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The mining capability is external to the network. You have a big enough pile of money, and you are guaranteed to be able to join the validation process meaningf

by NhanH 4y ago

The mining capability is external to the network. You have a big enough pile of money, and you are guaranteed to be able to join the validation process meaningfully. There is nothing anyone can do to stop you joining with a big ass mining hash power. The stake, however, is internal to the network. Even if you have a big pile of money, there is no guaranteed that the big stake holders are willing to sell you their coins. I think the majority of the arguments about the advantages/ disadvantages of PoW and PoS stems from that difference

nootropicat 4y ago
Yes, which is exactly why PoS is censorship resistant and PoW isn't. Taking over PoW is just a matter of acquiring resources - can be via regulation, or outright buying. The cost of mining hardware isn't very big. It's impossible to mine anonymously with any non-negligible hashrate due to power differences and required specialized hardware - all trivial to track. Taking over PoS is much harder because there's no way for governments to print tokens. It's easy to stake anonymously. A closed stable state in which only non-censoring validators control the network is always possible to achieve.
- fsociety999 4y ago
  The main difference I see here is that buying up mining hardware actually has limitations and constraints. You have to find enough supply of the hardware, find enough energy to run it, find a location big enough to house it, make sure to keep it up to date, etc. With PoS, although governments can’t print tokens, it doesn’t really matter. The governments and central banks have unlimited money. They control the money supply. Even if some of the top stakers won’t want to sell, they would still be able to find enough sellers who are. We have already seen how a single tweet from someone like Elon Musk can cause thousands of people to buy or sell. Manipulating the market is easy and doesn’t require permission from the people with the largest stake. All they would need to do is float a bill that they are planning on making Bitcoin illegal and then after it is on the front page of all the news sites, when everyone is rushing to exit, swoop in and buy up the supply. I think Wall Street has already done this to a large extent. Hence, this is why I believe they are likely the ones behind this push as opposed to the people who will be hurt as a result. All of that said, I’m willing to keep an open mind and see what happens to Ethereum after its switch to PoS. If I had to guess, I suspect we will begin to see stories of blocked transactions and blocked wallets, etc.
  - nootropicat 4y ago
    >With PoS, although governments can’t print tokens, it doesn’t really matter. The governments and central banks have unlimited money. so they pump eth price to infinity to get majority of stake? While in theory it could work, it would cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars. Compared to maybe $1B-$2B to take over PoW from nothing. Two orders of magnitude difference. As nobody needs a blockchain with censorship everyone else would move to a fork without the governmental stake. A very foolish plan.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
  The difference between pos and pow isn't in the architecture of just those two elements. It's in what those chains do. If a POW miner invested the resources to take over the network, breaking the network would certainly crash the price. However, node operators get a bigger payout than delegating your stake or staking it yourself. Overtime, this percentage difference will allow the node operators to control the network 'without breaking it'. Btc can be minimally exploited because it doesn't do anything. POS networks are by design highly adaptive networks, with smart contracts, oracles, virtual machines and any other wonder programmers can dream up. This allows a 'soft control' exploit rather than btc's 'hard control'.
  - nootropicat 4y ago
    >If a POW miner invested the resources to take over the network, breaking the network would certainly crash the price. In practice, us government would pass a regulation that forces miners to register and to censor sanctioned addresses. Once they realize that miners they control own majority of hashrate, they can add a requirement to ignore chains with sanctioned addresses (from others miners). There's no defense against this, because unlike PoS, you can't really move anywhere else. China has its own ban. Energy prices in europe are insane. Russia is sanctioned and just getting chips in is almost certainly a crime. Under PoS as long as there's any subset of non-censoring validators a fork away from censorship is possible. Unlike mining, staking is extremely mobile globally.
    - aserafini 4y ago
      And in this last scenario, how does someone joining the network know which of the now forked chains is the ‘one true chain’?
      - idiotsecant 4y ago
        How do you know literally any chain is the one true chain? You don't, because there is no such thing. There is only the chain which you agree is the one true chain. In practice the software generally is designed to connect to only one chain - a chain fork requires you to install different software. This isn't unique to any PoS or PoW project - it's a feature of literally all decentralized consensus mechanisms. Otherwise they wouldn't be decentralized consensus.
idiotsecant 4y ago
Do you think it's a realistic concern that the entire world will collude to not let you have enough of the currency that they rely on people having in order for it to have value? What's the incentive there? It seems more realistic that the manufacturers of the most efficient mining hardware would refuse to sell it and instead use it themselves or sell to allies since that has you know, happened.

