It's about time to turn off PoW mining

[delulo]

The transaction fee discussion inspired me to complete an analysis on what level of transactions would actually be necessary to sustain the current value of Bitcoin mining reward.  The gray columns I grabbed from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply, everything else is formulas.

Assumptions:
- Bitcoin will be considered a success at 10% of the population of the world adoption/using it.
- This success will be achieved around 50 years from now, and adoption will grow in an s-curve as the cumulative of a normal distribution.
- Current adoption is around 1 million people out of 7 billion = ~0.0143% adoption.
- The Bitcoin price is directly correlated to the adoption rate.
- The cost of a 51% attack is currently $300M
- All transactions pay $0.06 transaction fees.
- All numbers are considered present value - nothing considers inflation of the US dollar.

Conclusions (based directly on the above assumptions, so take it with a grain of salt):
- Exactly zero transactions are needed to sustain the current level of mining reward until the year 2052, at which point 68,302 transactions per block are needed to sustain the reward level.
- We'll need to have block sizes above 1MB by 2017 to sustain growth.
- We'll need to have block sizes above 13MB by 2025 to sustain growth.
- Eventually, we'll have 310,000 transactions per block, resulting in block sizes around 120MB each.
- Hopefully technology will continue advancing and sustain the ability for this number of transactions to continue on the Bitcoin network.
- The cost of staging a 51% attack will continue to rise into the billions of dollars until around the year 2030.
- The value of one Bitcoin will eventually reach $350,000.

Of course, much of this is wild guesses and conjecture, but it was still interesting to speculate about the future of Bitcoin in this manner.

That's a nice graph you have made there! Thanks!

[delulo]

Even with PoS you need to distribute the coins with PoW or you end up with horrible distribution of coins. The longer the PoW stage and more people having a coin, the fairer distribution. Hard to beat Bitcoin imo

Did you look at the Bitcoin distribution?
My propostion would be that POW vs. POS does not have any effect on the distribution. The only effect is how many ppl know about it while it is distributed.
As for the distribution period: This has two effects:
1) The longer it is the more ppl can get in
2) The longer it is when POW is used for distribution the more do economies of scale matter which centralizes the distribution.
It could even be said that an IPO suits a wide distribution better since more ppl have money than ppl have (competitive) mining power.
We also have to distinguish the "flatness" (measure for the difference between the smallest and biggest shareholder) and the "wideness" (many have the coin) of a distribution. Wideness (know that word doesnt exist) just comes over time. Flatness can not really be controlled if we don't abolish capitalism, not with POW and not with POS IPOs.

Btw, I am not a sole BitShares supporter or something. There are other valuable approaches. But the BitShares project is particularly competitive and worth the attention.

[The One]

There's an old saying....one must spend money to make money.

POW works as its similar to mining gold as medium of exchange before the government started to print fantasy money backed by nothing.

The more spent on mining the higher the value Bitcoin becomes without silly fads that occupies the altcoins.

In 20 years times, we probably have cold fusion as electricity

[delulo]

The transaction fee discussion inspired me to complete an analysis on what level of transactions would actually be necessary to sustain the current value of Bitcoin mining reward.  The gray columns I grabbed from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply, everything else is formulas.

Assumptions:
- Bitcoin will be considered a success at 10% of the population of the world adoption/using it.
- This success will be achieved around 50 years from now, and adoption will grow in an s-curve as the cumulative of a normal distribution.
- Current adoption is around 1 million people out of 7 billion = ~0.0143% adoption.
- The Bitcoin price is directly correlated to the adoption rate.
- The cost of a 51% attack is currently $300M
- All transactions pay $0.06 transaction fees.
- All numbers are considered present value - nothing considers inflation of the US dollar.

Conclusions (based directly on the above assumptions, so take it with a grain of salt):
- Exactly zero transactions are needed to sustain the current level of mining reward until the year 2052, at which point 68,302 transactions per block are needed to sustain the reward level.
- We'll need to have block sizes above 1MB by 2017 to sustain growth.
- We'll need to have block sizes above 13MB by 2025 to sustain growth.
- Eventually, we'll have 310,000 transactions per block, resulting in block sizes around 120MB each.
- Hopefully technology will continue advancing and sustain the ability for this number of transactions to continue on the Bitcoin network.
- The cost of staging a 51% attack will continue to rise into the billions of dollars until around the year 2030.
- The value of one Bitcoin will eventually reach $350,000.

