Topic: Is PoS dead? (Read 17329 times)

Not everyone knows that and PoW doesn't need to die - at least not necessarily or soon.

PoW can be sustained for quite some time if the price of the PoW coin rises and rises and rises. The only problem with that is that the price is not depending on the coin itself. And the demand for the coin can't be created by the miners at will.
So it's likely that PoW coins fail when the mining can't cover the costs for the mining and lots of mining hardware / mining power is turned off, leaving an enormous risk for >50% attacks for the network.

I'd rather say that PoS coins have a better chance to survice because of their energy efficient way of sustaining the security of the block chain

Your thread is for the waste container.

Everyone knows POW is going to die!

R.I.P

PoW is not backed by energy. Do you even know what 'backed by' means? It means you can convert your money to the asset that backs it, at a fixed rate no less. Can you convert PoW coins to Kwh at a fixed rate? No you can't. At best you can hope to convert it to fiat and then buy energy with it, but you can't be sure what amount of energy you can buy in the future with your PoW coins, maybe it'll be zero. PoW crypto is not backed by energy by any sound economic definition. And you can take this to the bank. Too many misconceptions on this forum that become myths and beliefs that people build their prosperity on. No wonder that prosperity often doesn't come to fruition.

My first thought when reading this was that it's wasted time to answer such a post.
I still think it's a waste of time.
But sometimes I like to waste some time

That's true for everything except for the things you really need to live (water, food, air).

With PoS everyone who is participating in minting gets a share.
The percentage for each participant is the same. So in the end there might be more coins in cirulation, but if the total supply goes up by x%, each participant has increased the owned coins by x%

Seriously - this is true for each scenario; with or without crypto, with PoW or with PoS. Welcome to the real world.
This is no problem associated with PoS but with the already unequal distribution of wealth.

In fact PoW doesn't remain decentralized. Mining farms are built where energy costs are low and the infrastructure is sufficient (geographical centralization) and operated/rented by people with sufficient money (financial centralization - woops: the rich get richer...). Should I tell you that pooled mining is another form of centralization?
PoS can remain decentralized, because it doesn't require mining farms, specialized hardware, etc.

That might be a serious problem for muslim people, but not for others.

Which costs a lot of money! Money you are going to lose if you successfully attack the coin of which you now own 51%...

And then you might be successful with your attack, mint successfully and have the coins you used for minting locked until they can be transferred (welcome to the world of successful minting...). How much do you think they will be worth once you can transfer them? Oh, you can perform that kind of attack. But make a gain with it? I doubt it...
But hey, what about renting some datacentres full of SHA-256 miners? Rent them for one day, attack Bitcoin and if you "earn" more than you pay for the hash rate, you have been successful^^

Bitcoin is permanently close to a > 50% attack. Just imagine what happens if one or two of the major pools are attacked and the remaining pools are above 50%?
What if pool operators secretly decide upon using the combined hash rate (that much about incognito attacks...)?

PoS is backed by itself. You need PoS coins to mint. You don't need to waste energy.

A funny thread!     

Each mining technique has its own unique risks in that a POW attacker could buy mining power instead of buying or stealing staking power.  The attacks you spoke of were not a problem with lack of staking but a problem with having a single exchange housing the majority of the trading volume/liquidity in the coin.  As a coin grows larger these types of risks will mitigate themselves so if you can't kill the coin via criminal acts in the early stages, it survives and still keeps its low energy mining advantage over POW mining. 

Exchanges store about 7% of available supply of NXT. Whoever talked about the thief could attack the network had no clue or was spreading FUD. The amount of NXT used in forging is ~60% per various stats calculations, which means you need at least 300m to attempt to stage any sort of attack.

