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Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. The people with the most money make the decisions. Proof-of-Work is provably resistant to this

• aqme28 5y ago
  I am not convinced that PoW is immune to those pressures or even resistant to it. The people with capital control the mining. At least the environmental problems are reduced with PoS
  • fredfoobar 5y ago
    There's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-war https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w... "Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/1394006548876308485?s=20 https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...
    • dahfizz 5y ago
      Why wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        [responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users. more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k
        • crispyporkbites 5y ago
          But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential. Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes with advertising as we see today in “normal” elections.
          • fredfoobar 5y ago
            > But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential. You're missing the energy part of the equation (opex), that is continuously required.
        • hanniabu 5y ago
          > you don't need any capital to run a node Please point me in the direction where I can find some of these free ASIC miners.....
          • fredfoobar 5y ago
            full node != miner Run your own full node, easiest option: getumbrel.com
      • SilasX 5y ago
        Did you mean PoS? Parent was talking about a PoW system.
        • dahfizz 5y ago
          Yes, editted.
      • grubles 5y ago
        You can do much worse things in a PoS system since power in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen. It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.
    • ekerstein 5y ago
      This is only relevant if people aren’t holding their coins on exchanges. Most users are and that concentration will increase as transaction fees are designed to do over the next decade.
      • fredfoobar 5y ago
        I'm here to help that transition, It's already happening, many folks I know are transitioning to a hardware wallet. I've personally helped people onboard on to lightning and running their own node. The whole process of running your own node has improved so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.
    • vbuterin 5y ago
      That was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks; that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.
      • jude- 5y ago
        Coins that no ones' nodes validate are worthless, aren't they?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • owens99 5y ago
      You're smart, I like your comments.
  • leishman 5y ago
    The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.
    • incrudible 5y ago
      The network majority can enforce any rule, doesn't matter if it's PoW or PoS.
      • sunsu 5y ago
        Wrong. NODEs (individual network participants) enforce the rules, not miners.
        • incrudible 5y ago
          Fantasy. Nothing forces miners to accept transactions sent by nodes attempting to enforce some rule.
          • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
            Its the other way round -- nothing forces nodes to accept bad blocks from miners. An honest node would simply ignore the bad data. The exchanges run nodes, so I would rather be generating or receiving transactions on a chain (or fork) that its users are engaging with. Nodes accept blocks from miners, miners don't accept blocks from nodes.
            • incrudible 5y ago
              Where do those honest blocks come from, if not from honest miners? Where do honest miners come from?
            • minsc__and__boo 5y ago
              Nodes still work on consensus, and given that they have no incentivization to exist, they have been dropping in number over years.
  • minsc__and__boo 5y ago
    That's a good point, though mining is also controlled by access to the cheapest costs (i.e. siphoning electricity off of a grid).
  • colordrops 5y ago
    Controlling the mining doesn't allow you to control much about how transactions work.
    • incrudible 5y ago
      The network majority decides everything, including how transactions work, how many coins there are, what the block size is... The prospect that there's only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin is ensured by nothing except majority opinion. It's not inconceivable that this will be relaxed in the future and Bitcoin will have a "Bitcoin Classic" fork where old rules are enforced. This could happen if, for instance, transaction fees don't make up for miner majority rewards.
      • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        Not quite -- the 21 million (or more accurately, 2.1 Quadrillion sat) is a hard line. Any coin not enforcing this rule is not bitcoin. There of course will be forks that dont, but they are not bitcoin.
        • incrudible 5y ago
          > Any coin not enforcing this rule is not bitcoin. That's your opinion. > There of course will be forks that dont, but they are not bitcoin. Again, that's your opinion.
        • drdeca 5y ago
          That’s a definition you can use, sure. And, I do tend to value using words in a consistent way over time. But definitions are choices. People are free to choose what definitions they think of as “the definition of <x>”. Some such choices are likely to cause more confusion when they interact with others, but this is not always sufficient to discourage/prevent some faction of people from choosing some definition that differs from that used by some other faction. Under the definition you are using for bitcoin, such a thing would not be the thing that you currently would consider bitcoin. That’s fine. This doesn’t mean that people wouldn’t use the name “bitcoin” for it. Perhaps 2000 years from now, the word “bitcoin” will instead refer to apples instead, due to random linguistic drift. (Or, a fruit which resembles apples. Will they technically count as apples, according to our current notion of apples?)
