What kind of currencies are these? If you show your support to a provably fraudulent project (e.g., Bitcoin SV), you're justifiably going to get red-trusted. Truth be told, most of those pump and wild-dump alts exist solely to disorientate from honest work.

Useless to you, isn't useless to everybody.

Exactly. It's clear that they're not banning it due to humanism or for the sake of the climate change, because they should have also behaved similarly to a gazillion other things. Their intention is to have more control over the people; the environmental disaster argument is just an alibi.

He wants to redraw the map I guess? What's your opinion?

Well, if you're asking whose fault is this, it's mainly Americans'. NATO, whose leadership is the US, keeps the expansions in the last two decades. Romania, Moldova, Poland and Lithuania, that are around Russia, are members of NATO. The US wanted from Ukraine to also be part of it, something Putin would definitely not want to as it'd block him from the black sea.

Putin isn't going to stop with the bombing until Ukraine becomes theirs. He's already referred to Ukraine as Russia. If the US doesn't step back and admit defeat, Putin's going to stretch it to the extremes. If that's the case, then it's a WWIII confirmed.

Along with @ETFbitcoin, I had also had conversations with interiawp. They were perpetually trying to figure out ways to unlock some outputs from the blockchain whose transactions were non-standard and therefore couldn't be accepted from the network.

I doubt they wanted to build reputation, they just had an account spared and chose to earn the most they could that way. They were looking shady anyways.

In PoW, there's a significant percentage of uncertainty. For example, you can't know for sure what will be your earnings in the future. You don't know if it's in favor of you to sell the ASICs or to keep them for yourself. On the other hand, in PoS, you know exactly the coins that suit you and you're not going to sell them unless one appears who's willing to pay you at least your future earnings.

Therefore, one owning the 1% of the computational power is more likely to vanish than one owning the 1% of all the coins in circulation.

This is false. They very much do, which proves you haven't actually read my writeup.

Vitalik, summing up that there's sacrifice in security:

I don't care what they do. I created this thread to share my thoughts.

This problem exists in PoS systems too. There are much greater whales in Cardano than in Bitcoin.

You can't realistically stop PoW, by banning it. There'll always be people who'll have access to computational power and therefore, can always use it to mine cryptocurrencies. Besides, isn't it already proven that the majority of the hash rate comes from renewable sources?

The attack doesn't have to retain; if one ever reversed a transaction x blocks deep, the game theory would have failed. The moment they did, Bitcoin would have lost all its value. Economically-wise, a 51% is easier in PoW, but that's unless there's a terrible wealth distribution which happens to be the case in most cryptos.

Extra Dos:

• Use common sense.
• Use it to buy things.
• Ask to be paid in it.
• Educate others.

Extra Don'ts:

• Don't hesitate to ask how it works.

That's a very non-recommended don't, because you should have never memorized your private key in the first place.

Hmm... Why is there unemployment in the first place? Isn't mainly due to global recession which occurs during financial crisis? Isn't debt the reason we have recessions? Isn't lending and borrowing what brings us to long-term and short-term debt cycles?

I'm not saying that Bitcoin makes the society more productive, but there's definitely something faulty with the current monetary system. I'm not against credit either if it's used to allocate resources and produce income. But, having the ability to introduce new money in the economy out of thin air makes you almighty; and when one's so almighty, we suddenly have a central point of failure. The society's economic future is down on this entity's fate.

Γράψτο στο λινκ πιο πάνω.

It was decentralized, but less than it is today. If we're going to agree with my centralization definition, then it's true; few people who owned an exchange had a fortune of 850,000+ BTC. The manipulation was easier and more intensive than it is today. Charts speak themselves.

Economy isn't a strictly connected term with money. It's related with administration, in general.

Don't you choose a pool to stake?

This place is known for its freedom of speech. If you don't want to try, then don't blame mods. The mods don't lock topics subjectively. Only if it's against the rules.

Which proves what exactly? The market had also chosen to put a dog-looking coin in the third position. Is that what you want? To simply reach a certain position among other currencies? Is that your project's goal?

And now you're comparing China with Europe...

