What is your opinion on PoS coins?

[spartak_t]

I'm not a coder, but through the years, I've had the chance to talk with several of the most prominent coders in here. There were all against it, but none of them wanted to go into details. My only personal concern on PoS coins, is if a person (or group) holds large % of the coin and takes larger % of the PoS reward. Can't think of another "glitch" that may come up. Mining is fun and I love it, though I stopped mining about 2 months ago, but I'm kinda sure it won't last forever. I have some other thoughts about the future of cryptocurrencies, but I'll share them further in this thread.

[bathrobehero]

I'm not a coder but here's my opinion from another thread:
The price of PoS coins is completely arbitrary. It's not based on anything. ICOs and crap like that setting the initial price is useless and similar to how FIAT works.
While PoW does sink money into electricity and taking it out of the ecosystem, it also creates a floor price; miners tend not to sell coins cheaper than what the cost of mining was.
PoW coins therefore have an actual cost of making therefore floor price, not just magic internet money created for free out of thin air.

PoS investors are also just as greedy as miners can be, but miners at least have to invest into mining equipment and more importantly electricity to mine while stakers doesn't need anything but to just hold some coins.
And stakers will earn coins at the exact same rate as everyone else staking which means everyone earns more at the same rate so in reality nobody really gains everyting.

I'm not saying PoW is perfect, far from it but I think Proof of Stake is awful and it's based on a fallacy.
I can't take PoS only coins seriously. Same goes for stakers; holding coins for the prospect of a few percentages in the volatile nature of crypto is probably as sound of an investment as gambling or ponzis. But, it's easy and doesn't require anything so of course people want it.

[alyssa85]

As a user I like them because you essentially get to earn some interest on your holding without dealing with banks.

They also solve one big point of failure in BTC. All bitcoin mining is now centralised in China behind the firewall. At present those miners are allowed to mine. But as the Chinese recession has been deepening their govt has been getting more authoritarian. What is to say they won't reach the point Venezuela has got to, where they start arresting miners?

With proof of stake, the stakes are distributed across the world, so the work of validating the network is also evenly spread and there is no single point of failure.

[spartak_t]

...

Forget the ICO's. My point was to secure the network in the future and people to accept cryptocurrencies as a way of payment. Agreed about PoW and electricity, but you are forgetting something. Back in May, 2014 , I paid 48,000 euros for combined 420MH scrypt ASICs and I was able to mine about $1000-$1300 worth of coins a day. My electricity costs were about $550/month. Nowadays you can't go even near to your electricity costs (if you are not lying your government)...

[spartak_t]

As a user I like them because you essentially get to earn some interest on your holding without dealing with banks.

They also solve one big point of failure in BTC. All bitcoin mining is now centralised in China behind the firewall. At present those miners are allowed to mine. But as the Chinese recession has been deepening their govt has been getting more authoritarian. What is to say they won't reach the point Venezuela has got to, where they start arresting miners?

With proof of stake, the stakes are distributed across the world, so the work of validating the network is also evenly spread and there is no single point of failure.

Chinese miners are in control of Bitcoin's mining/price (i.e. securing the network, and of course, they have some influence on price). If they start arresting miners nothing will happen imho. Of course, Bitcoin's network will be less secure, but the bigger problem is if the chinese start to panic sale.

[bathrobehero]

...

Forget the ICO's. My point was to secure the network in the future and people to accept cryptocurrencies as a way of payment. Agreed about PoW and electricity, but you are forgetting something. Back in May, 2014 , I paid 48,000 euros for combined 420MH scrypt ASICs and I was able to mine about $1000-$1300 worth of coins a day. My electricity costs were about $550/month. Nowadays you can't go even near to your electricity costs (if you are not lying your government)...

ASICs are a different topic and issue entirely. Unfortunately every successful coin will face a degree of centralization, be it centralized mining mainly because not everyone have an ASIC or that a small amount of people holding the majority of coins to manipulate the market. Imagine if Bitcoin's algo would keep changing every few months...

In PoS the rich gets richer and it incentivizes people to hold a lot of coins because then they earn more that way causing some centralization. I don't think coins should be held, they should be used.

And when you realize that in crypto pretty much every coin can easily jump 10-20% up or down in value within just a single day, holding coins just for a couple of percentages a year I think is crazy.

Maybe if a coin that would be successfully pegged to something might be worth it to safely stake.

