Topic: [Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate - page 8. (Read 3828 times)

If you aren't convinced from the OP, I'd advice you to read the entire thread. There have been some noteworthy arguments that I've forgotten to mention in it.

A cooperative interaction between Bitcoin and energy providers will be inevitable, with the energy providers starting to understand their role as a kind of quasi-central bank in the network.


It's the easy debate for anti-Bitcoin trolls who believe that if Bitcoin "dies", all the liquidity will flow to their POS shitcoin.


You don't have to convince them because they simply refuse to understand how important POW is for the world, and Bitcoin as designed. Bitcoin was built to survive against an adversarial environment. Proof of Stake doesn't provide the same level of assurances.

I've never given much credence to market cap when it comes to how "good" a coin is, but in this particular case the PoS coins you named are pretty good as far as altcoins go.  I also noted your point about support for PoS being quite low on bitcointalk (not surprising given bitcoiners tend to prefer PoW).

I've always been a fan of staking coins, and while I do understand OP's point about centralization and so forth, I just don't think it's as powerful an argument against the protocol as it might sound.  That's a gut feeling of mine; if you asked me to give you a considered counterargument, I'd probably have to think for a few days.

On the flip side, there are some PoS coins that are extremely awful.  I'm talking RDD, NAV, Neblio, CURE, and though I hate to say it, PIVX (that one has always had a place in my heart).  And man, NEO is just criminally overlooked.

You got all wrong, buddy. We acknowledge all of those you've said, we aren't daffy. We're just telling you that we don't give a shit. We know how things work and in order to have a properly working decentralized cryptocurrency, we'll have to use PoW. Period.

Over our dead bodies. 

The code doesn't have the traditional 2015 difficulty bomb but there are other measures taken and will be taken before the actual fork so that it becomes impossible for anyone to stay on the old chain without having to go through the code and change it back. I doubt anyone would do that.

Also remember what ethereum foundation did when ETH/ETC split happened. They used their premined ethereum that were doubled by then to dump ETC and crash its price. In fact poloniex (which was one of the biggest altcoin exchanges at the time) caught them and blocked their account at least twice but they successfully crashed its price.
They will do the same to any other split chain.

Another problem that shitcoins like ethereum face is their uncertain future. They have unlimited supply and no use cases apart from scams and money laundering through tokens. This is obviously a hype that can not last for ever. It has fallen 60% over the past 4 years.
Eventually it comes a time when it is too expensive to mine this shitcoin, miners leave and 51% attacks start. If it is already PoS and the foundation controls the network with their premine majority coin, they can easily keep the shitcoin network alive.

You are a troll or a moron.

Sounds harsh but it is essentially true.


I have developed:

 a  45 kwatt solar array
 a 115 kwatt solar array
 a 280 kwatt solar array

Mining BTC (and shit coins) are a huge incentive to develop solar arrays.

Rather than blaming mining for power usage. Simply encourage miners that use solar arrays.

Problem solved on so many levels it is a joke.

I would say really nasty shit to any one that is against properly developed mining via solar arrays.

This is not a debate it is simply trolls and shills for fiat and anti coins.

My disgust at main stream media is truly bigly larger than both of Trumps hand and feet combined.

I really will leave you with this.





this is a coal strip mine.  Basically a subsidy to coal companies as they are not required to fix it.

Simply make them build a solar array and use it to mine.

All pow problems go by by so long farewell

BTW sorry for insulting you , but I get so fucking pissed off whenever I hear or read what you wrote by you or anyone that is anti pow.

It's not a wonder - many broken things work. For example, there are countries with tons of corruption and they stay afloat somehow. Something staying afloat is not a proof of something being good.

How often do we have to repeat to you that it's the logical choice for profit maximization (of coin creators / cryptocurrency backing companies) to use or switch to PoS, because they usually already hold a lot of their own coins?
Be aware that while this is good for them (hence they implement it), it's not good for you, since it's a flawed concept.

Do you really believe all the companies are making products solely for the users' best interest? There's a reason behind most business decision that at first glance appear or are sold as 'for our users'.

Because for PoW coins they have a nice excuse (the climate). When (not if) they'll crack down on Ethereum et al., they will come up with some other excuse, you can bet on that.

Only because everyone does something it doesn't make it good. 99% of people click on 'accept all cookies' and enter their telephone number into every form that asks them. You tell me: is this good security / web browsing practice?

