[cocktailpeanuts]

Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.

Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".

However what will actually happen is this "censorship resistance" is what will make the PoS blockchain as a whole get "censored", ironically.

Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries. However Proof of Stake, because it can't be traced easily, the regulators will have to try to stop the entire blockchain as a whole.

Of course, it's impossible to completely stop it, but the governments can do a lot of things in their "anti-decentralized tech playbook" to make sure the adoption never goes mainstream. (See Tor, BitTorrent, etc.)

[nandhinianand]

dammn... now I wanna see the play book.. I can guess some of them, but feel like I am missing some. And I really think centralization has massive systemic bugs that have caused(and continue to cause) a big worrying set of problems.

[atweiden]

> Unlike Proof of Work based blockchains which require seizable factory infrastructure to break even, Proof of Stake doesn't need one.

This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.

> Most Proof of Stake supporters see this as a good thing because it means there's no electricity waste and higher degree of "censorship resistance".

Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:

    Overcoming censorship is not possible in a PoS system, as the censor
    has acquired majority stake and cannot be unseated. As such PoS
    systems are not censorship-resistant and the theory is therefore
    invalid.

If 51% of the stake — even if owned by separate entities — were to deliberately engage in censorship, the general public would have absolutely no recourse. Conversely, in Proof of Work systems, new miners could join the network at any time to challenge the majority miner censor. That is simply impossible under a Proof of Stake model with network censors.

In addition to being vulnerable to total censorship, Proof of Stake consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains. Under adversarial conditions, the PoS chains pos1, pos2, and pos3 cannot be quantitatively ranked by hashing power the way the PoW chains pow1, pow2 and po3 could be, as there is no hashing power in PoS. Instead, there is only “phone-a-friend” consensus, which Vitalik Buterin has euphemistically referred to as “weak subjectivity”.

Jude C. Nelson, who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeston, critiques PoS better than anyone [2]:

    PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between
    community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover
    from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because
    it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork
    quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing
    a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked,
    and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain
    can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners
    simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS,
    block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol
    cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like
    the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any
    recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having
    to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were
    totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and,
    since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're
    being honest about this?).

> Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries.

Because Proof of Stake blockchains can’t even come to consensus under adversarial conditions without human intervention (per JCN), these “blockchains” can actually be understood as distributed append-only ledgers managed by trusted central organizations the membership to which is gated by wealth. It’s highly misleading — even outright deceptive — to promote such systems as being more permissionless than PoW-powered systems like Bitcoin.

“Green-friendliness” was never a design goal of cryptocurrency: creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was.

[1]: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

[cocktailpeanuts]

> This isn’t inherent to PoW consensus. In 2010, Bitcoin was CPU mineable on any ordinary Windows PC. It wasn’t until Bitcoin commanded a significant market value — which wasn’t guaranteed in the slightest — that industrial scale mining operations came into the foray.

This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property. It's not that hard to understand why this would be the case. PoW is powered by competition, and competition begets scale, just like any other industry.

> Your understanding of censorship resistance is gravely mistaken [1]:

Before making this kind of condescending comments, maybe make sure that you are not the one who's misunderstanding what I am saying? I was talking about what many PoS supporters think, not what I thought. Go ahead and re-read what I said.

Their (The PoS supporters) idea is that "because it's much more difficult to find PoS validators than PoW miners because PoW miners need to maintain a factory whereas PoS validators can just hide in their mom's basement and make money, it's more difficult for the governments to regulate PoS than PoW". And my point was that that was an incorrect belief.

My entire post was talking about this false sense of "censorship resistance", basically Pro-PoW and anti-PoS, and you didn't need to lecture me on your superior understanding of PoW. I understand everything you said, but you completely misunderstood my point. If you didn't get that by reading, maybe it's your reading comprehension problem.

[atweiden]

Unfortunately, oweing to the fierce competition in the Bitcoin space, it’s long since become difficult for onlookers to distinguish between an argument of the form “PoW bad, PoS good, insert weakly anti-PoS sentiment as controlled opposition here to end up with a pro-PoS post”, and furtive PoS astroturfing — which has proliferated as of late.

As someone who has long been all too familiar with the various sophistry tactics commonly employed by Bitcoin’s competition, frankly that was my impression of your post. I apologize if I misread your intent.

> This is inherent to the PoW consensus. Satoshi Nakamoto himself even said Bitcoin would end up in data centers because of this property

Bitcoin wouldn’t have ever warranted industrial scale mining operations if not for BTC’s significant price appreciation. But PoW systems were never guaranteed to be commercially successful. It’s perfectly possible for Bitcoin to once again become CPU mineable on ordinary Windows PCs — assuming its market price collapses.

[hirako2000]

I also interpreted the post as arguing PoS is more censorship resistant than PoW.

I regularily receive a silly critic, which I always take the time to debunk, and then often get told "it was joke.. come on".

We live interesting times.

Edit: Not questioning the honesty of the author, the clarification is legit.