  • Taek 5y ago
    There's a couple of misunderstandings here. Mining is expensive and low margin. Generally, the people who own the most Bitcoins are not the same as the people with the most mining rigs, the two parties tend to be completely divorced, and the miners tend to be strongly incentivized around not rocking the boat (for better or worse). The other misunderstanding is that mining doesn't shape the protocol. The users shape the protocol, and can run any validation software they want. No user has to accept a block by a miner, and every block made by a miner has to conform to the protocol's rules.
  • beambot 5y ago
    POW is permissionless, in that you don't need anyone's permission to setup a mining rig and contribute significant work. POS isn't permissionless -- you literally have to buy a stake from existing holders in order to participate.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      The money to build a mining rig and consume the electricity needed to run it is not even remotely permissionless. To add insult to injury, most miners ignore the externalities of that electricity use.
      • chrischattin 5y ago
        It costs a couple hundred bucks to setup the hardware to run a Bitcoin node. As of today's exchange rate, you need ~$130k to stake ETH.
        • drdeca 5y ago
          Wait, to run a node (like, just keeping track of the chain), or to mine in a way that isn’t entirely ineffectual? Because the former doesn’t seem like the proper analogy to staking.
          • chrischattin 5y ago
            You can mine with a Raspberry Pi. It won't be profitable. But, you'll be contributing to the security of the network.
            • drdeca 5y ago
              What is the impact of a miner on the security of the network, conditioned on the event that it never successfully mines a block? I would think it would be 0. The probability that a raspi ever mines a block (like, if it were to start now, not if it was going since the network first started) is negligible. Therefore, I consider the probability that a given raspi would contribute to the security of the network, or, I suppose equivalently, the degree to which it contributes, to be negligible.
• fabioyy 5y ago
  people with money can buy mining factories and make decisions anyway.
  • leishman 5y ago
    See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers can prevent new people from staking. Existing miners can't do this in a PoW system
    • 8note 5y ago
      New people can still vote for their governments to affect those systems. The distinction feels irrelevant
      • leishman 5y ago
        It's very relevant. Mining is very easy to geographically diversify. PoS coins will almost all be controlled by US based custodians subject to US regulations. PoS coins will be controlled by the US financial industry at the end of the day
        • zionic 5y ago
          This is completely false, late/end game PoW centralizes mining around the cheapest electricity. It is impossible to mine profitably in the overwhelming majority of the world now.
        • 8note 5y ago
          Your government controls which coins you are able to use. It doesn't matter if the coin becomes run by another geographic area if it's illegal for you to trade in them
    • zionic 5y ago
      >See my comment to another in the thread. Existing stakers can prevent new people from staking There is little to no evidence of this. Completely unsupported conspiracy theory.
• roelb 5y ago
  Proof of work is no different in this regard: more capital, more mining power, more control. Miners interests don't always align with the network's users interests (see gas fees). Proof of work isn't more decentralized either (a few mining pool delegators control bitcoin), eth2 proof of stake is more secure because of the pseudorandom validator selection.
  • leishman 5y ago
    It is very different: The difference is that PoW is censorship resistant. Anybody can be a miner and existing miners cannot censor new miners. Performing new work is external to the network state. In PoS, existing stakers can prevent new stakers from registering. Very important distinction.
    • zionic 5y ago
      > Anybody can be a miner This is patently false, endgame PoW centralizes mining around 3rd world coal/cheapest possible (stolen?) electricity. The overwhelming majority of the world has been priced out of BTC mining, not that they could get ahold of an ASIC anyways.
      • CameronNemo 5y ago
        Easy, just buy guns, steal some ASICs, steal some coal, and mine away!!!
    • throw1234000 5y ago
      Anybody can be a miner the same way anybody can participate in the race for Mars. But that doesn't mean your bottle rocket will beat SpaceX there.
      • randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sure. And analogous to PoS is some kind of galactic requirement that you pay some kind of space bond in order to go to space. Mess around and your space bond is slashed. I like the bottlerocket model better.
• Rapzid 5y ago
  Smallish groups of consolidated power already control the future of the crypto currencies; see the migration to PoS. Crypto has made very little(perhaps zero) progress toward any solution in decentralizing power.
