Bitcoin and proof of stake

[pooya87]

i mean PoS is very efficient compared to PoW but every consensus has their challenge.

It depends on how you define "efficiency". PayPal is even more efficient than all of these algorithms that are introduced in the crypto community. We use PoW because it is secure and it provides the decentralization and immutability that we are looking for. PoS is providing none of that specially in shitcoins like ethereum that have 72 million premined coins.

[Phu Juck]

I am not advocating Proof of Stake because I know this will make Bitcoin more centralized but I would like to know how the problem of excessive energy consumption can be overcome in the long run.

Government should fund green energy directly. If all power is from green energy, we can prevent climate change.
No need to ban PoW.

Almost no coding expert is recommending PoS for Bitcoin.

So many Altcoins are using PoS already but it is clearly because devs have more power in PoS by hoarding a large chunk of premined coins, so Altcoin dev's choice is PoS.

Bitcoin is better in PoW, no need to change to PoS.

Now, we can wait and watch, what will be better but I expect many PoS coins will fail.

In addition, PoS is an unfair consensus because rich stakers are getting richer every time.

PoS is just not fair.

Can you please stop copying my text?
You have it copied from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5410782.msg60802859#msg60802859

[Abiky]

It depends on how you define "efficiency". PayPal is even more efficient than all of these algorithms that are introduced in the crypto community. We use PoW because it is secure and it provides the decentralization and immutability that we are looking for. PoS is providing none of that specially in shitcoins like ethereum that have 72 million premined coins.

PoS often sacrifices decentralization/censorship-resistance for high performance and cost-efficiency. The only reason ETH chose to become a PoS cryptocurrency is because it needed to scale to millions of users worldwide (especially when it's a platform designed for "decentralized" applications). It wouldn't be possible to achieve high transaction throughput with PoW, because of the time it takes to produce blocks. Bitcoin will never sacrifice its decentralization in favor of a new consensus algorithm which aims to increase scalability of the Blockchain network but would also centralize the same as whales will be able to gain all of the power. In a PoS system, the rich become richer, while the poor, poorer. That's the way it works.

Bitcoin is open source anyways, so there's nothing stopping someone from coming up with a hard fork that would use PoS on top of PoW. Most altcoins are heading towards the PoS direction, so it should only be a matter of time before Bitcoin remains the only PoW cryptocurrency on the market.

[ObscurePen]

to turn it to PoS requires forking bitcoin..

guess what. bitcoin has already been forked to PoS
there are dozens of altcoins that are PoS.. look at them all.. all unsuccessful

thus proves how crap it is

do you know why people do not buy air. .. because it costs nothing to make air.. just like the residual cost to make PoS.
PoS coins are never worth much. they have no real cost backing the acquisition of coins created. and so their market prices are near 100% pure speculation hype. rather than backed by a decent non-zero cost value

Ethereum is going to go through a process of rampant speculation. followed by a massive value crash.
yep once people realise they are getting coins for penny costs or zero cost by just staking with a custodian.. they would all be happy to sell at any price knowing that they are making a profit.
and no one would happily buy ethereum for over $1k if they can get ethereum for pennies

when you hear 99.5% less energy COST.. you should also be hearing 99.5% cost reduction. thus 99.5% less market price.

yep if people can get ethereum for penny/zero cost. then people will not want to pay over $1k for ethereum if they can get it for $0.10. so watch the buy demand die

bitcoin is not worth over $12k due to speculation.. its worth over $12k because no miner on the planet can mine bitcoin for less. no one can acquire bitcoin for less.
the reason why bitcoin topped out at $70k is because everyone on the planet could mine for under $70k at the time. and so no one was left to want to buy for more then $70k

..
in shorts its basic economics..

Hey I don't get this. Can you explain it to me? So to mine one Bitcoin it takes 12k worth of ... what? This is a legit question, not trying to be sarcastic or anything. I just don't get it, why does it take 12k to mine Bitcoin? So does this mean that Bitcoin price really wouldn't fall below 12k?

