[bracketfocus]

What’s with the hate for proof-of-stake? Seems like the hate is directed towards the fact that those have more to stake, benefit more.

Can’t the same argument be made about proof-of-work? Those who have the ability to buy more compute, also benefit more.

Instead of buying GPUs/ASICs for mining you’re buying into the network you’re trying to secure.

[proxynoproxy]

Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age!

Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.

[keeganpoppen]

Bitcoin proof of work is both the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the entire sphere… and i say this as an enjoyer of all the fancy math et al. in the space. it is genuinely a monumental achievement… one whose value… is indeterminate (at best; and worst). and i wouldn’t dare opine on that point, because i’m “from Switzerland” on this. but that it opened a mathemeatical pandora’s box is undeniable. when i read the original Bitcoin paper (about a year after publication) i was suffused with the feeling that something fundamental was “discovered” in a way i’ve only felt a handful of times in my entire life… (and then i spent all my BTC on drugs)

[mistercheph]

+1 blockchains and cryptocurrencies are super interesting and valuable IMO outside of the present speculative lotteries people are playing.

But I suspect even more interesting things than the current applications will come out of the opening of a bridge between pure computation and the material world over the next decades/centuries/millenia.

[everfree]

> Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database.

Proof of Work is much more self-serving than Proof of Stake, as it demands external expenditures to keep itself running. PoS can perform the same job (running a blockchain) without demanding that the world drop what it's doing to contribute electricity to one massive global tragedy of the commons.

Being self-referential is a beneficial feature, not a bug.

> Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc.

That's where Proof of Work ends up, not Proof of Stake. PoW's economies of scale always eventually result in a network controlled by a handful of massive mining operations running at razor-thin margins. The "26 dudes in discord" that people talk about are the CEOs of large mining warehouses with custom chips that make it impossible for home miners to break even.

In contrast, with a well-designed Proof of Stake system, people can contribute by staking at home and running mini-PCs in closets at edge locations. It has the potential to remain a much more grassroots network with less concentration of wealth, if the initial distribution is relatively fair. There is no economy of scale and ideally no concentration of wealth over time - as everyone earns the same percent returns in staking.

[proxynoproxy]

Haha, no. Like in sui where the validators halted and froze? Or Solana where dishonest stalkers rigged the delegated staking auction and stole from other stakers?

What you are repeating is the same PoS nonsense. Get out of here. Eth drove off a cliff when it went PoS. It’s going to zero vs Bitcoin, like every other PoS (or alt) coin. It’s all just PoS cartels. Meanwhile, many people have their “edge” BitAxe earning Bitcoin.

nb: PoS can never really be fairly distributed. It’s printed out of nothing to enrich the founders. The billionaires were dumping Sol on retail last cycle. It can never escape this. Eth was “premined”.

[kinakomochidayo]

Ethereum is doing just fine after going PoS, in fact, it’s much more secure than when it was PoW from a security budget standpoint while achieving less inflation compared to Bitcoin, and will continue to remain secure compared to Bitcoin’s critical security budget issue as block rewards go down. It’s also special compared to other chains in that it started out as PoW for at least 7 years.

Bitcoin has ASIC monopoly and conflicts of interest with core devs connected to companies dipping into mining.

Solana and other chains are VC fueled crap though, I agree.

[proxynoproxy]

And yet, every ETH is worth much less sats today then when it was PoW. Remember the flipping, lol.

All the yields in the world don’t mean nothin’ if the value of the capital is not preserved. To say nothing about “security”. I would argue the complexity introduced by the beacon chain mechanism reduces security… but it’s debatable.

You can keep beating the failing PoS drum or you can actually preserve your capital where other grubby humans can’t mess with it. I know what I’m doing.

[everfree]

ETH price has been performing poorly lately, therefore PoS is "failing"?

That seems like quite the leap in logic to me.

I'd like to mention by the way that Bitcoin has had two egregious bugs that caused network downtime - once in 2010 and again in 2013. Ethereum has had 100% uptime since inception.

Part of this is due to Bitcoin having one reference implementation and Ethereum having five, so it's impossible for the entire network to run into the exact same software bug.

