[jcaldas]

There is a far more eco-friendly alternative to proof-of-work (PoW) called proof-of-stake (PoS).

I wonder if a serious discussion will finally begin on moving Bitcoin to PoS. This will certainly have a strong opposition and will likely lead to a fork, i.e. two cryptocurrencies will exist at the same time, call them BTC-PoW and BTC-PoS.

In any case these news are a leap forward in the crypto space. IMO, replacing PoW by PoS is a bit like replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs at home.

[shiado]

Proof of stake is the funniest scam that exists in the crypto space. Vitalik is a fucking genius scammer pulling off what he has with Ethereum. Premine the coin, leverage mining when hash rate is low to make more, then transition to a 'rich get richer' printing scheme when the preminers and miners ponzi'd up their asset as it costs more to acquire for newcomers. Just incredible.

[DickingAround]

It is interesting that people think proof of stake works. If there is no work, there is not time-lock in. It's just the whimsy of the majority at this time. Today's majority can re-write all of history if they feel like it. With proof of work, the past is locked in by the work done to validate it. Under proof of work, if there is just one honest node out there, it's provably correct and you can tell the others are lying. Under proof of stake, it's just the will of the majority.

[shiado]

Some people just can't see the economic absurdity of it. Imagine if the FED announced that future USD would be printed into the accounts of USD holders by balance size, but that you have to have a high initial balance to be eligible and that the poors need to assemble little pools of other poors to split a reward. That's proof of stake as proposed. It's that simple and that stupid.

[Ottolay]

Sounds kind of like how one can grow one's money by investing it in an index fund and sitting on it and how rich people can get richer with no income and a passive investing strategy.

[Valakas]

How is it that PoW is better though? No single individual can mine profitably anyway. You also need to be part of a pool to get some share of the profits.

[broighbrobroigh]

Right now the central bank wills money into existence and then gives it to other banks who already have lots of money. Change your lens and see the similar topologies.

[otterley]

Proof of stake still boils down to availability of resources. With proof of work, it was energy. With proof of stake, it's now energy and materials. If whatever crypto unit is based on proof of stake becomes sufficiently popular, it will eventually approach the incremental price of whatever object is used to build your "stake." Economic theory says that (assuming a competitive market) the selling price of the object should converge upon the incremental cost to produce the object.

Or, to quote Homer Simpson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Yt4p_gJmY

[RealityVoid]

> Economic theory says that (assuming a competitive market) the selling price of the object should converge upon the incremental cost to produce the object.

This does not need to apply always. Does money have the value equal to production cost?

[otterley]

Very few things apply always. Obviously money doesn't, but money is not your garden-variety competitive market like carrots or coal. The only legal suppliers of money are the nation-states that issue it. If you tried to print "money" yourself, it'd most likely be worthless because either nobody would use it (ok, maybe some cryptocurrencies excepted, but for reasons that have more to do with anonymity and a desire to stash illicit savings with a potentially lower probability of forfeiture than anything else), or you'd get in trouble for counterfeiting.

[RealityVoid]

My point is that this is not a hard rule, and using it to prove something about PoW is on shaky ground.

[kolinko]

Ditto land and art.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

You can't produce more land, so there is no marginal cost - and art is literally not competitive - what makes art "art" is that it's unique.

[otterley]

... or, more commonly, that art is protected by copyright.

[kolinko]

What you said is not true in case of PoW, and we know it experimentally already - mining costs follow the price of bitcoin, not the other way around. You can look at the charts yourself.

[otterley]

It makes no sense to try to mine a crypto token if the cost to produce one is greater than its value. Advances in mining technology or the increasing value of crypto can help keep it profitable, but there are diminishing returns to investment in technology, and (one would hope) the value of Bitcoin will eventually stabilize.

[anonporridge]

Vanishingly unlikely. PoS would effectively destroy bitcoin's immutability, which is a huge part of the value proposition. And more importantly, a huge part of it's core principles.

Coins like Ethereum that have already proven that immutability isn't a core principle (DAO fork) are fine moving to PoS.

