[Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate

[n0nce]

The Governments are worried more.
My concern is the people that suffer because of power grid blackouts, and worst case a cascade failure that destroys the power grid transformers.

As I said before, if it's such a risk, they would build out infrastructure. That is always the logical choice of what's done if e.g. someone builds a normal factory with traditional heavy machinery. You think they just use the domestic power lines and if they are overloaded they shut down their business?
Again, the logical reaction would be to improve infrastructure, which is always good and gives people work to do & money circulates. It is always done, except apparently when it's not 'company X' in question, but 'Bitcoin'. Not a coincidence. It's about control.

PoW has a technical flaw of requiring geometrically increasing amounts of energy, which is why current energy resources can't continue it.

First of all, 'geometrical increase' isn't even a thing. I've never heard of it and there's no clear Wikipedia definition either. I suspect it's a buzzword spread in PoS circles without anyone checking what it even means. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Wikipedia does link me to 'exponential growth', but if you read the definition, it's not the same thing and probably not what you mean, you're meaning to say 'exponential growth'.

But you want to build something to handle geometric energy growth,
...

Energy consumption won't rise exponentially. That's because difficulty and efficiency advancements kind of cancel each other out. There is no reason for power consumption to grow with a steady Bitcoin price. Of course, if Bitcoin goes 10x, it would make sense for more people to mine and consumption to go 10x, but that's to be expected in a normal business. Like, if you produce 10x more phones, you need 10x the energy - I think that's self-explanatory.

Oh wait, BTC only has ~5 years from the ban,

Random number without any link to reality (what even is the ban...).

ok that only leaves regulation, meaning that only a select few btc miners are allowed to mine.

That's not possible due to the nature of PoW, but this is actually what happens in PoS. As you correctly realize, that's not a good thing.

But the problem with that is so much for freedom, so much for the last pretense of decentralization, not only will btc PoW miners be government licensed and regulated, but they will also  now censor transactions to keep their license.
Now you see why PoW is a technical dead end, the energy resources needed are inaccessible for thousands of years and government control is the only way for it to survive and stay PoW.

That's nonsense, I can't believe you honestly believe this. Also you still don't reply to the question why such an ultra-authoritarion government that you envision, wouldn't go after other cryptocurrencies the same way, too.

PoS is a cooperative design which is why it can coexist with humans without making their lives harder by using up all of the energy resources.

PoW will not use up all the energy resources.. Gosh. For so much 'research' (I hate this wording - looking up articles on the web is not research - but that's another topic), you should know that Bitcoin's energy usage is negligibly small compared to total energy consumption and crippled by many other industries. Hold your horses - any comparisons with small-GDP countries are pure emotional manipulation and meaningless. Like comparing apples to oranges.

Nope, underground PoS economy could easily survive,

So, if the government is not authoritarian and extreme enough to completely wipe PoS off the surface of the planet by applying the death sentence for using it for instance, why should it have the ability to kill 'underground PoW'?

PoW power use put a glowing red target on their back, which means they can't hide,

That's not true. Look up this 200W home miner or this 15W USB miner. Even if it was possible to find people who mine with an S9 (constant 800W load in the home), you cannot spot a 200W load, seriously. Difficulty would adjust accordingly, if large ASICs really weren't able to operate anymore and these little guys would actually become quite profitable.

(They don't even have to waste gas to go to the location, because of smart meters.)

That would first require billions of people to get a smart meter (most don't have one).
You'll also end up with a shitton of false positives, as I already mentioned: People with electric stoves, pets in terraria, aquarium owners, those that tan at home, ones with a sauna, or a heated pool, literally anyone with higher than average electricity usage would need to be checked manually. That's millions of households - good luck with that.

It is worth mentioning that PoS existed nearly as long as bitcoin since it was proposed in early years, and the first implementation of it is a coin called Peercoin (created in 2012) which is considered a dead coin today.
It was only recently that people on the internet started praising this weak and flawed algorithm! It was also recently that a rich centralized foundation started advertising a change from PoW to PoS just because they owned 72 million premined coins. Coincidence?

