Topic: Proof of stake is bad and why bitcoin is the only crypto I would trust (Read 329 times)

You can also add the flaws of POS why they are considered centralized

• Wealth centralization - this means the more coins the holder has the more power he has on the system which can lead to a concentration of wealth and power among small group of people.
• Limited Validator Set - With the limited validator this can lead to centralization
• Limited Participation -   PoS typically requires a certain amount of assets to participate as a validator, which can limit the number of potential participants and lead to centralization.
• Sybil attack Vulnerability - PoS systems is vulnerable to sybil attack, where attacker can create multiple identities to gain control of a large portion of network.
• Higher Barrier to entry -  new participants may have a difficulty participating because of the higher entry requirement to be a validator which leads a centralization among the existing participants.
• Governance Centralization -   PoS systems are often controlled by a small group of individuals or entities, giving them a disproportionate amount of control over the network's governance and decision-making processes.

---

Sources:
https://medium.com/stakin/centralization-of-stake-in-pos-f7ccb8f8254
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-proof-of-stake-invite-centralization
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6d1mca/proof_of_stake_leads_to_centralization_with_worse/

Proof of stake isn't necessarily bad. Its just bad for Bitcoin. PoS would not only centralize Bitcoin but it would take away everything that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. Now for altcoins, sure PoS can work quite well because thats what was envisioned. That does not make every PoS altcoin a scam. But it makes it possible for any PoS to become a scam. But nobody envisioned Bitcoin to be Proof of Stake. And I am strongly against PoS for Bitcoin. It is not an improvement and the only motivation for implementing PoS is the negative impact on the environment as the byproduct of electricity generation. And PoW needs a lot of electricity.

Some people point the finger at mining because it consumes electricity, which pollutes our planet, the more we generate it. But the real problem is the dirty way we generate our electricity, not the amount of electricity miners require.

Agree 100%. Ethereum had a huge pre-mine where 70% of the tokens were given to devs and venture capital insiders.


The other major use case for ethereum, other than the founders openly stating they want it to become the premiere platform for CBDCs--is to further enrich the devs and VC insiders who have dumped their pre-mined coins onto naive retail investors after manipulating the price. Ethereum is the biggest pump and dump scam in crypto. Why this VC scam coin hasn't yet been declared an obvious security and stopped by the SEC remains a mystery, but perhaps the SEC was bribed to remain silent about it. But let's hope strong pressure from the Congress and public pressure will eventually force them to do the right thing.

The day project developers realized that they could make money from creating a coin/token is the day new coins died for me. There is absolutely nothing in the world that could convince me otherwise, all the coins that we see today are ones that were created to make the owner richer. Including but not limited to even BNB which CZ created to make more money for Binance, hence himself.

So, there is absolutely no coin at all that could be considered as legit or decentralized anymore, they are all terrible and should be avoided at all costs. This is not really that much of a trouble of course if you end up with just bitcoin because it doesn't have a team at the top or an owner or project developer like that.

Basically someone who owns or stores Bitcoin crypto assets, especially in large quantities, he will not tell anyone and always recovers his ownership to avoid fraud.
If there is a world billionaire who says that he has adopted a large number of Bitcoins, then believe that he has really kept his assets safely or even used someone else's identity to buy and store these Bitcoin assets so that he is not tracked that he really has adopted Bitcoin. in bulk.
All crypto assets have the opportunity for theft or fraud what else in the future where technology will become more sophisticated and it will be easy for a hacker to be able to hack into investors' wallets and steal them.
One of the most effective ways is not to let other people know about large amounts of crypto adoption information.

It's true there's no reason fiat money to be involved with crypto, but they wouldn't care with those criticism and will try to make their CBDC looks new and claim to be have many improvement from the old fiat money. Many Average Joe doesn't really understand and not doing any deep research, so they will support the idea of this CBDC, again you can't force the government to not create CBDC.