Again, the fact you're so obsessed with 'investing' and 'returns', shows me you (and many others - one more reason PoS is getting popular - everyone wants to 'get rich quick' - they feel 'late to Bitcoin') only see this whole thing as a fiat maximization strategy, you're not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe that's why you don't understand PoW. But it's really not very hard to understand why PoS makes no sense.

what is going to happen is a fork

ASIC miners that want to continue asic mining will use old software that doesnt include the bomb code and just mine as usual making blocks
then those running the new software with the bomb will find they cant mine as its too costly so will just 'stake' instead. thus making two different classes of blocks. thus a divergence of 2 sets of ethereum.

the only reason to delay AGAIN (they already have) is because merchants, exchanges and miners that peg their sidechains of some what importance(to them), EG NFT ledger into block data just wont bother doing so on the PoS variant unless they see benefit in treating the PoS fork as the definitive chain.

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the issue with PoS is that the cost of making a block drops by about 2000x the very minute a PoS block is made and 'validators' see huge profit and then happily sell down the PoS ethereum coin on the markets. so again merchants and exchanges are hesitant to adopt the PoS fork as the defacto 'main net' of ether

what people dont realise is this simple thing..

if it only cost $2 to mine gold in your own back yard using just a spoon and coffee filter and 10minutes of your time. you would not be objecting to sell below $1800, or $900. because you will be happy to sell at any price down to $3, as its still 'profit'

however because gold mining costs over $900 and upto $2k(dependant on region variations of fuel, labour, equipment).. many do refuse to sell below their ultimate cost price. which is a minimum of $900 meaning gold will always resist going below $900.

same is true with PoW because it costs many tens of thousands to mine a bitcoin people will refuse to sell below cost.
the lower the price the less willing people are to sell and the more wiling people are to buy. which creates support levels.

and those that have high cost will buy coins if they are cheaper on the market then their higher cost. meaning with no one willing to sell new coin below the ultimate bottom (atleast $25k using new gen asics) and many countries with higher mining costs just buy instead, thus helping the support lines.

bitcoin has a good underlying value(not price, i actually mean underlying hidden value) of atleast $25k as the ultimate bottom and many support lines above that

.. ok i done some math and if a certain majority of eth users staked.. and due to the length of time each person had to wait before they got their chance to win a block reward. their PoS cost of electric just running 24/7 relaying blocks and staying online would have a net cost of about $2-5 , meaning Eth PoS bottom line value is only a couple dollars. and people would happily sell down to that.

PoS has crappy 'store of value' and have a high 'speculative' price. and many merchants know this and are reluctant to drop the good store of value part of ethereum

Interesting, according to the PoW supporters on this forum.
PoS is so flawed , it is a wonder it works.
PoW has no flaws, anything not wonderful about it is pure fud.


Yet, 

The following is directly opposed to their viewpoint.
The Majority of the Crypto Marketplace is PoS or is moving to PoS
Governments are talking about bans of PoW, not PoS.
Strange their is an increase in blackouts in places where BTC PoW miners reside.

So basically it comes down to the reader ,
believing the PoW supporters are telling the truth and everything the entire rest of the world is saying is pure fud,
or
Realizing the PoW supporters are ignoring the reality they live in due to their compromised reasoning skills.
And the so called fud will end in a worldwide ban of PoW.

The Great thing about this, is even if the answer is not apparent to the reader,
within a few years it will be undeniable even to the conspiracy minded nothing but fud thinkers.

Peace Out and Good Luck to all of you in your crypto investments.

The supply of miners is limited by manufacturing capacity, and it is not trivial to increase manufacturing capacity. Currently, power consumption by the miners is primarily a function of the supply of miners, although the price of bitcoin does influence this.

If there was sufficient supply of miners, the power consumption of the miners would be entirely a function of the price of bitcoin. Increasing mining manufacturing capacity requires substantial long-term investment, so I don't know if there will ever be a sufficiently large supply of miners that power consumption is entirely determined by the price.


You point out another deficiency with PoS. With PoW, it is possible to have a testnet because PoW equipment that has real value can be used to test a PoW coin. However with PoS, nothing of value is needed to "stake" via testnet, therefore someone wanting to mess with the testnet could do so at zero cost. As such, it is not possible to have a PoS testnet.