Interestingly, many PoS folks claim Ethereum 'always planned to transition to PoS later'.
However, if we look at the Announcement thread and check out the earliest archived 2014 versions of Whitepaper and YellowPaper, there is no mention of this.
It's almost as if the creators noticed they had a ton of those coins in their pockets after a while and decided it would be smart to gain voting power with this 'stake' by switching the algorithm. The plan got more concrete as they realized there was no way to beat Bitcoin (when I first joined Bitcoin, there was still a lot of hope by them of this being possible) and environmental arguments played into their hands.

The article mentioned it's possible since the smart meters have access to your network and analyze unencrypted data. Encryption could solve this privacy concern.

Yes, refusing to install a literal wiretap into your home should mostly invalidate this vector.
There is something called 'power analysis' or 'power signature analysis' (that's what franky1 mentioned as well), but it's not nearly good enough to spot someone using a specific device. It can work in very specific circumstances, but it's not like LegendaryK claims, where you get an accurate map of all miners at the push of a button.

People criticize Proof of Stake, but they cannot even make a test network without staking.

They can; Testnet is running on PoW. However, if it were the case that PoS was better for a test network in which the coins are worthless, then you kind of shot yourself in the foot if you believe based on these facts it would be a suitable algorithm for an altcoin's main network. 'Sure, lets use an algorithm that is well suited for worthless coins for our cryptocurrency!'..
Also, testnet is just for... testing... why should it be super decentralized and whatnot, it's just made for testing Bitcoin applications without losing money.

[pooya87]

Interestingly, many PoS folks claim Ethereum 'always planned to transition to PoS later'.
However, if we look at the Announcement thread and check out the earliest archived 2014 versions of Whitepaper and YellowPaper, there is no mention of this.
It's almost as if the creators noticed they had a ton of those coins in their pockets after a while and decided it would be smart to gain voting power with this 'stake' by switching the algorithm. The plan got more concrete as they realized there was no way to beat Bitcoin (when I first joined Bitcoin, there was still a lot of hope by them of this being possible) and environmental arguments played into their hands.

Maybe not from the very start but definitely from early days, that is why they premined their shitcoin and held on to most of it after only dumping to get a couple of million dollars.

In any case the plan also became clear after block 200,000 (Sep-07-2015 ETH is ~3 months old at this point) in the source code after Ice Age hard fork. You may have heard the term "difficulty bomb". It was essentially ensured by the code that at some point it becomes exponentially hard for ETH miners to continue on the PoW chain and to force everyone into submission and accepting PoS since they would have no choice by then.

Nobody thought this could be changed until ETH/ETC split and ETC devs "diffused the bomb". Then since the incompetent ETH devs couldn't come up with the 2.0 version that was supposed to be finished before 2017, they too started "diffusing that bomb" but by only pushing it back. So far there has been 5 hard forks AFAIK that pushed it back (forks between 2017 and 2021). I believe the last fork changed it so that there is no more reward for PoW miners after 2.0 is released without the difficulty bomb but I'm not sure since I don't really follow shitcoin development.

[ABCbits]

The article mentioned it's possible since the smart meters have access to your network and analyze unencrypted data. Encryption could solve this privacy concern.

its not so much about access to network to analyse data(computer bytes of your PC). it about knowing power consumption patterns EG knowing the average power of a TV and a coffee maker/microwave. and they can compare any variable of power consumption to when TV shows go to commercial break and people have a coffee or warm up a snack to know which program they are watching due to the timing

I know you mentioned more common method, but that research specifically utilize network access to perform MITM.

heck they use to allow police to be informed when people were using high energy 24/7 as it was believed that those houses were being used as weed growfarms
even a few years ago a few people got swatted by cops due to high 24/7 consumption thought of as being weed growing, but ended up being found to being an asic farm
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/28/22458632/bitcoin-mine-mistaken-cannabis-growing-operation-police

And it's proof such method isn't reliable to determine how people use electricity.

