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Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with ro

Multiple aspects. PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW while being about 4000x cheaper to run and sustainably decentralized. Sharding (along with rollups) allows for a truly global scale platform - over 100k TPS, potentially 1M, while still running on normal computers in people's homes. PoS is a requirement for sharding, as dividing security under PoW would make each shard too easy to attack. Last but not least, full eth2 turns eth into a positive yield asset, a share in ethereum (real income depends on fees paid by users - ethereum already dominates). https://cryptofees.info/ https://cryptofees.info/ To not overhype, the current launch is really an incentivized testnet only for PoS itself - real ethereum still runs on PoW as it was. It's important because it shows that after long delays eth2 is finally starting to happen, and because consensus itself is like a car that can drive without transporting anything or anyone - not very useful at the moment, but changes required to make it useful are relatively small compared to building the car from the ground up.

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
> PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW Uh, why do you say that? The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW: The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fake that. Well, you can compute two (or more) blocks in parallel, but then you'll spend half of your available CPU (or ASIC nowadays) cycles on each block, thus cutting your speed in half. So the non-malicious competitors on the network will produce more blocks meanwhile because they're not splitting their computation power, and thus your fake blocks will get invalidated because they're on the shorter chain. With PoS on the other hand you can create as many fake blocks as you want and spam them to the network. The only security is the hope that the random network topology arbitrarily results in the double-spending blocks arriving at the targets under attack after the other blocks arrive. But if you run thousands of nodes on the cloud and thus have better network connectivity than the victims you can make your double-spend blocks arrive first at the victims. So: - PoW: Relies on physical limits, you need to have physical hardware and physical energy to conduct an attack. - PoS: Relies on the network connectivity of the attacker being hopefully worse than the connectivity of the non-malicious network. Who can guarantee that? Nobody.
- delaaxe 6y ago
  Thanks for answering questions I’ve had for a long time about POS. Do you have any links to share on the subject?
  - eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
    Google "nothing at stake problem".
- woah 6y ago
  This is completely untrue and has been since 2014. The solution is that validators are "slashed" and lose their tokens if they have been found to sign two blocks at the same height.
  - ishishkin 6y ago
    What has happened in 2014? Is that a time when brain-washing campaign in crypto-media has been started? "Slashing" is not a solution to this problem.
    - woah 6y ago
      Vitalik Buterin came up with a solution for the nothing-at-stake problem: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proo... Also, I'm not sure why you and the other commenter are so argumentative about this. There are several PoS networks out there such as Cosmos, Tezos, etc, holding more than a billion dollars. If there was an issue, someone would have hacked them by now.
      - ishishkin 6y ago
        > Vitalik Buterin came up with a solution for the nothing-at-stake problem Is that a link to an article from a peer reviewed academic journal? > There are several PoS networks out there such as Cosmos, Tezos, etc, holding more than a billion dollars. If there was an issue, someone would have hacked them by now. I'll give you a hint: "slashing" is not a thing that sustains security of these networks.
intothev01d 6y ago
Exactly. As they say, first step is always the hardest. The switch from PoW to PoS was monumental and I'm glad they took the time to execute so well. This is a great step forward for Ethereum

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago

> PoS offers much, much stronger security than PoW Uh, why do you say that? The security of PoS in fact ought to be much LOWER than the security of PoW: The goal of requiring proof of work is that you cannot just send multiple versions of the same transaction into different areas of the network to double-spend your money - because you need to commit work for producing a block, and due to consuming energy you can't fake that. Well, you can compute two (or more) blocks in parallel, but then you'll spend half of your available CPU (or ASIC nowadays) cycles on each block, thus cutting your speed in half. So the non-malicious competitors on the network will produce more blocks meanwhile because they're not splitting their computation power, and thus your fake blocks will get invalidated because they're on the shorter chain. With PoS on the other hand you can create as many fake blocks as you want and spam them to the network. The only security is the hope that the random network topology arbitrarily results in the double-spending blocks arriving at the targets under attack after the other blocks arrive. But if you run thousands of nodes on the cloud and thus have better network connectivity than the victims you can make your double-spend blocks arrive first at the victims. So: - PoW: Relies on physical limits, you need to have physical hardware and physical energy to conduct an attack. - PoS: Relies on the network connectivity of the attacker being hopefully worse than the connectivity of the non-malicious network. Who can guarantee that? Nobody.

delaaxe 6y ago
Thanks for answering questions I’ve had for a long time about POS. Do you have any links to share on the subject?
- eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 6y ago
  Google "nothing at stake problem".
woah 6y ago
This is completely untrue and has been since 2014. The solution is that validators are "slashed" and lose their tokens if they have been found to sign two blocks at the same height.
- ishishkin 6y ago
  What has happened in 2014? Is that a time when brain-washing campaign in crypto-media has been started? "Slashing" is not a solution to this problem.
  - woah 6y ago
    Vitalik Buterin came up with a solution for the nothing-at-stake problem: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proo... Also, I'm not sure why you and the other commenter are so argumentative about this. There are several PoS networks out there such as Cosmos, Tezos, etc, holding more than a billion dollars. If there was an issue, someone would have hacked them by now.
    - ishishkin 6y ago
      > Vitalik Buterin came up with a solution for the nothing-at-stake problem Is that a link to an article from a peer reviewed academic journal? > There are several PoS networks out there such as Cosmos, Tezos, etc, holding more than a billion dollars. If there was an issue, someone would have hacked them by now. I'll give you a hint: "slashing" is not a thing that sustains security of these networks.

intothev01d 6y ago

Exactly. As they say, first step is always the hardest. The switch from PoW to PoS was monumental and I'm glad they took the time to execute so well. This is a great step forward for Ethereum