[franky1]

Hey I don't get this. Can you explain it to me? So to mine one Bitcoin it takes 12k worth of ... what? This is a legit question, not trying to be sarcastic or anything. I just don't get it, why does it take 12k to mine Bitcoin? So does this mean that Bitcoin price really wouldn't fall below 12k?

right now the network is about 210,000,00thashs of mining rate.
each asic is only Xthash..
that is about 1.3million asics operating 24/7
where there are only 6.25btc roughly on average every 10 minutes or 900 coins a day on average.

if you work out the time for 1 btc. and how much electric them over million asics and their hardware cost it requires to mine.. (at the cheapest most efficient amount on the planet) for the time to mine that 1 bitcoin.. you work out that it costs that (low) amount to mine 1 bitcoin..
because yes math...  math is great like that..
if you have only a small amount of hashpower it takes longer to mine enough shares of rewards to total the same 1bit which works out at the same cost (if the variables dont change)

that estimate is like the lowest known way to get the cheapest btc (for those lucky to get the coin for that price)

no one wants to sell for a loss
and if there are people with higher electric.. like in hawaii where it would cost them $80k+ to mine.. they would prefer to buy bitcoin at any price below $80k rather then mine at a loss..
(they are stil very very happy with the $20k-$24k amount this month)
so its market economics. if only a couple people can sell and profit at low number, but the average market is at $20k. and some people cant mine for under $80k
there are alot and i mean alot of buyers willing to pay anything at different amounts.. above (low)
and no one willing to sell below the (low) this the low becomes a wall/ a support. and stopping point of where sells dry up, IF it ever went town to that amount

thus this (low) amount which is the current whole planets lowest amount people can get bitcoin for.. thats the 'bottom'

yes bitcoin cost is actual real world costs.. its not something that can be got for free. there is a cost in one way or another.. thus the bottom is non-zero.  
there is a limit to how low it can go at current variables.. where everyone just gives up trying to sell because sellers run out and too many buyers are eating up them sells before it gets close to the 'bottom'(low)

bitcoin would literally have to break. where utility/desire dies, and everyone just wants to escape even if everyone makes a loss escaping. for the price to tank right down, breaking the economic low of sane value and market economics,  to near zero,

[pooya87]

The only reason ETH chose to become a PoS cryptocurrency is because it needed to scale to millions of users worldwide

I disagree. PoS doesn't really solve the scalability problem at all.
Not to mention that the main reason why they are moving to PoS is because they know that miners are not going to continue mining a shitcoin that can't gain value over the long term but could have increasing difficulty. Also PoS means those with the highest amount of this shitcoin (like the 72 ETH they premined) would be paid a lot of money for doing nothing.

It wouldn't be possible to achieve high transaction throughput with PoW, because of the time it takes to produce blocks.

You are confusing the difficulty in Proof of Work with block size. They are not related. The block size is the factor that limits scalability.

Most altcoins are heading towards the PoS direction

Exactly. They know that over the long run, miners abandon their useless coins which is why they are trying to find an alternative method of keeping their coin artificially alive.

[witcher_sense]

PoS often sacrifices decentralization/censorship-resistance for high performance and cost-efficiency. The only reason ETH chose to become a PoS cryptocurrency is because it needed to scale to millions of users worldwide (especially when it's a platform designed for "decentralized" applications).
<…>

You cannot sacrifice decentralization if the project has already achieved decentralization because this is how decentralization works! The reason Ethereum was able to switch to another consensus mechanism (though PoS is clearly not a consensus mechanism since you cannot come to consensus by only referring to internal processes that depend on the existence of consensus - circular logic that leads to nothing but an inevitable capture and centralization) is due to the fact that it has never been truly decentralized - developers and founders of Ethereum have had enormous power over the protocol and always could dictate its course and development. The main reason they unilaterally "decided" to shift to PoS is that this way, they can enrich themselves more quickly and efficiently and gain even more power over the project's fate and perhaps over the monetary system itself. Scalability is not their concern, and Vitalik Buterin claimed many times that PoS itself has nothing to do with the speed of transactions and that additional improvements, such as sharding, need to be implemented to make blockchain more scalable. The problem, again, is that sharding makes blockchain even less decentralized because it incentivizes users or stake maintainers to keep only their "part" of the blockchain and trust others with keeping other parts of the blockchain in a correct form. PoS is terrible, PoS with in-built sharding is even worse. Bitcoin doesn't need all that: it has gotten layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network which, among other things, doesn't make the underlying layer less reliable and less decentralized.