[n0nce]

Nobody thought this could be changed until ETH/ETC split and ETC devs "diffused the bomb". Then since the incompetent ETH devs couldn't come up with the 2.0 version that was supposed to be finished before 2017, they too started "diffusing that bomb" but by only pushing it back. So far there has been 5 hard forks AFAIK that pushed it back (forks between 2017 and 2021). I believe the last fork changed it so that there is no more reward for PoW miners after 2.0 is released without the difficulty bomb but I'm not sure since I don't really follow shitcoin development.

This makes me think: why would miners even vote for any type of difficulty bomb at all? Wouldn't they always vote for the chain where the difficulty bomb or other type of fork which makes the currency PoS, is pushed back or 'defused'?

[garlonicon]

Because this "bomb" is delayed. Miners can collect profits here and now. They can always pretend that there is some rabbit and that we are going to catch it. But chasing that rabbit is way more profitable than finally catching it and ruining the whole project. Of course there is some used equipment that is sold because of that consensus switch, but this computing power will not be destroyed. It could move to ETC or to other chains, second layers, etc. It will not simply die, because there is no reason to do so. Because of Turing completeness, I also expect some people could attach some difficulty to their staked coins, to have some additional protection. And that is unstoppable, in the same way as soft-forks are. That remaining power could be also used to scrap some bytes from signatures and save fees.

So, that voting is not about "what we want to do right here and right now". It is voting about some kind of "publicly announced direction". So, miners answer that "yes, we want to pretend that we will catch that rabbit" (and we can chase it for years, or expand that race duration in a lot of ways).

[pooya87]

This makes me think: why would miners even vote for any type of difficulty bomb at all? Wouldn't they always vote for the chain where the difficulty bomb or other type of fork which makes the currency PoS, is pushed back or 'defused'?

- Not giving a shit about the coin they are mining (they just want the money)
- Not giving a shit about the future of that coin (they simply switch their GPU rigs to another altcoin to mine)
- Lack of knowledge (they had no idea what they were agreeing with, remember ETH team has a good media team that advertised all these forks that introduced other stuffs that they didn't understand or care about).
- The first bomb was forced on the network in early days that the network was tiny, any subsequent work was in favor of miners (pushed their demise back)
- Centralization...

[n0nce]

So, that voting is not about "what we want to do right here and right now". It is voting about some kind of "publicly announced direction". So, miners answer that "yes, we want to pretend that we will catch that rabbit" (and we can chase it for years, or expand that race duration in a lot of ways).

This makes me think: why would miners even vote for any type of difficulty bomb at all? Wouldn't they always vote for the chain where the difficulty bomb or other type of fork which makes the currency PoS, is pushed back or 'defused'?

- Not giving a shit about the coin they are mining (they just want the money)
- Not giving a shit about the future of that coin (they simply switch their GPU rigs to another altcoin to mine)
- Lack of knowledge (they had no idea what they were agreeing with, remember ETH team has a good media team that advertised all these forks that introduced other stuffs that they didn't understand or care about).
- The first bomb was forced on the network in early days that the network was tiny, any subsequent work was in favor of miners (pushed their demise back)
- Centralization...

Sure, what I want to say though is: how to ETH developers envision this bomb not getting delayed over and over forever? Miners do have an incentive to keep mining Ether, because it's more profitable than other GPU-mineable coins, simply.
Lack of knowledge and centralization are possible, though.

It's funny: they want to switch to an algorithm such that the miners lose all voting power and they get it instead, but for this transition to happen they completely rely on the miners themselves.
Almost as if it's not that easy to stop PoW miners...... ^^

[garlonicon]

how to ETH developers envision this bomb not getting delayed over and over forever?

That's the point. It will be delayed and should be delayed (those who believe in the ETH should understand that). Here is the screenshot from Reddit where Proof of Stake is discussed in August 2015. Now we have March 2022. Almost seven years and the transition is still ongoing. It looks like Coyote Willy is trying to catch this Road Runner for almost seven years! Miners will run, developers will pretend they are switching, "business as usual", I would say.