[spartak_t]

...

Forget the ICO's. My point was to secure the network in the future and people to accept cryptocurrencies as a way of payment. Agreed about PoW and electricity, but you are forgetting something. Back in May, 2014 , I paid 48,000 euros for combined 420MH scrypt ASICs and I was able to mine about $1000-$1300 worth of coins a day. My electricity costs were about $550/month. Nowadays you can't go even near to your electricity costs (if you are not lying your government)...

ASICs are a different topic and issue entirely. Unfortunately every successful coin will face a degree of centralization, be it centralized mining mainly because not everyone have an ASIC or that a small amount of people holding the majority of coins to manipulate the market. Imagine if Bitcoin's algo would keep changing every few months...

In PoS the rich gets richer and it incentivizes people to hold a lot of coins because then they earn more that way causing some centralization. I don't think coins should be held, they should be used.

And when you realize that in crypto pretty much every coin can easily jump 10-20% up or down in value within just a single day, holding coins just for a couple of percentages a year I think is crazy.

Maybe if a coin that would be successfully pegged to something might be worth it to safely stake.

No. In PoW coins if you don't have miners - you don't have network, or if you have small amount of miners, someone can take over the network (i.e. mining more blocks & dump (for example)). For Bitcoin, that seems impossible, but we all know that chinese miners are controlling the mining part. What if they are a group of people acting together? I agree on centralization... it is somehow inevitable. There are a lot of coins bragging with anonymity and such, but they will adapt or die. In PoS, the rich can't get richer if the % of the yearly reward is reduced to acceptable minimum. What if you have $1Mn worth of coins in your wallet and your PoS reward is %1/year? Your profit will be like less than $1000/month just for holding them (and worry about the rest (i.e. someone can hack you and such...)). The story is different for the "ordinary" people. They can be satisfied with a $50/month profit.   

[bathrobehero]

...

Forget the ICO's. My point was to secure the network in the future and people to accept cryptocurrencies as a way of payment. Agreed about PoW and electricity, but you are forgetting something. Back in May, 2014 , I paid 48,000 euros for combined 420MH scrypt ASICs and I was able to mine about $1000-$1300 worth of coins a day. My electricity costs were about $550/month. Nowadays you can't go even near to your electricity costs (if you are not lying your government)...

ASICs are a different topic and issue entirely. Unfortunately every successful coin will face a degree of centralization, be it centralized mining mainly because not everyone have an ASIC or that a small amount of people holding the majority of coins to manipulate the market. Imagine if Bitcoin's algo would keep changing every few months...

In PoS the rich gets richer and it incentivizes people to hold a lot of coins because then they earn more that way causing some centralization. I don't think coins should be held, they should be used.

And when you realize that in crypto pretty much every coin can easily jump 10-20% up or down in value within just a single day, holding coins just for a couple of percentages a year I think is crazy.

Maybe if a coin that would be successfully pegged to something might be worth it to safely stake.

No. In PoW coins if you don't have miners - you don't have network, or if you have small amount of miners, someone can take over the network (i.e. mining more blocks & dump (for example)). For Bitcoin, that seems impossible, but we all know that chinese miners are controlling the mining part. What if they are a group of people acting together? I agree on centralization... it is somehow inevitable. There are a lot of coins bragging with anonymity and such, but they will adapt or die. In PoS, the rich can't get richer if the % of the yearly reward is reduced to acceptable minimum. What if you have $1Mn worth of coins in your wallet and your PoS reward is %1/year? Your profit will be like less than $1000/month just for holding them (and worry about the rest (i.e. someone can hack you and such...)). The story is different for the "ordinary" people. They can be satisfied with a $50/month profit.  

Then you're terrible with money and losing out on a lot of value which you could get investing it elsewhere. 1-5% per year is nothing and it's crazy to invest money for that 1-5% considering the general volatility of crypto.
So once again low% PoS is pointless and high% PoS is a joke. There's no benefit to it. Stakers are basically just being paid a tiny bit so they're not dumping it on the market which is just a desperate attempt to reduce supply temporarily in the hopes of demand driving the price up.

[d5000]

In my opinion, PoS can work if the coins are well distributed. That would be the case in a "mature" stage of a PoS cryptocurrency, when it's used by a high number of people (I would say, the limit between a "nascent" and a "mature" cryptocurrency in this case is between 10.000 and 100.000 active (regularly using/investing/trading) users to achieve this, so no PoS coin is even close actually).