Of course, much of this is wild guesses and conjecture, but it was still interesting to speculate about the future of Bitcoin in this manner.

With your parameter tx estimated/needed what do you refer to, tx per block/10minutes?

[pythonista]

Btw, you can hold BTC in Bitshares  

LOL

Its true - there's an asset called BitBTC that's market pegged to the value of a Bitcoin. It even pays you interest for hodling it. Give it a try

[Vod]

Conclusions (based directly on the above assumptions, so take it with a grain of salt):
- The value of one Bitcoin will eventually reach $350,000.

So a cost of $35 per transaction.   

[iluvpie60]

1) I'm assuming you're including the block reward as part of the transaction "cost".  That's not a valid comparison, since that is money injected into the network.  Even if it was, upon reduction to negligibility of the block reward, that number will drop dramatically.  The free market will eventually settle on what makes a fair transaction cost is in absence of a block reward.

Yes, when block reward is gone, that number may drop dramatically, but what then? what about 51% attack? Right now a PoW 51% attack on Bitcoin would cost hundreds of million dollars too, if the block reward is gone, then transaction fees better make up for it, otherwise a 51% attack would become very cheap.

Now if the transaction fee does make up for the block reward, then we are still back to to the original problem, hundreds of millions of dollars bleeding from the community each year, and paid to hardware vendor/electric company.

You're too short-sighted.  If Bitcoin is still around by the time the block reward is insignificant to miners, then it's going to be worth a lot more than it is now, and a lot more transactions are going to be pushed through it than are pushed now, upping the reward per block.  Transaction fees aside, think about it - the price only has to DOUBLE in 4 years to maintain the same value of reward to miners.  In the last 4 years, the price has gone from $0.0025/bitcoin to $500/bitcoin.  That's 200,000 times the current value. Now certainly, the value of Bitcoin cannot continue rising indefinitely, but one thing is for certain: if Bitcoin is successful, then block rewards will continue sustaining mining for decades to come.  If Bitcoin ISN'T worth a lot more by the time the block reward is insignificant, then the Bitcoin experiment effectively failed, because the current value isn't enough for a significant number of people to be using it for transacting and storing value.

And you've still failed to convince me how money is "bleeding" from the community.  What does that even mean?  What do you expect miners would be doing with their money if mining wasn't available?

Finally, what's the correct level of security that Bitcoin needs?  A 51% attack would be detrimental, but it wouldn't mean the end of Bitcoin.  There are ways to counter and mitigate it, and the worst that would happen is a suspension of transactions until the attack is resolved.  So, what's to say that $10M of attack prevention isn't enough?  Currently it would cost somewhere in the hundreds of millions, but is that really necessary?  I'd be interested to see some analysis in that regard.

Do you know what you fail to take into account when you say "the price only has to DOUBLE in 4 years to maintain the same value of reward to miners"? How about the fact that the difficulty is going to be so high in 4 years there will likely not be almost any miners left except 1 or 2 big ones companies.  With the difficulty currently at 27,428,630,902.258 and the next difficulty change is forecasted at about 29,612,408,114.79462019(sources from block explorer  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#How_often_does_the_network_difficulty_change.3F)

Do you really think bitcoin is not goign to bleed all the miners dry? what will the difficulty be next year at the same time? the increase in %change for this next one is about 7.96167048%....If not higher.

sorry i did not go by a specific real date just did 13 days rating onthis and assumed 8% increase everytime.