Almost as if it's not that easy to stop PoW miners...... ^^

Even this ridiculous proposal from stwenhao makes more sense, because in this case, miners cannot stop that. The fact that ETH is going to ask miners for their "yes" vote simply means that they are not thinking seriously about switching. And even in case of some switch, I expect things can quickly get out of control, but because of centralization, they could always deploy just one more hard-fork, in the same way as during ETC split. Failed Proof of Stake activation is a good excuse for one more fork, right?

[PrimeNumber7]

But you want to build something to handle geometric energy growth,
...

Energy consumption won't rise exponentially. That's because difficulty and efficiency advancements kind of cancel each other out. There is no reason for power consumption to grow with a steady Bitcoin price. Of course, if Bitcoin goes 10x, it would make sense for more people to mine and consumption to go 10x, but that's to be expected in a normal business. Like, if you produce 10x more phones, you need 10x the energy - I think that's self-explanatory.

The supply of miners is limited by manufacturing capacity, and it is not trivial to increase manufacturing capacity. Currently, power consumption by the miners is primarily a function of the supply of miners, although the price of bitcoin does influence this.

If there was sufficient supply of miners, the power consumption of the miners would be entirely a function of the price of bitcoin. Increasing mining manufacturing capacity requires substantial long-term investment, so I don't know if there will ever be a sufficiently large supply of miners that power consumption is entirely determined by the price.

People criticize Proof of Stake, but they cannot even make a test network without staking.

They can; Testnet is running on PoW. However, if it were the case that PoS was better for a test network in which the coins are worthless, then you kind of shot yourself in the foot if you believe based on these facts it would be a suitable algorithm for an altcoin's main network. 'Sure, lets use an algorithm that is well suited for worthless coins for our cryptocurrency!'..
Also, testnet is just for... testing... why should it be super decentralized and whatnot, it's just made for testing Bitcoin applications without losing money.

You point out another deficiency with PoS. With PoW, it is possible to have a testnet because PoW equipment that has real value can be used to test a PoW coin. However with PoS, nothing of value is needed to "stake" via testnet, therefore someone wanting to mess with the testnet could do so at zero cost. As such, it is not possible to have a PoS testnet.

[LegendaryK]

Interesting, according to the PoW supporters on this forum.
PoS is so flawed , it is a wonder it works.
PoW has no flaws, anything not wonderful about it is pure fud.


Yet, 

The following is directly opposed to their viewpoint.
The Majority of the Crypto Marketplace is PoS or is moving to PoS
Governments are talking about bans of PoW, not PoS.
Strange their is an increase in blackouts in places where BTC PoW miners reside.

So basically it comes down to the reader ,
believing the PoW supporters are telling the truth and everything the entire rest of the world is saying is pure fud,
or
Realizing the PoW supporters are ignoring the reality they live in due to their compromised reasoning skills.
And the so called fud will end in a worldwide ban of PoW.

The Great thing about this, is even if the answer is not apparent to the reader,
within a few years it will be undeniable even to the conspiracy minded nothing but fud thinkers.

Peace Out and Good Luck to all of you in your crypto investments.

[franky1]

This makes me think: why would miners even vote for any type of difficulty bomb at all? Wouldn't they always vote for the chain where the difficulty bomb or other type of fork which makes the currency PoS, is pushed back or 'defused'?

