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Dumb out-of-the-loop question: then what's this talk of Ethereum moving to proof of stake? Whenever someone brings up that PoW is bad, people say Ethereum; when
by lucb1e 6y ago
Dumb out-of-the-loop question: then what's this talk of Ethereum moving to proof of stake? Whenever someone brings up that PoW is bad, people say Ethereum; whenever someone says why PoW, someone says because PoS isn't safe.
- polyomino 6y agoShort answer is it doesn't work now and is not known to be able to work. Much easier to make promises than keep them.
- anythingdude321 6y agoDon't want to duck your question but: the reason this is hard to get a handle on is that it's really complicated. It's not that the premises and protocols themselves are complicated — sure, they're technically sophisticated, but they can be explained simply. The problem lies in that it is very hard to predict the economic consequences and security guarantees of the various consensus mechanisms. Frankly, if Bitcoin hadn't been working flawlessly for the past 12 years very few people would guess that it would work.
- centimeter 6y agoThere are two problems here: The first is that a lot of ethereum talk is just that; hot air with little substance. The second is that PoS has significantly worse security properties than PoW. The core reason is that "changing your mind" (rolling back the blockchain) is free with PoS, except for possible loss of value of the cryptocurrency, whereas it's extremely expensive with PoW. There are all sorts of band-aids you can slap on like ignoring block reorgs of a certain depth, but then you lose properties like network partition tolerance.
- rauljordan2020 6y agoWe shipped ethereum proof of stake December 1st, 2020. There are over 100,000 validators in the network, securing over $6 billion worth of value. This isn't hot air with little substance. EDIT: adding source https://beaconcha.in https://beaconcha.in