I feel like you don't fight Greenpeace's FUD exactly. You're justifying why Proof-of-Work is good for both the users and the environment, but you don't debunk their anti-Proof-of-Work arguments.
First off, from your very first myths you're sticking to whataboutism, which is not what I'd classify as a strong argument.
Mining bitcoin is actually quite environmentally friendly, compared to mining gold.
Other human activities (Netflix) produce comparable (Amazon) results (YouTube).
Televisions, airplanes, Christmas lights, and plastic all require enormous amounts of energy to be produced and used; what is the amount of energy considered excessive to produce them? Why is this calculation done for Bitcoin and not for other goods?
The process of mining bitcoins is being attacked, because the brainwashing lies on two aspects:
- Bitcoin (as currency) isn't felt to provide essential benefit to the world.
- Switching to Proof-of-Stake is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative with no trade-offs.
On your second paragraph, you explain the drawbacks of Proof-of-Stake, but I think it deserves another title than this:
Myth: Proof of Work is more wasteful than Proof of Stake
Proof-of-Work isn't more wasteful than Proof-of-Stake, because both are wasteful of the same magnitude: Zero. If the energy that is used, is used to secure the network it isn't wasted. I'd prefer having this title:
Myth: Proof-of-Stake comes with no drawbacks
or:
Myth: Proof-of-Stake can replace Proof-of-Work with no tradeoffs
Further differences between these two mechanisms that emphasize on (de)centralization:
Proof-of-Work 1. Entrance of new voters can't be forbidden. All that's needed is energy and machines that are capable of calculating hashes. Therefore, a miner who once owned 1% of the hash rate, can't make sure he'll maintain his percentage forever.
2. You can't try to cheat without being punished, because you're spending energy. For example, if a malicious miner, who owns 10% of the hash rate, tries to reverse a transaction 6 blocks deep, and fails, his real cost is equal with the income he could have had if he had chosen to mine bitcoin; he spent energy for nothing.
3. It's very difficult to steal the units that contribute to the security of the network (e.g., ASICs, GPUs etc.)
Proof-of-Stake 1. Entrance of new voters is down to the stakers' permission. A staker who owns 1% of the total coins in circulation (presuming the total supply is fixed) can retain the same voting power overtime, if he just chooses to hold them.
2. You can cheat without being punished. That's known as Nothing-at-stake problem[1].
3. It's much easier, compared to Proof-of-Work, to steal the units that contribute to the security of the network. For instance, say an attacker hacked an exchange. He'd instantly gain a lot of voting power.
One more core difference is that Proof-of-Stake doesn't give a solution to the Byzantine Generals' problem[2]. That's why it suffers from producing consensus, and that's why it's commonly referred to as "subjective mechanism"[3]; not objective as Proof-of-Work.
[1]:
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/2402/what-exactly-is-the-nothing-at-stake-problem [2]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090309175840/http://www.bitcoin.org/byzantine.html [3]:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity Fourthly, on your fourth paragraph, I'd add that Proof-of-Staked Bitcoin has already been implemented, and failed miserably:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoinpos/. I'm telling you this, because you're saying that a change has to be good, and been demonstrated in real-world conditions. Also, I'd absolutely remove this:
Such an agreement has not been reached for the use of Proof of Stake in Bitcoin. In fact, a majority of users are opposed to this change because Proof of Stake has not been trialed thoroughly.
And replace it with:
Such an agreement has not been reached for the use of Proof of Stake in Bitcoin. In fact, a majority of users are opposed to this change because Proof of Stake is not approved by the Bitcoin community due to the drawbacks that are explained above.
Not being trialed is a weak argument (it's not even a valid argument, it's been trialed to thousands of altcoins, Bitcoin-fork included). We've already debunked Proof-of-Stake
from the core. Why not using this instead to convince it's a fundamentally flawed mechanism?
The text from
cleanupbitcoin should be a meat and drink for us. Here's some easy to counter-argue parts:
Bitcoin uses an outdated technology called proof-of-work to validate transactions.
As Bitcoin's price surges, so, too does its energy use.
We know Bitcoin stakeholders are incentivized not to change.
We know crypto doesn’t need much energy to work.
