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PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes over / subverts / influences the li

PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes over / subverts / influences the limited number of stakeholders, then it is game over. With PoW the state can influence the existing miners, but cannot prevent new independent miners to pop up and counter act.

CarlBeek 5y ago
There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...) State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is comparatively easy. In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably require social consensus and a hard fork
- micropresident 5y ago
  Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?
- eeegnu 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
  - meowkit 5y ago
    But that doesn’t mean all of those validators will be in the same voting committee, or that any of them will be selected to propose a new block. Many of you in this thread need to read up on how the staking is designed to work.
    - eeegnu 5y ago
      The point is that the parent comment conflated validators with people, whereas one person or entity can control many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim that an attack needs to compromise so many individual people rather than potentially just a few entities that control vast quantities of eth.
- fvdessen 5y ago
  Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and can make laws that affect many people. With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.
pamplemoose 5y ago
or you can fork and remove the bad actors, burning all their coins. good luck with their next attack. in contrast, you can't burn an attackers fleet of miners
- micropresident 5y ago
  What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs? Slashing stake is significantly more arbitrary. You basically need to reset the coin's ledger in order for it to make any sense.
  - nootropicat 5y ago
    >What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs It's only possible once, and this move is so obviously predictable any determined attacker is going to have gpus ready.
    - micropresident 5y ago
      Repeating "ultrasound money" memes. That specific meme has to do with state level attackers blowing up mining farms. It has nothing to do with changing issuance. And the entire premise is that an external force comes in and tries to co-opt it. That isn't relevant to the conversation of stakers having misaligned incentives to change the rules. The most a state level actor can do is censor transactions if they were to take over a chain. With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers run the validators everyone is using. You already saw this with the steemit takeover. In PoW coins, the miners and validating economic nodes are two separate groups. Watch what happens when exchanges slip over to Eth2 nodes and call it Eth. During the BCHA/BCH split the exchanges were the ones that decided the ticker. Most users have ZERO CLUE about what happened. They went on their with their lives calling the fork the exchanges chose BCH. Once exchanges are validators there is no bulwark against changes.
      - fvdessen 5y ago
nootropicat 5y ago
The exact opposite is true. It's always possible for a state to obtain enough mining hardware - PoW is hopelessly insecure. It also has infinite economies of scale inevitably leading to absolute centralization even absent state attack. Once majority of hashrate is achieved, profits nearly double as minority can be censored. That's the inevitable end state of PoW. PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require buying up tokens on an impossible scale, and in the case an attack somehow succeeds a fork can be created that deletes the hostile stake. This can be repeated indefinitely. That's impossible in PoW more than once, once a gpu PoW gets attacked it's over. PoS has no economies of scale, so contrary to PoW it can stay decentralized forever. There's no way to make existing stakers unprofitable by adding more nodes, like it's possible with mining hardware in PoW. PoW is also vulnerable to takeover of existing miners because mining at scale requires big industrial warehouses with industrial power owned by registered companies. Impossible to hide. PoS can run on anonymous home nodes. In every single security and decentralization aspect PoW is hopelessly inferior to PoS.
- fvdessen 5y ago
  > PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require buying up tokens on an impossible scale You don't need to buy the tokens. You make laws which the stakers have to follow, otherwise you seize their tokens for breaking the law. You can also use electronic warfare to steal the tokens of stakers outside your juridiction. If you are doing this as a big country such as USA/China, then other stakers might be tempted not to fork because a compromised system that works with those countries might still be more valuable than an uncompromised system that has not access to a large part of the world economy.
  - nootropicat 5y ago
    This is only enforceable against miners, not stakers. Stakers can trivially hide, miners can't. >otherwise you seize their tokens for breaking the law. that's not possible, there's no mechanism to seize eth. What can be trivially seized, though, are physical miners.
- swensel 5y ago
hajile 5y ago
Don't forget the billionaire problem either. Proof of Stake as setup gives all the power to people/companies who have large amounts of liquid assets. Consider Amazon, they keep a rolling window of cash in-between when an item is sold and when the seller gets paid. This effectively gives them billions in interest-free capital. If this were Etherium, it would translate into huge amounts of voting power. Likewise, if/when people deposit their etherium into banks, those banks can then leverage that "free" capital to grab huge voting stakes that wouldn't otherwise exist (because no person living paycheck to paycheck has the equivalent of 100k sitting around). This leverage simply does not exist with proof of work.