But when you have whales, then you will have always the "Nothing at stake problem" as a certain risk. Someone may be tempted to sell or lend (for the "shorting attack") an attacker a large portion of stake, and when distribution is unequal, even 2-3% are dangerous.

So my opinion is that a nascent cryptocurrency, until it reaches maturity (in the sense of my words above) should not rely on PoS alone. It could follow first a hybrid model with PoW mining like Peercoin or Decred.

An interesting model for the intermediate stage (when you have e.g. 1000 to 10000 users) is NEM's PoI ("Proof of Importance"), because this model encourages the creation of businesses like online wallets, exchanges etc.. because they can benefit from the PoI reward structure. But for a mature cryptocurrency, PoI encourages moving of coins too much to excel at scalability.

For now, my ideal cryptocurrency would start with a PoW/PoI hybrid model and then slowly switch to PoS with a peercoin-like reward structure (PoW being slowly phased out).

[spartak_t]

...

Forget the ICO's. My point was to secure the network in the future and people to accept cryptocurrencies as a way of payment. Agreed about PoW and electricity, but you are forgetting something. Back in May, 2014 , I paid 48,000 euros for combined 420MH scrypt ASICs and I was able to mine about $1000-$1300 worth of coins a day. My electricity costs were about $550/month. Nowadays you can't go even near to your electricity costs (if you are not lying your government)...

ASICs are a different topic and issue entirely. Unfortunately every successful coin will face a degree of centralization, be it centralized mining mainly because not everyone have an ASIC or that a small amount of people holding the majority of coins to manipulate the market. Imagine if Bitcoin's algo would keep changing every few months...

In PoS the rich gets richer and it incentivizes people to hold a lot of coins because then they earn more that way causing some centralization. I don't think coins should be held, they should be used.

And when you realize that in crypto pretty much every coin can easily jump 10-20% up or down in value within just a single day, holding coins just for a couple of percentages a year I think is crazy.

Maybe if a coin that would be successfully pegged to something might be worth it to safely stake.

No. In PoW coins if you don't have miners - you don't have network, or if you have small amount of miners, someone can take over the network (i.e. mining more blocks & dump (for example)). For Bitcoin, that seems impossible, but we all know that chinese miners are controlling the mining part. What if they are a group of people acting together? I agree on centralization... it is somehow inevitable. There are a lot of coins bragging with anonymity and such, but they will adapt or die. In PoS, the rich can't get richer if the % of the yearly reward is reduced to acceptable minimum. What if you have $1Mn worth of coins in your wallet and your PoS reward is %1/year? Your profit will be like less than $1000/month just for holding them (and worry about the rest (i.e. someone can hack you and such...)). The story is different for the "ordinary" people. They can be satisfied with a $50/month profit.  

Then you're terrible with money and losing out on a lot of value which you could get investing it elsewhere. 1-5% per year is nothing and it's crazy to invest money for that 1-5% considering the general volatility of crypto.
So once again low% PoS is pointless and high% PoS is a joke. There's no benefit to it. Stakers are basically just being paid a tiny bit so they're not dumping it on the market which is just a desperate attempt to reduce supply temporarily in the hopes of demand driving the price up.

No, bud, please try to think a bit more. I was trying to say that 1% PoS interest (for example) is nothing for a guy who has $1Mn worth of coins (again, for example) in the wallet (given the fact that the price is not moving upwards), because he's stuck with that investment. That's a bad investment! But there are also thousands (if not millions) of people who can be satisfied with their $10/month profit. Those are the people who support the network while keeping their wallets open 24/7. The volatility of crypto is obvious, but my question was about the flaws in PoS coins. One is inflation, but that can be easily overcomed with low interest.

[spartak_t]

In my opinion, PoS can work if the coins are well distributed. That would be the case in a "mature" stage of a PoS cryptocurrency, when it's used by a high number of people (I would say, the limit between a "nascent" and a "mature" cryptocurrency in this case is between 10.000 and 100.000 active (regularly using/investing/trading) users to achieve this, so no PoS coin is even close actually).

But when you have whales, then you will have always the "Nothing at stake problem" as a certain risk. Someone may be tempted to sell or lend (for the "shorting attack") an attacker a large portion of stake, and when distribution is unequal, even 2-3% are dangerous.

