I am not here to debate. I am here to inform people that POS is a scam, and to warn Bitcoiners about a rising attack on Bitcoin.
This is the beginning of Fork Wars 2.0.My perspective: Although I consider myself a Bitcoiner first and foremost, I also do altcoins. I’ve had long-term investments in some POS coins for years, and some of that has been highly profitable to me. (Not identifying my portfolio’s winners. Not here to pump things.) I have altcoiner friends in the POS world, with whom I have been privately discussing this issue for months. And until I saw that
Solana’s founder recently attacked Bitcoin with a propagandistic claim that it must go POS, I
was planning some projects and community contributions in the Solana ecosystem—which is POS. Hey, I
enjoy coding for Solana!
As I have gained longtime experience in POS, I have increasingly come to see that even my most profitable POS investments are built on a foundation of lies and financial manipulation. But for a long time, I tried to make excuses, and balance my negativity towards POS against other factors. Even after I fully admitted to myself that POS is intrinsically based on a dishonesty so subtle that it fools innocent buyers such as myself—even after I was alarmed to find that one of my favorite POW altcoins plans to go POS—I was deterred from action by the scope of the problem. POS is eating the “crypto” world alive! What can one individual do to stop it?
The breaking point for me, the impetus to break out of passivity and rise to action: Just over a week ago,
Do Kwon and Terraform Labs executed a contentious hardfork of the Terra (Cosmos SDK) POS chain, against massive community opposition. They pulled off the fork in
ten days from first public announcement to fork height. They needed only the collusion of a small, wealthy group of DPOS companies. The result was a brazen, bald-faced rugpull to divert value from both UST holders (many of whom lost their life savings in the depeg), and people who bought LUNA in the crash (disclosure: including me).
I will save the details for future discussions and publications—I’ve had a close view of that controversy.
As to the subject of this thread, the question is beyond debate. We have empirical evidence to test various competing theories.
In 2017,
Bitcoin proved that POW is decentralized. If you were in Bitcoin in November 2017, then you remember those harrowing moments when the Bitcoin blockchain simultaneously faced
two large-scale attacks from rich, powerful groups with gigantic hashrate at their command. The objective of those attacks: Hostile takeover of the Bitcoin blockchain.
One attack fell flat: Bcashers’ attempted “flippening” on (IIRC) November 12, 2017 moderately degraded Bitcoin’s performance for a few hours, without lasting harm.
The other attack, S2X, was cancelled by its perpetrators at the last moment: They backed down and gave up, because they saw that they would lose.
As I have said in
one of my recent Wall Observer posts, I don’t idealize POW. But the theory is proved: If POW were not adequately decentralized in practice—
if Bitmain had the type of power that large stake operators have in POS—then we would all be using BCH or S2X right now.
In 2022,
Terra proved that POS is a centralized scam. You can’t trust a POS blockchain. A POS blockchain is mutable—Do Kwon’s original proposal had literally been to rewrite people’s wallets! He only backed off from that because bigwigs like @cz_binance publicly denounced it. A POS blockchain can be hardforked out from under you to change the rules, to change the nature of your money—just because some big stake operators colluded to back a corrupt dev team. That’s what Do Kwon did just over a week ago on Terra, as a fraudulent financial shell game to divert value without literally rewriting people’s wallets. The incumbent majority of stakes preserved their position by forbidding recently purchased LUNA from being staked; then, as Do Kwon loudly boasted of their support on Twitter, they used their position to hardfork to a new token designed to suck the value out of the coins they had prevented from staking,
and to renege the peg obligation to UST holders.
When I bought LUNA in the crash, I relied on the premise that LUNA was a cryptocurrency recorded on a decentralized blockchain. “Decentralized” means that even if Do Kwon goes nuts or turns out to be totally evil, at least, I am protected so that I get what I paid for—
right?I had no idea that Do Kwon could suddenly change the rules by executive fiat, just because he decided that some people had bought LUNA too cheap in honest transactions at market—and who needs those sad-looking UST holders, anyway? Thanks, POS!
Although the stablecoin meltdown is what grabs headlines,
this is one of the biggest lessons from Terra. And the lesson is generally applicable. The major POS ecosystems tend to be dominated by big stake operators—often by the same parties, who operate in multiple ecosystems. What happened on Terra can happen in
any POS ecosystem that hits a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, market turmoil, and rich insiders losing too much money.
Do not trust POS to protect you with decentralization when you most need that protection—in exactly the type of circumstance where real decentralization would protect outsiders and small investors from a relatively small, collusive group of corrupt insiders.
