Topic: [Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate - page 12. (Read 3828 times)

If they really cared about the environment, they (Ethereum guys etc) should build mining plants that run on renewables or maybe even develop something that ordinary people can buy and run their miners off-grid. Or something else entirely; what I'm trying to say is that there are much better ways to work on a PoW cryptocurrency to make it impact climate less.

To me, this just seems like a cash grab. The founders know exactly that they have a large amount of coins, while probably not running a single miner. With their greed increasing, they want more coins, so now they're trying to convince people to sell their mining rigs and pump more money into founders' pockets by acquiring large amounts of coin and 'staking' it.

In ETH you do, if you don't have enough coin to stake by yourself (which many don't, I suspect).

To be honest; it's great for Bitcoin that when ETH switches to PoS, it will be the only remaining, relevant PoW coin. It will have no competition at all at that point.
The move to switch ETH to PoS is kind of a way to admit they lost, that a 'flippening' that they so so wished for for years, is not going to happen and that they will just compete with the lot of PoS coins since they're easier rivals.

You're very worried about governments, aren't ya? This, my friends, is PoS mindset. PoW people don't care about 'probable' 'worldwide' 'bans'. Yes, I put everything in quotes since you and I know it will not happen. Besides the fact that there will always be countries not banning it; the power of decentralization is that governments simply can't know if you're running a miner in your basement.
While they can ban large mining plants, that will be great for Bitcoin, since the gear will be sold to ordinary people at low prices (demand < supply) and decentralization of hash power will reach all time highs!

Essentially, and that's a point I don't hear often, PoS coins are 'money printing machines'. You put in a certain amount and you're guaranteed to get out a larger amount.
As always, when someone proposes a money printing machine, you should be cautious. Especially asking: 'if you have a money printing machine, why are you selling it to me and not using it yourself?'.
In PoS, that's exactly what happens though. Sure, the developers allow you to print money as well (limited though; certain minimum of stake etc), but due to them holding the majority, they basically have the largest amount of 'money printers' out of the box. Because why wouldn't they.

This is hilarious and simultaneously the biggest red flag I've ever seen for anyone investing in cryptocurrencies. If your new system doesn't meet the security requirements, you do not change the security requirements! What is wrong with people?

That's an interesting idea; however, ASICs also already push for efficiency for obvious reasons. If the algorithm works, you will get people (companies) building specialized computers with the bare minimum required computing power to run a shitton of VMs, which again run extremely stripped-down and minimal OSes which will do nothing else than running your mining program; since they consume so little electricity, people will just fill warehouses with them, and... well, energy consumption will add up and you kind of get to the same point you're at now.

I spent a bit of time looking into Chia mining (proof of space and time) and while the cryptographic idea is that 'computation is free', in reality it's not. In practice, Chia mining rigs are computing new shares all the time on tons of threads and cores, which eats a lot of energy.

Sure I did, you just don't like the answer.
Bitcoin PoW Mining Pools are Centralized.
Proof of Stake is far more decentralized than PoW mining pools, which is one reason why ethereum is switching.

https://cardanians-io.medium.com/cardano-pos-vs-bitcoin-pow-a14aa6c746b5

You didn't answer to my question. I asked you if it's desirable to have a structure that brings centralization over time. Your response has to do with the "gathering" of the hash rate while it's been repeatedly told you that it's a false way to detect faulty behavior.

By the same reasoning, I also trust the government for not deciding to allocate the required resources to destroy Bitcoin. It's a game theory.

You are trusting only 3 to 4 mining pool operators for the last five years to not 51% attack bitcoin.
Yes Miners can switch pools , but they only know to do so after an attack, so trusting the pool operators you are.
So I would say PoW bitcoin supporters are more trusting than any PoS supporter.

When the rich became the only ones that could afford warehouses full of ASICS, bitcoin decentralization died.
Ask yourself how many blocks did you mine today, this month, this year, security of bitcoin is in the hands of the elite, same as banking regulations.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/are-large-mining-pools-bad-cryptocurrencies/

The core principle of having a cryptocurrency is to avoid central points of failure; in other words, it's decentralization. As I've already mentioned:
If the mechanism that is used centralizes the economy, then the system is faulty. I'm not saying that it doesn't work, but in the long term, it's going to be problematic. We've already covered that PoW decentralizes the economy due to uncertainty and mitigation of voting's unequal distribution. It has already been underlined that it's resistant to subjectivity opposed to PoS.

In which of the above do you disagree?

Which introduces trust, a problem that is meant to be solved. That's the purpose of a cryptocurrency after all.

So you will be handing over your bitcoins instead of facing prosecution. How very agreeable of you.
You missed the part about storing the PoS coins in friendly country.
PoS coins can stake as easy on a laptop in the house or on a VPS or an exchange pool in a crypto friendly country.
Tell those PoW miners how meaningless those thousands of Dollars they lost from downtime and shipping cost and new location costs,
I imagine they would disagree with you.

Which is easier
hiding staking PoS coins or a warehouse full of ASICS drawing the power of 15000 homes from the grid?




