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> Also all cryptos are bad for the environment How is a proof of stake crypto worse for the environment than what we are currently using to verify transaction

> Also all cryptos are bad for the environment How is a proof of stake crypto worse for the environment than what we are currently using to verify transactions?

VietnamTom 5y ago
The /s at the end means that the previous statement is sarcasm.
- kadoban 5y ago
  Sarcasm doesn't excuse a statement from having semantic content worth asking questions about.
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    you’re right /s
delecti 5y ago
How does mining work in proof of stake models? This isn't intended to be a gotcha, I genuinely don't know. I've mostly just heard the term "proof of stake" without much explanation, and the Wikipedia doesn't mention mining at all.
- kemonocode 5y ago
  The specific details vary on the implementation, but the analogue to mining in a Proof-of-Stake system is this: newly minted coin is distributed as a reward to whomever wins the block validation "lottery" for a given block. A validator is required to lock up a certain amount of coin before they can start validating (their stake in the system) and based on the more coin you lock up/the longer you've been locking it up/any other variable depending on the implementation, the greater the chances you'll be selected as a given block's validator, and if consensus is achieved, you get your reward. If your node goes offline or collusion is detected, you get penalized by losing a part/all of your stake, again, depending on the exact implementation.
- trsohmers 5y ago
  Because there is no mining at all... The reward for new blocks is given on what can be thought of as a lottery system to those that have coins staked, and the reward is proportional to the amount staked. Effectively, payouts go out to everyone in the form similar to interest paid out on a CD.
- kadoban 5y ago
  In short, anyone with coins can put them in a special state (they're unspendable temporarily) in order to vote on which chain is correct. So you vote with your "stake" (coins) instead of with your computational power. I don't think it's called mining in PoS usually.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    > In short, anyone with coins can put them in a special state You mean exchanges. People aren't going to run a node and risk to be punished for bad configuration or a power outage. They are going to deposit to managed staking at Coinbase and Binance which will be the biggest validators. Congratulations. You've just recreated the current financial system with central banks and whatnot.
    - xur17 5y ago
      Maybe - ETH staking was specifically setup with incentives to encourage self hosting as much as possible (downtime penalties are tiny, especially if they only comprise a small portion of the network). There are some "decentralized" staking options that don't give over custody of your funds (the node operator only has enough control to run the node, doesn't actually have the ability to take your funds). And even with centralized exchanges, at least this system gives people a choice. I can choose to run my own Ethereum staking node. I can't choose to operate a bank / participate in the fed's central banking system.
      - ulzeraj 5y ago
        If the link bellow is accurate then the penalty for being offline is 4 times the base reward. https://consensys.net/blog/codefi/rewards-and-penalties-on-ethereum-20-phase-0#:%7E:text=Rewards%20and%20penalties-,Slashing,blocks%20for%20the%20same%20slot https://consensys.net/blog/codefi/rewards-and-penalties-on-e... For someone who is staking 32 ETH on a faulty RPi how big the reward would be? I'm too dumb to figure out the reward value.
