Proof of stake coin --- The pros and cons?

[ChuckOne]

Still no one has coded either of the methods that had been come up with that were thought to possibly be able to actually work.

What methods do you talk about?

[ChuckOne]

The same reason someone would accumulate enough hash power to destroy/steal coins. It's much easier, having a fat wallet, to buy a bunch of coins and stake them.

Define easier.

Buying 100000 Amazon instances is as easy (if not easier) as to buy 100000 tokens in a PoS currency.

[ChuckOne]

The same reason someone would accumulate enough hash power to destroy/steal coins. It's much easier, having a fat wallet, to buy a bunch of coins and stake them.

Even worse: in PoW, consensus power can be added at will and without any control by the network. In PoS, consensus power is confined to the maximum amount of available stake. Having said this, in PoS cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished. I consider this a huge advantage.

[Kalizar]

The same reason someone would accumulate enough hash power to destroy/steal coins. It's much easier, having a fat wallet, to buy a bunch of coins and stake them.

Define easier.

Buying 100000 Amazon instances is as easy (if not easier) as to buy 100000 tokens in a PoS currency.

Not really.

Running EC2 to GPU mine is extremely expensive. Not to mention, deploying and configuring that many instances (if Amazon allowed it) would take a while for 100,000 mining sessions. Since it's PoW, if it were ever to occur, they would need to maintain 51% for almost 10 blocks.

With PoS, it simply takes a large purchase of coins and staking them all. Much easier.

[Kalizar]

The same reason someone would accumulate enough hash power to destroy/steal coins. It's much easier, having a fat wallet, to buy a bunch of coins and stake them.

Even worse: in PoW, consensus power can be added at will and without any control by the network. In PoS, consensus power is confined to the maximum amount of available stake. Having said this, in PoS cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished. I consider this a huge advantage.

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

That would entirely defeat the purpose of crypto coins. You'd be better off having the banks seize your assets. At least then it would be a little more "official"

[ChuckOne]

Not really.

Running EC2 to GPU mine is extremely expensive. Not to mention, deploying and configuring that many instances (if Amazon allowed it) would take a while for 100,000 mining sessions. Since it's PoW, if it were ever to occur, they would need to maintain 51% for almost 10 blocks.

With PoS, it simply takes a large purchase of coins and staking them all. Much easier.

Huh? What is the difference in buying mining equipment for X dollars or buying tokens for X dollars?

One thing is convenience: regarding PoW, it can be achieved by automatic deployment using scripts/images/magic of computer science.
Another thing are the costs: that is a matter of price. So, I see no point in arguing about that. Just because Bitcoin is very expensive right now does not mean that I cannot kill a cheap PoW coin by the method described above.

[ChuckOne]

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

Please point me to my words where I said: "centralized authority".

[Kalizar]

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

Please point me to my words where I said: "centralized authority".

cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished.

Clear implication.

[Kalizar]

Not really.

Running EC2 to GPU mine is extremely expensive. Not to mention, deploying and configuring that many instances (if Amazon allowed it) would take a while for 100,000 mining sessions. Since it's PoW, if it were ever to occur, they would need to maintain 51% for almost 10 blocks.

With PoS, it simply takes a large purchase of coins and staking them all. Much easier.

Huh? What is the difference in buying mining equipment for X dollars or buying tokens for X dollars?

One thing is convenience: regarding PoW, it can be achieved by automatic deployment using scripts/images/magic of computer science.
Another thing are the costs: that is a matter of price. So, I see no point in arguing about that. Just because Bitcoin is very expensive right now does not mean that I cannot kill a cheap PoW coin by the method described above.

It would be cheaper and more practical to just buy a bunch of coins than consuming more resources and money than a huge corporation does to keep networked.

[lynn_402]

POS promotes savings, not spending and it's not good as a currency but good for speculation...
Coins 100% POS are a bullshit, miners play a important role, without them, you won't build a big community around them.

I think POS promotes spending because of never ending inflation. Especially for most users who cant have computer on 24/7.

No need to keep the computer on 24/7. PoS coins accumulate coin-age, thus if you keep some in a cold wallet for a year and unlock your wallet for minting, you'll find a PoS block in very short time, which should give you almost the same interest that if you kept your wallet always open (less the small compound interest)

[lynn_402]

I'd like to add this pro:
In PoW, a big part of the community who's interested in the coin will invest in mining hardware, whereas for PoS, they will simply buy the coins, which promotes a higher valuation of the coin; more profit potential.

[r0ach]

If there are 100 coins in circulation(for example) and only 4 coins staked, that would only require 5 staked coins to perform an attack. That is how a PoS attack would be performed, having over 51% of the staked coins.

That would be a problem for a coin if it:

1) had a high minimum stake age
2) low stake reward
3) bad distribution
4) dishonest miners (ie: stakers)
5) no checkpoint system


The checkpoint system would still save it anyway.  


If the coin has a faster stake time, good distribution, and reasonable stake reward, I consider 2% to currently be the best choice in relation to inflation/deflation and transaction fees destroyed, then it would be better equipped to deal with these issues.

The main problem is that the checkpoint system needs to be decentralized, which like I said earlier, is why I'm making sure Whitecoin focuses on that as first priority, then building a pruning system off of that now that the community has taken over the coin.

I think POS promotes spending because of never ending inflation. Especially for most users who cant have computer on 24/7.

Transaction fees are destroyed.  You can easily have a decreasing coin count in PoS due to this.

2% stake is honestly the best all around choice though, IMO.  Then you set transaction fees based off network variables to consume 1% of increased coin count.  After that, you have 1% inflation, but lost coins per year in crypto is very high and would cover this to bring the currency somewhere around equilibrium.  Coin count would either slightly decrease, or increase, by less than 1% a year most likely.

