Topic: What is the drawback of PoS ? - page 4. (Read 1010 times)

You can make this same argument about miners regarding a PoW coin.

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The reason why PoS is inferior to PoW is the ease of going from a coin holder to a miner, and vice versa.

A PoS holder could potentially become a miner, sell their coin via a derivative contract, do something malicious as a miner, and close out their derivative contract. If a PoS miner has a way to do harm to the network, they can do so without any cost to them.

OTOH, a PoW holder would need to purchase mining equipment, and it is not trivial to convert a PoW miner back into the underlying coin quickly. This means that a PoW miner who does something to harm the network would have losses from the value of their mining equipment, and the malicious party would have no way to hedge against these losses.

Thanks for your time tadamichi; I don't currently have the time to argue with LegendaryK on two different threads and go into each of his points one by one (even though I've done so in the past).

This is the most important point he doesn't seem to understand.
Being hard to create a new PoW coin from scratch and getting people to point hashpower at it, is obviously a strength for Bitcoin. Not a downside.

How can it be good if you have a consensus mechanism that allows to freely pump out shitcoin after shitcoin, with no effort or costs? How does that make them valuable? It doesn't. In fact, it makes them less valuable. If there were 10 PoW coins, each with decent hashpower going into them, it could be argued that Bitcoin would have more competition and thus lower value.

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Another point that he doesn't seem to understand about his sacred CoinMarketCap top 10 list, is that while only 2 or 3 coins are PoW, it doesn't mean that there are 7 or 8 PoS coins in there.
Last time I counted, less than half were PoS actually, since there was a token and Tether which has neither consensus mechanism and is centrally issued and controlled.

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Exactly; it's easy and cheap to pump out PoS coins. There literally is no cost. Maybe get a developer to download another coin's codebase off GitHub and change the project name and there you have a new PoS coin. Just like that, it will pump out a block every X minutes, without anyone doing anything. This is the definition of basically Monopoly money. Even if nobody would stake, with no risks and no chances of slashing or anything like that, blocks would be produced and coins would be issued. How can that be a good thing?

Maybe because the creators don't want the coin to be decentralized? FYI, most of the crypto ventures are infested with scummy people.

Mining bans happen in authoritarian states. Not in civilized countries with sensible people in government that knows about carbon taxation :p The problem isn't with the "use", it's about how you "source" your energy. Banning xyz, isn't an answer to climate change.

Let’s just go trough the process of creating a new coin.

If we try to choose PoW, then it’s way harder to produce actual hash power(especially on a new network), than it is to stake some artificial newly created coins. Hash power is limited worldwide, it’s always a competition with Bitcoin indirectly for it, which makes it almost impossible. (But sorry ik you won’t accept actual reasons)

Now what we’re seeing in reality is that many founders don’t go trough the hassle of choosing PoW, they just pick PoS instead(not the only reason).

The irony is that even when they chose PoS for their altcoin, we still have cases where founders and devs just cash out on their altcoin and then go into Bitcoin. Are they cultists too?


I cant wait to see your face, when there’s serious merged mining projects coming out.


We won’t put energy into stopping plans, we’ll just keep mining, as always.


I never claimed this, but idk how knowing someone would matter.


Im not a psychologist, but i appreciate that you have enough faith in me, to reveal your mental state. I can arrange you a session.


Centralization will be your bigger threat, energy can simply be purchased or produced. Ban or no ban, there’s enough corrupt governments that mining will never vanish, even in the most extreme unrealistic scenarios.


If you’re really decentralized you don’t gotta be afraid/ bend over to governments, centralized projects might be concerned and should switch their consensus mechanisms.

I do, Bitcoin decided to scale in layers to stay decentralized. There it outscales cardano by a lot. Lightning has more than 80.000 channels at the moment, each channel can do 500 transactions per second. Which gives it a theoretical troughput of 40.000.000 transactions per second. Someone correct me if I’m wrong or something changed.

If PoW is so unstopable , where are your new coins using it?

Please provide a list of all the new ones created since 2020.  

And what is your plan again to stop the future PoW mining bans, since you claim to know more than the majority of crypto developers.