[justdimin]

The reason Ethereum was able to switch to another consensus mechanism (though PoS is clearly not a consensus mechanism since you cannot come to consensus by only referring to internal processes that depend on the existence of consensus - circular logic that leads to nothing but an inevitable capture and centralization) is due to the fact that it has never been truly decentralized - developers and founders of Ethereum have had enormous power over the protocol and always could dictate its course and development. The main reason they unilaterally "decided" to shift to PoS is that this way, they can enrich themselves more quickly and efficiently and gain even more power over the project's fate and perhaps over the monetary system itself.

What you are missing is that they do not have "control" they have influence. There is a huge difference between those two. When they want to switch to this protocol, they had to provide something to people like a voting and people did moved their money there enough, billions moved there, and that is how they were manage to get the greenlight to do it.

You assume that they just wanted to do it and did it all without any pushback, and there was absolutely nobody that created a counter argument to why we should stay with PoW and built a chain or at least kept the current one and attracted people there. Whereas when PoS was announced, everyone went mad. Hence, it is not a shock that they could do it without any pushback.

[witcher_sense]

What you are missing is that they do not have "control" they have influence. There is a huge difference between those two. When they want to switch to this protocol, they had to provide something to people like a voting and people did moved their money there enough, billions moved there, and that is how they were manage to get the greenlight to do it.

You assume that they just wanted to do it and did it all without any pushback, and there was absolutely nobody that created a counter argument to why we should stay with PoW and built a chain or at least kept the current one and attracted people there. Whereas when PoS was announced, everyone went mad. Hence, it is not a shock that they could do it without any pushback.

I honestly can't see the difference between those two because if you have influence in a network that is supposed to be decentralized and free of any elite groups able to dictate what needs to be done, you can gaslight less technically competent users and convince them that all changes you propose and make are actually good for them and the protocol as a whole. In my view, it is just synonymous with having control over people's minds. Moreover, you are talking about voting and other democratic terms, but you must have forgotten that in decentralized blockchains, people vote with the software they are running - full nodes. You don't need polls on Twitter or something like that to express your opinion regarding changes in a consensus mechanism: you merely install a piece of software that enforces certain rules with which you agree. The problem is that in Ethereum no one, except for big companies, runs a full node, and therefore, ordinary users don't have real power to influence the fate of a project. Instead, big corporations like Amazon, Infura, Alchemy, Circle, etc decide whether to switch to Proof-of-Stake or not, whether to give users access to certain smart contracts, and so on. Users have neither the right to vote nor the power; they are at the mercy of these big corporations controlling nodes, developers making changes, and governments regulating everything.

[LegendaryK]

Ethereum switched to Proof of Stake for very simple reasons.
Increased Security
Increased Transaction Capacity
PoS Holders can finally participate in Network Security increasing Decentralization higher than the previous few mining PoW pools,
Energy Use of the PoS network will decrease by over 99% verses the old Proof of Waste model while allowing onchain transaction performance to increase.
* Note this also increases financial incentives to run Full Nodes, a financial incentive that is severely lacking in BTC PoW model.*

Governments have been warning of Bans on Proof of work mining for years.
China has implemented their ban.

And whether you want to believe that the PoW ban warnings are mere fud, or actually because energy resources are not unlimited,  
the fact is, as China proved, PoW mining can be banned.

Ethereum no longer has to be concerned with the security danger of the world governments banning their network model.

However since Bitcoin Developers and community have decided to stick their collective heads in the ground,
and pretend the government ban warnings against PoW does not exist.

The only real question , is what will happen to BTC when the Governments all ban PoW mining.
It is not an IF, but a WHEN.

* My guess is the ban takes effect forever freezing all bitcoins in their collective wallets forever, and
even those willing to sell will be unable, as the price verses fiat will literally go to zero overnight.
It will be a financial bloodbath like most have never seen. (Even Faster than the Tulips Crash)
But before that happens ,
ethereum will take the #1 spot on CMK,
and btc holders will have very little time after that to cash out or just go down with the btc PoW ship.