You kind of missed the point of encrypted offsite backups.
As a PoW supporter you should at least know how to backup your private keys, why do you think such a simple thing is beyond a PoS staker.
Note: Well Designed PoS coins stake but won't allow sends without the encrypted passwords, and what simpletons don't protect their system from malware and viruses.

That is not rephrasing, that is called twisting my words.

China bans what is popular because nobody is using an unknown altcoin that is created and exists only on exchanges for trading. China bans a currency they can not control and could potentially undermine the same cryptocurrency their central banking system is working on.

If there is a ban, it is trivial for the government to force the person to hand over all the PoS coins they own or face prosecution. How long it takes to move it elsewhere is meaningless.

If we are talking about hypothetical situations, then there is no need for a missile, a simple free malware can destroy the PoS staker's funds without any way to recover it.

Or to rephrase
Staking PoS is Versatile and fluid while mining PoW is rigid, and extremely wasteful.  

Example,
China Bans PoW mining or PoS staking

PoW miners face enormous costs and head aches in moving your PoW operation, not to mention the hardship of getting an industrial energy contract in the new country.
Takes weeks especially, if caught off guard about the ban.

PoS stakers can just move their laptop, or move their coins to a pool outside the country, at almost zero cost and within 2 hours all finished.

However if they wished, a PoS Staker can hide in any country and never be discovered since the energy efficiently hides them from all electric utilities.
PoW miners however, draw more power than residential use, and the electric utilities can pinpoint their location at a minute's notice.

Another example:
Say you are in the Ukraine, and a missile just destroyed your warehouse full of PoW mining ASICS.  You are officially now done and bankrupt.
However say your PoS Staking Laptop was destroyed.
PoS Stakers can go buy any cheap $500 laptop, restore their coins from their encrypted offsite backup and be back up and running in 12 hours.

In survival situations, those that are versatile and adaptable are better able to survive than those unwilling or unable to adapt to a changing environment.

Production of ASICS is even wasteful,
ASICS usually only mine a singular PoW algo , requiring purchase of a different asics for other PoW algo.
The useful life spans of ASICS are only 1 to 2 years before you are best to turn it into scrap and have to buy all new ones.
Any Laptop running multiple PoS coins, can run a full 7 years or longer before needing to be replaced.
Or a PoS staker could use a VPS or a staking pool in a friendly country.

Another issue with PoS is lack of commitment.

A PoW miner has to plan ahead, crunch numbers, prepare the operation, install ASICs and cooling, etc. and in the end they can't just dump their ASICs any time they want and buy it back later if they changed their mind. If someone starts mining something like bitcoin, specially with large operations, they commit to it. "In sickness and in health"!

In case of PoS they have no commitment whatsoever. They can buy the coins and become a big stakeholder with virtually one click and at any moment they can dump it and get out. For example if the PoS coin starts dumping they can sell it immediately effectively abandoning the coin.

PoS security is the Longest Chain with the Highest Difficulty.
Difficulty is determined in some cases by Number of Staking coins * Age of coins since last staked
PoS implementations are incredibility versatile, so different coins may have other variables that determine difficulty factoring in pool variables.
Note: Some PoS coins ignore coin age altogether. It all depends on the specific code design for a specific coin.

A very large number of "VM" miners but not unlimited - this kind of proof is actually designed to push people to develop efficient VM and container images just for sleeping - but like ASICs there's probably a performance ceiling to how many you can run at a time. In fact it could be the long-term heir to ACISs, since it will cause CPU cores and threads to be hoarded instead of GPUs, FPGAs, and energy-eating ASIC miners, which are rendered useless for a proof of time or proof of idle model.


My parameters for sleep time and timeout are going to have to be tweaked to accommodate this.


I thought PoS also adhered to the "longest chain" principle?

If you remove the requirement that a miner/node needs to "work" in order to find a block, it will become trivial for a single entity to create an ~unlimited number of "miners" from a small number of computers.

Regarding your specific proposal, network connections among all nodes are not going to have a small enough latency for it to work. Also, it is not uncommon for different nodes to have a slightly different times for a variety of reasons. Bitcoin's implementation of PoW, for example, allows for nodes to have their time be by up to 2 hours.

Your proposal also made me think of another reason why PoS is inferior. With PoS, if you are connected to a set of nodes, you have no real way of knowing if you are receiving a valid copy of the blockchain. More specifically, if you receive two copies of the blockchain, you do not have a good way to validate which copy is correct. With PoW, if a node is sent two copies of the blockchain, it is trivial for the node to determine which version is valid because it can trivially calculate which blockchain has the greater amount of total work.

Energy prices going up => Electricity prices rising => Government announces planned power outages. Which are terrible because they wreak havoc on filesystems in Linux (non-RHEL) machines even if they are shut down cleanly and are backed with UPS'es (wrong freed block/inode counts galore  )

I have just recovered from the 3rd power outage today. It wasn't fun at all. I have no idea if there's a huge mining presence where I'm living now, but these kinds of governments are usually the first to take an action against PoW coins. A reduction in mining difficulty corresponding to a ban would almost certainly see BTC's price go down by some significant percent (we are talking between 20-30% depending on the severity of the ban).