Sure a true Bitcoin maximalist will hold most of their funds in Bitcoin, but it doesn't make them to not use fiat money or CBDC (if it's already adopted).

doesnt need big money to derail ethereum

ethereum is the so called "biggest" PoS coin, right?
meant to have had the most independent markets and utility and soo many different subnetworks of utility, right?

yet even basic overview of ethereum market shows it has little to none of its own community..
if it had its own massive utility separate from bitcoin. it would have its own culture and sentiment where people would view ethereum market as a separate independent price discovery market, unlike bitcoin.

yet it 99.9% shadow traces bitcoins market. or more precisely bitcoins arbitrage is majority of all ethereums movements.

the markets wiggles of price movements although at a different value price ratio. wiggle in the same pattern

so here is the 5 day chart of both btc and eth

can you tell which one is ethereum

what about this last week(and ill add more hints this time)

99% of the time, the dev teams of such Proof of Stake coins are so greedy that they try to get the lion's share early, just like that. Before the coins even gets to the exchanges. Most of the time it hardly works for them though. Exchanges (the less ethical ones) as I mentioned get far less of these kind of rug-pulls, but when they do, they usually identify those coins accurately and milk them out.

Who are rich enough to derail Proof of Stake PoS coins?

Founder teams
Developer teams
Exchanges. Newbies can surprise if they know exchanges derail PoS coins a lot with their staking pools. The fiasco of FTX exchange, Terra Foundation Guard, Celsius, Three Arrows Capital and some big projects, ventures in 2022 are very red flags for PoS coins and risk of their centralized powers in operations of exchanges.

With centralized power, Terra team successfully biased the vote for community to reach a solution for their fork from Terra to Terra Classic and now we have LUNA and LUNC.

Even big altcoins like Ethereum and BNB (Binance token) are centralized too.

Undoubtedly the only one cryptocurrency that has decentralized network is Bitcoin.

I think my main issue with "Proof of Stake" is this :

People with a lot of money, can derail a whole project ...if they use that toilet paper (Fiat) to get a big enough Stake.. to influence the outcome of decisions that are made with that project.

It gives Fiat rich people or governments an easy opportunity to attack that technology. It is way more difficult to convert FIAT into a whole mining operation and to pay for the electricity to get enough hashing power to do the same with Bitcoin. 

CBDCs has all the drawbacks of fiat money, which is what bitcoin was made to avoid. The main drawback being governments can print an infinite supply of government digital coins which devalues your fiat holdings over time, CBDCs are highly centralized and controlled by the whims of a handful of politicians or bureaucrats, among other problems. Money printing is the biggest source of massive inflation in the US in recent years. If the major use case of ethereum is just to be a platform for CBDCs then why the hell would anyone want to use it?  Just stick with the fiat money system you have no reason to be involved with anything crypto.

It's scary, but I guess everyone are forced to use it because CBDC will replace paper fiat.

To be fair, I think CBDC is better than unregulated stable coin e.g. USDT, USDC, BUSD etc since the government might have an insurance funds to recover CBDC losses from error, hack or any other thing.

Both of them are centralized, KYC, and have same value, but CBDC can offer many better features than stable coin.

But what if i told you the CBDC origins is in the "hyperledger" projects. by which even bitcoin blockstream devs have been part of(aswell as the ethereum elites)

where the terms "layer 2" buzzword origined from hyperledger. not the open crypto community
yep bitcoin is being the sandbox test of many CBDC future code.. in regards to its mainnet(reserves chain) and subnetwork(user payments) network

but governments dont want to use existing mainnets as their base reserves platform. they just want to take working open code. and adopt it into their own new genesis beginning networks

---

as for PoS
its fatal flaws are these 2 things

a. lack of underlying cost of coin creations means lack of underlying value. thus the market price speculates at a higher multiple compared to its small value(and can/will correct just as massively)
meaning value security is null and void

b. thresholds of being validators ends up pooling/syndicating the small shrimp amount holders. into large custodians. the shrimp then wont want to oppose their custodian because if they do oppose it. their stake is gone. thus they end up foolishly accepting whatever their custodian proposes, even if its a bad idea

"Scalability"

If you want that, you should be running your own blockchain using Hyperledger Fabric which uses its own consensus mechanism which is faster than PoS/PoW (Kafka orderers) and thus the most scalable and risk-free in terms of economics (there are no economics!), but it provides 0% decentralized trust.