Most coins don't need their own PoW though. It's likely that we'll end up with one PoW chain and everyone else can periodically checkpoint themselves into bitcoin's immutable blockchain.

[trompetenaccoun]

Ethereum was running on PoW when that happened. If anything you've just made an argument against PoW and miner centralization, where they can just get together and roll back the chain. The same would be possible in Bitcoin and while it hasn't happened yet there, we've had instances of large mining pools trying to censor transactions. A PoS system with sufficient decentralization would actually be more resilient against both these threats than a PoW one where mining is done by ASICs, which means large mining centers as opposed to individuals running an Ethereum node from their homes.

[anonporridge]

This is a reasonable criticism. Let me try to counter.

PoW doesn't protect you from a large enough cabal of power (in Eth's case, developers and whale bag holders) controlling the direction of the chain, or censoring entities they don't like from continuing to contribute.

What it does do is ensure that this large cabal can't erase history that happened. The only reason Ethereum was able to fork was because it was still young, they moved very fast, and there was enough external incentive from all parties to ignore the lost mining costs. And even with all that, Ethereum Classic still exists with all the PoW post DAO hack preserved.

On the other hand, PoS has no cost associated with writing the blockchain as far back as you want. If a majority cabal of stakers agree to rewrite history, they just do it. They can rewrite the chain from the dawn of proof of stake with whatever changes they want and it looks equally valid as the "true chain". No energy intensive hashes needed.

With PoS, you have to compromise a large enough number of stakers to mutate the chain. Very little cost after that.

With PoW, you not only have to compromise the miners, but you need to force them to burn tons of real world energy to catch up to the current block to rewrite the chain. Insanely expensive and effectively impossible the farther back in time you go.

[trompetenaccoun]

Fair point, you'd need more energy to do that in Bitcoin, although I want to stress that by no means could you simply roll back months of PoS Ethereum 2.0 history at the snap of a finger.

The DAO reset was very controversial and people still talk about it years later. Prominent Ethereum devs have repeatedly stated there would not be a second one. This isn't to say it couldn't happen, but it would be a big deal and even more contentious and would lead to even more fallout than the first time, should it ever happen again. So it's not like big Eth holders can just get together and roll back the state at will.

Granted, it's still a concern any way you look at it for certain applications where you want absolute certainty over long periods of time, for example for having an immutable archive of events for future generations. Wouldn't it be great if all that electricity were used to provide a truly reliable historical record for the first time in human history? Bitcoin could be used to preserve news articles, encyclopedias and other such data. For everything else PoS chains seem a lot more practical though. We have to see the pros and cons, for most applications it makes no sense to sacrifice all the advantages good PoS implications bring for absolute long-term immutability.

[anonporridge]

I do see a day when every database that promises immutability periodically checkpoints the root of a hash tree of every piece of data they have into the bitcoin blockchain.

Whether it's the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, or your personal git repo, if there's some piece of data that you may want to be able to prove hasn't been altered, you check it into the blockchain.

[quickthrower2]

What is the use? You can’t recover the data from the hash, and the hash doesn’t prove the data is truthful.

[liquidify]

DAO fork has absolutely nothing to do with PoS. This is nonsense.

[anonporridge]

Actually it did.

> There’s another wrinkle: The Ethereum Foundation is on track to switch to a new consensus mechanism called “proof of stake”, and in that scenario, anyone who owns 14% of all ether will have tremendous control over the future blockchain.

https://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists

[space_rock]

DAO fork showed Ethereum to be centralised similar to a company therefore a database or PoS for the blockchain is a better fit than PoW

[liquidify]

This is nonsensical. PoS is a mechanism for assuring transactions can get added to the block chain securely. It has nothing to do with whether the controlling interests are centralized or not.

[anonporridge]

If you could take control of all the miners, how much would it cost to rewrite the chain?

If you could take control of all the stakers, how much would it cost to rewrite the chain?

Answer this honestly and you'll see why people trust PoW much more than PoS.

[space_rock]

PoS is only suitable for more centralised projects. For Bitcoin it would remove the properties that make the network unique