It doesn't have to be PoS but any other proof that does not rely on using coins to influence difficulty can be dropped in-place of Bitcoin's PoW (such as my example proof of time) in a scheduled hardfork if the time comes.

In PoW, there's a significant percentage of uncertainty. For example, you can't know for sure what will be your earnings in the future. You don't know if it's in favor of you to sell the ASICs or to keep them for yourself. On the other hand, in PoS, you know exactly the coins that suit you and you're not going to sell them unless one appears who's willing to pay you at least your future earnings.

Therefore, one owning the 1% of the computational power is more likely to vanish than one owning the 1% of all the coins in circulation.

This is false. They very much do, which proves you haven't actually read my writeup.

Vitalik, summing up that there's sacrifice in security:
I don't care what they do. I created this thread to share my thoughts.

This problem exists in PoS systems too. There are much greater whales in Cardano than in Bitcoin.

You can't realistically stop PoW, by banning it. There'll always be people who'll have access to computational power and therefore, can always use it to mine cryptocurrencies. Besides, isn't it already proven that the majority of the hash rate comes from renewable sources?

The attack doesn't have to retain; if one ever reversed a transaction x blocks deep, the game theory would have failed. The moment they did, Bitcoin would have lost all its value. Economically-wise, a 51% is easier in PoW, but that's unless there's a terrible wealth distribution which happens to be the case in most cryptos.

That is quite important difference: in PoW in case of 51% attack, "you could in theory design and build your own ASICs". On the other hand, in PoS in the same case, when someone will have 51% of the coin supply (that can be unknown, because someone may have many wallets), it is impossible to compete, even in theory.

Well yes, you could in theory design and build your own ASICs.

In practice though, you'd buy them from the likes of Bitmain,
which really is another miner as much as an ASIC manufacturer.
There's no telling how long the ASIC they ship you has been "tested" by them.

Cardano has countered that concern with the following.
https://www.coinbase.com/cloud/discover/solutions/cardano-stake-pledge-margin

One: I did not invent PoS, that was Sunny King in 2013. So 9 years later and no one has killed it yet.
Two: Not avoiding , but ignoring since in the earlier post I showed the majority of coins are PoS based. (Which means their developers share none of your concerns.)
If you truly have a major flaw in PoS, then feel free to destroy all PoS coins to prove that what you speak is fact and not imagined conjecture.
Until then as a pronounced PoW supporter, don't be surprised that PoS developers/users simply ignore your concerns.
Kind of the same way all PoW supporters ignore that only 3 or 4 mining pool operators could 51% attack bitcoin at any time over the last 5 years,
and yes the miners could dump any corrupt pools but only after the damage is done, not early enough to prevent it.

The main issue you keep ignoring are the government bans of PoW because of energy consumption.
No matter what happens with PoS, a world wide ban of PoW mining before 2030 is very probable, and that is a very real danger not imagined conjecture.

Thanks to the ever growing supply chain issue, energy is getting harder to come by, so letting PoW miners draw large % of energy will be focused on by everyone.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/largest-ever-power-cuts-hit-turkey-s-industrial-production-report-122012500009_1.html
Imagine anyone PoW mining in that industrial zone, profit potential just got slashed.

https://gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/iran-bitcoin-mining-ban-power-usage-electricity-shortage-2692287

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/01/25/kazakh-crypto-miners-cut-off-from-electricity-supply-until-end-of-january/

i'm not going to argue for proof of stake because i know it's not the real deal. only something that requires physical resources and expends them at some cost is something you can take seriously. even then, there's attacks like 51% attacks but i'll take that risk anyday over the bad things that can happen in proof of stake fairy tale systems. that's all they are is a fairy tale. just ask jimmy song.

You can't even begin to compare a "major miner" with an exchange that holds a lot of users' funds. A miner has spent a lot of money and put a lot of effort to acquire that large hashrate while the exchange has done virtually nothing. Not to mention that the miner has a lot at stake while the exchange doesn't.

No.

It was decentralized, but less than it is today. If we're going to agree with my centralization definition, then it's true; few people who owned an exchange had a fortune of 850,000+ BTC. The manipulation was easier and more intensive than it is today. Charts speak themselves.

Economy isn't a strictly connected term with money. It's related with administration, in general.

Don't you choose a pool to stake?

This place is known for its freedom of speech. If you don't want to try, then don't blame mods. The mods don't lock topics subjectively. Only if it's against the rules.

Which proves what exactly? The market had also chosen to put a dog-looking coin in the third position. Is that what you want? To simply reach a certain position among other currencies? Is that your project's goal?

And now you're comparing China with Europe...

Okay, so... May I assume you didn't read my writeup, right? I've detected flaws to your mechanism and you keep avoiding them. You're the one who asked for serious conversation, troller.

You do have the option to not buy them from another miner, though.