Difficulty          Increase %      Date
27,428,630,902   108.00%   09/07/14
29,622,921,374   108.00%   09/20/14
31,992,755,084   108.00%   10/03/14
34,552,175,491   108.00%   10/16/14
37,316,349,530   108.00%   10/29/14
40,301,657,492   108.00%   11/11/14
43,525,790,092   108.00%   11/24/14
47,007,853,299   108.00%   12/07/14
50,768,481,563   108.00%   12/20/14
54,829,960,088   108.00%   01/02/15
59,216,356,895   108.00%   01/15/15
63,953,665,447   108.00%   01/28/15
69,069,958,683   108.00%   02/10/15
74,595,555,377   108.00%   02/23/15
80,563,199,807   108.00%   03/08/15
87,008,255,792   108.00%   03/21/15
93,968,916,255   108.00%   04/03/15
101,486,429,556   108.00%   04/16/15
109,605,343,920   108.00%   04/29/15
118,373,771,434   108.00%   05/12/15
127,843,673,149   108.00%   05/25/15
138,071,167,001   108.00%   06/07/15
149,116,860,361   108.00%   06/20/15
161,046,209,189   108.00%   07/03/15
173,929,905,925   108.00%   07/16/15
187,844,298,399   108.00%   07/29/15
202,871,842,270   108.00%   08/11/15
219,101,589,652   108.00%   08/24/15
236,629,716,824   108.00%   09/06/15
255,560,094,170   108.00%   09/19/15
276,004,901,704   108.00%   10/02/15
298,085,293,840   108.00%   10/15/15
321,932,117,347   108.00%   10/28/15
347,686,686,735   108.00%   11/10/15
375,501,621,674   108.00%   11/23/15
405,541,751,408   108.00%   12/06/15
437,985,091,521   108.00%   12/19/15
473,023,898,842   108.00%   01/01/16
510,865,810,750   108.00%   01/14/16
551,735,075,610   108.00%   01/27/16
595,873,881,658   108.00%   02/09/16
643,543,792,191   108.00%   02/22/16
695,027,295,566   108.00%   03/06/16
750,629,479,212   108.00%   03/19/16
810,679,837,548   108.00%   04/01/16
875,534,224,552   108.00%   04/14/16
945,576,962,517   108.00%   04/27/16
1,021,223,119,518   108.00%   05/10/16
1,102,920,969,079   108.00%   05/23/16
1,191,154,646,606   108.00%   06/05/16
1,286,447,018,334   108.00%   06/18/16
1,389,362,779,801   108.00%   07/01/16
1,500,511,802,185   108.00%   07/14/16
1,620,552,746,360   108.00%   07/27/16
1,750,196,966,068   108.00%   08/09/16
1,890,212,723,354   108.00%   08/22/16
2,041,429,741,222   108.00%   09/04/16
2,204,744,120,520   108.00%   09/17/16
2,381,123,650,162   108.00%   09/30/16
2,571,613,542,174   108.00%   10/13/16
2,777,342,625,548   108.00%   10/26/16
2,999,530,035,592   108.00%   11/08/16
3,239,492,438,440   108.00%   11/21/16
3,498,651,833,515   108.00%   12/04/16
3,778,543,980,196   108.00%   12/17/16
4,080,827,498,612   108.00%   12/30/16
4,407,293,698,501   108.00%   01/12/17
4,759,877,194,381   108.00%   01/25/17
5,140,667,369,931   108.00%   02/07/17
5,551,920,759,526   108.00%   02/20/17
5,996,074,420,288   108.00%   03/05/17
6,475,760,373,911   108.00%   03/18/17
6,993,821,203,824   108.00%   03/31/17
7,553,326,900,129   108.00%   04/13/17
8,157,593,052,140   108.00%   04/26/17
8,810,200,496,311   108.00%   05/09/17
9,515,016,536,016   108.00%   05/22/17
10,276,217,858,897   108.00%   06/04/17
11,098,315,287,609   108.00%   06/17/17
11,986,180,510,618   108.00%   06/30/17
12,945,074,951,467   108.00%   07/13/17
13,980,680,947,585   108.00%   07/26/17
15,099,135,423,391   108.00%   08/08/17
16,307,066,257,263   108.00%   08/21/17
17,611,631,557,844   108.00%   09/03/17
19,020,562,082,471   108.00%   09/16/17
20,542,207,049,069   108.00%   09/29/17
22,185,583,612,994   108.00%   10/12/17
23,960,430,302,034   108.00%   10/25/17
25,877,264,726,197   108.00%   11/07/17
27,947,445,904,292   108.00%   11/20/17
30,183,241,576,636   108.00%   12/03/17
32,597,900,902,766   108.00%   12/16/17
35,205,732,974,988   108.00%   12/29/17
38,022,191,612,987   108.00%   01/11/18
41,063,966,942,026   108.00%   01/24/18
44,349,084,297,388   108.00%   02/06/18
47,897,011,041,179   108.00%   02/19/18
51,728,771,924,473   108.00%   03/04/18
55,867,073,678,431   108.00%   03/17/18
60,336,439,572,705   108.00%   03/30/18
65,163,354,738,522   108.00%   04/12/18
70,376,423,117,604   108.00%   04/25/18
76,006,536,967,012   108.00%   05/08/18
82,087,059,924,373   108.00%   05/21/18
88,654,024,718,323   108.00%   06/03/18
95,746,346,695,788   108.00%   06/16/18
103,406,054,431,451   108.00%   06/29/18
111,678,538,785,968   108.00%   07/12/18
120,612,821,888,845   108.00%   07/25/18
130,261,847,639,953   108.00%   08/07/18
140,682,795,451,149   108.00%   08/20/18
151,937,419,087,241   108.00%    09/02/18
164,092,412,614,220   108.00%   09/15/18
177,219,805,623,358   108.00%   09/28/18
191,397,390,073,226   108.00%   10/11/18



