It is very different: The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.
> Anybody can be a miner This is patently false, endgame PoW centralizes mining around 3rd world coal/cheapest possible (stolen?) electricity. The overwhelming majority of the world has been priced out of BTC mining, not that they could get ahold of an ASIC anyways.
Easy, just buy guns, steal some ASICs, steal some coal, and mine away!!!
What do you mean? We totally got what we wanted; we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services. I'm 100% serious here; it's been working fine for quite a number of years. The fiat conversion is pretty noisy but BTC on average goes up in value in fiat terms at a fast pace. BTC is easy to turn it into stuff. No one has ever censored my transactions or asked for ID. Even if you buy something really exp…
> we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services. Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency activity is actually used for trade (as opposed to speculation) that it is a novelty and newsworthy when it actually happens. E.g. We all know about that guy who bought a pizza with BTC. And when Tesla decided to allow purchases via BTC (which they have since backtracked) it was a media sensation a…
> Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency activity is actually used for trade
In reality, an overwhelmingly large percentage of tangible trade is fasciliated by one specific cryptocurrency for one particular umbrella of goods and services that may have something to do with onions.
In practice a PoS network tends to have a participation rate of between 10% and 30%, and the 2-3 largest exchanges collectively tend to own between 10% and 50% of the total supply. And then also in practice most of the staking is performed by a small number of outsourced staking firms, which increases the power concentration even more. And it also makes hardforks more traumatic because your economy and your consensus…
>You can't fork an exchange off of the network without also disrupting every single user that parks funds on that exchange. Anyone who willingly opts into staking on a shady exchange, agreeing to a contract saying that they might be slashed, needs to be prepared to be slashed. On the other hand, any exchange that automatically opts user deposits into staking without notifying them should be criminally liable. That's…
> On the other hand, any exchange that automatically opts user deposits into staking without notifying them should be criminally liable.
I never realized this could even happen. And this is a HUGE problem for PoS if I am understanding this correctly. Because Exchanges don't even settle the transactions that often on chain, and could totally do this without user knowledge and then say they did with someone else's coins. You can't even prove it.
I was fairly into the space in 2014-2016 but stopped paying attention the last few years. It seems like lots of theorized applications actually exist and have a proof-of-concept now. If I’m building a marketplace business in 2021, where I want to be “crypto-first” instead of relying on PayPal and Stripe Connect, where do I start? The marketplace sells access to resources with an off-chain ACL system. It facilitates t…
Realistically, you can't. Unless you want to be a very early adopter, no mainstream businesses are accepting payments in crypto. Techwise, Coinbase has a thing: https://commerce.coinbase.com/ But I've absolutely never seen it in the wild.
To add my experience. I looked at rolling out Coinbase commerce a couple of years ago and then again a couple of months ago. I found their current integrations lacked support or were seemingly abandoned.
Contacting general or merchant support often took over 2 weeks to get a response, which was a deal-breaker for any service that would inevitably impact customers on our end.
I'm mostly talking about governance. The biggest "users" and governance decision makers of any PoS protocol will be regulated financial institutions (e.g. Coinbase) operating on behalf of end users. In theory Joe Schmoe can be a staker from his garage, but in practice the only stakers that matter will be regulated custodians (full disclosure, I am the CEO of a regulated custodian) other than a handful of independent…
How does this view of PoS governance explain how Ethereum protocol governance has operated in reality for the past five years? As far as I can tell, the power held by miners has been minimal; if miners had any significant power at all then the various issuance reductions and now EIP 1559 would not have been accepted nearly so smoothly. So when miners are replaced by PoS validators, the power that PoS validators will…
> "I want to buy coins but the existing hodlers are all colluding to not let me"
This isn't the problem. The problem is, "I want to buy enough coins to stake without being diluted but existing hodlers are all colluding to not let me by charging me a price equal to the total expected returns the staked coins would produce" The emphasized parts are where PoS has trouble. The market forces governing PoS incentivize hodlers rich enough to stake to never allow more stakers to arise -- the act of selling ETH is now also the act of giving up future revenue from keeping it and staking it.
What do you mean? We totally got what we wanted; we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services. I'm 100% serious here; it's been working fine for quite a number of years. The fiat conversion is pretty noisy but BTC on average goes up in value in fiat terms at a fast pace. BTC is easy to turn it into stuff. No one has ever censored my transactions or asked for ID. Even if you buy something really exp…
> we have a deflationary currency we trade for goods and services. Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency activity is actually used for trade (as opposed to speculation) that it is a novelty and newsworthy when it actually happens. E.g. We all know about that guy who bought a pizza with BTC. And when Tesla decided to allow purchases via BTC (which they have since backtracked) it was a media sensation a…
> Such a vanishingly small percentage of cryptocurrency activity is actually used for trade (as opposed to speculation) that it is a novelty and newsworthy when it actually happens.
First, that last part is definitely not true. People do accept Bitcoin and buy things with it, and it’s not newsworthy at all unless it’s a meme-driven electric car company boss doing it. But secondly, why do these percentages actually matter? At what point does my valid use of something become dismissible because another use case which you don’t like gets popular? Do we dismiss people who actually like playing the Pokémon card game because lots of people collect the cards purely for speculation now?
Ethereum 2.0 isn’t expected to be released until 2022, 2023, or 2024* If you’re looking for something that works now, you can take a look at the 3rd most popular cryptocurrency on Coinbase, Stellar Lumens (XLM). It sure is energy efficient. More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/nbqfey/since_co2_e... Sources: *Coinbase, Stakewise
False. PoS Beaconchain is already running, since December 2020, and the merge is expected to happen Q3 2021 or Q1 2022. Sharding is not immediately necessary for Eth2 to scale - we have rollups in the meantime for that.
I went through that as it was happening. Vitalik Buterin & co. have no integrity. Most people should be aware about how they defrauded everybody with the DAO and subsequent fork of Ethereum. But, of course, it has been conveniently sweeped under the rug.
In a PoW chain, Vitalik Buterin can talk, propose, and make patches to an Etherum client, but it means nothing unless miners approve the changes by running the updated client. He is the most important voice in that coin's ecosystem, but miners are the ones who decided to approve the fork. Switching consensus to a different set of rules is entirely within the scope of a PoW system, and it's based on the same mechanism…
I don't see how switching consensus from a proof of work system to proof of stake system "is entirely within the scope of a PoW system". If the majority of the network decides to do that, I understand why that makes it valid, and this is intentionally hyperbolic/don't think proof of stake is properly viewed like this, but to me that reads like "voting in a dictatorship is entirely within the scope of a democratic system". Technically it might be true, but the moment you make that valid democratic decision a decision like that can't happen the same way again.
Paxos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos has existed for more than 30 years. If it were easy or simple to issue a money with distributed signing, it'd have been done before Bitcoin's PoW Difficulty Adjustment Fixed Money Issuance novel art was published. Ethereum has been "about to release PoS" for almost 6 years now and all of the initial critiques (By issuing X units of value, you incentivize ~ https://www.truthco…
> Without mining, less electricity is used in mining, and less silicon is used in mining chips. Are these resources available for extra production? Yes. However, these “non-wasted” resources are offset by other resources which are “wasted”. This would seem to be the main argument of that second article you posted summarizing the economics around PoS. The idea is that if you’re backing your crypto with itself (like in…
What is ethically wrong with using electricity? Or have you skipped a few steps in your argument?