That's the point. It will be delayed and should be delayed (those who believe in the ETH should understand that). Here is the screenshot from Reddit where Proof of Stake is discussed in August 2015. Now we have March 2022. Almost seven years and the transition is still ongoing. It looks like Coyote Willy is trying to catch this Road Runner for almost seven years! Miners will run, developers will pretend they are switching, "business as usual", I would say.

Even this ridiculous proposal from stwenhao makes more sense, because in this case, miners cannot stop that. The fact that ETH is going to ask miners for their "yes" vote simply means that they are not thinking seriously about switching. And even in case of some switch, I expect things can quickly get out of control, but because of centralization, they could always deploy just one more hard-fork, in the same way as during ETC split. Failed Proof of Stake activation is a good excuse for one more fork, right?

Sure, what I want to say though is: how to ETH developers envision this bomb not getting delayed over and over forever? Miners do have an incentive to keep mining Ether, because it's more profitable than other GPU-mineable coins, simply.
Lack of knowledge and centralization are possible, though.

It's funny: they want to switch to an algorithm such that the miners lose all voting power and they get it instead, but for this transition to happen they completely rely on the miners themselves.
Almost as if it's not that easy to stop PoW miners...... ^^

- Not giving a shit about the coin they are mining (they just want the money)
- Not giving a shit about the future of that coin (they simply switch their GPU rigs to another altcoin to mine)
- Lack of knowledge (they had no idea what they were agreeing with, remember ETH team has a good media team that advertised all these forks that introduced other stuffs that they didn't understand or care about).
- The first bomb was forced on the network in early days that the network was tiny, any subsequent work was in favor of miners (pushed their demise back)
- Centralization...

Because this "bomb" is delayed. Miners can collect profits here and now. They can always pretend that there is some rabbit and that we are going to catch it. But chasing that rabbit is way more profitable than finally catching it and ruining the whole project. Of course there is some used equipment that is sold because of that consensus switch, but this computing power will not be destroyed. It could move to ETC or to other chains, second layers, etc. It will not simply die, because there is no reason to do so. Because of Turing completeness, I also expect some people could attach some difficulty to their staked coins, to have some additional protection. And that is unstoppable, in the same way as soft-forks are. That remaining power could be also used to scrap some bytes from signatures and save fees.

So, that voting is not about "what we want to do right here and right now". It is voting about some kind of "publicly announced direction". So, miners answer that "yes, we want to pretend that we will catch that rabbit" (and we can chase it for years, or expand that race duration in a lot of ways).

This makes me think: why would miners even vote for any type of difficulty bomb at all? Wouldn't they always vote for the chain where the difficulty bomb or other type of fork which makes the currency PoS, is pushed back or 'defused'?

I know you mentioned more common method, but that research specifically utilize network access to perform MITM.


And it's proof such method isn't reliable to determine how people use electricity.

Maybe not from the very start but definitely from early days, that is why they premined their shitcoin and held on to most of it after only dumping to get a couple of million dollars.

In any case the plan also became clear after block 200,000 (Sep-07-2015 ETH is ~3 months old at this point) in the source code after Ice Age hard fork. You may have heard the term "difficulty bomb". It was essentially ensured by the code that at some point it becomes exponentially hard for ETH miners to continue on the PoW chain and to force everyone into submission and accepting PoS since they would have no choice by then.

Nobody thought this could be changed until ETH/ETC split and ETC devs "diffused the bomb". Then since the incompetent ETH devs couldn't come up with the 2.0 version that was supposed to be finished before 2017, they too started "diffusing that bomb" but by only pushing it back. So far there has been 5 hard forks AFAIK that pushed it back (forks between 2017 and 2021). I believe the last fork changed it so that there is no more reward for PoW miners after 2.0 is released without the difficulty bomb but I'm not sure since I don't really follow shitcoin development.

As I said before, if it's such a risk, they would build out infrastructure. That is always the logical choice of what's done if e.g. someone builds a normal factory with traditional heavy machinery. You think they just use the domestic power lines and if they are overloaded they shut down their business?
Again, the logical reaction would be to improve infrastructure, which is always good and gives people work to do & money circulates. It is always done, except apparently when it's not 'company X' in question, but 'Bitcoin'. Not a coincidence. It's about control.