PoS in large coins has a bigger problem; it pretends to be trustworthy, but the large exchanges and pools who are the top stakers are not, so the whole crypto just provides false trust.

sometimes something that has ownership rights or someone who is responsible will surely be trusted and in the interest of many people.
but what happens in the world of crypto and bitcoin or digital assets, on the contrary, those with ownership rights are very prone to fraud.
then bitcoin is indeed the right choice in choosing digital assets to invest.
but I hope that other crypto assets will also be trusted in the future and there will be no fraud.

Joseph Lubin is one of the founding members of ethereum. His company Consensys runs Infura which provides the main node service for ethereum.
Lubin praises government CBDCs and actually wants CBDCs to run on the ethereum blockchain in the US and elsewhere.

From Lubin and his Consensys website:


To me this is scary but if you like government CBDCs then ethereum is the blockchain for you.

While I do support proof-of-work and agree that proof-of-stake is an inferior mechanism, I didn't think of the easy-to-raise supply as a reason. I guess I thought it was more limited than central bank policies for fiat, assuming that there was a predetermined set condition of how much is accumulated under which conditions with proof-of-stake, but after this thread, I read more and realized that it's technically true but the policies are way more flexible than I thought. To me, a big point against proof-of-stake was ideological: it's literally a system that makes the rich even richer and doesn't give anyone else a decent chance. Mining equipment and maintenance costs money, but at least we have separate categories of miners and richest hodlers, and how rich you are doesn't directly determine your further profit. I am happy that Ethereum is finally not proof-of-work, though, as the GPU market was crazy when people used them for mining ETH.

Using these two very unrelated topics together (PoS and bitcoin) is pretty weird!

Altcoins "imploding" is not always because they were "scams". They die only because they are useless.

Then you do not know what Ethereum is!
Ethereum is a centralized shitcoin with a gigantic premine and a mutable blockchain where they can roll back blocks if they wanted to and a severely flawed protocol that can easily be exploited. The only usage it has is creating tokens to scam people with.
You see, none of these things had anything to do with PoS! Ethereum switching to PoS was adding yet another flaw on top of their pile...

The only reason this shitcoin got any big was 2 part:
1. It had a pretty strong pumping team with millions of dollars to waste.
2. It provided a fantastic environment to scam people very easily and without any cost which also attracted a lot of gamblers who invested in those scams.

In addition to this anyone holding more than enough tokens in stakes can control the fate of that token in terms of pricing. It's easy to say that these systems are well planned etc but they could cause the problems in long term. We have seen this happening with xrp in the initial days and now with ETH same thing is happening. In fact many project owners will distribute only some amount of token for staking thus keeping the large chunk at their wallets for later usage. I never liked PoS. Bitcoin is just so perfect in all the senses. I love to see the PoW because it is real, there is energy involved, there is actual hard and smart work is underway which makes it perfect.

The more reason why bitcoin can never turn to proof of stake is because of centralization, anything that has to do with central authorities bitcoin cannot cope or allign itself together with such system, the more reason also that has presented bitcoin as the only decentralized and most preferred digital currency, if people truly understand the process that entails proof of stake they wouldn't have recommended it at all as a suggestion for bitcoin to turn into because the decentralization is part of what's being enjoyed through bitcoin.

I can't remember the original argument I'd ever heard but it went along the lines of "what's to stake if there really isn't anything to stake?" and that hit home for me. When you behave badly on Bitcoin, or you want to continue mining on a fork (accidental or deliberate) you risk everything from a financial perspective. It simply costs too much to mine on a fork, you'll always want to mine on the winning chain.

PoS? You can mine on 100 forks, it costs you nothing. Nothing is at stake.

Why nobody talks about energy consumption for PoW or PoS doesn't matter, because the oil lobbyist is using it to cover the energy left in the atmosphere (oil, gas....). Of course, this is not the only reason but it is a good reason.

One of the main reasons it's very bad is that unlike Bitcoin PoW you can't be part of full network consensus if you don't have alot of  money or the required amount of money (which most participants typically can't afford) ... Better still, you can't take part in proper Governance and/or Consensus if you don't have alot of money, and this kind of make power reside in the hands of few like your number 4 point suggest. That is the typical corruption you see in third world countries... The kind of 3rd world corruption that force the subjects to rise up against ruling elites who allowed or invented such corrupt way of governance.