Okay, so... May I assume you didn't read my writeup, right? I've detected flaws to your mechanism and you keep avoiding them. You're the one who asked for serious conversation, troller.

You do have the option to not buy them from another miner, though.

There are definitely alternatives to Coinomi.

Yes. The moment I recover my fork coins, that very moment I'll express my disagreement of the fork's existence by converting them to Bitcoin.

You may don't feel safe with it for one reason or another.

Security-wise? No.

This thread is a tribute to all the discussions that have been made regarding these two mechanisms. As a PoW enthusiast, I'd like to explain why PoS is an inferior mechanism for such protocol as it loses in both centralization and capability of producing consensus, two of which are necessary for an innovative kind of money of this character.

But, before I move onto anything, I think that it's very important to understand what's centralization. It can be described as:

As you may get, centralization is a vague term and it's nowadays misused either unwittingly or to favor benefits. One may say that Bitcoin is less centralized in contrast with an altcoin, because its hash rate is distributed more properly, but they'd also be as correct as one saying that it's less centralized, because it has a better wealth distribution (no ICOs etc.). An other may say that few pools own the majority of the hash rate and hence, it's centralized; they may disagree that centralization can be measured etc.

Therefore, we need to precise what exactly we'll call centralization. My definition goes as following:

So, the more something's centralized, the more those few can affect it. They're analogous values. These people can either be developers or regular users.

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Proof of Work
How it works in theory: (With lottery tickets as metaphor)

• Everyone can generate lottery tickets.
• Scratching those requires spending of computational power.
• There's no way to know if a ticket is a winning one unless you scratch it.
• Each ticket has a rarity.
• If someone proves they scratched a ticket whose rarity was one-out-of-one-trillion, they essentially reveal that they have searched one trillion tickets on average.
• The network decides what rarity is required for a ticket to be a winning one.
• Whoever scratches such ticket gets a reward.
• The required rarity changes based on the frequency of the winners.

Proof of Stake
How it works in theory:

• Owners of the cryptocurrency lock up their funds.
• They vote by proving their financial bond with a digital signature. The greater the bond, the more the votes.
• The block with the most votes is considered the valid one.

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A valid transaction is a transaction that complies with the consensus rules and has been included into a block. For example, if you try to spend a transaction output that has already been spent, then the transaction is invalid as it goes against the rules. Satoshi Nakamoto solved the double-spending problem in the following way:

• Require all the transactions to go through a ledger. Any transaction that is not written in it is ignored.
• When there are two conflicting transactions, the "correct" one is the one that was published first.
• To determine time, you need a timestamp server.
• To have a timestamp server, rely on proof of work.

That way you can ensure for the validity of the ledger, without being present all the time. Consensus takes place when the transaction ordering problem is resolved in a decentralized way. That's essentially Bitcoin. That's the Byzantine generals' concerted strategy.

Why Proof of Stake cannot produce consensus
Punishment plays a big role in this system. Our wealth is protected solely from a game theory: One or more entities are discouraged to cheat. Why that happens? Well, besides that:
There's also one thing our fellow forgot to mention (or emphasize): Energy. If one's behavior is dishonest towards the network, they're forced to pay for acquiring energy whether their attack is successful or not. They're punished outside the system.

This is not true in proof of stake and you'll understand why that's bad along the way. Nonetheless, there has to be a way to discourage cheaters, even if they're punished within the system's borders, and there is: Security deposits. Once nodes stake their money, the network can use those to punish them in case they misbehave.

While the mechanism uses the users' money to avoid double-spending it suffers from the so-called "double-signing problem". In other words, the system isn't objective in broad terms:


Remember, we use consensus to ensure that a newbie who just installed a client, syncs without doubt of whether what they're receiving is valid or not. Their node demands from the rest to send blocks, it verifies the validity of every block and transaction and it'll initially reach to the last block of the chain with the most work. That's essentially the purpose of consensus; to avoid having unreliable actors.

When it comes to unreliability, our newbie is definitely safe in the PoW environment, but not in the PoS'. You see, since there's lack of objectivity, the weaknesses already seem to show up. If, say, one wanted to attack, they could gain much influence by liquidating their stake and proceeding to the abuse of their own keys. Any blocks that had been signed by them would be vulnerable and they'd have nothing to lose. That's known as "Nothing at stake problem".

