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ntoskrnl | 3 years ago
PoW burns a lot of energy, but the algorithm has an elegant simplicity to it. Crucially, the _work_ is impossible to fake.
PoS (very roughly) means that the richest control the network... which seems reasonable. But suppose you decide to rewrite the blockchain to say you're the richest, do you then control the network? It's a circular loop, and defending against those kinds of attacks is dramatically more complex. I've been lightly following development and I get the sense they've been playing whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities and bugs since ~2016. It's hard to have confidence in the result.
pshc|3 years ago
ntoskrnl|3 years ago
Coming back down to earth, this is why ETH requires checkpoints[1], but PoW chains do not[2].
[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
[2]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/75733/why-does-b...
Gigachad|3 years ago