    - woah 5y ago
      Why comment with an incorrect statement on something you don’t seem to know much about? Most proof of stake algorithms allow people to delegate coins to validators who run actual nodes. The coins are still in control of the user, but they will lose some if the validator they have delegated to misbehaves.
- tylersmith 5y ago
  Not that PoW and PoS are not themselves consensus algorithms but generally in PoS-using algorithms you just sign blocks, or "votes", etc with a private key that's been committed to with some amount of stake. In the case of Ethereum for example, a random number generator decides a set of stake that may produce the next block and when it's your turn you make a simple digital signature on place of where BTC miners brute-force a hash collision. In the case of Avalanche, nodes choose random stakers on their own and perform a repeated subsample across the staker set. Stakers respond with votes signed by a key thay was committed to when the staker first staked their coins.
- centizen 5y ago
  Proof of Stake changes things to the point where mining is no longer really a good descriptor of what is going on behind the scenes. Proof of Stake starts out with a large amount of coins being generated out of thin air. These are then distributed, and owners add nodes to the network by locking in a portion of their coins as their "stake". The nodes perform transaction verification, and over time a reward block is built out of the transaction fees involved. This is awarded to a psuedorandomly selected node weighted by stake.
  - delecti 5y ago
    So the people who already have the most of a coin are the most likely to earn even more by just sitting on it?
    - wiredfool 5y ago
      By the rich, for the rich.
    - woah 5y ago
      In proof of work, the rich also get richer, but they just spew tons of co2 while doing so. Anyway, what doesn’t work this way? Have you ever heard of stocks, or interest on a loan or bank account?
    - TacticalCoder 5y ago
      Well yes and no: those staking coins do indeed get more coins but there's still lots of speculation going on. I mean: it's not a given that if, today, with x coins you can buy, say, a laptop tomorrow with x * 2 coins you'll still be able to buy that same laptop. Stakers do definitely take the volatility risk. They're rewarded by getting more coins.
- LightMachine 5y ago
  Mining is voting weighted by wasted CPU power. Stake is voting weighted by wealth. That's all, really. Both are used to build decentralized networks, since they allow it to pick a random participant to order the previous X transactions (aka block), without being susceptible to sybil attacks. PoS is much less energy-hungry than PoW, but it has a problem: how do you distribute money fairly, to begin with? Which is why Ethereum started with a few years of PoW to only then shift to PoS. Pretty clever IMO.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  In addition to what the others said: if you try to cheat in a proof-of-stake system, your stake is forfeited. Which is kinda the whole point: if someone wants to make a double spent / revert a transaction and gets caught, his stake is destroyed and all the people helping him to try to do his double-spent have their stake destroyed to. The one issue is "long range attacks": where someone creates a fake chain and then tries to substitute it for the real-chain. In a PoW model you need more PoW than the real chain to mount your attack: that's how PoW chains are protected. In a PoS model not so much. But Vitalik Buterin (the Ethereum creator) and a few others are pretty sure they've got a working proof-of-stake system. Time will tell: expensive experiment ongoing!

