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It's only controversial in the minds of purists/"maximalists" who are too invested in BTC. Their arguments would be something like: - PoS is not "decentralized

It's only controversial in the minds of purists/"maximalists" who are too invested in BTC. Their arguments would be something like: - PoS is not "decentralized" nor "democratic", because it means that only those with capital can participate in the network consensus building. This is "technically correct", but (a) it ignores that existing PoW also require massive amounts of capital to deploy mining facilities and (b) it is not democratic because only those with access to cheap electricity will profit from being a miner. - PoS implies that those staking their crypto are "investing" with their tokens, which would make the token a "security" and not a "currency". This distinction could make it easy for the SEC and governments to intervene and create regulation that would require stakers to only participate if they implement changes at the protocol level. E.g, it could happen that a staker would reject to validate any block containing transactions to smart contracts that got sanctioned. This is a more real concern, if you think about all the big players (read, centralized exchanges) who are staking ETH on behalf of their customers and therefore will have non-negligible control over the network. In this case, the community expectation is that (a) users of staked ETH pull out of the exchanges and run their own validators and (b) the exchanges realize that they will be shooting themselves in the foot, and therefore go on to fight whatever legislation that pushes on that type of control/censorship at the protocol level.

swznd 4y ago
In PoS the rich can become validator as long as they have money. The limit is money. In PoW, they can’t buy gpu as long as they have money, because there is another limit that money can’t always buy, energy, resources, needs (gpu for gamers, researchers, etc)
- Sargos 4y ago
  > In PoS the rich can become validator as long as they have money. The limit is money. > In PoW, they can’t buy gpu as long as they have money, because there is another limit that money can’t always buy, energy, resources, needs (gpu for gamers, researchers, etc) Just to elaborate, the implications of this are that PoW has an extra layer of centralization that threatens the network as ASICs/GPUs are only produced by less than a dozen companies and they can pick and choose who gets what kind of hardware and when (including keeping the best for themselves). This ensures that mining cannot be a level playing field and economies of scale will take over long term. This is even ignoring the massive corruption in the energy markets. On the other hand PoS only requires one resource which nobody has a monopoly on so anyone can stake with nearly zero overhead. It's a level playing field regardless of size or political connections which allows for a much greater distribution of actors.

swznd 4y ago

In PoS the rich can become validator as long as they have money. The limit is money. In PoW, they can’t buy gpu as long as they have money, because there is another limit that money can’t always buy, energy, resources, needs (gpu for gamers, researchers, etc)

Sargos 4y ago
> In PoS the rich can become validator as long as they have money. The limit is money. > In PoW, they can’t buy gpu as long as they have money, because there is another limit that money can’t always buy, energy, resources, needs (gpu for gamers, researchers, etc) Just to elaborate, the implications of this are that PoW has an extra layer of centralization that threatens the network as ASICs/GPUs are only produced by less than a dozen companies and they can pick and choose who gets what kind of hardware and when (including keeping the best for themselves). This ensures that mining cannot be a level playing field and economies of scale will take over long term. This is even ignoring the massive corruption in the energy markets. On the other hand PoS only requires one resource which nobody has a monopoly on so anyone can stake with nearly zero overhead. It's a level playing field regardless of size or political connections which allows for a much greater distribution of actors.