  a lot of people has been calling for the patch of this bug that people are exploiting but because they are making money from fees hike, they have turned blind eye and keep saying Bitcoin is open source, if it was transaction they were able to remodified, I believe the protocol would have been done since but they don't want to patch this ordinals because it's helping them make tons of Bitcoin from transactions.

PoS doesn't process any more transactions than PoW. Changing the consensus mechanism of the blockchain doesn't change the throughput of the blockchain.


If you think it's a flaw, here's the patch that fixes the bug, why don't you run it? https://github.com/rot13maxi/bitcoin-purifier

But in reality, to process more transactions without interfering the block size we need more power while PoS can change that with simple upgrades and even the verification/confirmation on PoS requires no energy while when we seek decentralization we have to feed more energy sources. I understand PoS is against the nature of decentralization but this is free market and anyone can launch their project in the way they want, isn it?

There might be argument of decentralization and security in POW but with the advancement of technology non-pow coins too are much secure than ever. we could also devise way to distribute non-pow coins in a decentralized manner making it more decentralized and secure than POW.
The reason why POW was a tech in past and needs to be phased out in modern coins is its excessive use of precious energy. Old coins like Bitcoin and Litecoin would stay mineable but there are no popular new POW and we should too discourage using such energy intense activity to achieve something that could be achieved without huge energy consumption.

Indeed, with proof of stake affecting the scheme of the transaction and the block that works, I feel that these two make a difference but also the options of investors and validators contribute. If you look at the proof of stake from the mission and mission, I am also a little backwards, yes the market must be with the ability to outperform if you want to get more rewards than others and more easily just deposit. Likewise, the opposite is against the law of post. Both have variants that people are able to choose, freedom of choice and the main thing is to contribute to the same coin. although at the end of the day buy and sell whatever way you can. I support both, the fact is that the 2 proofs (for example bitcoin and ethreum) are very amazing and complement each other.

I only keep the change but I'm happy to do it.

Bitcoin being the most successful cryptocurrency ever and having PoW mechanism says a lot of things. It is a great invention and an even better investment. Everyone knows it for its top-tier decentralization giving access and control to absolutely no one

Although PoW is a good thing overall we can not deny how PoW is just consuming too much energy hence why PoS has emerged. Even with lower consumption of energy, I still think PoW is a better one though it needs some improvement of course

No. That is not how it works at all. Adding more power to a PoW system doesn't make it process more transactions. PoS requiring no energy to reorg blocks is a vulnerability, not a feature.

Both POW and POS have their own pros & cons. The most common con that is associated with POW is energy consumption as well as environmental pollution. To overcome this negative perspective of POW we saw new crypto using POS protocol. I am not a big fan of POS as it has more issues than POW but currently we see every new or upcoming crypto project using it.

Pow and Pos it’s Decred! ;D

If to be honest, pos almost the same like Pow, different only what give you power to “vote” in the chain.

PoW consensus algorithm is a backbone of a decentralised blockchain network. It's robust and unstoppable.

PoS reward distribution mechanism is a backbone of an unregistered security market. It's often used to conceal a central authority and distribute profits to shareholders in a public company.

I agree, POW isn't perfect but this is way better than POS. The POS is simply made for the developers that have baghold those tokens of theirs and have got a pre-mined supply on their side already. With PoW, it gives more security to the blockchain of the project even if there are attacks and spam, this is still better than POS.

Phil I agree.  PoS is probably my protocol of choice.  I think PoS encourages hoarding and benefits early holders of coins.  Most of the time at least nowadays a lot of the PoS coins have terrible distribution which discourages people from onboarding.  PoS has its issues especially with newer coins and lower profitability but I think the good outweighs the bad there.