> Also all cryptos are bad for the environment How is a proof of stake crypto worse for the environment than what we are currently using to verify transactions?

VietnamTom 5y ago

The /s at the end means that the previous statement is sarcasm.

kadoban 5y ago
Sarcasm doesn't excuse a statement from having semantic content worth asking questions about.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  you’re right /s

delecti 5y ago

How does mining work in proof of stake models? This isn't intended to be a gotcha, I genuinely don't know. I've mostly just heard the term "proof of stake" without much explanation, and the Wikipedia doesn't mention mining at all.

kemonocode 5y ago
The specific details vary on the implementation, but the analogue to mining in a Proof-of-Stake system is this: newly minted coin is distributed as a reward to whomever wins the block validation "lottery" for a given block. A validator is required to lock up a certain amount of coin before they can start validating (their stake in the system) and based on the more coin you lock up/the longer you've been locking it up/any other variable depending on the implementation, the greater the chances you'll be selected as a given block's validator, and if consensus is achieved, you get your reward. If your node goes offline or collusion is detected, you get penalized by losing a part/all of your stake, again, depending on the exact implementation.
trsohmers 5y ago
Because there is no mining at all... The reward for new blocks is given on what can be thought of as a lottery system to those that have coins staked, and the reward is proportional to the amount staked. Effectively, payouts go out to everyone in the form similar to interest paid out on a CD.
kadoban 5y ago
In short, anyone with coins can put them in a special state (they're unspendable temporarily) in order to vote on which chain is correct. So you vote with your "stake" (coins) instead of with your computational power. I don't think it's called mining in PoS usually.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  > In short, anyone with coins can put them in a special state You mean exchanges. People aren't going to run a node and risk to be punished for bad configuration or a power outage. They are going to deposit to managed staking at Coinbase and Binance which will be the biggest validators. Congratulations. You've just recreated the current financial system with central banks and whatnot.
  - xur17 5y ago
    Maybe - ETH staking was specifically setup with incentives to encourage self hosting as much as possible (downtime penalties are tiny, especially if they only comprise a small portion of the network). There are some "decentralized" staking options that don't give over custody of your funds (the node operator only has enough control to run the node, doesn't actually have the ability to take your funds). And even with centralized exchanges, at least this system gives people a choice. I can choose to run my own Ethereum staking node. I can't choose to operate a bank / participate in the fed's central banking system.
    - ulzeraj 5y ago
      If the link bellow is accurate then the penalty for being offline is 4 times the base reward. https://consensys.net/blog/codefi/rewards-and-penalties-on-ethereum-20-phase-0#:%7E:text=Rewards%20and%20penalties-,Slashing,blocks%20for%20the%20same%20slot https://consensys.net/blog/codefi/rewards-and-penalties-on-e... For someone who is staking 32 ETH on a faulty RPi how big the reward would be? I'm too dumb to figure out the reward value.
  - woah 5y ago
    Why comment with an incorrect statement on something you don’t seem to know much about? Most proof of stake algorithms allow people to delegate coins to validators who run actual nodes. The coins are still in control of the user, but they will lose some if the validator they have delegated to misbehaves.
tylersmith 5y ago
Not that PoW and PoS are not themselves consensus algorithms but generally in PoS-using algorithms you just sign blocks, or "votes", etc with a private key that's been committed to with some amount of stake. In the case of Ethereum for example, a random number generator decides a set of stake that may produce the next block and when it's your turn you make a simple digital signature on place of where BTC miners brute-force a hash collision. In the case of Avalanche, nodes choose random stakers on their own and perform a repeated subsample across the staker set. Stakers respond with votes signed by a key thay was committed to when the staker first staked their coins.
centizen 5y ago
Proof of Stake changes things to the point where mining is no longer really a good descriptor of what is going on behind the scenes. Proof of Stake starts out with a large amount of coins being generated out of thin air. These are then distributed, and owners add nodes to the network by locking in a portion of their coins as their "stake". The nodes perform transaction verification, and over time a reward block is built out of the transaction fees involved. This is awarded to a psuedorandomly selected node weighted by stake.
- delecti 5y ago
  So the people who already have the most of a coin are the most likely to earn even more by just sitting on it?
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    By the rich, for the rich.
  - woah 5y ago
    In proof of work, the rich also get richer, but they just spew tons of co2 while doing so. Anyway, what doesn’t work this way? Have you ever heard of stocks, or interest on a loan or bank account?
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    Well yes and no: those staking coins do indeed get more coins but there's still lots of speculation going on. I mean: it's not a given that if, today, with x coins you can buy, say, a laptop tomorrow with x * 2 coins you'll still be able to buy that same laptop. Stakers do definitely take the volatility risk. They're rewarded by getting more coins.
LightMachine 5y ago
Mining is voting weighted by wasted CPU power. Stake is voting weighted by wealth. That's all, really. Both are used to build decentralized networks, since they allow it to pick a random participant to order the previous X transactions (aka block), without being susceptible to sybil attacks. PoS is much less energy-hungry than PoW, but it has a problem: how do you distribute money fairly, to begin with? Which is why Ethereum started with a few years of PoW to only then shift to PoS. Pretty clever IMO.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
In addition to what the others said: if you try to cheat in a proof-of-stake system, your stake is forfeited. Which is kinda the whole point: if someone wants to make a double spent / revert a transaction and gets caught, his stake is destroyed and all the people helping him to try to do his double-spent have their stake destroyed to. The one issue is "long range attacks": where someone creates a fake chain and then tries to substitute it for the real-chain. In a PoW model you need more PoW than the real chain to mount your attack: that's how PoW chains are protected. In a PoS model not so much. But Vitalik Buterin (the Ethereum creator) and a few others are pretty sure they've got a working proof-of-stake system. Time will tell: expensive experiment ongoing!