PoS cryptocurrencies attempt to solve this problem by either punishing the attackers with the deposits' loss if they sign another block during a particular period of time or by ignoring a block that is signed a certain period of time later. The problem is that you can only do the latter if you were there from the start. If you had your node syncing, you'd have no way to know which of the two identical blocks is the correct one. As I've already said to have a timestamp server you need to rely on proof of work.

Why Proof of Stake centralizes the system
Because, the sources to contribute to the network aren't available outside the system. The "underpinnings" are in the stakers' fate. In proof of work, when you setup your ASICs and start mining you're, intentionally or not, subsidizing decentralization as the rest of the miners suddenly have less power. The opposite happens in proof of stake: To acquire voting power you increase their gains.

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I address to PoS-ers to come to this thread and constructively argue with the above assertions or if they don't disagree, to spell out why PoW is worse. This was just my opinion; anyone's free to support the other side. I didn't type this title for no reason.

That's exactly what I meant. Businesses do use Linux, but the main target is the consumers plus the rest of the businesses that use Windows. That alone, encourages them to code malicious software mainly for Windows. (But, not exclusively)

That's also what I meant! 

Here in Greece, there are countless of merchants that run their business in Windows, but have a Linux hosting service. Also, another reason I hadn't thought of is gaming. There are lots of internet cafes where people enter personal information besides their game's login credentials, such as Facebook, phone number, even credit card details. Gaming doesn't comply with Linux.

This is not how things work and SegWit is definitely a bad analogy. If Bitcoin switched to another mechanism, it'd work differently. It wouldn't have just "upgraded", we wouldn't be just talking about an "improvement"; the entire project's reliance would have changed.

The mechanism of Bitcoin is one of its principles. Principles don't change and if they ever do, it won't be an improvement, see forks. Besides, we've already explained why PoS fails in both centralisation and consensus.

Sorry that we don't comply with your agenda. Maybe we need arguments to start a serious conversation? 

No. If you got a successful verification, then it means the signature you downloaded from electrum.org is valid, given the public key you imported to Kleopatra. You didn't do anything incorrectly as long as you imported the correct public key.

Depends on what you want to do. Did you just create it to verify Electrum? If yes, then go ahead and delete the whole Kleopatra. However, you may find it interesting to learn what's all about these key pairs. It may also help you do something you couldn't before. For instance, you can now send encrypted messages if you find others who use GPG.

These software wallets are resulted from work of people who want to make you use a fork of Bitcoin. They exist solely for their own benefit. I wouldn't use it unless I converted all of my fork coins to Bitcoin.

The majority of the people also use Windows as their main OS, Google as their main search engine and Facebook as their main messenger. That doesn't mean they're safer. Don't use Coinomi as it's closed-source and has an unusually bad fame.

It's not the canon, but most people purchase computers with pre-installed OSes. I've never seen any of those having a Linux distro, only Windows. Since these are the hackers' victims, they will spend more time to write their malicious software there. They'll focus on Windows. Or a better example: How many businesses do you know that use Linux?

Having Linux doesn't mean you understand security, but since most don't, there are definitely less dangers to be aware of.

1. Download the signed checksums: https://github.com/BTCGPU/electrum/releases/download/3.2.1/SHA256SUMS.asc
2. Search for a public key with fingerprint=0x38EE12EB597B4FC0: https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?search=0x38EE12EB597B4FC0&fingerprint=on&op=index
3. Save the public key and import it on a PGP software (such as Kleopatra).
4. Rename the signature file to your executable as I've previously told you:
5. Open the signature file with the PGP software. In Kleopatra it'll verify it automatically.

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This is very important:
I would never trust a person who promotes a fork of Bitcoin and has spent time to make it work. They're welcomed to my blacklist.

PoW is a mechanism meant to stay forever. It does have its downsides, but I don't see any if we're going to compare it with PoS. It's not ideal, but it's the best one we have. I may, myself, make a megathread one of these days regarding this much discussed debate.

For the troller's thread, I'd say the exact opposite. To make the positive point of view of PoW invisible.