FYI:
The decentralization myth of PoW has been B.S. ever since the ASICS took over.
Only the rich elite can afford to mine BTC, their is no decentralization if the common man can not participate.
Anyone that thinks a mere 4 BTC PoW mining pool operators are decentralized, well beyond gullible is an accurate evaluation.  

FYI2:
Anyone not paying attention to the rising price of energy across the Globe, is going to be in for a rude awakening this winter.
Don't be surprised when PoW mining is banned, because the people need that energy to keep from freezing to death.
Europe is already rationing power, expect PoW mining permanently banned in Europe before Feb15th, 2023.
US Government will Ban PoW mining by Jan 2024 or the Texas Power Grid will Collapse under the strain.  

[Abiky]

You cannot sacrifice decentralization if the project has already achieved decentralization because this is how decentralization works! The reason Ethereum was able to switch to another consensus mechanism (though PoS is clearly not a consensus mechanism since you cannot come to consensus by only referring to internal processes that depend on the existence of consensus - circular logic that leads to nothing but an inevitable capture and centralization) is due to the fact that it has never been truly decentralized - developers and founders of Ethereum have had enormous power over the protocol and always could dictate its course and development. The main reason they unilaterally "decided" to shift to PoS is that this way, they can enrich themselves more quickly and efficiently and gain even more power over the project's fate and perhaps over the monetary system itself. Scalability is not their concern, and Vitalik Buterin claimed many times that PoS itself has nothing to do with the speed of transactions and that additional improvements, such as sharding, need to be implemented to make blockchain more scalable. The problem, again, is that sharding makes blockchain even less decentralized because it incentivizes users or stake maintainers to keep only their "part" of the blockchain and trust others with keeping other parts of the blockchain in a correct form. PoS is terrible, PoS with in-built sharding is even worse. Bitcoin doesn't need all that: it has gotten layer 2 solutions such as Lightning Network which, among other things, doesn't make the underlying layer less reliable and less decentralized.

That's certainly true, mate. Developers have a high concentration of power within the Ethereum project, yet they claim the Blockchain is completely decentralized. There's a lot of focus on ETH creator Vitalik Buterin, so anything he says or does can either negatively or positively impact the project itself. Not like Bitcoin whose creator and developers are unknown by the general public. In order to achieve true decentralization and censorship-resistance, there must be no personally-identifiable information of the project's founders and/or developers.

One thing for sure is that PoS will only make matters worse as developers and big whales will be able to control the Blockchain to their own will. The little guy will be completely out of the system, making the PoS coin no different than a corporation or any ordinary central bank. It's a pity since this shifts us from Satoshi's original vision of decentralizing everything. People are free to choose their own path, but Bitcoin will always remain a PoW cryptocurrency no matter what. Who knows if BTC becomes the only PoW cryptocurrency in existence while the rest switch to PoS? Just my thoughts

[2stout]

It's possible; however, this is a non-starter and a no-go, not happening.  Changing from PoW to PoS would be a major fundamental violation of the foundation of Bitcoin as well as blasphemous.

[d5000]

why bitcoin protocol cannot use pos instead of pow ?

I'll answer the question from a different perspective (by the way I agree with most here that PoW is way superior to PoS, but there's a much better megathread for that).

Let's consider the scenario the Core developers, from whatever inexplicable reasons (a "vision" changing their mind, a chip implanted from governments or another weird conspiracy, haha), decide to implement PoS - very similar to what Ethereum is doing just now. So they prepare the upgrade for block X.

Would everybody upgrade? Well, those which certainly won't, are the miners. First, they probably are unhappy with the change. But second, they have nothing to lose if they simply stay with the old client, as they can't generate blocks (by mining) with the new version from block X on.

If enough miners continue mining to prevent the block time becoming too long and persist so until the next difficulty change, then the original Bitcoin chain will persist.

In this case, basically BTC-PoS, "technically" spoken, would become a hard fork of Bitcoin, very much what BCH is now. The only difference to BCH is that it would be endorsed by Core, but it's still a departure from the original Bitcoin protocol.