[everfree]

Sui didn't halt because of PoS, it halted because of poor coding practices. Solana isn't rigged because it's PoS, it's rigged because its token is distributed mostly to insiders.

> What you are repeating is the same PoS nonsense. Get out of here.

That's rude and unhelpful.

> Eth drove off a cliff when it went PoS.

ETH is the only PoS token that's been performing relatively poorly lately, and it's still in the #2 spot by market cap. (And #1, surpassing Bitcoin, by most other network metrics).

> The billionaires were dumping Sol on retail last cycle.

Because they gave themselves a bunch of Sol. Fairly distributed PoS coins are not like this.

> Eth was “premined”.

103 million of the current 120 million ETH (89%), you or I or anyone could have bought at the public token presale or mined since then. No one person owns more than 0.25% of the supply. That's hardly "premined".

Compare that to Bitcoin, where Satoshi mined 5% of the supply while the network was little more than a whitepaper and a repo. That's 20x the largest holder of ETH, and it's a real risk that those keys come alive again some time in the future and cause a panic in the markets.

[proxynoproxy]

60% of eth was printed from nothing and sold to insiders on day for Bitcoin!

It’s all awful and inexcusable!

(Edit for 60%)

[everfree]

See my other reply. The coins were not sold to insiders, and your percentage is wrong on top of that.

[throwaway290]

PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.

[proxynoproxy]

It’s more that waste energy allows one way process, which is valuable. Valves. Diodes. One doesn’t complain about waste heat from computation in general, if that computation has value.

And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy. The history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.

[throwaway290]

It's a waste because the energy is not spent creating real value. If energy spend's goal is to make energy spend valuable and nothing else, it's a waste and evolutionary deadend. Your example is wrong because in diodes and valves waste heat is a byproduct of getting real value not the goal (when heating is the goal and provides actual value of people not dying from cold that is again real value).

> And the second part - you won’t understand because you prefer authority to set monetary policy

You will discover that monetary policy is always set by someone one way or another. Choose if you want it to be democratically elected to serve you government or randos who happen to have a bunch of BTC from selling drugs to kids on black market or scamming and ransomwaring people (this is it's biggest use case).

[proxynoproxy]

It’s not wrong, you just don’t like it, don’t get it. It’s ok; you will eventually. Everyone does.

In the scenario I trust the later more than the former! And that’s fine, we have different perspectives.

You wanna shut us down, I want you to ignore us, See the difference?

[throwaway290]

> In the scenario I trust the later more than the former

You made your choice, that's fine, just don't pretend it's virtuous.

[someone235]

If someone has 30% of the stake, he can keep his share forever if he wants to. If someone has 30% of the hash power he has to keep innovating and keep up with the competition to keep his share. This kind of dynamics makes PoW permissionless, since you don't need cooperation from other miners in order of joining the game.

[everfree]

To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum.

To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.

[proxynoproxy]

No, you need to buy from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who printed it from nothing.

Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi

[everfree]

Of course if you want to buy something useful you have to pay someone who created it or someone who is reselling it.

It sounds like you're basically describing the software market, and more broadly, intellectual property in general. When you write software, it creates something using near-zero physical resources and physical effort, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme.

Your description could also apply to all fiat money, too. You're born with zero of it, and you have to buy it from someone who ultimately got it from someone who printed it out of thin air. That doesn't mean all money everywhere is a Ponzi scheme.

Expenditure of real resources isn't an indicator of a product's worth. If it was, Microsoft would be burning coal to power Microsoft Word.

[proxynoproxy]

It’s good that you have identified that PoS and the global fiat financial system are pretty much the same microcosmic scam.

[everfree]

Society is a scam. Everyone else already owns all the good stuff by the time you're born.

Wake me up when you can manufacture a Bitcoin mining ASIC by yourself starting with sticks and rocks.

[tromp]

In summary: PoW is a mechanism for fair coin distribution (of course, fairness still depends on the emission curve), while PoS is not (its creators start with 100% of all coins).

[kinakomochidayo]

No, not all PoS start with the creators having 100% of all coins. See Ethereum.

