[lawn]

I tend towards the theory that POS is more centralizing than POW, and the question is will it stay decentralized or end up with one address (or rather one entity) controlling 50%?

With POW a miner needs to continually provide new investments to be competitive, with new and more effective hardware and electricity.

But with POS you can just keep your coins in one place, and it will keep building up with no new investments at all (except running a node, a relatively small cost).

And in POS if someone ever reaches 50%, then it can forever hold that position, and it's essentially game over (baring a drastic hard fork).

It doesn't seem that unlikely that one big exchange will accomplish it.

[pphysch]

More likely, a) a cartel will opaquely control >50% of the network and b) probably already does

Fraudsters have a strong incentive to maintain a patina of integrity (for their given industry)

[godelski]

From a POS point of view it is easier to get people to leave custodial wallets (the biggest holders you see here, like coinbase). BUT people don't for a lot of pretty valid reasons. First is that you won't be staking on ETH2 if you don't have 32 tokens (roughly $50k). (I see this as a pretty centralizing barrier and similar to why people joined mining pools instead of being on their own) The second is that people invest in many coins, so it makes sense to keep everything in a singular location than 20 different wallets. So, convenience.

I honestly have yet to see a system that provides a strong decentralizing force. To be fair, I think this is a really difficult task that people don't really give it it's credit. I mean there's resource momentum and resources make it easier to obtain more resources. The problem with that is that it seem to be outside the control of any cryptocurrency and this makes the issue infinitely more difficult.

[mrits]

From a centralization perspective there isn't much difference between POS and POW. Miners are becoming corporations that can be bought and sold.

[admax88qqq]

Sure there is.

The continued investment required for PoW is the difference.

If a PoW coin ever becomes centralized, it can become decentralized by new parties investing in more hashing power.

If a PoS coin ever becomes centralized, then it stays centralized. You can't just "buy" more stake unless the 51% player agrees to sell you some.

It really seems like PoS is the rich get richer without having to expend any effort. They stake their coins (costing nothing) and get rewards. If you have more coins to stake than others on average, you'll win the block rewards more often than others, increasing your ownership share.

In PoW, because computers are constantly getting faster/more efficient, your existing mining hardware depreciates with time and you have to continue to invest to maintain your dominance.

[charcircuit]

>But with POS you can just keep your coins in one place, and it will keep building up with no new investments at all (except running a node, a relatively small cost).

But everyone else will also be building up which means that your relative size will be the same.

[Fatnino]

Little nitpick: it's 2/3 needed now, not 50%.

If a bad actor misbehaves before controlling 2/3 then their stake gets eroded or even erased as punishment. Even merely being offline can result in stake erosion.

[lawn]

No I mean 50% as in nobody can ever remove you from the 50%.

But to your point, who should decide who the misbehaving actor is? In what situation can you punish the network with only 1/3, as compared to 1/2 as with Bitcoin?

[Fatnino]

The punishment is baked into the protocol I think. If the protocol sees a node trying to create a fork that node gets spanked. I think all actions are signed now.

I don't really know, I just read one article about it this week. I've personally cashed out and checked out a long time ago.