[KirinDave]

This statement is not always true.

May deployed PoW implementations are provably worse than most modern proposals for Proof of Stake. PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies, whereas Proof of Stake fixes the set of actors opens to scrutiny the mechanism for "who gets to mine the next block."

This doesn't mean that proof-of-stake is magical, but it's certainly less prone to issues than Proof of Work. It's also less inundated by religious zeal; PoS proposals face healthy skepticism and more vetting BEFORE they tend to be deployed. PoW is the axiomatic and beloved sacred "nakamoto consensus" in (incorrectly, but to many in the space) a platonic form.

[api]

I have two issues with PoS that I've never seen addressed?

(1) Isn't it Plutocratic? PoW can be too in that capital and energy costs money, but PoS seems to directly reward the largest stakeholders with more stake.

(2) Removing money from circulation is not free. It reduces monetary velocity and has other detrimental effects on the currency's economic system.

[KirinDave]

1. That's a process question. It's quite possible to rotate stakeholders, audit stakeholders, and challenge stakeholders.

2. If a network can hold back some currency, but actually scale to meet global transactional demand, it'll be better in this regard anyways.

[brian_cloutier]

> PoW mining opens selfish mining strategies

This isn't really true. It's true of Bitcoin but selfish mining is an artifact of Bitcoin's sloppy way of estimating how much work is being done, not an artifact of PoW. An enhancement like Bobtail [1] eliminates the incentive to selfishly mine by improving the network's ability to estimate the network hash strength.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.08750

[KirinDave]

I've read it, but my concern with this approach is it actually slows bitcoin down substantally. Bitcoin already can't scale, and moving transactions off-chain to Lightning doesn't really address this concern. What's more, the slower the basis blockchain gets, the more prone Lightning networks are to malicious actors.

[brian_cloutier]

I'll admit I haven't read it for a few months, but I don't remember anything which would cause Bitcoin to slow down. What do you mean?

It does require a larger block header and more network traffic but Bitcoin's scalability is currently limited by politics, not network bandwidth.