[proxynoproxy]

Ethereum printed 60% of its tokens day one; sold to insiders. and then mined 40% for the illusion of decentralization.

Close enough. Premined scam. (Edit for 60%)

[tromp]

Ethereum didn't have a "PoS start", as it started out as a (70% premined) PoW coin.

[wmf]

I suspect it's tribalism with layers of rationalizations on top.

[sph]

Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards.

Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost.

Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.

[D13Fd]

With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets

With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.

[kingstnap]

Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity.

Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.

[everfree]

> Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work.

Why is scarcity required to be physical? And if it fundamentally can't work, why does it seem to be working by the metrics?

[D13Fd]

The reality is, if crypto requires a proof of work system that burns energy for nothing, it’s not a system we as a society should be using.

[sph]

> we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels

Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world.

Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores.

It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

[D13Fd]

A proof-of-work system intentionally wastes energy as a means of doing a distributed spreadsheet. That's it.

When you use scale that spreadsheet to track currency, a proof-of-work system wastes massive amounts of energy, by design, all to keep the distributed spreadsheet honest.

Energy is scarce and expensive. Wasting huge amounts of it for a proof-of-work crypto systems drives up the cost of electricity for everyone.

Beyond that, all electricity generation has negative external effects, including carbon release, pollution, or even just wasting space. We are all impacted by those effects. It doesn't matter if the proof-of-work system uses "green" electricity, it's still intentionally wasting massive amounts of electricity and other resources that could be used elsewhere, all just to change values on a spreadsheet.

[mattwilsonn888]

If you cannot describe a way to update a spread sheet with equal security as scaled PoW then your premise that it 'wastes' energy is unfounded.

[proxynoproxy]

And just to think of the energy that you wasted arguing this tired point! It’s about trust.

You don’t see it has value because you trust in authority. For those that don’t trust in authority, they need a proof of work to prove that someone else… did the work. Dont trust, verify.

That no-trust, verify model is valuable to me. It’s a one way valve. Super useful when you can’t trust anyone around you.

Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

[munksbeer]

> Bitcoin is money for enemies. If my enemy and I can transact in an adversarial environment without relying on some subjective truth, this is valuable.

What are you transacting? Ultimately, you're going to be transacting in a real world "thing", rather than just something on the chain. So you haven't actually solved anything, there is still a layer of trust involved. You still rely on your enemy to either make the transaction after you deliver the "thing", or you rely on your enemy to deliver the "thing" after you make the transaction.

Sure, you can stand there with guns to heads, but then you could just do it in cash, no need for bitcoin.

[munksbeer]

> It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

It must feel tiring to you, because you're at an impasse. You clearly believe what you believe, but that doesn't mean you are correct. You could consider, you could be completely incorrect, and wasting enormous amounts of energy on a concept that achieves almost nothing.

Put it this way, if bitcoin disappeared tomorrow, the world wouldn't stutter, it wouldn't even blink. "The unbanked" argument is largely bunkum, a few anecdotes thrown together to create a moral for the bitcoin narrative.

But in the end, it could disappear, and nothing of value would have been lost.

So, there are a small subset of people (like yourself) who value bitcoin. The rest don't. When you look at it from their perspective, it is easy to see why they think burning huge amounts of energy every day for nothing is a waste. An enormous waste.

PS. For what it is worth, I am a long term bitcoin holder (well, since 2017, still relatively late). I wait for the day when I can cash out to retire in style, and I sincerely hope that people keep pretending that it is worth something other than to sell it to the next person for more fiat money.

[proxynoproxy]

“I hate TikTok and all those ByteDance Data Centers must be shut down because it’s a waste and I don’t like it”.

[runeks]

With proof-of-stake, an attacker compromising a majority of private keys results in the attacker taking control of the blockchain. The attacker could publish only empty blocks using this stake majority, and there'd be no way to distinguish these malicious valid blocks from actually useful blocks.

This makes proof-of-stake inherently less secure than proof-of-work because for PoW blockchains, consensus is not affected by compromising private keys.

