[bracketfocus]

What’s with the hate for proof-of-stake? Seems like the hate is directed towards the fact that those have more to stake, benefit more.

Can’t the same argument be made about proof-of-work? Those who have the ability to buy more compute, also benefit more.

Instead of buying GPUs/ASICs for mining you’re buying into the network you’re trying to secure.

[proxynoproxy]

Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age!

Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.

[keeganpoppen]

Bitcoin proof of work is both the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the entire sphere… and i say this as an enjoyer of all the fancy math et al. in the space. it is genuinely a monumental achievement… one whose value… is indeterminate (at best; and worst). and i wouldn’t dare opine on that point, because i’m “from Switzerland” on this. but that it opened a mathemeatical pandora’s box is undeniable. when i read the original Bitcoin paper (about a year after publication) i was suffused with the feeling that something fundamental was “discovered” in a way i’ve only felt a handful of times in my entire life… (and then i spent all my BTC on drugs)

[everfree]

> Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Proof of Work is much more self-serving than Proof of Stake, as it demands external expenditures to keep itself running. PoS can perform the same job (running a blockchain) without demanding that the world drop what it's doing to contribute electricity to one massive global tragedy of the commons.

Being self-referential is a beneficial feature, not a bug.

> Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc.

That's where Proof of Work ends up, not Proof of Stake. PoW's economies of scale always eventually result in a network controlled by a handful of massive mining operations running at razor-thin margins. The "26 dudes in discord" that people talk about are the CEOs of large mining warehouses with custom chips that make it impossible for home miners to break even.

In contrast, with a well-designed Proof of Stake system, people can contribute by staking at home and running mini-PCs in closets at edge locations. It has the potential to remain a much more grassroots network with less concentration of wealth, if the initial distribution is relatively fair. There is no economy of scale and ideally no concentration of wealth over time - as everyone earns the same percent returns in staking.

[throwaway290]

PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.

[someone235]

If someone has 30% of the stake, he can keep his share forever if he wants to. If someone has 30% of the hash power he has to keep innovating and keep up with the competition to keep his share. This kind of dynamics makes PoW permissionless, since you don't need cooperation from other miners in order of joining the game.

[everfree]

To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum.

To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.

[wmf]

I suspect it's tribalism with layers of rationalizations on top.

[sph]

Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards.

Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost.

Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.

[D13Fd]

With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets

With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.

[runeks]

With proof-of-stake, an attacker compromising a majority of private keys results in the attacker taking control of the blockchain. The attacker could publish only empty blocks using this stake majority, and there'd be no way to distinguish these malicious valid blocks from actually useful blocks.

This makes proof-of-stake inherently less secure than proof-of-work because for PoW blockchains, consensus is not affected by compromising private keys.

[bawolff]

Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

For a smaller chain, purchasing a lot of compute sounds easier than hacking everyone's keys. Not to mention if you can hack someone's private key, surely you can hack their server farm

(Fwiw, i think both have a similar level of risk, its just coming from different threats)

[everfree]

I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

[someone235]

Btw, this is one of the reasons they wanted to revert the DaoHack - they didn't want a malicious entity to hold 5% of the stake

[Mistletoe]

It’s just ignorance pure and simple. Proof of stake means you don’t enrich chipmakers and electric companies on the way to your security.

[proxynoproxy]

Nah you just enrich the founders who did nothing except print all the tokens out of nothing. PoS is worthless, it came from nothing, it is worth nothing.