[danaris]

I've heard a lot about proof-of-stake as being a lesser drain on energy per unit of mining, but I'm still very unclear on—well, many things about PoS, actually, but one in particular stands out:

How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?

My understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchains is still fairly limited, but I'm struggling to see how any system that allows for conversion of computing resources into a saleable commodity can avoid that problem, whether or not it finds a way to avoid the "electricity-consumption-to-money" pipeline.

[22c]

>How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?

I guess the point here is that you could effectively stake on a Raspberry Pi with a 256GB SD card for the next 5 years or so, and you don't need more Raspberry Pis or SD cards to stake higher amounts. The main limiting factor is typically you need to be a full-node, which means syncing the entire blockchain.

If that's not really green enough for you, you can also do delegated staking. One person could run a staking service on their Raspberry Pi for 1,000 people, etc.

[danaris]

...Can you expand on that a little further? I don't really understand what it means "to stake" in this context, or why more RPis (or other compute resources) wouldn't let you mine more/faster.

Or if you have a link to a good resource for explaining how proof-of-stake works in a way that would clarify this, that would also be fantastic.

[22c]

> more RPis (or other compute resources) wouldn't let you mine more/faster.

Essentially, because there is no computationally intensive work being done. Proof-of-Stake is kind of like saying:

"I have 100 of these coins staked in the network that I can't spend, because of my faith in the network, I'd like to validate this other transaction of 10 coins, the network should award me with 1 coin for validating this transaction because I'm being a good validator.".

Another validator has an incentive to prove that those validations are invalid, because if they do, they get the reward instead, and usually an additional fee.

"Not so fast, I have a copy of this ledger as well, and I can see that this transaction could not be possible. I also have 1000 coins staked, so the network should trust me even more than it trusts you! Not only should I get the reward instead, but we should all agree that you'll get no more rewards in future until you clean up your act."

The rest of the validators, along with their stake, then essentially vote on who wins the dispute. All of this is not computationally expensive. The person staking 1000 coins and the person staking 100 coins can do so both on the same hardware, but yet one of them has more "voting" power on the network, and can net more rewards by having more validation throughput.

That's all very over-simplified, but I think it covers the basics.

[danaris]

Thanks for replying, even so late!

If you don't mind, then, can you explain what does allow for staking more coins at a time? That is, if I wanted to increase my rate of mining by 100x in a PoS system, how would I do it?

[22c]

That's simple, you just stake more coins. Staking rewards go back into the stake, so it is compounding (ie. you stake 100, get a reward of 1, you are now staking 101). As long as you don't unstake, your stake will grow over time.

If you want to stake more coins than you have, then you need to acquire coins by other means (ie. buy them off someone who doesn't want to stake them).

Stakers also have an incentive to trade some of their rewards instead of re-staking them, because they want the network to get utilised rather than simply be 100% staked.

[davidgerard]

> How would eliminating all Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies and shifting entirely to Proof-of-Stake eliminate the incentive for miners to monopolize every last bit of computing resources they can?

It absolutely wouldn't - as we see from Proof-of-Space trashing the hard disk market recently.

[22c]

Proof-of-Stake != Proof-of-Space

Also Proof-of-Space != Proof-of-Storage (seems a lot of people are conflating the two in this thread as well).