First of all, 'geometrical increase' isn't even a thing. I've never heard of it and there's no clear Wikipedia definition either. I suspect it's a buzzword spread in PoS circles without anyone checking what it even means. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Wikipedia does link me to 'exponential growth', but if you read the definition, it's not the same thing and probably not what you mean, you're meaning to say 'exponential growth'.

Energy consumption won't rise exponentially. That's because difficulty and efficiency advancements kind of cancel each other out. There is no reason for power consumption to grow with a steady Bitcoin price. Of course, if Bitcoin goes 10x, it would make sense for more people to mine and consumption to go 10x, but that's to be expected in a normal business. Like, if you produce 10x more phones, you need 10x the energy - I think that's self-explanatory.

Random number without any link to reality (what even is the ban...).

That's not possible due to the nature of PoW, but this is actually what happens in PoS. As you correctly realize, that's not a good thing.

That's nonsense, I can't believe you honestly believe this. Also you still don't reply to the question why such an ultra-authoritarion government that you envision, wouldn't go after other cryptocurrencies the same way, too.

PoW will not use up all the energy resources.. Gosh. For so much 'research' (I hate this wording - looking up articles on the web is not research - but that's another topic), you should know that Bitcoin's energy usage is negligibly small compared to total energy consumption and crippled by many other industries. Hold your horses - any comparisons with small-GDP countries are pure emotional manipulation and meaningless. Like comparing apples to oranges.

So, if the government is not authoritarian and extreme enough to completely wipe PoS off the surface of the planet by applying the death sentence for using it for instance, why should it have the ability to kill 'underground PoW'?

That's not true. Look up this 200W home miner or this 15W USB miner. Even if it was possible to find people who mine with an S9 (constant 800W load in the home), you cannot spot a 200W load, seriously. Difficulty would adjust accordingly, if large ASICs really weren't able to operate anymore and these little guys would actually become quite profitable.

That would first require billions of people to get a smart meter (most don't have one).
You'll also end up with a shitton of false positives, as I already mentioned: People with electric stoves, pets in terraria, aquarium owners, those that tan at home, ones with a sauna, or a heated pool, literally anyone with higher than average electricity usage would need to be checked manually. That's millions of households - good luck with that.

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Interestingly, many PoS folks claim Ethereum 'always planned to transition to PoS later'.
However, if we look at the Announcement thread and check out the earliest archived 2014 versions of Whitepaper and YellowPaper, there is no mention of this.
It's almost as if the creators noticed they had a ton of those coins in their pockets after a while and decided it would be smart to gain voting power with this 'stake' by switching the algorithm. The plan got more concrete as they realized there was no way to beat Bitcoin (when I first joined Bitcoin, there was still a lot of hope by them of this being possible) and environmental arguments played into their hands.

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Yes, refusing to install a literal wiretap into your home should mostly invalidate this vector.
There is something called 'power analysis' or 'power signature analysis' (that's what franky1 mentioned as well), but it's not nearly good enough to spot someone using a specific device. It can work in very specific circumstances, but it's not like LegendaryK claims, where you get an accurate map of all miners at the push of a button.

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They can; Testnet is running on PoW. However, if it were the case that PoS was better for a test network in which the coins are worthless, then you kind of shot yourself in the foot if you believe based on these facts it would be a suitable algorithm for an altcoin's main network. 'Sure, lets use an algorithm that is well suited for worthless coins for our cryptocurrency!'..
Also, testnet is just for... testing... why should it be super decentralized and whatnot, it's just made for testing Bitcoin applications without losing money.

I finally got through this whole thread, and I would not even claim to understand all of the arguments contained herein.. Furthermore, I have hardly any claim to having much if any technical expertise in terms of the comparing and contrasting of POW to POS, yet I have been learning about bitcoin since about late 2013 - when I first got into it. 

At first, I had a tentative sense that bitcoin was an invention that was adding some kind of value that had never really been accomplished previously, and I was not exactly sure about how bitcoin was accomplishing that, but in some sense bitcoin seemed to provide a kind of hedge against the dollar.. a kind of gold 2.0. 

