[plokiju]

> POW currencies are guaranteed to prevent this kind of abuse unless any individual entity is able to get more than 51%. There's an incentive in addition to this because corrupting the integrity of the network would also devalue the currency. Larger networks (like BTC) are harder to do a hostile take over of because it's harder to get that much compute (though mining centralization is a risk).

Couldn't this be re-written as:

> POS currencies are guaranteed to prevent this kind of abuse unless any individual entity is able to get more than 51% of the staked currency. There's an incentive in addition to this because corrupting the integrity of the network would also devalue the currency. Larger networks (like ETH) are harder to do a hostile take over of because it's harder to get that much stake (though validator centralization is a risk).

My (non-expert) interpretation is that staking is just an abstraction of mining, and they are secured by the same incentive system

[gonehome]

This comment above does a better job than I did at explaining why the staking incentive is somewhat flawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810686

[plokiju]

> PoS is closed-membership with a veneer of open-membership, because the means of coin production are tied to owning a coin already. What this means in practice is that no rational coin-owner is going to sell you coins at a fast enough rate that you'll be able to increase your means of coin production

It seems to me like they're arguing that PoW is more egalitarian/decentralized, which may be a fair point. But using the same argument, attackers being forced to buy stake in the open market should make PoS even more secure against 51% attacks than PoW.

I think this is a good post explaining the tradeoffs: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

[jude-]

Why would they need to buy 51% stake? Just buy x% and then knock the remaining staking nodes offline so that less than 2x% stake remains participating. That's often much cheaper.