  • reedjosh 5y ago
    At least with privacy coins censoring transactions shouldn't be possible. Also with Monero anyone can cpu mine it, and transaction participants are obfuscated. With ARRR, miners don't know the identity of transaction participants.
• x4e 5y ago
  POW just gives the power to whoever can purchase the most computing power. It also gives control of the network to those directly benefiting from high fees. At least POS gives the power to those that actually have an interest and stake in the currency itself.
  • leishman 5y ago
    PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians, which certainly have a tremendous incentive to siphon as much value from the currency as possible. PoW has a much more diversified set of actors with competing interests, which makes it much more difficult to change the rules. This is a feature not a bug.
    • incrudible 5y ago
      > PoS will be controlled by US-based custodians... You might as well claim that the Chinese Communist Party controls Bitcoin. Not entirely wrong, but misleading.
      • leishman 5y ago
        No it's very different. Bitcoin consensus is achieved through a combination of mining actors and economic actors. PoS collapses this into a single group: custodians.
        • incrudible 5y ago
          Bitcoin consensus is achieved through miner majority, end of story. Any other narrative is pure make-belief.
          • grubles 5y ago
            Nodes enforce the ruleset that miners must abide by, and can invalidate new blocks that miners generate. You can see examples of this in history e.g. bitcoin.com mining a block with a greater block size than consensus allowed, which caused the block to be invalidated and the cost of energy wasted.
• lawn 5y ago
  > almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol If the miners really wanted to change the protocol, they would have done that. The exchanges would have followed, as they had declared that the longest chain would win, and that would be game over. Instead the miners gave in to the perceived authority of the Core developers, who pinky promised to later raise the block size (which they backed away from).
  • Taek 5y ago
    The exchanges have no reason not to support both sides of a fork, for example the BTC/BCH split. Then the owners of the tokens ultimately decide which one is more valuable by selling their tokens on the chain they don't prefer and buying tokens on the chain they do prefer.
    • lawn 5y ago
      There is a very clear bias if one chain keeps the ticker, and therefore the price, so much that in practice exchanges exchanges can decide which chain "is the original one".
    • rcxdude 5y ago
      This. There's a bunch of waffling above about how the miners vs stakers will control stuff and so on, but in reality it's the markets which define which gets used. That's what decided the block size debate, not users spinning up nodes or miners pushing in one direction in ther other. Miners follow the market, and so will those running validators on proof of stake. Those who can influence the market have the most power here (and usually that's vocal members of the community or developers).
• andrewla 5y ago
  > Proof of Stake is already how our current financial system works. This is a naive viewpoint. Ethereum (as a currency) is an "M0" token, like cash or Fed deposits. There's a lot of handwaving about bonds and whatnot, but essentially the Fed can create new money simply by changing numbers on a balance sheet, and they can make that money into folding money and change which they can issue. The banking system is a complex system that creates IOUs on top of that base. Some of those IOUs are even better than the cash layer -- you can't buy stock, for example, for cash, you need bank IOUs to do that. That said, then, what is PoW and PoS used for? They're essentially distributed methods of ensuring that nobody can forge money. So the equivalent in the world of dollars is not a bunch of bankers chuckling to themselves about how they're fleecing the plebes. The equivalent in the real world is a bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live.
  • reedjosh 5y ago
    > The equivalent in the real world is a bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live. Largely funded by forging dollars.
    • andrewla 5y ago
      If you are a miner and you get a block reward for mining a block in Ethereum, you are not forging currency; this is the structurally correct way for Ethereum to be created. Similarly only the Fed has the ability to make new dollars; although technically the US Treasury has this ability in a narrow sense. There's a lot of mummery around how the Fed goes about doing it, but that is the structurally correct way for dollars to be created. Calling it forgery or "theft by inflation" or whatever are political talking points. Forgery is specifically when any other party in the world decides that they can mint coins or print bills. Other parties can create dollars in other ways, like by committing fraud or by taking advantage of the fact that certain forms of IOUs are so liquid that they are considered cash equivalents. In the US this is a little locked down (although the overnight lending market is a particularly insidious form of shadow banking) but internationally the Eurodollar market is the wild west where anything goes. Anything, that is, except actually forging coins or bills.
