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.
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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?
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
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.