so by the same time next year you can see the difficulty has risen by almost 10 times. 2 years from this date the difficulty would look something like 10 times that, then 3 years later it is something like 10 times that again. how in the hell are you calculating anything other than being bled the fuck dry? miners are already being bled to death at 27 billion... and ur saying when it starts up in 4 years which is 151trillion difficulty that we only need double the bitcoin price? are you high on every drug or something at the same time. get fucking real.

[Justine]

All the current PoS coins can be seen as building on top of bitcoin (PoW).

Without bitcoin and bitcoin holders, none of the PoS coin will have any value since no one will be able use a secured ledger distributed public network to buy the PoS coin hence giving it a value.

[johnyj]

Actually the mining cost of the whole network is what backs bitcoin's value.  Since digital currency is not backed by any government or physical assets, the only thing that can baseline its value is the cost, no cost = no value. I can not think of anything that has value without a cost

Of course the cost means the lowest possible cost, which is already very energy efficient today. If you do those hashes using CPU you will cost millions of times more electricity

I would disagree with this rationale. The profitability of mining has varied widely since bitcoin was born. Sometimes it would be vastly profitable to invest in a machine that is capable of mining bitcoin and the electricity to run it while other times it has not. I would argue that the fact that the network is secure is what gives bitcoin it's value.  

Mining cost has always been closely related to the exchange rate, because capital inflow could always select between mining and buying, so if one of them is very profitable, the capital will flow to that direction and reduce the difference

At some point there were super profitable miners, but they have to be ordered months ago before its inception, and ordering those future miners are just like gambling: Some of the people win, most of the people lose

[cbeast]

In a PoS currency how do you guarantee that a 51+% stake holder remains a benign actor?

It's only logical that the 51% group of holders will not have bad intentions against a currency that they themselves have a majority stake in.

You have no guarantee in a PoW system neither, since it only needs about 10% of the value of the eco-system to 51% attack. Also the other problem is you don't even need to own the currency to attack it, therefore the attacker have no stake in the system.

To 51% attack a PoS eco-system, you yourself must be an extremely large stake holder in the eco-system, which means you are basically attacking yourself. Not to mention you need extremely large amount of resources, at least several times the value of the eco-system, to achieve 51% in the first place.

Just plain wrong on all accounts.

51% PoS stakeholders have every reason to reverse transactions. Because they use TOR, nobody knows they even have 51%. They can attack transactions to grow their wealth. When they are rich enough, they can sell their stake. With PoW, they have to invest in equipment that is traceable so they can't attack anonymously. When they want to cash out, their equipment is obsolete and worth much less. As far as the value of the ecosystem, 51% is 51%. That means just over half, not "several times the value."

In DPOS it is not the stakeholders who generate block but delegates (comparable to pools in Bitcoin except that the DPOS delegates/pools can be voted in and out) which makes your argument invalid.

Who guarantees the stakeholders and delegates are not colluding?

No guarantee but it is highly unlikely (way more unlikely than with Bitcoin) since block producers are more decentralized (~ 60 individuals (delegates) all with the same block production capacity than with Bitcoin's 2 or 3 pools which control 50% of the block production capabilities) and because stakeholders who vote for delegates have a stake in the network whereas with POW there is no way that the coin holders can choose who is securing their network.

We're talking theoretical here. Bitcoin's pool problem is temporary and being dealt with currently no PoS system is safe at all, that's why they have not much value. No guarantee with PoS because you have to trust people. Bitcoin only trusts math, If a 51% secret cabal took over any PoS, then it could take permanent control. Even if someone temporarily took 51% control of Bitcoin, then someone else could simply add mining power and take it away. With PoW, the permanent ability to 51% attack isn't even a possibility. With PoS it is inevitable.

