[lrvick]

There is even -less- evidence this can actually work at large scale without becoming centralized. By design the rich get gradually richer via staking and once enough nodes/coins are controlled by a single party they can change the rules of the network.

Maybe social dynamics work out to avoid this, but humans have a long history of trending towards various forms of plutocracies.

One of the reasons Ethereum forked was to avoid a single party (the DAO thief) controlling far too large a portion of the total ether which has big consequences in a future with PoS.

Are we going to continue fork networks every time one party gets too rich? We could. Unless of course that party is pretending to be many individuals and we can't tell. Hard to stop this without deanonymization and a loss of censorship resistance. To be fair PoW suffers similarly from mining power all clustering in cheap electricity areas and thus players like Bitmain have a scary amount of centralized control.

I am skeptical of PoW long term without much better globally distributed use of renewalable energy. PoS by dropping this anchor to the physical world seems even crazier.

I am however somewhat optimistic about Bram Cohen's "Proof of space and time" in his "Chia" project which attempts to move the PoW problem from proof of expended electricity to proof of burned disk space, which feels inherently greener and easier to geographically distribute.

Or neither of these PoW alternatives work and the lessons learned from them empower as of yet unknown innovations. Exciting times to be sure.

[Nursie]

Greener?

It's not free to manufacture hard drives, in terms of materials, energy, CO2 etc. Proof of space and time merely shifts the pressure away from compute power to storage.

It has the potential to do for the storage market what PoW as done for the graphics card market - pump up prices and move useful tech out of the reach of most consumers.

[lrvick]

Graphics cards and ASICs are high up front cost and ongoing electricity cost that forces them to geographical areas with cheap electricity. Disk based systems are still up front cost, but substantially less cost to operate. Chia style nodes could be very low compute/electricity overhead and could potentially run off raspberry Pis on solar or using spare storage on mobile devices that are already powered on for other uses.

[Nursie]

Yes, but such a system would incentivise the mass acquisition of storage media, pumping up prices, increasong production and having huge environmental consequences.

Proof of storage is just another ecological disaster in the making and I sincerely hope it never takes off.

[moneybadger]

Excuse my ignorance but how are the PoS rich getting richer different than the PoW rich getting richer? Aren't the payouts proportional to the investment for both schemes? And can't Delegated PoS more or less eliminate 51% attacks for PoS?

[tuesdayrain]

The rich get richer either way, but PoW is more biased towards the rich because poor people will lose money mining due to electricity costs. That might not be the case with a staking pool.