- Not giving a shit about the coin they are mining (they just want the money)

what is going to happen is a fork

ASIC miners that want to continue asic mining will use old software that doesnt include the bomb code and just mine as usual making blocks
then those running the new software with the bomb will find they cant mine as its too costly so will just 'stake' instead. thus making two different classes of blocks. thus a divergence of 2 sets of ethereum.

the only reason to delay AGAIN (they already have) is because merchants, exchanges and miners that peg their sidechains of some what importance(to them), EG NFT ledger into block data just wont bother doing so on the PoS variant unless they see benefit in treating the PoS fork as the definitive chain.
the issue with PoS is that the cost of making a block drops by about 2000x the very minute a PoS block is made and 'validators' see huge profit and then happily sell down the PoS ethereum coin on the markets. so again merchants and exchanges are hesitant to adopt the PoS fork as the defacto 'main net' of ether

what people dont realise is this simple thing..

if it only cost $2 to mine gold in your own back yard using just a spoon and coffee filter and 10minutes of your time. you would not be objecting to sell below $1800, or $900. because you will be happy to sell at any price down to $3, as its still 'profit'

however because gold mining costs over $900 and upto $2k(dependant on region variations of fuel, labour, equipment).. many do refuse to sell below their ultimate cost price. which is a minimum of $900 meaning gold will always resist going below $900.

same is true with PoW because it costs many tens of thousands to mine a bitcoin people will refuse to sell below cost.
the lower the price the less willing people are to sell and the more wiling people are to buy. which creates support levels.

and those that have high cost will buy coins if they are cheaper on the market then their higher cost. meaning with no one willing to sell new coin below the ultimate bottom (atleast $25k using new gen asics) and many countries with higher mining costs just buy instead, thus helping the support lines.

bitcoin has a good underlying value(not price, i actually mean underlying hidden value) of atleast $25k as the ultimate bottom and many support lines above that

.. ok i done some math and if a certain majority of eth users staked.. and due to the length of time each person had to wait before they got their chance to win a block reward. their PoS cost of electric just running 24/7 relaying blocks and staying online would have a net cost of about $2-5 , meaning Eth PoS bottom line value is only a couple dollars. and people would happily sell down to that.

PoS has crappy 'store of value' and have a high 'speculative' price. and many merchants know this and are reluctant to drop the good store of value part of ethereum

[n0nce]

PoS is so flawed , it is a wonder it works.

It's not a wonder - many broken things work. For example, there are countries with tons of corruption and they stay afloat somehow. Something staying afloat is not a proof of something being good.

The Majority of the Crypto Marketplace is PoS or is moving to PoS

How often do we have to repeat to you that it's the logical choice for profit maximization (of coin creators / cryptocurrency backing companies) to use or switch to PoS, because they usually already hold a lot of their own coins?
Be aware that while this is good for them (hence they implement it), it's not good for you, since it's a flawed concept.

Do you really believe all the companies are making products solely for the users' best interest? There's a reason behind most business decision that at first glance appear or are sold as 'for our users'.

Governments are talking about bans of PoW, not PoS.

Because for PoW coins they have a nice excuse (the climate). When (not if) they'll crack down on Ethereum et al., they will come up with some other excuse, you can bet on that.

Realizing the PoW supporters are ignoring the reality they live in due to their compromised reasoning skills.

Only because everyone does something it doesn't make it good. 99% of people click on 'accept all cookies' and enter their telephone number into every form that asks them. You tell me: is this good security / web browsing practice?

Peace Out and Good Luck to all of you in your crypto investments.

Again, the fact you're so obsessed with 'investing' and 'returns', shows me you (and many others - one more reason PoS is getting popular - everyone wants to 'get rich quick' - they feel 'late to Bitcoin') only see this whole thing as a fiat maximization strategy, you're not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe that's why you don't understand PoW. But it's really not very hard to understand why PoS makes no sense.

[philipma1957]

I might not be the best PoS enthusiast but i'm definitely not a fan of Pow, today a new bill was introduced into the EU parliament named (MiCA) legislation, the bill lost votes but it had 28 votes, this bill says that All tokens to stay Legal must move away from the high energy consumption it currently has, I suggest all the PoW people to stop dragging BTC to the mud because of their pride and ruin the whole cryptocurrency movement. this is a dark point in the history for crypto people. Energy isn't free and Bitcoin uses lots of it. and we are playing Russian roulette because bills like MiCA will keep coming and oneday one will pass and it would be too late.