This post is a part of the beginning of a series of public messages to document the frauds, failings, and fallacies of POS,
and other related activity. On this thread, and elsewhere—on-forum, and off-forum—I am determined to push back against POS, to stop it from eating the whole crypto-world, most of all to stop it from harming Bitcoin.
What can one individual do against a massive, well-funded, highly organized push to deprecate POW and replace it with POS? But I must act—and I doubt it will be in vain, for I learned important lessons both from Bitcoin’s Fork Wars, and from recent my observations of Terra.
When Bitcoin was under serious threat from the forkers 2015 to around 2019, and most of all in 2017, it didn’t
only survive because of POW decentralization. Bitcoin survived because its community had a hard core of idealists, who fought tooth and nail against a hostile takeover. The superior decentralization of POW gave them solid ground on which to stand; it protected them from simply being steamrolled by Bitmain,
et al. But technology without people is nothing.
Bitcoin is resilient. But a major part of its resilience is in its people, not in technology. There are no technological solutions to some problems. Complacency when the writing is on the wall is one of those problems. I am doing my part right here, right now, to try to help solve that problem.
Recently, in the Terra community, there were some principled, intelligent voices speaking out against the hardfork—including LUNA holders who protested on behalf of UST holders, seemingly against their own short-term financial interests. There was widespread mass-sentiment against the fork. And at least one big DPOS company strongly refused to collude with the forkers—they went so far as to shut down their Terra operations altogether, after the fork. I applaud them for that. I have zero financial interest in their operations; and as of this writing, I have never before used their services. I will henceforth urge POS delegators in other communities to switch to them, and I will use their services myself if the occasion arises: If you need to trust someone with the fate of your fake-decentralized blockchain, then you should at least trust someone with a record of some basic honesty and decency!
There
was pushback. But there was nothing even remotely comparable to the community activism that I saw in Bitcoin during the Fork Wars.
If the Terra community had had that, it still would have gotten steamrolled—thanks to POS. To those who were fighting in the trenches there, it was made abundantly clear that
no matter what they did, Do Kwon and his big-stake backers could do whatever they wanted with the blockchain. But—to put it delicately—let’s just say that much though I respect and admire some of the people I saw opposing the Terra fork, I was painfully conscious of the overall difference from the Bitcoin community!
Bitcoin needs people to stand up and push back.
Now. Propaganda attacks against Bitcoin are rising fast. The push for POS has been converting some significant POW altcoins (other than ETH, which has planned that switch for years), with the apparent objective of strategically isolating Bitcoin; most Bitcoiners don’t seem to care about that, but did you notice how heavily the annoying POS shill in this thread plays that angle? Legislative and regulatory attacks against POW are arriving in the U.S., in the E.U., and elsewhere. The time to get organized and start mounting a serious defense is not
later.
Instead of being lazy and waiting for
someone else to do what I think should be done—instead of idly complaining that others don’t act as I think they should—I should step up and do my part. When others do similarly for their own parts—when Bitcoiners are up in arms over this issue—then Bitcoin will have the resilience that it needs now more than ever.
When the Bitcoin community as a whole actively defends against the “switch to POS” attack as vigorously as they defended Bitcoin in the Fork Wars, then I have full confidence that Bitcoin will prevail.
[ANN] POS is Fork Wars 2.0
[...]
This is an “all hands on-deck” moment.
For the record: I made this forum account, death_wish, as a throwaway so that I could vent my anguish at a very bad moment for me personally. Hey—notwithstanding all those CAPTCHA challenges to prove my humanity, I guess I must be human! At a tumultuous time with much going on behind the scenes, I returned here specifically to speak out against the POS attack on Bitcoin, and on some related topics. Depending on how events play out here, perhaps I may switch names to something with a more appropriate level of professionalism. Maybe.
Disclosures: I have no past or present direct economic interest or investment in POW mining. I never did mining; my involvement in Bitcoin and in some POW altcoins has only been in other ways. Maybe I will get into mining in the future. If so, that will be motivated primarily by the principle of supporting POW decentralization—not primarily motivated by money, other than “I must do break-even or better here.” A high-risk, effort-intensive, hypercompetitive business with high upfront capital investment and razor-thin operating margins is not exactly what I personally enjoy doing. Some people love it—I’m glad they do!
I currently hold some (drastically reduced by financial wreckage) amounts of various POS coins; and I have a long-term holding in a mid-cap POW altcoin that is now planning to switch to POS.
Obviously, I have a financial interest in Bitcoin. But I first came to Bitcoin for idealistic reasons, and I care about Bitcoin for idealistic reasons. The foregoing is motivated accordingly.