By the way , here is a list of news articles of what you call my doomsday fears.  
https://www.ft.com/content/8a29b412-348d-4f73-8af4-1f38e69f28cf

Your confusion at how much energy is required to run a node and how much is required to run a warehouse full of ASICS is borderline ignorant.
If there is even 1 hour per day of utility power, it is very easy to store enough power to run a node for days,
ie: eco delta plus => https://us.ecoflow.com/ , and that is even without using solar to completely bypass the grid.

Companies like amazon cloud have backup power systems to keep their stuff running in case of utility power failure.
Your ASICS warehouses draw such an insane amount of power , that trying to have a backup power system for anything over 15 minutes utterly destroys any profit margin.
Which is why you don't see any BTC miners running off nothing but solar in the desert and using batteries to run the other 19 hours of the day when solar is below peak efficiency. They literally can't afford it.
Even being on utility power PoW Miners are in the hole below $28K, so without constant free Venture Capital (which is drying up) to keep them afloat, look for more miners to sell all of their btc before their bankruptcies this fall.  
The only real question is will the BTC PoW miners go broke and death spiral the btc network before the Governments can permaban PoW mining and death spiral the BTC network.  Either way you are going to see BTC in a death spiral , if BTC maintains PoW as it's choice for consensus.


While PoW is awaiting a deathspiral, from bankruptcy or Government Bans,
PoS continues to evolve , not really caring what happens with PoW death.
https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/proof-of-stake-delegated-proof-of-stake-consensus-mechanism

Funny how every sane person can realize the superiority of Proof of Stake, but all a btc cultist can see is fud.  

https://fortune.com/2021/05/27/ethereum-founder-vitalik-buterin-proof-of-stake-environment-carbon/

https://www.stilt.com/blog/2021/10/what-is-cardano/

Want to compare PoW verses PoS transaction fees.
Bitcoin PoW peak transaction fee $54 , while Cardano PoS peak transaction fee of $2.85 .
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-average-transaction-fees-lowest-in-two-years-at-1-04
https://messari.io/asset/cardano/chart/txn-fee-avg

Want to compare transaction performance of PoW BTC against PoS Cardano.
Bitcoin processes 4.6 transactions per second.
Cardano currently processes approximately 250 transactions per second , and is going to increase in the future.
Cardano is over 54 times the transaction capacity of btc.

If after reading the above, you can't understand why PoS is superior to PoW,
well my friend you make an excellent btc cultist, and why should we let reality interfere with your fantasy Delusions.  

Also, keep in mind if you are staking your coins there is usually a cost of time and effort to unstake them. Or if you are using a centralized service there can be other costs.
AND if for wherever reason you are disconnected from the network there may be penalties and so on.
If your mining pool goes offline most mining equipment has the ability to add multiple pools so you don't loose that much.
If your preferred mining pool starts supporting proposals you don't like you can change pools.
And so on.

-Dave

Why not? The whole coin supply is not mined instantly, so you don't need to get more than 10.5 million coins to get 51%. If there is one million mined, then you need only 500k. Another thing is that you don't need even 500k, having a majority of the total trading volume could be sufficient to rule Proof of Stake network. And as far as I know, it happened also on Bitcoin, with some exchanges like MtGox, when they controlled a lot of coins. You can even see such arguments in the mentioned long topic about PoW vs PoS:

A harder thinking man knows the sun, wind, hydro, volcanoes, nuclear reactors, oil, coal, heat, gas won’t vanish overnight worldwide, and doesn’t buy into doomsday hysteria by people who have financial interests to sell inferior, centralized forms of money or political propaganda. And that the network still subsidizes miners with 6,25 Bitcoin(125.000€, can be more if we reach higher levels again) every Block(around 10 minutes) to keep their operations running.

A harder thinking man knows that a flawed consensus mechanism, can’t provide security or consensus, as well as PoW. And that all of these arguments already got debunked objectively, and got silenced in the other thread.

A harder thinking man knows that it’s never smart to base decisions around, how many people are doing something, especially if this decision gives them more power and profits, and is also done to virtue signal to some corrupt politicians.

If your decision is based on doomsday fears, following the herd and debunked assumptions, doesn’t this sound a little more cultist?

// Edit:
Another short question, if PoS is so unstoppable, so where is luna now? How many times was solana down already? What if your hypothetical energy doomsday  brings down cloud severs and 65% of Ethereums nodes?