In regards to your number 3 point, solving problems or generating money/value requires energy, but PoS people don't seem to like that too much. They seem to want a system that make them alot of money without working hard or consuming the amount of energy that is needed to make the money. They can't escape this unless they build devices that use energy efficiently without compromising on hardwork

If only these people didn't create their own coins and just continue to use bitcoins and support it or make some development to improve its transactions, we would have not suffered any losses in the market but the way they counter the popularity and the spread of its implementation, they create huge numbers of altcoins which ruin the idea why bitcoin has been created and now their true motive has appeared and they only added problem than working solutions to counter the bank's manipulations of our money. If only Satoshi Nakamoto showed himself and clarify all the doubts pertaining to the control of bitcoins, it could change the course of crypto history and I'm pretty sure it will be a good result if he really intends it and he is truthful about what he says in his whitepaper.

Well I liked ethereum a lot better when it was using PoW. It's pretty hard to talk about PoS without mentioning ethereum since it is the biggest crypto that uses PoS. I think most people are thinking PoS must be better just because it seems to be the latest technology that improves upon the older protocol but without really understanding the drawbacks.

Proof of stake does have some advantages such as energy use. Yes it uses a lot less energy than proof of work, but so do bicycles.
But does that mean we should all stop driving our cars and just ride around in bicycles?


Not familiar with that problem. Interesting.


This is a huge one and this alone should tell you all you need to know about ethereum PoS--it is pure garbage.


Seems not a day went by in recent years where you didn't hear about another ethereum smart contract getting hacked and drained of its funds.
Smart contracts should be called dumb contracts because they have been nothing but a security nightmare.

Your arguments are not directed at PoS, they are directed at Ethereum, and they are not good enough to convince an Ethereum fan who has some understanding of crypto protocols.

If you want to attack PoS, you could point out that it has the unsolved and maybe unsolvable "nothing at stake problem", which means that it's cheaper to attack PoS blockchains than PoW blockchains. Plus there's a lot of other problems, like encouraging people to store their money in pools, which means trust.

And if you want to attack Eth, you can point out that its ecosystem is useless, it doesn't have any solutions for real life, it's all about creating and swapping worthless tokens that have no utility. Originally ETH was promising that people would be selling goods and services through smart contracts, and this promise never materialized, because a) it has too many downsides and b) people are fine with how things are.

No did you?


Uh yes I have done a lot of research which leads me to conclude my opinion that proof of stake is garbage. It seems you cannot counter my statements so you resort to personal attacks. Which just proves my point. If you feel otherwise then you have to provide some credible reasons to support your position instead of personal attacks which to me is a sign of your desperation.

Did you experience something recently to hate and make it your mission to defame ETH?

I hope you have researched a lot to back your claim because, from what I see, you are hurt and probably invested a lot in a project that makes you hate the technology but not the people who have planned the scams, etc.

That is PoS, what I know more about it is that it is centralized, unlike PoW. But if you want to know more about PoW versus PoS, you can read the difference from this thread:

[Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate

PoS is also a means crypto is moving more towards ways the government will find it easier to have more control.

Another thing I believe is very bad about Proof of Stake...is the staking.

You are giving up your private keys to stake your coins to a staking pool that you have to trust to give your keys back when you want to unstake. So much for self custody. Why anyone would want to stake ethereum is beyond me, especially after the collapse of companies like Blockfi and Celsius where customers lost millions worth of their staked funds. I would not be able to sleep at night with my funds staked in such a way. Not your keys not your coins. This just totally goes against the concept of decentralization IMO.

It may be possible to stake ethereum without using a staking pool and keep your private keys but from what I understand this is very difficult, and beyond the technical ability of the average person.



That may be true but as a long term investment I would not feel comfortable having my funds in anything other than bitcoin at this point. After the collapse of  FTX and others it appears much stronger regulations are on the way soon in the US that would officially classify ethereum and most every other altcoin as a security. Which could then likely cause the price of eth to drop like a stone. Proof of stake is still a new and unproven concept and I do not want to be the guinea pig to see how it plays out in the future.

Can you backup your claim with some verified statistical data?
When if comes to crypto scams, the blockchain doesn't matter. Crypto scams can exist in a proof-of-stake environment as well as a proof-of-work environment. What matters the most for all scams is how the scammer would deceive a bunch of naive people to trust him and put their money in a fake project.
Anyway, there's no need to praise PoF and shit on PoS. There have been hundreds of posts around the forum about this topic and I don't think that you are adding anything new to the conversation. Time will tell whether or not Proof-of-Stake has a future in the crypto world.