[CliveK]

Assumptions:
- The cost of a 51% attack is currently $300M

I would like to know how you got to this calculation?  I believe the figure is about 1/2 of this.

You need just over 50% of total hash rate, and then need to house, cool and power it for a day.  Using an AntMiner S3+ with no discount for bulk purchase, and the price of $0.08 / kWh, we are talking about approximately $157M, or roughly the cost of 3 x F18 Hornets.

[leannemckim46]

In a PoS currency how do you guarantee that a 51+% stake holder remains a benign actor?

It's only logical that the 51% group of holders will not have bad intentions against a currency that they themselves have a majority stake in.

You have no guarantee in a PoW system neither, since it only needs about 10% of the value of the eco-system to 51% attack. Also the other problem is you don't even need to own the currency to attack it, therefore the attacker have no stake in the system.

To 51% attack a PoS eco-system, you yourself must be an extremely large stake holder in the eco-system, which means you are basically attacking yourself. Not to mention you need extremely large amount of resources, at least several times the value of the eco-system, to achieve 51% in the first place.

Just plain wrong on all accounts.

51% PoS stakeholders have every reason to reverse transactions. Because they use TOR, nobody knows they even have 51%. They can attack transactions to grow their wealth. When they are rich enough, they can sell their stake. With PoW, they have to invest in equipment that is traceable so they can't attack anonymously. When they want to cash out, their equipment is obsolete and worth much less. As far as the value of the ecosystem, 51% is 51%. That means just over half, not "several times the value."

In DPOS it is not the stakeholders who generate block but delegates (comparable to pools in Bitcoin except that the DPOS delegates/pools can be voted in and out) which makes your argument invalid.

Who guarantees the stakeholders and delegates are not colluding?

No guarantee but it is highly unlikely (way more unlikely than with Bitcoin) since block producers are more decentralized (~ 60 individuals (delegates) all with the same block production capacity than with Bitcoin's 2 or 3 pools which control 50% of the block production capabilities) and because stakeholders who vote for delegates have a stake in the network whereas with POW there is no way that the coin holders can choose who is securing their network.

I disagree. With PoS you really don't know who the stake holders are. They could very well be all one person who has multiple computers (or even Virtual Machines w/VPN setup) to make it look like there are numerous stakeholders. With PoW there are a small number of pools, but if a pool starts to act in a way that is not proper then miners can easily leave the pool and join another one. It costs almost nothing to switch pools (you have a few seconds of downtime and minutes to get your hashrate back up to speed) therefore the concentration on hashpower at individual pools should be considered temporary 

[delulo]

I don't need to convince everyone here.

@ leannemckim46 I agree with you that it would be a problem if 51% of the stake would be in the hand of one person or a colluding group. In that worst case scenario the other 49% could fork away and not honor the 51% at the point in time when the 51% performed an attack or without the attack if they just feel uncomfortable with it. This forking away is much easier in POS than POW because in POW you would have to find another POW (scrypt for example) if someone has all the computing power over Sha256.

@cbeast you are completely on the wrong track. Bitcoin only trusts math is the biggest myth in crypto. It is a matter of fact that users have to trust that tx versifiers / block producers do not collude. Pools and ASICS also are a fact and won't go away (any reason why it should not centralize further?).

If you are really interested and want to understand it read this http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS
http://bitshares.org/delegated-proof-of-stake/

[cbeast]

@cbeast you are completely on the wrong track. Bitcoin only trusts math is the biggest myth in crypto. It is a matter of fact that users have to trust that tx versifiers / block producers do not collude. Pools and ASICS also are a fact and won't go away (any reason why it should not centralize further?).

If you are really interested and want to understand it read this http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS
http://bitshares.org/delegated-proof-of-stake/

I will wait for Bitshares 2 or 3 that has more features and is proven. That's another flaw with PoS, there is no fair distribution that can't be duplicated with a superior blockchain and a slick marketing campaign. PoW is too expensive to do that. If there is going to be a successful PoS, I will wait for a major corporation or government to roll it out with parades and a Michael Bolton theme song.

[kokojie]

We're talking theoretical here. Bitcoin's pool problem is temporary and being dealt with currently no PoS system is safe at all, that's why they have not much value. No guarantee with PoS because you have to trust people. Bitcoin only trusts math, If a 51% secret cabal took over any PoS, then it could take permanent control. Even if someone temporarily took 51% control of Bitcoin, then someone else could simply add mining power and take it away. With PoW, the permanent ability to 51% attack isn't even a possibility. With PoS it is inevitable.

