5 ms·

They don’t need to be, but it gives the best security guarantees. PoS is subject to threats that don’t exist for PoW, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=

• lahoda-xyz 5y ago
  what qbout zkp or vdf extensions to pos?
  • runeks 5y ago
    PoS relies on the possession (“keeping secret”) of private keys. No matter what you do, private keys (information) can be stolen, including in a covert manner (in a way that no one discovers that anything has been stolen). PoW relies on hardware, for which the same problem does not exist.
    • jacoblambda 5y ago
      There's been some work done to work around this issue. One of the approaches is to keep an always offline "fallback" key that can be used to "lock" an account and transfer ownership to a new account in the case that a private key is leaked. https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/872 https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/872 This doesn't solve the issue entirely but it does provide a mechanism for recovering in the case of a major attack.
• danbruc 5y ago
  They don’t need to be, but it gives the best security guarantees. That is not true, the security has nothing to do with energy consumption, only with cost. If you had to verifiable set a million dollars on fire for mining a block, that would be as secure as proof of work without wasting energy. Also anything like mining is only necessary at all if you want anonymity, if you drop that requirement you unlock a vast space of very cheap solutions.
  • ajkdhcb2 5y ago
    >If you had to verifiable set a million dollars on fire for mining a block, that would be as secure as proof of work without wasting energy Sure, but nobody has found a way to do that, nor has anybody found an alternative to PoW that doesn't have terrible security tradeoffs. It doesn't help to say something magical could have better properties - you need to find something that actually works in practice by satisfying all requirements