The problem with PoS coins is that nobody mints/forges, or at least not enough. Everyone keeps their coins on an exchange, waiting for the next pump to dump on, in which case the coin staking weight is low and an attacker needs far less than 51% of coins to attack the network. Either that or the exchange keeps the coins in a hot wallet because they are greedily staking themselves, trying to get free money since everyone keeps their coins at an exchange and you end with a situation like vericoin/mintpal. Even when 5% total NXT were stolen from bter, there was talk that the thief could attack the network, probably because less than 10% of total coins were forging, which goes back to the problem of everyone keeping their coins on an exchange so they don't miss the next pump.

All of this is moot for PoW coins since stealing coins or not keeping your wallet open doesn't really affect the security of the network.

POS is the evolution of POW.  POS efficiently mines a coin with minimal electricity waste while POW is simply massively wasteful and this is an evolutionary detriment to the survival of all POW coins.

Natural selection has already begun as evidenced by the steep decline in new POW coins and the continued launches of POS coins.  It may be that only the lucky few elite POW coins that can overcome the energy wastefulness of POW will survive and it may be that Bitcoin is the only POW coin that has enough value to survive the advantages that POS has over it.

Some analogies to help you understand the relationship of POW and POS are as follows:

1.  POW is a wasteful V8 gas car that gets 16MPG.........POS is an electric Tesla model 3 that gets 110eMPG and is also faster than the V8 muscle car all while having more space.
2.  POW is a bicycle with 1 gear..........POS is a bicycle with 21 gears to more efficiently use the human energy to go faster and farther using less work.
3.  POW is a music album on CD that requires physically printing millions of wasteful plastic disks and cases............POS is a music album in mp3 format that can be copied forever for essentially free and stored on a thumbstick drive.

Once you grasp that POW mining is unnecessary to a blockchain, then you can see how POS mining is an evolutionary advancement over POW that is not only here to stay, but probably here to dominate.

Well said.  PoW is dead unless you are bitcoin.

Yeah, double-spend my ass sure, you're done here, because spreading FUD is hard, hard work, especially if you don't have a clue on the technicals

I was quoting the nxtcrypto.org wiki. Since forging is how NXT secures transactions, who cares what the forging fee is if you can double spend? That is the type of political power any central banker wishes.

ANyway. I'm done here. I love PoS because it's so easy everyone should have their own PoS altcoin. I hate PoW because it's hard. That's why they call it work.

It's not my wiki. The amount of NXT you hold determines probability of forging a block, that's correct. What power grab are you talking about? Forging blocks isn't even profitable for anyone, no matter their size of stake. It gives a measly 0.5% yearly of the owned stake. Forging blocks is not about profits or power, it's about securing the network. What wishes does it execute? Like Santa Claus wishes? You're obviously making stuff up as you go.

How do I select someone to be a stakeholder in a PoS currency (not DPoS)? Give him some coins as a present?
Stakeholders are the people. The majority of all stakeholders (weighted by stake) decides over the PoS economy.

I don't get why this "can" be a government. What makes you think countries are interested in a non inflationary currency?

Derp. I didn't say PoS *is* controlled, I said it can be controlled permanently. Please read my posts before making yourself look foolish.

The one that uses (among others) a thinly veiled form of power grab 'by iterating through all active accounts and seeing which one has the highest "hit"." determined by the "amount of NXT you can earn is dependent upon the number of NXT you hold in your effective balance, the total number of NXT "active" on the network."

It's right on your wiki. NXT is not a lottery. There is no randomness. It executes the wishes according to activity which is itself determined by the aggregated amount.

This is not a strawman, do you even know what one is? <<-- This could be considered Ad-hominem.

Which PoS implementation are you talking about? This is not the way it works in NXT, and I am not familiar with all existing PoS implementations to claim you're wrong, because maybe some PoS behaves the way you described it. So which one did you just describe?

The algo doesn't choose anything. The queue is chosen by stakeholders. The algo simply executes the stakeholders wishes. The algo doesn't select the stakeholders either. The stakeholders are selected by people to have the power over the PoS economy. That is as political as you can get.

That's only in BitsharesX. There is no electing delegates in NXT, the algo chooses the next block generator in queue. There are a few implementations of PoS, unlike PoW.