| > 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 |
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.