1. I don't think that's entirely accurate. Just like Bitcoin's PoW, Ethereum has a fixed reward per block and a target block time. On average over a long period of time, it should hit these averages.
2. Bad actors using/building on a non-restricted blockchain doesn't necessarily mean that the mainnet blockchain itself is a scam.
3. No argument on unregistered securities. Though just because it takes no effort to generate coins, doesn't mean that it's not economically sound in the long term. Time will tell!
4. Well, you don't know that for sure. Miners have a lot of power and to say that they are a large and distributed group of people at this point would be quite naive. Maybe there are more groups and it doesn't come under one group or founder, but I definitely would not say that "elitisim" doesn't exist in Bitcoin.

Proof of Stake is another consensus method. It's not terrible in the way Ethereum has implemented it, time will tell if it can keep up with Bitcoin though.

So what?? Majority of the financial scams and hacking incidents involve bitcoin. Does it matter? It's a very wrong statement and unrelated to the subject of the thread.

POS is definitely more centralized in nature than POW coins. Also POW coins have a production cost unlike POS coins. But that doesn't make ETH look bad. It is a steller performer since the day it was launched.

If you don't trust ETH, that's fine! But ETH is equally a great investment like bitcoin.

I need to disagree

If proof of stake has greater scalability, faster operations and cheap, we wouldn't see any people keep complaining about ETH transaction is slow and the fees is high. There's no improvement from Vitalik Butterin to solve the scalability issue, they're not creating a second layer and other thing. He seems to be agree if ETH is using the other centralized network e.g. BSC, polygon etc that can't be controlled by them.

Any crypto is flexible because it can be transferred to any address regardless which city or country of the holder is.

Talking about energy efficient doesn't really that important since any business will use energy, the bigger the business/project = the bigger the energy consumption.

Proof of stake has its own advantages too like greater scalibility, flexibility, faster operations, cheap, energy efficient, etc.
Its good that we got eth on PoS and btc on PoW.
Let the users decide what they want to be on. Everyone got freedom to choose between the two.

---

What are you talking about ? ETH has merged to PoS only a few months ago late 2022 (around September 2022 IIRC). Before that eth was on PoW, your point is baseless with one-sided opinion.

In short, centralized assets will never be more secure than decentralized assets. If you enter the market looking for a coin to use, multifunctional, safe, secure, and not controlled by anyone, then bitcoin is a perfect choice. But if you are here to invest for profit, invest in any coin you think can give you profit. ETH is not as secure as bitcoin, but those who invested in it early have also received returns that are not inferior to bitcoin, and in recent years, ETH has provided a better ROI than bitcoin. The decision is up to each person and depends on each person's needs. Let's wait and see next bull season, which coin offers better returns.

Why I think proof of stake is bad and bitcoin is the only true decentralized crypto. Everything else is a scam as we have seen with so many major altcoins imploding over the years. Anyone else agree?

1. Proof of stake tokens such as ethereum can be generated out of thin air in unlimited amounts. The creators can give themselves as much as they want and dump it onto the market whenever they want. Proof of stake is no better than the fiat money system where money can be printed by the central bank in unlimited amounts.

2. As we have seen over the years maybe 90 to 95% of crytpo scams have been perpetrated on the ethereum blockchain.

3. That is why proof of work is so much better. It takes a lot of work and effort to mine the bitcoins. Bitcoin cannot be simply generated out of thin air like ethereum and other sh*tcoins. Ethereum and 99% of altcoins are unregistered securities. The SEC and CFTC have both stated bitcoin is the only digital asset recognized as a commodity in the United States. Everything else are unregistered securities.

4. Bitcoin is the only crypto I can think of that doesn't have a leader or small group of people controlling it, which makes bitcoin perhaps the only digital asset that is really trustless. Ethereum has Vitalik Buterin, Cardano has Charles Hoskinson, Terra Luna had Do Kwon, etc. You have to trust that these people will not one day decide to steal all your money and run.

There are probably many other reasons why I believe proof of stake is terrible but these are a few I can think of right now.