There's so much wrong in your statement, I don't know where to start, let me give it a try:

* "currently no PoS system is safe at all"
Actually, just the opposite. Currently no PoS altcoin has been successfully 51% attacked, ZERO! While plenty of PoW altcoin has been attacked to death.

* "If a 51% secret cabal took over any PoS, then it could take permanent control"
That's true, except you don't even need 51% of the eco-system in PoW, you need 0% of the coin, and at most 10% of the value of the eco-system, also you don't push up the coin price while you acquiring hardware, unlike in PoS, you will push the price up astronomically even acquiring 10% of outstanding coins. So attacking a PoW system is MUCH easier. Also, if someone manages to somehow owns 51% of the PoS eco-system (probably after spending an astronomical amount of money), they have zero reason to attack it, since they are basically attacking themselves, as they are the biggest stake holder in the eco-system, the only result would be destroying their own wealth.

* "Even if someone temporarily took 51% control of Bitcoin, then someone else could simply add mining power and take it away"
Like who? non of the 51% attacked to death PoW altcoins has shown this phenomenon, they were all powerless against the 51% attack. please give me some examples.

* "With PoW, the permanent ability to 51% attack isn't even a possibility. With PoS it is inevitable."
Except, again, ZERO PoS altcoin has been 51% attacked, so I'm not sure where this "inevitability" come from. Though I could say a PoW system being attacked IS inevitable, once the coin supply run out, and it become extremely cheap to attack. The Bitcoin PoW network is basically currently being secured by the coin supply, once it runs out, it's laughably cheap to 51% attack Bitcoin(unless transaction fees somehow become extremely expensive, and people would still accept that).

I think the biggest problem with PoW is that:
1. it bleeds money from the community, into the pockets of hardware vendors and electric company, continuously, non-stop. The price action this year has clearly shown this problem. There has been a joke circling around in the Chinese community that "Bitcoin was invented by electric companies".

2. to attack a PoW system, you don't need a stake in the eco-system. I could borrow Gavin's argument "There is no stake" to describe PoW as well, you need exactly 0 stake in a PoW eco-system to attack. This is how big miners attacked PoW altcoin with ease and frequency, because they have no stake in their target. Now if they have to acquire 51% of the coin to attack? then forget about it, no one will spend that much money to attack (and they are attacking themselves at that point).

[CIYAM]

The real problem with PoS is the "initial distribution" (although Peter R's idea of using a snapshot of the Bitcoin blockchain is perhaps one possible solution to that issue).

We have already seen coins where > 50% are owned by "anonymous people" whose accounts were created around the same time as the coin was launched (so quite possibly sock puppets of the coin creator) and the cost of owning the "initial distribution" can be *very low* (say as little as 21 BTC).

Whilst that might not be an issue immediately it certainly could become an issue at a later stage if said "coin creator" decided to "do the dirty" in order to gain funds.

[kokojie]

The real problem with PoS is the "initial distribution" (although Peter R's idea of using a snapshot of the Bitcoin blockchain is perhaps one possible solution to that issue).

We have already seen coins where > 50% are owned by "anonymous people" whose accounts were created around the same time as the coin was launched (so quite possibly sock puppets of the coin creator).

Whilst that might not be an issue immediately it certainly could become an issue at a later stage if said "coin creator" decided to "do the dirty" in order to gain funds.

It's not a problem, distribution can be clearly checked and verified. An unfair distribution will not succeed, and will be instantly mocked by the community, and usually tagged as scams.

Does Bitcoin even need re-distribution to switch to PoS system? I'm not convinced that it does. Only a hard fork would be required. Because for example Peercoin has built in functionality to fade out PoW naturally, without any re-distribution needed.

[Brangdon]

It's only logical that the 51% group of holders will not have bad intentions against a currency that they themselves have a majority stake in.

For individuals behaving rationally in a closed system that is true. With entities that may have some overarching agenda, such as, hypothetically, the dominance of a competing currency, then the cost may be well worth while, despite "collateral damage", as it were.

The point is they are not so much attacking the currency as buying it. It's like instead of flying two 'planes into the World Trade Centre, the terrorists bought the towers and then shut them down so no-one could use them.

