31–40 of 111 posts
Surely the amount of energy consumed by this valuable POW would make it potentially worth it when the returns would benefit society, the environment, etc...
Miners almost certainly won't see it that way. "Oh so now you say that I can recoup my capital investment until 12/31/2024? Great, I will happily sign blocks that mark a transition to proof-of-stake." Miners would fork the coin at best. Or, rather, this new proof-of-stake coin would be considered the 'fork'.
Serious design changes should be proposed via the process. For bitcoin, that's BIP [1]. This is just wishful thinking. Someone who proposes a 'ban' and not a design change is not genuinely motivated to supporting a decentralized currency.
Why transition bitcoin at all? Just endorse PoS coins and if they're truly superior then they will take on more value and people will naturally transition. Metcalfe's law is difficult to overcome. However, the value should be apparent in an overall decrease of the network's CAPEX+OPEX.
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/README.mediawiki
Nobody has any right to tell me what kind of math I can on processors I own powered by electricity that I bought.
In both consensus systems, a censor is someone that has amassed 51% of the currently available stake (in PoW stake is mining machines, in PoS it is outstanding tokens).
In proof-of-work systems, a censor can be unseated by censored parties allocating more capital to mining machines until non-censoring parties own 51% of all machines.
In proof-of-stake systems, it is impossible to unseat a censor: since it owns 51% of tokens, it will also owns 51% of newly minted units in perpetuity (assuming it doesn't stop censoring and doesn't run into issues that would end up slashing some of their stake).
This is like saying incandescent light bulbs should be banned. Sure, it’s a sensible thing to say once you have unilaterally-better bulbs already fully commercialized and in mass production. (And this happened with CFLs and then LED bulbs; and then we did ban incandescents, here in Canada and in many other places.) But we’re not at that “fully commercialized and in mass production” inflection point yet with Proof-of-…
It's unlikely that there will be any real attempt to regulate bitcoin while it enables the circumvention of capital controls and reliably brings wealth and investment into rich countries.
It's unlikely that there will be any real attempt to regulate bitcoin while it enables the circumvention of capital controls and reliably brings wealth and investment into rich countries.