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I'm still unconvinced about proof of stake. I've never seen a satisfactory answer to what happens if the chosen stakeholders are unwilling or unable to forge th

• DennisP 8y ago
  There's a similar attack in PoW: a 51% attacker can just make empty blocks. Either way, if your attacker is persistent and too dominant to beat, you can fix it with a hard fork. In PoW you change hash functions; you can generally do this only once for each hash implemented in ASICs and then you're down to general-purpose hardware and new functions don't help you. In PoS, you can make a fork that simply eliminates the attacker's stake. You can continue this as many times as necessary. This is, of course, the last-ditch remedy, applicable to any PoS protocol. Researchers do aim for "liveness," and can prove how dominant an attacker has to be to break it.