by NhanH 4y ago

nootropicat 4y ago

Yes, which is exactly why PoS is censorship resistant and PoW isn't. Taking over PoW is just a matter of acquiring resources - can be via regulation, or outright buying. The cost of mining hardware isn't very big. It's impossible to mine anonymously with any non-negligible hashrate due to power differences and required specialized hardware - all trivial to track. Taking over PoS is much harder because there's no way for governments to print tokens. It's easy to stake anonymously. A closed stable state in which only non-censoring validators control the network is always possible to achieve.

fsociety999 4y ago
The main difference I see here is that buying up mining hardware actually has limitations and constraints. You have to find enough supply of the hardware, find enough energy to run it, find a location big enough to house it, make sure to keep it up to date, etc. With PoS, although governments can’t print tokens, it doesn’t really matter. The governments and central banks have unlimited money. They control the money supply. Even if some of the top stakers won’t want to sell, they would still be able to find enough sellers who are. We have already seen how a single tweet from someone like Elon Musk can cause thousands of people to buy or sell. Manipulating the market is easy and doesn’t require permission from the people with the largest stake. All they would need to do is float a bill that they are planning on making Bitcoin illegal and then after it is on the front page of all the news sites, when everyone is rushing to exit, swoop in and buy up the supply. I think Wall Street has already done this to a large extent. Hence, this is why I believe they are likely the ones behind this push as opposed to the people who will be hurt as a result. All of that said, I’m willing to keep an open mind and see what happens to Ethereum after its switch to PoS. If I had to guess, I suspect we will begin to see stories of blocked transactions and blocked wallets, etc.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  >With PoS, although governments can’t print tokens, it doesn’t really matter. The governments and central banks have unlimited money. so they pump eth price to infinity to get majority of stake? While in theory it could work, it would cost at least hundreds of billions of dollars. Compared to maybe $1B-$2B to take over PoW from nothing. Two orders of magnitude difference. As nobody needs a blockchain with censorship everyone else would move to a fork without the governmental stake. A very foolish plan.
TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
The difference between pos and pow isn't in the architecture of just those two elements. It's in what those chains do. If a POW miner invested the resources to take over the network, breaking the network would certainly crash the price. However, node operators get a bigger payout than delegating your stake or staking it yourself. Overtime, this percentage difference will allow the node operators to control the network 'without breaking it'. Btc can be minimally exploited because it doesn't do anything. POS networks are by design highly adaptive networks, with smart contracts, oracles, virtual machines and any other wonder programmers can dream up. This allows a 'soft control' exploit rather than btc's 'hard control'.
- nootropicat 4y ago
  >If a POW miner invested the resources to take over the network, breaking the network would certainly crash the price. In practice, us government would pass a regulation that forces miners to register and to censor sanctioned addresses. Once they realize that miners they control own majority of hashrate, they can add a requirement to ignore chains with sanctioned addresses (from others miners). There's no defense against this, because unlike PoS, you can't really move anywhere else. China has its own ban. Energy prices in europe are insane. Russia is sanctioned and just getting chips in is almost certainly a crime. Under PoS as long as there's any subset of non-censoring validators a fork away from censorship is possible. Unlike mining, staking is extremely mobile globally.
  - aserafini 4y ago
    And in this last scenario, how does someone joining the network know which of the now forked chains is the ‘one true chain’?
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      How do you know literally any chain is the one true chain? You don't, because there is no such thing. There is only the chain which you agree is the one true chain. In practice the software generally is designed to connect to only one chain - a chain fork requires you to install different software. This isn't unique to any PoS or PoW project - it's a feature of literally all decentralized consensus mechanisms. Otherwise they wouldn't be decentralized consensus.

idiotsecant 4y ago

Do you think it's a realistic concern that the entire world will collude to not let you have enough of the currency that they rely on people having in order for it to have value? What's the incentive there? It seems more realistic that the manufacturers of the most efficient mining hardware would refuse to sell it and instead use it themselves or sell to allies since that has you know, happened.