Someone on Reddit recently explained PoW vs PoS: Besides POW there are other ways to delegate control in a decentralized system. Actually, for a smaller networ

Someone on Reddit recently explained PoW vs PoS: Besides POW there are other ways to delegate control in a decentralized system. Actually, for a smaller network, POW is not a good consensus mechanism at all, because it is not prohibitively expensive to dominate the hashpower of a small network. Many altcoins have been successfully attacked like this. So how to decide who controls the network? Proof of Stake (POS) is probably the most common alternative. In POS there is no electricity cost to mining, there is no hash puzzle to solve. Actually there is no mining and no miners, only validators. The users who own the most coins are allowed to validate the most blocks. To attack the network you have to buy 51% of the coins and the theory is that you wouldn’t want to attack your own asset once you own that much. The “staking” refers to the fact that the validator has to lock up some of his coins and promise not to use it while he remains a validator. If you own 3% of the total staked coins, you are given 3% of the blocks to validate. Because validating a block has a reward, this means you also get 3% of all new coins. Part of the criticism of POS is that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer because the more coins you own, the more blocks you will validate and the more coins you will get as reward. This means you can stake even more coins and get even more rewards, and so on. This POS mechanism gradually consolidates most coins into only a few hands and leads to centralization. You could ask how is this different with POW. The miners with the most mining rigs validate the most blocks and gets the most rewards and accumulates more and more coins? The truth is that most miners have to sell their Bitcoins. Mining is not a passive investment like POS because there are ongoing running costs. A miner must not only pay cold, hard cash for the electricity to make a block, but also invest in expensive equipment, maintenance, salaries and so on, put in actual work. Would you rather pay someone who can prove he did some work, or someone who can prove he is wealthy? Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pfryce/pow_vs_pos/hb6ecjv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/pfryce/pow_vs_pos/...