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Vitalik announced the eventual switch to PoS before he was even finished writing Ethereum, before it was released.

• mrkramer 6y ago
  I didn't read Ethereum whitepaper because I consider it to be a copy of Bitcoin but what was the purpose of POW then? Just to initially mine a distribute coins? Looking at Ethereum whitepaper[1] I only found one mention of proof of stake: "an alternative approach has been proposed called proof of stake, calculating the weight of a node as being proportional to its currency holdings and not computational resources; the discussion of the relative merits of the two approaches is beyond the scope of this paper but it should be noted that both approaches can be used to serve as the backbone of a cryptocurrency." And why Satoshi didn't consider switching Bitcoin to POS if it is so good. [1] https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/ https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
  • everfree 6y ago
    Both didn't start with PoS because it's much more difficult to come up with a practical PoS design than a practical PoW design. I consider Casper CBC to be the first robust PoS design, and it took many years of research for it to developed. Look at peercoin for an example of an early PoS design that was fundamentally flawed. PoW was ready back then, PoS tech was not there yet.