Proof of Work guarantees nothing, it is merely an overly wasteful way to secure a crypto.
I suggest looking at the mining pool operators , these are the real guardians of the BTC PoW coins,
as all it takes is the top 4 mining pool operators to collude and a 51% attack can occur anytime they wish.
Would the miners switch after the attack, yes, but only after, not before and not in time to stop it.
So all of btc wasted energy security is really only secured by 4 guys, mining pools centralized btc security.
https://www.investopedia.com/tech/are-large-mining-pools-bad-cryptocurrencies/

Many PoS coins have more security coded into their allowance of pools than anything btc has,
and they are more decentralized and more secure because of it.

I suggest looking at the reality of the top 12 crypto coins, and notice that BTC is the only PoW coin.
PoW tech is dead on arrival , as due to energy shortages it is becoming more unsustainable by the day.

Instead of falling into the nonsense of thinking something is flawed in PoS.
Try and decide how will the flaws in PoW be prevented.

1. How will BTC , PoW function, when the rolling blackouts are daily,
and the politicians ban PoW because they need the energy so people can heat / cool their homes, or hospitals have enough power for surgeries.
* China already started a PoW mining ban, Iran just imposed a mining ban even on their licensed BTC miners,
* Most of Europe will be having rolling blackouts in less than 3 months,
* The US is on the verge of the entire southwest & Midwest having rolling backouts.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/bitcoins-intensive-energy-demands-spark-a-crypto-backlash


The time of plenty is ending, and the wastefulness of PoW can not be allowed for much longer.

Now a BTC religious fanatic will just cry fud and ignore the reality that is unfolding,
a thinking man will start to wonder how can PoW survive if the utilities can barely keep the power on.
A thinking man will also realize, that PoS networks can survive with so little energy, that they could function as secure as before and run off laptops with nothing more than solar powered backups.
And if the thinking man thought the above, he realize that is the reason that every smart developer is moving to PoS to avoid the flaws in PoW that can not be fixed.

The only thing left for you to decide is are you a thinking man or a btc cult member and you have the answer to your question.

That's not exactly correct. The PoW mining algorithm ensures that you have to make a dedicated investment that you can't get rid of that easily in order to gain a "vote" in the system. Whether it ends up being decentralized or not depends on a lot of factors like distribution of miners.
If the algorithm alone ensured decentralization then all the altcoins that use PoW and are centralized (like BCH, ETH, BSV, ...) would have been decentralized!

Not exactly though. There was mining pool that never "controlled" the hashrate, they just happen to have a lot of miners connect to their servers who actually went away very quickly when the pool's total hashrate surpassed 51%.

No coin has a trillion market cap. Even bitcoin is at 400B, followed by ETH at 150B and then rest of the shitcoins below 100B

Usually, you just have to gain 50% of the staked coins to disrupt the network. Due to how most of the models work, people stake in groups (or pools). This is where centralization comes.

Well, first of all the largest PoS market cap is in the dozens of billions; not in the trillions.
Even the potentially soon (don't believe so myself) largest market cap coin, Ethereum, is at right around $150 billion. Still a good way off a trillion dollars. On the other hand, that's also a lot of money and still the founders hold more than half of it.

So especially in any coin where the initial supply was not mined, but just allocated by the developers and then sold on the market, there is a high probability that half of it sits in the founders' hands, no matter how valuable it becomes, because that lets them keep all of the decision power.

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Even if it seems practically infeasible, there's no denying that it's always going to be simpler quickly buying and selling some digital tokens (that's what all this is about, right) than buying, setting up, powering, disassembling and selling a ton of hardware that doesn't even exist. So sure; with huge market caps, it becomes expensive to buy 51% of tokens. But the very fact that it's going to be much harder to buy half of the world's SHA256 ASICs automatically makes PoW the logical choice for me.

I also believe this is part of what is right now being discussed in [Megathread] The long-known PoW vs. PoS debate, so opening another thread about the same question was kind of stupid to begin with.

I would argue, that it’s not just easy, but the natural state most PoS chains will develop into, if no further measures are taken.

Let’s take ethereum for example:

In a PoS network only the validators can create new blocks, and thus rake in transaction fees and newly created coins. The more coins you stake, the more rewards you will collect.

There’s a gate on becoming a validator, you will need 32 eth for this, something most people can’t ever reach. To get around this, you will need to get inside staking pools, but they will take parts of the profit and you have to give up self custody and centralized pools will control a huge amount of coins, while getting paid for it. People with 32 eth don’t have this disadvantage, they earn more with less risk.