Using Whitecoin as an example, the coin has barely been out any length of time and some guy already lost 6 million coins from a laptop he had stolen from his car.  That's 2% of entire coin count removed from the system in one day.

[MarketNeutral]

MarkM provided some good context to the cons.

When researching PoS, it's best to avoid recent posts in the altcoin subforum. They mostly don't know what they're talking about.

Instead, some of the oldest posts about various PoS protocols as discussed in the bitcoin subforums were explicated in profound detail by the more technically-inclined early programmers and adopters. They really mete out criticism well, but it's over the heads of most pump-and-dump noobs.

In other words, there are very good technical reasons why bitcoin is only PoW and SHA256 and hasn't been forked to PoS or some other algo.

[r0ach]

MarkM provided some good context to the cons.

When researching PoS, it's best to avoid recent posts in the altcoin subforum. They mostly don't know what they're talking about.

Instead, some of the oldest posts about various PoS protocols as discussed in the bitcoin subforums were explicated in profound detail by the more technically-inclined early programmers and adopters. They really mete out criticism well, but it's over the heads of most pump-and-dump noobs.

This is not really correct.  Most of them now agree that PoS is secure, if not more secure than Bitcoin itself, the only problem is centralized checkpoints.

This is why I'm attempting to make decentralized checkpoints then building pruning off that feature the #1 priority of the Whitecoin community takeover, to finally bring PoS to a level that surpasses Bitcoin in security and decentralization, using multipool tax to fund that goal.

Many of these older posters would love to say that until PoS coins remove checkpoints entirely, or convert to decentralized checkpoints, that they shouldn't even be considered cryptocurrency.  The only problem is, they can't type that since they already know Bitcoin itself is using checkpoints in each update.

But you're correct in some regard, many of these coins just cruise along with centralized checkpoints not even caring about removing them and waiting for someone else to figure it out.

[Kalizar]

MarkM provided some good context to the cons.

When researching PoS, it's best to avoid recent posts in the altcoin subforum. They mostly don't know what they're talking about.

Instead, some of the oldest posts about various PoS protocols as discussed in the bitcoin subforums were explicated in profound detail by the more technically-inclined early programmers and adopters. They really mete out criticism well, but it's over the heads of most pump-and-dump noobs.

This is not really correct.  Most of them now agree that PoS is secure, if not more secure than Bitcoin itself, the only problem is centralized checkpoints.

This is why I'm attempting to make decentralized checkpoints then building pruning off that feature the #1 priority of the Whitecoin community takeover, to finally bring PoS to a level that surpasses Bitcoin in security and decentralization.

Many of these older posters would love to say that until PoS coins remove checkpoints entirely, or convert to decentralized checkpoints, that they shouldn't even be considered cryptocurrency.  The only problem is, they can't type that since they already know Bitcoin itself is using checkpoints in each update.

But you're correct, many of these coins just cruise along with centralized checkpoints not even caring about removing them and waiting for someone else to figure it out.

Blackcoin removed their checkpoint...

[r0ach]

Blackcoin removed their checkpoint...

Oh, that's interesting.  I just looked at their thread and it appears to have happened very recently, within the last 24 hours or something?

I still believe checkpoints are very useful and needed, just in decentralized format.  It's a good security feature to prevent massive rollback and is also a logical pathway to pruning.

[Kalizar]

Blackcoin removed their checkpoint...

Oh, that's interesting.  I just looked at their thread and it appears to have happened very recently, within the last 24 hours or something?

I still believe checkpoints are very useful and needed, just in decentralized format.  It's a good security feature to prevent massive rollback and is also a logical pathway to pruning.

It was done a while ago. Nobody noticed until now. The devs were trying to keep it secret, I'm assuming.

[qqNxt]

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

Please point me to my words where I said: "centralized authority".

cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished.

Clear implication.

obviously you never looked deep enough in nxt.
no one controls the detection or the punishment, its done by the algorithms. the network detects and bans them for a certain time.

[Kalizar]

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

Please point me to my words where I said: "centralized authority".

cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished.

Clear implication.

obviously you never looked deep enough in nxt.
no one controls the detection or the punishment, its done by the algorithms. the network detects and bans them for a certain time.

You can stockpile stake blocks and release a re-org at your leisure. This is why PPC uses centralised checkpointing, and also why they use a stake modifier which depends on some subset of the last N PoW blocks, wheras the recent rash of pure PoS coins has simply removed this entirely, hoping no-one would notice.

[qqNxt]

So you are saying PoS can have a centralized authority that determines who is being a bad guy. Sounds familiar....

Please point me to my words where I said: "centralized authority".

cheaters and bad guys can be detected and punished.

Clear implication.

obviously you never looked deep enough in nxt.
no one controls the detection or the punishment, its done by the algorithms. the network detects and bans them for a certain time.

You can stockpile stake blocks and release a re-org at your leisure. This is why PPC uses centralised checkpointing, and also why they use a stake modifier which depends on some subset of the last N PoW blocks, wheras the recent rash of pure PoS coins has simply removed this entirely, hoping no-one would notice.

again.. that's not how nxt works..

anyway im not the technical one, you can read here and post your concerns here for others to show you why.
https://nxtforum.org/transparent-forging/rigging-the-forging-lottery/

nxt was announced to have 90% attack resistance with its algorithms.

In perfect network this number would be 100%, but we can't have 100% coz of lags and disconnections. "Ninety" is an easily-pronounced number that is very close to 100%. "Ninty-five" is not so nice coz u spend more time to "pronounce" it in ur mind when u think of Transparent Forging.

all i can say is nxt is not your average PoS.