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Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. The protocol dictates that the chain created by the majorit

Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. The protocol dictates that the chain created by the majority of mining power is the canonical one. In the event that a censored party can create a heavier chain (has >50% of the mining power) then the argument that its more censorship resistant holds, but on the PoS side, you would be betting that not a single participant in the main chain included their new stake registration in their blocks. This is different than the PoW model as non-malicious nodes in PoW can still be part of the main chain. It's definitely not that cut and dry

leishman 5y ago
There are a few distinctions: 1. In PoS you actually never know who mined a given block with certainty. You can mine anonymously making censorship pretty difficult. This is not the case in PoS. 2. In PoW miners risk losing money by not building off the block found by a miner they're trying to censor. There is a cost to losing. This isn't the case in PoS (for the most part), as long as they don't double stake. 3. Additionally, the key distinguisher is that miners and custodians (almost all US based and controlled by VC funds) are two very distinct groups in Bitcoin. In a PoS currency they are the same group. That results in a power consolidation that effectively makes a PoS currency completely controlled by a few silicon valley insiders and eventually the US government.
- drdeca 5y ago
  I think you made a typo in your point #1, as you said something is the case of PoS, and then contrasted it with PoS, saying “This is not the case in PoS”. I suspect the first PoS was meant to say PoW. Correcting that is the main point of this comment, the rest is just a side note. I don’t really understand your point #2, but this very well may be because I don’t understand the proposed protocol. You say “as long as they don’t double stake”, but if a given block is expected to probably be in the consensus chain, then either they don’t endorse it or whatever, not putting their stake behind it, and therefore, I would think whatever they do put their stake behind, if the block-to-be-censored is included in the long-run consensus, then what they backed isn’t, and so they get no reward, and so they lost out on potential reward, or, if they try to support multiple things, they lose (some fraction of) their stake. Uh, unless they can be rewarded for supporting a block that is parallel to the block-to-censor even though the block-to-censor gets in? But that doesn’t seem right. I suppose there are uncle blocks maybe (idk if that is part of Ethereum’s planned PoS system or just its current system), but those have a substantially lower reward, so deliberately producing probably-uncles would still involve giving up rewards on average. Again I could easily be missing something here.
crazypython 5y ago
> Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. Censored transactions can hire/pay miners who won't censor more transaction fees, to encourage them to include the transactions in a block. In other words, since transactors pay miners, transactors are customers of miners. There is an open market competition– any miner censoring transactions will lose higher fees from people who send censored transactions.

leishman 5y ago

There are a few distinctions: 1. In PoS you actually never know who mined a given block with certainty. You can mine anonymously making censorship pretty difficult. This is not the case in PoS. 2. In PoW miners risk losing money by not building off the block found by a miner they're trying to censor. There is a cost to losing. This isn't the case in PoS (for the most part), as long as they don't double stake. 3. Additionally, the key distinguisher is that miners and custodians (almost all US based and controlled by VC funds) are two very distinct groups in Bitcoin. In a PoS currency they are the same group. That results in a power consolidation that effectively makes a PoS currency completely controlled by a few silicon valley insiders and eventually the US government.

drdeca 5y ago
I think you made a typo in your point #1, as you said something is the case of PoS, and then contrasted it with PoS, saying “This is not the case in PoS”. I suspect the first PoS was meant to say PoW. Correcting that is the main point of this comment, the rest is just a side note. I don’t really understand your point #2, but this very well may be because I don’t understand the proposed protocol. You say “as long as they don’t double stake”, but if a given block is expected to probably be in the consensus chain, then either they don’t endorse it or whatever, not putting their stake behind it, and therefore, I would think whatever they do put their stake behind, if the block-to-be-censored is included in the long-run consensus, then what they backed isn’t, and so they get no reward, and so they lost out on potential reward, or, if they try to support multiple things, they lose (some fraction of) their stake. Uh, unless they can be rewarded for supporting a block that is parallel to the block-to-censor even though the block-to-censor gets in? But that doesn’t seem right. I suppose there are uncle blocks maybe (idk if that is part of Ethereum’s planned PoS system or just its current system), but those have a substantially lower reward, so deliberately producing probably-uncles would still involve giving up rewards on average. Again I could easily be missing something here.

crazypython 5y ago

> Its not really though, if the majority of PoW miners want to omit a certain miners blocks, they can. Censored transactions can hire/pay miners who won't censor more transaction fees, to encourage them to include the transactions in a block. In other words, since transactors pay miners, transactors are customers of miners. There is an open market competition– any miner censoring transactions will lose higher fees from people who send censored transactions.