Bitcoin is more vulnerable to irrational attacks than PoS. They'd just have to kidnap the families of the controllers of the few largest mining pools. Or an ASIC manufacturer.

51% PoS stakeholders have every reason to reverse transactions. Because they use TOR, nobody knows they even have 51%. They can attack transactions to grow their wealth.

How will destroying trust in the currency increase their wealth, when that wealth is denominated in that currency?

With PoW, they have to invest in equipment that is traceable so they can't attack anonymously. When they want to cash out, their equipment is obsolete and worth much less.

You are being naive about how they need to acquire their equipment. Even if it is traced, so what? And once they'd used their ASICs to destroy one coin, they can sell it to other people to mine different coins (that use the same hashing algorithm).

Even with PoS you need to distribute the coins with PoW or you end up with horrible distribution of coins. The longer the PoW stage and more people having a coin, the fairer distribution. Hard to beat Bitcoin imo

Have you looked it the Bitcoin distribution? 0.71% of the accounts hold 55% of the coins. The real situation is probably worse, because each owner spreads their bitcoins over multiple addresses. For example, Satoshi rarely has more than 50 coins at a single address. We only know he owns millions of coins because he was the only miner for a while.

As for distribution of hashing power, that is also terrible, with pools sometimes going over 50% almost by accident.

[cbeast]

We're talking theoretical here. Bitcoin's pool problem is temporary and being dealt with currently no PoS system is safe at all, that's why they have not much value. No guarantee with PoS because you have to trust people. Bitcoin only trusts math, If a 51% secret cabal took over any PoS, then it could take permanent control. Even if someone temporarily took 51% control of Bitcoin, then someone else could simply add mining power and take it away. With PoW, the permanent ability to 51% attack isn't even a possibility. With PoS it is inevitable.

There's so much wrong in your statement, I don't know where to start, let me give it a try:

* "currently no PoS system is safe at all"
Actually, just the opposite. Currently no PoS altcoin has been successfully 51% attacked, ZERO! While plenty of PoW altcoin has been attacked to death.

Well altcoins don't really have much work behind them yet, do they? That's a poor argument.

* "If a 51% secret cabal took over any PoS, then it could take permanent control"
That's true, except you don't even need 51% of the eco-system in PoW, you need 0% of the coin, and at most 10% of the value of the eco-system, also you don't push up the coin price while you acquiring hardware, unlike in PoS, you will push the price up astronomically even acquiring 10% of outstanding coins. So attacking a PoW system is MUCH easier. Also, if someone manages to somehow owns 51% of the PoS eco-system (probably after spending an astronomical amount of money), they have zero reason to attack it, since they are basically attacking themselves, as they are the biggest stake holder in the eco-system, the only result would be destroying their own wealth.

You can try to double spend at any percent. If you try you will fail and probably be prosecuted for fraud. Even if you have a successful 51% attack, it is likely to be detected and you will lose your mining investment.

* "Even if someone temporarily took 51% control of Bitcoin, then someone else could simply add mining power and take it away"
Like who? non of the 51% attacked to death altcoins has shown this phenomenon, please give me some examples.

Altcoins can be interesting experiments. Many of them make unfounded claims and deserve their fate. Namecoin was spared this fate by merge mining because it serve a purpose other than competing with Bitcoin.

* "With PoW, the permanent ability to 51% attack isn't even a possibility. With PoS it is inevitable."
Except, again, ZERO PoS altcoin has been 51% attacked, so I'm not sure where this "inevitability" come from. Though I could say a PoW system being attacked IS inevitable, once the coin supply run out, and it become extremely cheap to attack. The Bitcoin PoW network is basically currently being secured by the coin supply, once it runs out, it's laughably cheap to 51% attack Bitcoin(unless transaction fees somehow become extremely expensive, and people would still accept that).

Wealth has a funny way of aggregating into a few families. With PoS, it can be quietly and secretly secured over time until only one person controls the majority stake. With PoW, people have to actually work to maintain wealth. It's not so easy to own human spirits.

There is a fundamental difference between PoS and PoW. PoS is aristocratic in nature. PoW is proletariat. It comes down to which side of humanity you choose to identify.

[CIYAM]

There is a fundamental difference between PoS and PoW. PoS is aristocratic in nature. PoW is proletariat. It comes down to which side of humanity you choose to identify.

This seems poorly thought out - proles can't afford "high end ASIC" can they?