Maybe Core reaches a consensus with most major exchanges to just "consider BTC-PoS the 'real' BTC". Maybe many governments ban PoW (it's difficult to ban it outright as you can't ban "hashing", but they can do things like a ban PoW coins from exchanges, like the EU proposed for some time). Thus the BTC-PoS chain has a good chance to become stronger than BTC-PoW.

But there is a group which I estimate pretty big which will continue to ignore the update to PoS: all the Bitcoiners who believe that only PoW provides true decentralization. So BTC-PoW would probaly never cease to exist. If governments ban it, they'll set up exchanges in places where it isn't banned. Or use P2P and atomic swap methods, or simply using it, exchanging it for goods and services.

Even with ETH this is likely to happen - ETHW (EthereumPoW) is preparing its fork (or "refusal to upgrade") and its already traded on some exchanges. Although as some have noted, Ethereum has already a high centralization degree, so PoS will be embraced by more Ethereum folks than Bitcoin folks.

Another thing: If Bitcoin's PoW changes to 100% renewable energy, then there isn't any argument for PoS left at all (at least for Bitcoin). This would be a heavy blow for PoS coins - most will probably disappear. So Bitcoiners should do everything, even if it's impossible to enforce at protocol level, to make 100% renewables happen.

[LegendaryK]

Another thing: If Bitcoin's PoW changes to 100% renewable energy, then there isn't any argument for PoS left at all (at least for Bitcoin). This would be a heavy blow for PoS coins - most will probably disappear. So Bitcoiners should do everything, even if it's impossible to enforce at protocol level, to make 100% renewables happen.

Their is no 100% renewable energy, that is a ridiculous myth spread by people unwilling to accept the fatal flaw in PoW.
Droughts have shut down the majority of hydro power across the globe.
Solar has always been shit, with only 4 max hours of energy produced per day mainly in the summer.
Governments across the world are already rationing power and we are not even in a full winter yet.

Bitcoiners don't have to change to PoS, it can just be banned and die ,
because that is where the continued ignoring of reality is going to take it.

No worries about ethereum , because they evolved to solve their energy foot print ,
while btc community has devolved into continuous ignoring of their energy waste.

FYI:
The technical innovations in onchain transaction capacity /smart contracts / energy efficiently / users securing their own networks,
have ensured Proof of Stake has a long life ahead of it.
Proof of Waste, however will be banned because the people of the world just can't afford to waste the world's limited energy resources anymore.
Ask any sane person, do you want lights, refrigeration, Air conditioning , Hot Water, Heat,
or
would you prefer your friends die in the cold and dark this winter, so some jackass can waste all of the world's energy mining a useless bitcoin.

[franky1]

there already are many bitcoin PoS so if governments want one. they can go play with them right now.

to actually cause the real bitcoin to be obliterated where users just use a forked pos coin. would require it to be impossible to solve blocks on bitcoin. this would be the same mechanism of ethereum.
basically, have everyone use an implementation for PoW where every difficulty adjustment increase by 75% EVERYTIME, no matter what..  so that it becomes too difficult to solve blocks intime and never able for asics hashing power to catch up. thus stalling blocks.

i dont think anyone would agree to accept a bitcoin implementation release that allows this where the difficulty of bitcoin PoW is forced to exponentially increase 75% every fortnight. while also releasing a PoS fork to offramp utility too

breaking bitcoins fundamental rule of difficulty (2016 blocks a fortnight, which is the bases of the halving at 210k blocks per 4 year, which is the bases of the 21m cap by 2140~)
is a breach of the protocol. which then is a breach of the immutable rules that made bitcoin a trusted currency in the first place.

once you start messing with the consensus rules/fundamental rules that should never change. it then makes the coin then not a trusted store of value/trusted network of peoples value

[teosanru]

why bitcoin protocol cannot use pos instead of pow ?

First reason is that it was started with pow mechanisms and to change it to pos most of the core miners have to agree on it. Secondly ther is a very large debate regarding which method is better some argue pos does saves a lot of energy but a lot argue that it's not a valid consensus system also a person entering at a initial stage will always be better off as compared to someone who enters late when price has already skyrocketed. Due to these reasons bitcoin cannot move to pos.

[LegendaryK]

why bitcoin protocol cannot use pos instead of pow ?