Then there’s mechanisms like EIP-1559 which burns coins in circulation, that disproportionately favor older holders who don’t move their coins, making their relative stake bigger automatically over time.

Now imagine a combination of burning an amount of coins from people who do transactions, and giving out new coins to a small amount of people that have enough capital to stake and just let their coins sit there. This is the worst combination of deflation + inflation, if you wanna keep the distribution fair and healthy.

Which creates one result: more and more concentration of wealth at the top, hardcoded inside, large holders are disproportionately favored to get more coins automatically over time, while newbies get punished to even use the chain and loose more and more relative stake over time. It’s not really a question if a small group gets 51%, but when.

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And note this is just one example, check out the other thread for a deeper analysis on everything.

The top 10% of fiat whales own 76% of the worlds wealth.

Yes but this was in the early days.
I am assuming a mature system here like a system with a market cap of a trillion. It is not likely that one entity would control half of that, right?

Yes, it happened on Bitcoin in the past, you don't have to take my word on that: there are some topics about it, and there are some traces in the blockchain, that can convince you about that.

Again, you can find some historical signs related to that. Both collecting 51% coin supply and reaching 51% computing power happened on Bitcoin, but we recovered from that. If we would have Proof of Stake, then our coin would be already gone.

In Bitcoin, you have whales, and you have large miners. It is possible to have a large miner with a lot of coins, but because those two functions are clearly separated, getting more coins won't give you more power, unless you consider speculation. Another thing is that some people have 50 BTC coins from the early blocks, but they mined it long time ago on their CPUs. If today they don't own a lot of mining equipment, they cannot just use their past coins to rule Bitcoin, because it is based on Proof of Work, not Proof of Stake, so signing huge amounts is not affecting the chain rules directly.

Look, it depends on how you implement PoS.
If you are staking with coins, then whoever owns 51% of the STAKED coins controls the majority and can disrupt the chain.

ETH counters this with casper ffg and other consensus protocols. In short, all the bad actors will get their ETH slashes(or deleted) until they no longer have the majority  
ETH PoS still has some downsides to it, interested to know? (Hint: read the previous line again. That could happen to someone who wasn't a bad actor but was staking on a faulty client which got exploited :p yea, you will lose your ETH if you are staking on a buggy client if it's used by most people)

Yeah but who is to say that it is easy for a single entity to gain control over a large amount of tokens? I don't quite see that. I actually dont think it is realistic for a single entity to control more than 50% of the currency supply in a large network. We even don't have that in the Fiat world.

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So how do you reply to my challanges?

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Well but if that number is still relatively large, let's say ten thousand then it is all good correct? I mean in Bitcoin it is also the rich people who control more hashing power.

The difference is that with PoS, it is possible for a single entity to control a large percentage of the total supply of tokens, which would give them a lot of voting power. Which is much easier, compared to having control over all the hashing power(or even 50%). Given where we are now, it would require laaaaaarge amount of hardware.

it can still be prevented tho(gaming the system in pos), like Ethereum is using Casper FFG
Read this:
https://medium.com/unitychain/intro-to-casper-ffg-9ed944d98b2d

Have fun  

If it would be only one drawback. There are lots of them, see this long topic: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/megathread-the-long-known-pow-vs-pos-debate-5387588

But to list at least a few of them:
1) Staking require no work at all, you can sign any message you want, so by reaching 51% of the coin supply, you have full control over the coin, forever. In case of Proof of Work, after reaching 51%, you have to keep all miners running, and you start to compete with yourself, so you can gain more by turning off some miners (to reduce your electricity bills).
2) To stake coins, you need to keep your private keys around, you cannot stake without them. In Proof of Work, you can mine on someone else's behalf, and you can also just mine on your address, without keeping your private key on your mining machine.
3) Proof of Work clearly separate miners (those who own equipment) from whales (those who have coins). In Proof of Stake, whales control the network. That means, in Proof of Stake, the whole network can be ruled by some exchange, just because it is popular, and users deposited a lot of coins there.

First of all note that there is no miner in a POS cryptocurrency. Instead, people need to stake their coins.
In a POS cryptocurrency, people with more coins can have more power and since a significant percentage of the coins are usually owned by a few number of people, they can have full control over the network and make the coin centralized.