You are a troll or a moron.

Sounds harsh but it is essentially true.


I have developed:

 a  45 kwatt solar array
 a 115 kwatt solar array
 a 280 kwatt solar array

Mining BTC (and shit coins) are a huge incentive to develop solar arrays.

Rather than blaming mining for power usage. Simply encourage miners that use solar arrays.

Problem solved on so many levels it is a joke.

I would say really nasty shit to any one that is against properly developed mining via solar arrays.

This is not a debate it is simply trolls and shills for fiat and anti coins.

My disgust at main stream media is truly bigly larger than both of Trumps hand and feet combined.

I really will leave you with this.





this is a coal strip mine.  Basically a subsidy to coal companies as they are not required to fix it.

Simply make them build a solar array and use it to mine.

All pow problems go by by so long farewell

BTW sorry for insulting you , but I get so fucking pissed off whenever I hear or read what you wrote by you or anyone that is anti pow.

[pooya87]

ASIC miners that want to continue asic mining will use old software that doesnt include the bomb code and just mine as usual making blocks

The code doesn't have the traditional 2015 difficulty bomb but there are other measures taken and will be taken before the actual fork so that it becomes impossible for anyone to stay on the old chain without having to go through the code and change it back. I doubt anyone would do that.

Also remember what ethereum foundation did when ETH/ETC split happened. They used their premined ethereum that were doubled by then to dump ETC and crash its price. In fact poloniex (which was one of the biggest altcoin exchanges at the time) caught them and blocked their account at least twice but they successfully crashed its price.
They will do the same to any other split chain.

Another problem that shitcoins like ethereum face is their uncertain future. They have unlimited supply and no use cases apart from scams and money laundering through tokens. This is obviously a hype that can not last for ever. It has fallen 60% over the past 4 years.
Eventually it comes a time when it is too expensive to mine this shitcoin, miners leave and 51% attacks start. If it is already PoS and the foundation controls the network with their premine majority coin, they can easily keep the shitcoin network alive.

[BlackHatCoiner]

The following is directly opposed to their viewpoint.

You got all wrong, buddy. We acknowledge all of those you've said, we aren't daffy. We're just telling you that we don't give a shit. We know how things work and in order to have a properly working decentralized cryptocurrency, we'll have to use PoW. Period.

And the so called fud will end in a worldwide ban of PoW.

Over our dead bodies. 

[The Sceptical Chymist]

So no matter anyone's opinion here for or against, the marketplace has already chosen.
And their is an undeniable lean toward PoS or anything other than PoW.

I've never given much credence to market cap when it comes to how "good" a coin is, but in this particular case the PoS coins you named are pretty good as far as altcoins go.  I also noted your point about support for PoS being quite low on bitcointalk (not surprising given bitcoiners tend to prefer PoW).

I've always been a fan of staking coins, and while I do understand OP's point about centralization and so forth, I just don't think it's as powerful an argument against the protocol as it might sound.  That's a gut feeling of mine; if you asked me to give you a considered counterargument, I'd probably have to think for a few days.

On the flip side, there are some PoS coins that are extremely awful.  I'm talking RDD, NAV, Neblio, CURE, and though I hate to say it, PIVX (that one has always had a place in my heart).  And man, NEO is just criminally overlooked.

[Wind_FURY]

I might not be the best PoS enthusiast but i'm definitely not a fan of Pow, today a new bill was introduced into the EU parliament named (MiCA) legislation, the bill lost votes but it had 28 votes, this bill says that All tokens to stay Legal must move away from the high energy consumption it currently has, I suggest all the PoW people to stop dragging BTC to the mud because of their pride and ruin the whole cryptocurrency movement. this is a dark point in the history for crypto people. Energy isn't free and Bitcoin uses lots of it. and we are playing Russian roulette because bills like MiCA will keep coming and oneday one will pass and it would be too late.

You are a troll or a moron.

Sounds harsh but it is essentially true.


