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> But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. Could you direct me
by MadSudaca 5y ago
> But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could.
Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.
- dlubarov 5y agoThe main security difference is that with PoW any attempt to create a fork has a cost. With PoS, slashing can be used to impose a similar cost. But that doesn't work for very that long forks (longer than it takes for stakers to unbond), since the accounts being slashed might no longer exist on the main fork. In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period. The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint. More here: https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-weak-subjectivity https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea... And some good discussion here: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785 https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785