First reason is that it was started with pow mechanisms and to change it to pos most of the core miners have to agree on it. Secondly ther is a very large debate regarding which method is better some argue pos does saves a lot of energy but a lot argue that it's not a valid consensus system also a person entering at a initial stage will always be better off as compared to someone who enters late when price has already skyrocketed. Due to these reasons bitcoin cannot move to pos.

PoW miners don't have to agree to anything,
all that has to happen is the developers update the code.
If BTC converted to Proof of Stake , it would finally give people a reason to run a full node with a full history always back to the genesis block,
instead of that pruned PoW node nonsense that will eventually cause the destruction of BTC by losing the blockchain history.

The Miners wanted larger blocksizes, the developers aka blockstream refused them and shoved segwit in instead.
Once a few more Bans take place, it is evolve or die for btc.
Staying a useless waste of energy that btc currently is , won't be allowed in the future.

The debate that btc community is hiding from,
is what will happen to btc,
1. When the energy is no longer available at the current supply.
2. When the Governments just outright ban it for wasting energy.

Evolve or Die, that is btc only options.

[d5000]

Governments across the world are already rationing power and we are not even in a full winter yet.

I don't want to derail too much, but things like "the tropics" and "the southern hemisphere" do exist. I heard a lot of people live in these strange places. There is even energy there. Am I wrong? (i.e.: regional problems != "the world" - for example, I'm living in a region with lots of hydropower and after a long drought over the last years, in 2022 the reservoirs finally could fill again and increase to full power due to above-average rainfall. They're also increasingly adding wind and solar to the mix.)

[...] onchain transaction capacity /smart contracts / energy efficiently / users securing their own networks

I don't say PoS has no merits at all, there are even reasons why altcoins can indeed increase their security by using PoS, because a 51% attack is a real danger for them. Even Ethereum may have considered the problem of GPU botnets when they decided to switch, as gamers have more hashrate than the ETH network, so if a substantial part of them united (voluntarily or due to malware), they could attack ETH.

But regarding the strongest blockchain in the world, Bitcoin, there is no reason absolutely to change. You need always "weak subjectivity" for PoS, and thus it's simply inferior, as BlackHatCoiner already explained.

And no, onchain capacity is not directly related to PoS, also something already mentioned by others here. Some special solutions like the ETH sharding concept depend on it, but there are alternatives like LN and sidechains which work well with PoW.

[pooya87]

all the Bitcoiners who believe that only PoW provides true decentralization.

This is a misconception. People who have at least some understanding of the technology believe that so far there has not been any proposal that can provide better decentralization that PoW. And we know for sure that PoS provides no security or decentralization.
But we are all open to proposals that can provide a better algorithm.

Even with ETH this is likely to happen

This is unlikely because of the minefield that the centralized authority has left in the code. In other words if the miners were to decide to remain on the main chain (like ETC aka the original ethereum) they would have to perform a hard fork themselves to defuse those mines!

Another thing: If Bitcoin's PoW changes to 100% renewable energy, then there isn't any argument for PoS left at all (at least for Bitcoin). This would be a heavy blow for PoS coins - most will probably disappear.

I disagree. PoS is there to ensure shitcoins that can not attract miners (to provide security for they dying chain) remain alive. Take ethereum for example, when they switch to PoS even if everyone abandoned it they still have the 72 million premined coins and can ensure its survival. But if they continue on PoW, as miners leave the hashrate drops and it becomes susceptible to 51% attacks and their 72 million premine can not help them there.

Their arguments against bitcoin also has nothing to do with energy, they are just using that as an excuse since someone started the FUD a while back and it worked.

[Jeger.Kiting]

why bitcoin protocol cannot use pos instead of pow ?

Perhaps many crypto assets use a consensus mechanism to verify the validity of the information added to the ledger. It can prevent double spending (sending two transactions with the same token). In addition, consensus can also prevent invalid data from being added to the blockchain.

The emergence of PoS is still relatively new when compared to PoW systems. Therefore, it is not surprising that PoS has not been rigorously tested. By default, PoW prevents the blockchain from forking or forking. If the blockchain is forked, miners must decide which chain to support. The reason is, if miners continue to support both blockchains, then they will have to share their computing resources.