• vmception 5y ago
  Correct, the US Federal Reserve is a Proof of Stake system. Members earn 6% dividends for the last 100 years, and this was to entice them to join the system at all. Just pointing out that the idea of an omnipotent US government is a fairly new concept, and it must incentivize and entice people to join its payment network as opposed to other private ones. The private networks for final settlement are becoming more interesting to market participants. And they are also aiming for distributed (sharded) proof of stake.
  • nextaccountic 5y ago
    > Members earn 6% dividends for the last 100 years, and this was to entice them to join the system at all. Can you tell more about this? Specially the "and this was to entice them to join the system at all." part.
    • vmception 5y ago
      The Federal Reserve Act from 1913 incentivizes banks to join the Federal Reserve payments network. Let me update this to 2020s lingo: The Federal Reserve System is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that pays its stakers 6% annually. It has operated for over 100 years flawlessly. The stakers gain access to a market leading depository and credit system, and have the ability to voice opinions on some variables but the shares itself are non-voting. Like many kinds of entities such as trusts and foundations, there are no owners, only trustees. The human interface to the system is a separate public agency called the Board of Governors, which simply tells the public what the Federal Reserve has done, and also communicates any changes to the Federal Reserve's charter (any legislative updates) to the DAO.
      • reedjosh 5y ago
        The federal reserve is Decentralized? > The Board of Governors' seven members guide the entire Fed system. > The Board and FOMC make the Fed's decisions based on research. https://www.thebalance.com/the-federal-reserve-system-and-its-function-3306001 https://www.thebalance.com/the-federal-reserve-system-and-it...
• simias 5y ago
  It's not like cryptocurrencies achieved any of their goals so far anyway. If it's about facilitating pyramid schemes and creating a worldwide casino we might as well do it efficiently and without wasting insane amounts of resources. I'm personally very happy for PoS and hope that it'll be successful, I would be a lot less annoyed with cryptocurrency bullshit if it wasn't so wasteful. With proof-of-stakes it basically joins the ranks of essential oils and other MLM scams, I'm fine with that.
  • leishman 5y ago
    Funny how everyone complains it's wasteful yet I see absolutely nobody complaining that they have some sort of electricity shortage because of Bitcoin miners.
    • Valgrim 5y ago
      The issue is not scarcity, it's pollution.
      • drdeca 5y ago
        In a sense, we could say “lack of CO2 in the atmosphere” is the scarce resource which is being depleted. ( Maybe kind of like how you can think of something which can burn by absorbing oxygen, as releasing phlogiston (which is just a lack of oxygen, in a certain sense)? )
    • Rogach 5y ago
      Well, here's a datapoint for you: I've witnessed firsthand how a big miner farm resulted in full blackout in a small-ish city (~100k population).
    • drew-y 5y ago
      Because shortages aren't the issue. The issue is using more power than all of Argentina for one currency. That is a lot of CO2 emissions for something that brings questionable value.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  I wish we could have proof of work but the work would be something like , doing an actual workout.
  • Judgmentality 5y ago
    Now this is my favorite new cryptocurrency idea!
  • pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
    I knew there was a reason I was still slogging through these comments. Well commented sir.
  • acid__ 5y ago
    That's how you end up with crypto-mining sweatshops...
  • throwawayForMe2 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
• s7atic 5y ago
  Why do you believe a global PoS currency will be controlled by US actors? The US has a 10--20% share of global GDP. Regardless, history has proven that the most legitimate branch of a blockchain wins, irrespective of security model. It will not be the actor with the most hash power or stake. For reference, see the Justin Sun/STEEM drama. Vitalik Buterin has an interesting blog post on legitimacy: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/03/23/legitimacy.html.
  • leishman 5y ago
    Because they're all largely funded by U.S. based VC funds.
• vbuterin 5y ago
  I think you're conflating _consensus_ and _governance_; the two are quite different. It's not PoW vs PoS that allows a chain to resist a coordinated attempt by elites to force a protocol change, it's users personally verifying the chain (and so automatically rejecting chains that violate the rules even if >51% of PoW/PoS nodes support those chains). So no, PoS is not "how our current financial system works". Our current financial system doesn't give people the ability to independently verify anything at all; it's even worse than the most centralized chains in that regard. I would actually say PoS is more resistant to cabals and regulatory systems than PoW; PoW mining requires huge and visible capital investments and electricity consumption and it's incredibly easy for governments to detect and shut down miners in their own countries (not as true for GPU mining, but GPU-friendliness is difficult to sustain long term), whereas you can be a PoS validator with the most basic computer hardware from anywhere.
