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by dlubarov 9 days ago
There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural -

- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).

- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.

- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."

- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
1 comments
Ferret7446 7 days ago
The centralization and PoS makes Ethereum unsafe. What's the point of moving from a currency that a government can unilaterally control to a currency that the Ethereum board/stakers can unilaterally control?

The point of PoW is that it resists monopolization unlike PoS.

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exo762 2 days ago
PoW is trivial to control in its' today form. When the network hash power is dominated by three players, you know every address you need to pay a visit.
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dlubarov 7 days ago
The centralized leadership has no hard power though; the community normally goes along with changes they propose because they're normally sensible. If they go rogue, people will stop following their proposals.

In Vitalik's words: "If someone puts a gun to my head and tells me to write a hard-fork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download and install the update and switch to that chain? I see relatively few raised hands. This is called decentralization"

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