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sennight | 2 years ago
1) PoW is the only way that is actually decentralized. If you want decentralized power over the currency - PoS will never work on a long time horizon, because you'd need some way of representing stake that is just impossible. As far as the whole "waste" complaint: relative to what? I've never seen a comparative study that included the entirety of the existing financial system. The academic papers I have seen complaining about bitcoin were full of comically bad errors: using geolocation to try and pin mining operations to nearest power plants, estimating hashes per watt based on FPGA or first gen ASIC miners, etc.
2) Bitcoin volatility has been going down every year, which makes sense given wider participation. Volatility is obviously different from price.
3) Bitcoin has had the capability for offchain transactions a long time now - using smart contracts with onchain settlement, so this really isn't a real concern any longer.
starttoaster|2 years ago
There are proof systems that are not truly Proof of Work and are also not Proof of Stake. But sure, you're not wrong that proof of stake is not truly decentralized. Anyway, suffice to say I was not talking about Proof of Stake.
But you do bring up some thoughts that I've had previously, with regards to the energy waste in comparison to exactly what. Thanks for reminding me of it.
sennight|2 years ago
Got any examples in mind? Because the only stuff that I can think of besides the two are convoluted Rube Goldberg methods of concealing what is actually PoS. Take any one of the goofy token based protein folding style coins as an example. Unless you are thinking of some kind of premined fedcoin, which is closer to a giftcard than a cryptocurrency.