I have developed:

 a  45 kwatt solar array
 a 115 kwatt solar array
 a 280 kwatt solar array

Mining BTC (and shit coins) are a huge incentive to develop solar arrays.

A cooperative interaction between Bitcoin and energy providers will be inevitable, with the energy providers starting to understand their role as a kind of quasi-central bank in the network.

Rather than blaming mining for power usage. Simply encourage miners that use solar arrays.

It's the easy debate for anti-Bitcoin trolls who believe that if Bitcoin "dies", all the liquidity will flow to their POS shitcoin.

Problem solved on so many levels it is a joke.

I would say really nasty shit to any one that is against properly developed mining via solar arrays.

This is not a debate it is simply trolls and shills for fiat and anti coins.

My disgust at main stream media is truly bigly larger than both of Trumps hand and feet combined.

I really will leave you with this.





this is a coal strip mine.  Basically a subsidy to coal companies as they are not required to fix it.

Simply make them build a solar array and use it to mine.

All pow problems go by by so long farewell

BTW sorry for insulting you , but I get so fucking pissed off whenever I hear or read what you wrote by you or anyone that is anti pow.

You don't have to convince them because they simply refuse to understand how important POW is for the world, and Bitcoin as designed. Bitcoin was built to survive against an adversarial environment. Proof of Stake doesn't provide the same level of assurances.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I've always been a fan of staking coins, and while I do understand OP's point about centralization and so forth, I just don't think it's as powerful an argument against the protocol as it might sound.

If you aren't convinced from the OP, I'd advice you to read the entire thread. There have been some noteworthy arguments that I've forgotten to mention in it.

[mikeywith]

Strange their is an increase in blackouts in places where BTC PoW miners reside.

Can you name a few places? the U.S is now the largest mining hub and I don't recall any blackouts were caused by mining operations, places that might have blackouts due to added mining operations are most certainly corrupt and people steal electricity without having to worry about damaging the electrical infrastructure, otherwise and in any half-decent country, the electric company will only wire energy to licensed businesses and houses, and they can limit the amount of power each of them can use to avoid blackouts, so in other words, the same blackouts would have happened due to people using more ACs or taking more showers or anything for that matter, they just happened "faster" with mining.

One point you are missing is that POW creates incentives for people to find cheaper ways of generating energy. Also consuming more energy be it clean or not is also good for every economy, it creates more jobs, increases sales, and essentially helps in economic growth.

Mining is about extracting value, so even if mining was to make energy cost higher for other businesses it does not matter, the business that extracts the most value will survive, this is how capitalism works, I don't see why would anyone have a problem with that unless they are somehow communists.

With that said, PoW isn't perfect either, the voting power will always shift towards one direction which is "cheaper power", but the process of that happening is a lot easier in PoS, it can take years for anyone to acquire say 50% of the voting power in PoW, they will need time to build the farms, time to receive the gears, and they also need to ensure that nobody else is getting close to what they are getting, with PoS, a rich prince or king can just decide to buy half the supply at any given day, he can't just own 150EH worth of hash power in a day, not even in a year even if he had an unlimited supply of money.

Also, the argument you make about the majority of top coins being PoS makes PoS better isn't exactly a perfect argument, the number of coins is irrelevant, I can create 1000 PoW coins or otherwise PoS in a few hours, that won't change a thing, you need to look at the value of the market, if you combine the market cap of all PoW coins vs PoS you will see that market has chosen PoW contrary to your claim.

I don't hate PoS, I am not PoW maxi, not even BTC maxi, I am a big fan of "if it works for you, stick to it", if ADA is doing great with PoS, let it be, if BTC is doing fine with PoW, why nag about it?

[Wind_FURY]

Strange their is an increase in blackouts in places where BTC PoW miners reside.

Can you name a few places?

That's laughable. Using that kind of debate, they're obviously nitpicking. Plus they're merely using different forms of arguments/straw men, and see what sticks. I believe if we ask any serious developer which technically gives superior security assurances between Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, the answer would always be Proof of Work.