[bawolff]

Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

For a smaller chain, purchasing a lot of compute sounds easier than hacking everyone's keys. Not to mention if you can hack someone's private key, surely you can hack their server farm

(Fwiw, i think both have a similar level of risk, its just coming from different threats)

[runeks]

> Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

Firstly, no one is offering for sale enough compute to attack e.g. Bitcoin.

Secondly, and more importantly, this would be a temporary attack, during which the blockchain in question is rendered unusable. Once an honest majority of hashing power is reestablished, everything is back to normal. But a compromise of a majority stake is a permanent compromise of a chain. No honest actor can conjure up more stake to gain an advantage over the attacker who now sits on a majority.

[sph]

> Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute.

It’s easier to accumulate a lot of money than to accumulate a lot of hardware and building a nuclear plant to literally outcompete the rest of the world, no? And at that point you are no longer invisible, so the rest of the world could simply decide to ignore your monopolistic contributions to the blockchain altogether and fork.

[everfree]

I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

[proxynoproxy]

You don’t really get how mining pools work. It’s not a monolithic thing. well OK MARA is a proprietary pool, but the rest are made up of people contributing hash. If a state actor took over a pool, we could spin up another quick smart. Hash is fluid. Try that with slashing and stake lockups and others nonsense PoS invents to do a worse job.

[everfree]

Bitcoin is not currently mined by "people", it is mined by large specialized companies with razor-thin margins in warehouses with access to bulk ASIC purchase agreements and incredibly cheap electricity.

The last time a "person" was able to mine Bitcoin at breakeven was around 2017 or so. Maybe 2020 or 2022, if you threw the dice on buying ASICs from shady companies, hired an electrician to install a new circuit, then filled your home office with 10,000W of equipment.

In contrast to stake as an individual, you don't need special access to electricity or agreements or anything. Just buy tokens and run them on a mini-PC that costs less than a grand. The minimums are low due to DVT.

> Try that with slashing and stake lockups

I don't see how slashing is relevant to the conversation.

As for lockups, it's much easier to wait a few days for stake to unlock than to try to sell a bitcoin mining ASIC. It's also less counterparty risk and a much more liquid market.

[proxynoproxy]

https://bitaxe.org/ I guess all those plebs are just imagining mining sats at the edge. Mining isn’t just farms. And farms are not pools. You are regurgitating ETH propaganda that doesn’t match reality.

what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing. The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing. PoS is a Ponzi to dump worthless tokens on you. You can’t escape that.

PoS trends to zero. I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…

[everfree]

One bitaxe costs $145 and runs at about 400GH/s. That's $0.02 per day in gross revenue, before electricity expenditure. It breaks even at $0.05 per kWh, which is an electricity rate so cheap it's impossible to get most places in the world. Mining 20 sats per day - which are worth a tenth of a cent each - is completely meaningless.

Even if you could somehow get completely free electricity, you need to buy 1700 bitaxes at a cost of $240,000 to earn a modest $1k per month, or 5% annual return initially, which dwindles quickly as ASIC technology improves year-over-year. You never reach breakeven.

So the bitaxe is a novelty item. Economically viable mining is indeed just farms now.

> what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing.

Satoshi's coins were printed from running some lines of C he wrote on a desktop computer. That's just as "nothing".

> The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing.

That's not how economics works. See my other reply about how software also comes "from nothing" but is obviously not worth nothing. All intellectual property comes "from nothing", but intellectual property powers the modern economy.

> PoS trends to zero.

Opinion.

> I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…

Cherry-picked timeline.

[runeks]

> [...] than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

No reason to target many people's private keys. Just find a few insecure exchanges — maybe a single exchange is enough, even — that together hold a majority of stake.

[everfree]

The largest single staking entity, Coinbase, currently holds 7.6% of the ETH stake.

[someone235]

Btw, this is one of the reasons they wanted to revert the DaoHack - they didn't want a malicious entity to hold 5% of the stake

[Mistletoe]

It’s just ignorance pure and simple. Proof of stake means you don’t enrich chipmakers and electric companies on the way to your security.

[proxynoproxy]

Nah you just enrich the founders who did nothing except print all the tokens out of nothing. PoS is worthless, it came from nothing, it is worth nothing.