  • eyezick 5y ago
    I'd further add on to say PoS has the benefit of being able to eliminate bad actors unilaterally. You can't stop anyone from attacking a PoW chain over and over again. Attacking a PoS chain is much riskier as the attacker's stakes are held on chain and are at the mercy of the community who uses the network.
    • jude- 5y ago
      Why does the attacker need to hold or buy any coins? All the attacker has to do to wreck havoc is prevent quorum from being reached. This can be done by knocking validators offline (which is a slashable penalty), or hacking validators and making them slash themselves, or hacking an exchange or two in order to amass control of 33% or more of the voting power.
      • pshc 5y ago
        Correct me if I'm wrong, but being offline is not a slashable penalty. You would slowly lose ETH and eventually be ejected, but not slashed like a malicious validator would be.
• armandillo 5y ago
  Proof of work is currently controlled by 3 companies in terms of hashpower and 1 in terms of hardware - Bitmain. So, the absolute worst case for PoS is already pretty much the case for PoW.
• andy_ppp 5y ago
  Can’t the people with most money buy the most computer power?
  • leishman 5y ago
    Yes, but they then need to maintain that edge by selling their Bitcoin and buying more computer power. They have constantly growing operating expenses and there is no force that centralizes control. PoS playbook is 1) get a stake, 2) set it and forget it.
    • andy_ppp 5y ago
      Well I guess we’ll see if you’re right...
• DSingularity 5y ago
  No way dude. Our current system isn’t even close to PoS. Most obviously the federal reserve controls the monetary policy. Beyond that there is no “code is law” that we can all audit and fork if we find it inadequate. If ethereum centralized you can amend the protocol and fork the blockchain. Show me how you can do that with USD.
• duxup 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency and the philosophical goals / ideals just don't match how they...are.
• eloff 5y ago
  I don't think your example proves proof of work isn't vulnerable to the same effect. At best it proves it's not always vulnerable to that - but the same could technically happen with proof of stake. Like it or not the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule may well be the most powerful law of the universe. It applies to everything from physical systems like stars and galaxies to social systems and individual human achievement. I don't see why crytocurrency should be any different. Proof of work through cost of capital investment exhibits the exact same concentration of wealth and power, but at least PoS doesn't destroy the environment as a side effect. I'm skeptical about why we need the decentralized aspect of cryto when it ends up centralizing anyway. Seems like a very inefficient way of doing things. Maybe we just want an immutable public ledger - but I could be wrong on that. It hasn't lived up to the hype yet.
  • leishman 5y ago
    There is a very big difference. PoS collapses governance into a single group: custodians. With PoW governance is a push and pull between miners and custodians. Additionally, PoW miners need to constantly sell Bitcoin to cover operating costs, whereas stakers in a PoS system have a small fixed cost and large stakers will always stay large. Miners on the other hand need to constantly invest and expand to stay competitive.
• suifbwish 5y ago
  Proof of work consumes a real world resource. Proof of stake does not, therefore proof of work exchanges REAL value for virtual value. It literally takes actual value in the world and deletes it. What’s the difference with the US financial institutions buying up all the big mining rigs and then buying up all the stakable tokens ?
  • politician 5y ago
    Energy is not being exchanged for "virtual value", but rather "shared belief". Wars have been fought to force shared beliefs. It's fairly common in history for "real world resources" to be permanently burned in order to create a shared belief system in order to facilitate trade. For example, the Roman Empire or any other empire. I'd rather use electrons to create shared belief than bullets and bombs.
    • suifbwish 5y ago
      Virtual value/shared belief are the same thing. The fact remains we are destroying something of utilitarian value to create something that has no utility past being tradable and valuable because people follow trends
      • politician 5y ago
        Shared beliefs absolutely have intrinsic value. Our ability to have this discussion in English over devices connected to a common communication platform is sufficient proof of that.