So my opinion is that a nascent cryptocurrency, until it reaches maturity (in the sense of my words above) should not rely on PoS alone. It could follow first a hybrid model with PoW mining like Peercoin or Decred.

An interesting model for the intermediate stage (when you have e.g. 1000 to 10000 users) is NEM's PoI ("Proof of Importance"), because this model encourages the creation of businesses like online wallets, exchanges etc.. because they can benefit from the PoI reward structure. But for a mature cryptocurrency, PoI encourages moving of coins too much to excel at scalability.

For now, my ideal cryptocurrency would start with a PoW/PoI hybrid model and then slowly switch to PoS with a peercoin-like reward structure (PoW being slowly phased out).

That's a good point and I must admit that I must think about it a bit more. Nevertheless, it's not answering on my question: Why prominent coders are thinking that PoS is more insecure than PoW?

[Joshua kingpin]

I'm not a coder, but through the years, I've had the chance to talk with several of the most prominent coders in here. There were all against it, but none of them wanted to go into details. My only personal concern on PoS coins, is if a person (or group) holds large % of the coin and takes larger % of the PoS reward. Can't think of another "glitch" that may come up. Mining is fun and I love it, though I stopped mining about 2 months ago, but I'm kinda sure it won't last forever. I have some other thoughts about the future of cryptocurrencies, but I'll share them further in this thread.

I'm lovin PoS coins! 

[r0ach]

Why PoS is busted:

For instance, you could remove mining to save energy and create a closed loop, recursive, PoS system, but without the external entropy of mining, you now have a permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency.  It has no real fault or state recovery since it needs to reference the parts that have already failed in order to continue.  With Bitcoin PoW, there really is no terminal failure unless the cryptography itself becomes compromised.  That's why Bitcoin is more valuable than all the alternative methods you see.  A global economy can't go from working to dead at the drop of a hat with no way to fix it.

[Snail2]

I'm not a coder but here's my opinion from another thread:
The price of PoS coins is completely arbitrary. It's not based on anything. ICOs and crap like that setting the initial price is useless and similar to how FIAT works.
While PoW does sink money into electricity and taking it out of the ecosystem, it also creates a floor price; miners tend not to sell coins cheaper than what the cost of mining was.

OK... and which floor price do you mean? The US price, the Chinese price, or the the price when some blokes stealing or obtaining electricity by other means for free ?

[spartak_t]

Why PoS is busted:

For instance, you could remove mining to save energy and create a closed loop, recursive, PoS system, but without the external entropy of mining, you now have a permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency.  It has no real fault or state recovery since it needs to reference the parts that have already failed in order to continue.  With Bitcoin PoW, there really is no terminal failure unless the cryptography itself becomes compromised.  That's why Bitcoin is more valuable than all the alternative methods you see.  A global economy can't go from working to dead at the drop of a hat with no way to fix it.

What is your point exactly? Cryptocurrencies losing their "freedom" (being centralized)?

[Snail2]

Why PoS is busted:

For instance, you could remove mining to save energy and create a closed loop, recursive, PoS system, but without the external entropy of mining, you now have a permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency.  It has no real fault or state recovery since it needs to reference the parts that have already failed in order to continue.  With Bitcoin PoW, there really is no terminal failure unless the cryptography itself becomes compromised.  That's why Bitcoin is more valuable than all the alternative methods you see.  A global economy can't go from working to dead at the drop of a hat with no way to fix it.

Well that's fine but actually bigger and more valuable cryptoes are already lost that "external entropy of mining" as the whole mining process is dominated by a couple big fish. But the possibility for such entropy is still there indeed.

[spartak_t]

Is this the answer?

[d5000]

That's a good point and I must admit that I must think about it a bit more. Nevertheless, it's not answering on my question: Why prominent coders are thinking that PoS is more insecure than PoW?

Because of the Nothing at Stake problem. (If you don't know it, you should google this forum, the NXT forum and terms like "N@S").

Basically, the Nothing at Stake problem says that "it costs nothing to attack a PoS currency". That means, that you can attack the chain minting at more than one chain at once. Your goal would be to mint several blocks in a row with an old "private whale key" and double-spend.

