POS - may the force be with usA riddle from Yoda you get
this quote who said?
If you think about the general principal behind proof-of-work, you have money in the real world, you take it and use it to buy miners and then miners produce blocks basically in proportion to how much money you have. If the algorithm manages to be ASIC resistant for a long time then it could be a bit more democratic than that but ASIC resistant proof-of-work is even more controversial than proof-of-stake which is where we are at now.
The idea with proof-of-stake is that you have virtual money inside the system in order to buy virtual miners and the system basically simulates the mining. It simulates the fact that if you have five virtual miners and there are 500 total you are going to get 1% of the blocks. In reality, proof-of-stake systems don’t quite work that way but from an economic perspective, it kind of works like that.
So, the basic principal is that in proof-of-stake, because everything is virtual and simulated, you basically control the laws of physics of the system and because of that, you can set the laws of physics to be whatever you want. So you can make sure it provides an optimal level of security. That is kind of the 101 theoretical and philosophical argument for it.
More concretely, it is kind of obvious that simulated miners don’t burn any actual electricity and there are definitely some capital lock up costs for people who are participating in the system by purchasing these virtual miners. There are basically opportunity costs, because if you have 10,000 … and you lock up 3,000 of them in order to do proof-of-stake voting, for that particular period of time, you won’t be able to use that 3,000 … . But if you do the economic math, even though those effects are real, they are much less than the effects of actually spending 3,000 on a physical miner. Second of all, there are less risk that you’ll run into problems that prevent the miner from actually producing value.
Third, there is an interesting argument that if you take half of the supply of money and get rid of it, the remaining half should theoretically become worth twice as much. What that means is that if I have a $100 bill and I actually burn it, inflation should go slightly down and everyone’s money should be worth very slightly more and in an economic equilibrium, the increase should be equal to $100 spread across the remaining economy.
In a proof-of-stake context, if people lock up half … , even though that is an inconvenience to them, at the same time it will make everyone else’s … more valuable so [the effect of the opportunity cost and the deflation] might cancel each other out.
Since proof-of-stake is a closed system, you have all these opportunities to control costs and as new ways are discovered, you can adopt them. My estimate is that you can get the same security as proof-of-work with a thousand times less cost.