        • suifbwish 5y ago
          Unfortunately that is not a belief shared by everyone ironically
• ptr2voidStar 5y ago
  It is astonishing to me that this has to be stated explicitly like this for people to see this for what it is. "Turkeys voting for Christmas" comes to mind. Cryptocurrency offers the opportunity to break away from the current hegemony - only for people to hand over the power back to the powerful. Perhaps the world is in the current state - because that's what we deserve? (because we keep voting for it?)
• lumost 5y ago
  The main value of cryptocurrencies is a provable ledger with an open API. PoS sufficiently establishes that for all economic purposes save for those wishing to make themselves feudal lords. Currently your money is transmitted by csv copies across thousands of companies, most of whom use a semi-manual process. Moving this type of transaction to a distributed ledger will save financial institutions billions in audit costs.
• Heteraruki 5y ago
  Proof of Stake is the worst form of Socialism. It is Socialism governed by the wealthiest elite Proof of Work is brute Capitalism. It Capitalism without regard for life or health. STX is Proof of Transfer (secured by bitcoin's hash-power and the Stacks network). Proof of Transfer is the best of both worlds. It is community and global capitalism with community and global responsibility. When a technology is simultaneously a store of value, & a utility, the demand for it is exponential, people will seek it in both states, but for different and individual purposes. STX earns BTC for the directed purposes of any individual and as that individual desires with minimal network effect. STX drives community demand only as demanded by the community. STX drives Network benefits only as desired by the Network. Lets imagine a series of networked micro-communities built with sun energy using solar panels that photochemically convert the atmospheric water into liquid hydrogen. This is being done today. That hydrogen is then stored as energy in fuel cell batteries. That energy is then used in part to mine community bitcoin. That community bitcoin is used in part to build and maintain community infrastructure and finance community healthcare. The community will also use a small portion of the wholesale mined bitcoin to leverage the Stacks Proof of Transfer PoX miners. The STX block reward will support the maintenance and expense of bitcoin mining. The winning PoX miner's committed bitcoin is allocated randomly to the locked Stacks token holders that are all also bitcoin miners. The locked pools secure the stacks chain and bitcoin node operators secure the bitcoin chain. The community through Non-fungible tokenized (NFTized) hashed identity quadratically vote on finance mechanisms using the creation of decidable language smart-contracts. Those smart-contracts execute for community tokenized provenances or (NFT's) of decentralized communication, decentralized wealth & decentralized egalitarian and merit based commerce. And the by-product is pure H2O and clean air.
• troyvit 5y ago
  Eh, I gotta say that no matter the system, speculators are gonna speculate and power hungry idiots will do everything they can to control a currency. That's fine, and human, and expected. Just please try not to melt all the ice caps while ya'll have at it.
• nootropicat 5y ago
  >as evidenced by the 2017 blocksize debate where almost every large miner and bitcoin company wanted to change the protocol and it was fought off through grassroots efforts Literally the opposite happened, although PoW isn't very relevant here. Grassroot enthusiasts tried to fight a cabal of developers sabotaging adoption of bitcoin - and those users failed, mostly because of massive censorship on major social places. The idea was that users would instead go to a centralized network called Liquid. The sabotage succeeded, the Liquid part didn't, users went elsewhere. Now it's 2021 and bitcoin has lost all network effects it ever had. Did you know bitcoin used to have tokens and even dexes (although poor)? Google mastercoin and counterparty. In the long run, it turned out well, as ethereum is a way better foundation. It's indeed possible it wouldn't have happened with PoS, as contrary to PoW stakers are long-term oriented - miners don't really care about long-term prospects and acquiesced, dooming bitcoin in the long term, but it's possible btc stakers would be afraid of going against core developers too.
• hakfoo 5y ago
  I always felt a bit to the contrary. In a proof of work system, you can buy your way to the grown-ups table by throwing enough money at mining gear. In contrast, a proof-of-stake system requires someone to sell you enough of a stake to be relevant. I suppose the question is whether it's easier to get someone to sell out their community, or find a bunch of graphics cards these days.
• chmike 5y ago
  We have a bad experience with this PoS principle in France. It ended in a revolution. The assumption that people with the most stakes will act in the interest of the community has been proven flawed in many occasions. They will act in their own interest first whatever it wight be. The weak logical link is that their own interest always coincide with the interest of the community. If someone could explain me how this assumption will always be true, I would be very happy.