My point is that the Nothing at stake problem is a real risk for young cryptocurrencies (although, to my knowledge, nobody has performed it successfully until now), but in a currency with many users and a well distributed coin supply it won't work, as it would be almost impossible to get the stake necessary to perform a N@S attack - even if you try to lend the coins and do a short shell.

If Bitcoin was a PoS currency and you would like to perform a N@S attack, you would have to try to get coins for hundreds of millions of dollars to have a real chance. But take some of the 10.000- or 100.000-usd-market-cap-altcoins - with these coins it's perfectly possible to perform such an attack.

[kiklo]

That's a good point and I must admit that I must think about it a bit more. Nevertheless, it's not answering on my question: Why prominent coders are thinking that PoS is more insecure than PoW?

Because of the Nothing at Stake problem. (If you don't know it, you should google this forum, the NXT forum and terms like "N@S").

Basically, the Nothing at Stake problem says that "it costs nothing to attack a PoS currency". That means, that you can attack the chain minting at more than one chain at once. Your goal would be to mint several blocks in a row with an old "private whale key" and double-spend.

My point is that the Nothing at stake problem is a real risk for young cryptocurrencies (although, to my knowledge, nobody has performed it successfully until now), but in a currency with many users and a well distributed coin supply it won't work, as it would be almost impossible to get the stake necessary to perform a N@S attack - even if you try to lend the coins and do a short shell.

If Bitcoin was a PoS currency and you would like to perform a N@S attack, you would have to try to get coins for hundreds of millions of dollars to have a real chance. But take some of the 10.000- or 100.000-usd-market-cap-altcoins - with these coins it's perfectly possible to perform such an attack.

I hear this every now and again, and it is like this if there are no coins staking the difficulty # is in the toilet.
(low difficulty is like 0.0002, any coin that low is weak and vulnerable to what you mentioned.)
Target= Difficulty for the below formula
hashProofOfStake <= [Coin-age] x [Target]      
[Coin-age] = [amount of coins] x [days in stake]      

But if you have a larger amount of coin staking , you have a higher difficulty and are completely resistant to such an attack.
By the way BTC will only have 21 million coins total, some of the Proof of Stake already have Billions of coins so there will always be some staking.  

Plus , this will cost nothing , is not true you risk damaging the reputation of the Coin and therefore losing your investment of the coins purchased to pull off the attack.
Most Proof of stake coins have good difficulty with a lot of coins, the more coins staking the more secure the network can be.

Also to compare to PoW , this would be like buying an asic gaining 51% of BTC mining , just to make the ASIC worthless, because no one would trust BTC anymore.
(Not Bright to say the least)

 

[kiklo]

Why PoS is busted:

For instance, you could remove mining to save energy and create a closed loop, recursive, PoS system, but without the external entropy of mining, you now have a permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency.  It has no real fault or state recovery since it needs to reference the parts that have already failed in order to continue.  With Bitcoin PoW, there really is no terminal failure unless the cryptography itself becomes compromised.  That's why Bitcoin is more valuable than all the alternative methods you see.  A global economy can't go from working to dead at the drop of a hat with no way to fix it.

Sorry this just sounds like a bunch of confusion.

PoW, requires you to mine the next block , and that gives it permission to place an entry in the ledger.
PoS requires your block outstake competing blocks , and that gives it permission to place an entry in the ledger.

So that permissioned ledger and not a real decentralized currency, sorry does not ring true with me at least.

Fact as a Proof of Stake User with a well designed System, I do not need to join a Pool to earn coins.
So once it becomes more widely used, there will be more individual PoS wallets staking than PoW.
Reason being PoW BTC requires the majority of users to Joins Pools, so those miners can not be counted as individual miner , but must be counted per pool.
Are there even 50 BTC pools out there now, which some will drop at the next halfing, so PoW will be nothing but Centralized.

Where as with PoS coin every single user counts, so our numbers will be higher and we will be more Decentralized than PoW.  

 

FYI:
BTC will fail when the electricity costs are more than the coin profit can generate.
Which for individuals this happened years ago.

FYI2:
Proof of stake , you earn more coins by running a node.
Longer it runs the more compound interest you can earn.
Plus it runs as an Minimized App on my PC,
while I am using the PC for other things and the electricity cost are not even noticeable, since I would have the PC on anyway.  

Proof of Work , BTC Nodes are declining because not enough financial incentive to keep running them?
http://bravenewcoin.com/news/the-decline-in-bitcoins-full-nodes/