Yeah.,. I did not make that shit up.  There were already plenty of discussion and presentation of bitcoin as a potential hedge against the dollar and a kind of gold 2.0 in late 2013.  Some  people try to act like earlier people into bitcoin did not know what bitcoin was and everyone thought bitcoin was ONLY for transactions blah blah blah.. Sure, bitcoin had always been known to have multiple use cases, but surely continued and ongoing concerns about the extent to which bitcoin might be able to continue to survive and strive somewhat under-the-radar while gaining adoption and network effects that can take a lot of time to build and for people to get used to these matters.

I find so much nonsense in various claims about POS coins/projects adding any kind of value, or that bitcoin is going to evolve into POS with the passage of time because more and more aspects of bitcoin has developed or entangled with various POS systems.   None of us even need to assert that POS systems are bad because all kinds of them exist all over the world, and various kinds of them have existed way before bitcoin and some of the shitcoins and even status quo powers that be representatives who are currently proclaiming that POS brings various kinds of innovation are not completely wrong in regards to various kinds of innovations that can happen on and through POS systems.. while at the same time, those various POS systems are not bringing anything that is substantially and meaningfully new to the table that is likely even close to being better than bitcoin, and even if some of us might want to argue that they may be better than bitcoin, the better fucking be at least 10x better than bitcoin if they want to get the market to adopt them as superior to bitcoin.

Anyone who might be paying any kind of attention in terms of attempting to understand what bitcoin brings to the table does not even need to get enmeshed with the so many compare and contrast arguments regarding whether POW or POS might be better, because in some sense bitcoin has established itself as being at least 10x better than any kind of POW system that had preceded it... and bitcoin was a paradigm-shifting invention that got so many things adequately and sufficiently correct in order to allow itself to progress into a kind of gravitational pull of value in terms of Metcalfe's law.. and sure, it still might be confusing to many folks regarding the extent to which bitcoin has blowed it out of the park with its more than 13-year old invention .. or at least it has been live for more than 13 years.... and some of the details regarding difficulty adjustment could have been tweaked to have been something else, but those kinds of systems are sufficiently good enough for existing players and new entrants to build upon... creating incentives in which if some folks cannot recognize that value is going to continue to flow into bitcoin and they are distracted by various POS systems that are not really adding much if any value, then they will just need to figure that out later - while some of us have already identified bitcoin's paradigm shifting invention that involves the greatest POW system to date - is likely going to continue to attract value into it because it ends up being the soundest money and the most fair system.. in which anyone can jump on board at any time.. it just costs them more (on a personal level) if they wait longer.

No problem that various POS systems might exist side by side bitcoin and potentially supplement aspects of bitcoin in the event that bitcoin does not end up absorbing them, yet the foundation of value is going to remain bitcoin as a foundational POW system, and any kind of system that strives to displace bitcoin better be at least 10x better.. and there is nothing like that 10x better currently in existence - even though something could evolve, and it would be hard pressed to consider that anything that might displace or sufficiently improve upon bitcoin would be anything other than some other kind of POW system.. not some dumb-ass lack of innovation POS system that largely is convoluted at best and merely replicates various status quo systems that have already been shown to have a lot of defects including the fact that there seems to be no way out of a POS system retaining too much centralization (that bitocin seems to be getting away from.. even if the decentralization might not be perfect in bitcoin but bitcoin systems are likely the most decentralized of any systems that we currently have), and surely some of the unfairnesses of getting in and out and even building upon well being in status quo systems seems to have quite a few improvements with bitcoin..

and POW seems to be the underlying incentive system that drives the whole damned thing.. so anyone so confused about arguing against POW.. seems to be failing/refusing to actually understand what the fuck bitcoin brought to the table and continues to bring.. and who gives a shit if it happens to use electricity along the way.. the benefits way outweigh the cost for anyone who is able to appreciate what is being brought to the table and better get some earlier rather than waiting around for some pump and dump POS system that is only complementing bitcoin at best.

People criticize Proof of Stake, but they cannot even make a test network without staking. For example, signet is very centralized. Developers did nothing to decentralize testnet3 in Proof of Work way as you described, they simply made a centralized network and added even easier Proof of Work than Satoshi did! Still harder than 20 leading zero bits in prenet, but definitely easier than difficulty one on mainnet. So, even Bitcoin developers are testing Proof of Stake and making new signets for new features (check https://ctvsignet.com/ if you don't believe me), guess what will be next. Just look at the mailing list in this month, there are more and more proposals involving signatures and staking. That means, Proof of Stake could win even on Bitcoin!