POW and POS, which is better?

[tee-rex]

I always believe that POS is much better than POW. Energy saving, safer...
But "Fake Satoshi" Dr Craig seems to believe that POW is better than POS when he said: POW is fair & for everybody who work hard while POS is for people who are wealthy (they have much money for staking).

What do you think?

This topic seems to reappear here with a surprising regularity, but I'm still curious why you would believe or trust someone whom you yourself call a "Fake Satoshi"? With that said, I can't gather how you can honestly consider POW more fair and available to everybody while POS being only for people who are wealthy. Care to explain? Have you checked the prices for bitcoin miners recently? If anything, it is POW which is for those who are extremely wealthy and highly specialized in this field, which is very demanding in terms of technical expertise.

On the other hand, POS is exactly for everyone in the context you mean it as you don't need to have a hefty startup capital to join the club of coin miners. Apart from that, it doesn't require profound knowledge of the gory details associated with the technical aspects of mining.

What am I missing?

[bavian]

For me, proof of stake is better than proof of work. Need less electricity, faster, fairer and needn't for high performance hardware.

[iconoclast]

PoW is far too energy intensive to be a long term solution. The central argument against PoS as an alternative has been that it is less decentralised than PoW. The idea being that the only thing preventing someone from control over 50% of the nodes and completely controlling the currency is money. But if you look at mining the same argument can be made that it is possible to lease over 50% of the hashing power or buy up enough of the available ASIC mining rigs and also gain control if you throw enough money at it. If a PoS system is implemented that makes it very easy for everyone who holds the currency to take part in the process and would require you to own over 50% of the currency before you could exert effective control over the network then it would be much more impervious to anyone successfully doing that since the price of miners and hashing power tend to be more inelastic to supply and demand than the price of coins. Gaining control over half the mining power may be possible but if you tried to control over half the Ethereum or Bitcoin you would end up driving up the price so that all the fiat in existance would probably not be enough money to buy control.    

[SmartIphone]

PoW consumes lots of energy and this is killing the ecosystem and the environment and I think that those that are using PoS are much much better, high efficiency and more usable.
For those that use PoW it is good because you are converting "energy" into the money and those who make the most profit are those who may steal the power energy from the gov.

[AiloveYouks21]

I always believe that POS is much better than POW. Energy saving, safer...
But "Fake Satoshi" Dr Craig seems to believe that POW is better than POS when he said: POW is fair & for everybody who work hard while POS is for people who are wealthy (they have much money for staking).

What do you think?

I prefer the work of Proof of Stake because it saves electricity more than Proof of Work, but either POS or POW has no effect on whales because they can become rich with both proofs, with POW they can buy a lot of mining tools while with POS they can buy lots of coins, it's the same.

[bolshojkush]

I think at this point in time, POW is also only available to rich people. After all, to mining cryptocurrency with POW you need to buy very expensive equipment. But, with POS mining does not need to buy and maintain equipment.

[clarkt]

Proof of of stake is better than proof of work.  The proof of stake use less energy and less energy is good for the envinroment!  Proof of stake will ensure that a lots of people become a node and many masternode will emerge and thus decentralisation of cryptocurrency is achieved!

[BitcoinHodler]

Proof of of stake is better than proof of work.  The proof of stake use less energy and less energy is good for the envinroment!  Proof of stake will ensure that a lots of people become a node and many masternode will emerge and thus decentralisation of cryptocurrency is achieved!

masternodes are the exact definition of centralization! it is basically a "bank" that is processing transactions and in some of the master node coins you can't even run one without spending and risking a huge amount of money.

as for PoS, it has the worst way of distributing coins. basically anyone with money receives new coins. and it means there will be a lot of rich guys who are receiving a lot of free money which they don't hesitate to dump. that is why POS coins are declining.
in POW at least the miner does some actual work and gets paid for that work and then if they sell they are selling to cover their  costs and pay their bills and also take profit not just receiving free money to dump.

[sinkfish]

POS still better than POW. POS require less energy and material. everyone can become a node with minimum set up. while POW require dedicated high end mining machine and heavy electricity to work. cost over production is way lesser for POS compare POW.

[Triss Merigold]

POW implies the costs of purchasing mining equipment, which means speculation in the market of video cards and coins tied to them. On the other hand, POS can be good only when investing directly in 1 coin, which means its direct growth in capitalization. I believe that POS is the best economic solution.

[livingfree]

That's debatable.

Maybe POW is a good reward for those people who are working hard but its really costing a lot of energy where activitsts are against to it. They are using this mechanism to say that crypto's aren't good for the world. POS is really rewarding for those that believed to that coin and managed to have plenty of it.

IMO, we need balance and both of them are good.

[jazz1984]

In my opinion so far, nothing better than POW has been invented. All the same, POS is money from the money and nothing more, but time will show in which direction technologies will go.

[tee-rex]

PoW is far too energy intensive to be a long term solution. The central argument against PoS as an alternative has been that it is less decentralised than PoW. The idea being that the only thing preventing someone from control over 50% of the nodes and completely controlling the currency is money. But if you look at mining the same argument can be made that it is possible to lease over 50% of the hashing power or buy up enough of the available ASIC mining rigs and also gain control if you throw enough money at it.

I don't think this is not a real argument. If we focused on what this argument is about conceptually and tried to create a currency that wouldn't have that "flaw" (I don't think it is really a flaw), then we would have to impose some external rules (like POW does), but they would still be susceptible to breaking by someone with enough resources, money, or power. To put it differently, we can't escape this vicious circle of "backdoors". And here we come to the conclusion that it may be impossible to create an algorithmic currency as opposed to currencies based on physical limitations like scarcity of gold or some other physical phenomena which are beyond the reach of human influence and control (like gravity or time).

Besides that, it seems natural that if someone holds more than 50% of all coins he can force his will on the remaining minority of users (in terms of coins held). Then again, if we wanted to create a currency resistant to this kind of influence or attack vector, it may not be possible to "create" it in the sense cryptocurrencies are created. We would have to employ some external factor which would be completely out of our control. Gold is a close enough approximation to that but it is too "rigid" for a currency to be used in the modern economy.

[juliyett]

POS is better here, it is more preferable for its features and speed of increasing popularity which plays not the leats role in the case of current cryptomarket.