CarlBeek 5y ago

There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...) State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is comparatively easy. In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably require social consensus and a hard fork

micropresident 5y ago
Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?
eeegnu 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
- meowkit 5y ago
  But that doesn’t mean all of those validators will be in the same voting committee, or that any of them will be selected to propose a new block. Many of you in this thread need to read up on how the staking is designed to work.
  - eeegnu 5y ago
    The point is that the parent comment conflated validators with people, whereas one person or entity can control many validators. That doesn't say anything about it being better or worse than PoW, but it's disingenuous to claim that an attack needs to compromise so many individual people rather than potentially just a few entities that control vast quantities of eth.
fvdessen 5y ago
Corrupting many people is easy if you are a superpower and can make laws that affect many people. With PoW you can corrupt many miners, but the other superpowers can spawn new miners to counter act.

pamplemoose 5y ago

or you can fork and remove the bad actors, burning all their coins. good luck with their next attack. in contrast, you can't burn an attackers fleet of miners

micropresident 5y ago
What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs? Slashing stake is significantly more arbitrary. You basically need to reset the coin's ledger in order for it to make any sense.
- nootropicat 5y ago
  >What do you think a PoW change does when the PoW is being done by ASICs It's only possible once, and this move is so obviously predictable any determined attacker is going to have gpus ready.
  - micropresident 5y ago
    Repeating "ultrasound money" memes. That specific meme has to do with state level attackers blowing up mining farms. It has nothing to do with changing issuance. And the entire premise is that an external force comes in and tries to co-opt it. That isn't relevant to the conversation of stakers having misaligned incentives to change the rules. The most a state level actor can do is censor transactions if they were to take over a chain. With PoS you'd need to slash the validators stake on a fork; which isn't going to happen because the stakers run the validators everyone is using. You already saw this with the steemit takeover. In PoW coins, the miners and validating economic nodes are two separate groups. Watch what happens when exchanges slip over to Eth2 nodes and call it Eth. During the BCHA/BCH split the exchanges were the ones that decided the ticker. Most users have ZERO CLUE about what happened. They went on their with their lives calling the fork the exchanges chose BCH. Once exchanges are validators there is no bulwark against changes.
    - fvdessen 5y ago

nootropicat 5y ago

The exact opposite is true. It's always possible for a state to obtain enough mining hardware - PoW is hopelessly insecure. It also has infinite economies of scale inevitably leading to absolute centralization even absent state attack. Once majority of hashrate is achieved, profits nearly double as minority can be censored. That's the inevitable end state of PoW. PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require buying up tokens on an impossible scale, and in the case an attack somehow succeeds a fork can be created that deletes the hostile stake. This can be repeated indefinitely. That's impossible in PoW more than once, once a gpu PoW gets attacked it's over. PoS has no economies of scale, so contrary to PoW it can stay decentralized forever. There's no way to make existing stakers unprofitable by adding more nodes, like it's possible with mining hardware in PoW. PoW is also vulnerable to takeover of existing miners because mining at scale requires big industrial warehouses with industrial power owned by registered companies. Impossible to hide. PoS can run on anonymous home nodes. In every single security and decentralization aspect PoW is hopelessly inferior to PoS.

fvdessen 5y ago
> PoS is resistant to state attacks because it would require buying up tokens on an impossible scale You don't need to buy the tokens. You make laws which the stakers have to follow, otherwise you seize their tokens for breaking the law. You can also use electronic warfare to steal the tokens of stakers outside your juridiction. If you are doing this as a big country such as USA/China, then other stakers might be tempted not to fork because a compromised system that works with those countries might still be more valuable than an uncompromised system that has not access to a large part of the world economy.
- nootropicat 5y ago
  This is only enforceable against miners, not stakers. Stakers can trivially hide, miners can't. >otherwise you seize their tokens for breaking the law. that's not possible, there's no mechanism to seize eth. What can be trivially seized, though, are physical miners.
swensel 5y ago

hajile 5y ago

Don't forget the billionaire problem either. Proof of Stake as setup gives all the power to people/companies who have large amounts of liquid assets. Consider Amazon, they keep a rolling window of cash in-between when an item is sold and when the seller gets paid. This effectively gives them billions in interest-free capital. If this were Etherium, it would translate into huge amounts of voting power. Likewise, if/when people deposit their etherium into banks, those banks can then leverage that "free" capital to grab huge voting stakes that wouldn't otherwise exist (because no person living paycheck to paycheck has the equivalent of 100k sitting around). This leverage simply does not exist with proof of work.