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With proof of work, you have to spend your pile of money if you want to influence a vote. Whatever the cost of a 51% "attack" would be, the attacker has to actu
by max51 4y ago
With proof of work, you have to spend your pile of money if you want to influence a vote. Whatever the cost of a 51% "attack" would be, the attacker has to actually spend that money to do it.
With proof of stake, having that money is enough to vote and you don't need to spend or waste it. In fact, you get paid for having that money sitting in the account.
- hot_gril 4y agoThe catch is that people will notice 51% attacks. If you have enough voting money and fudge transactions, all that money becomes worthless pretty quickly. The more realistic issue is that the big voter gets to decide the direction of the protocol, but again sufficiently screwing things up only leads to their own demise. It was worse with PoW in theory. Just because you have tons of mining equipment doesn't mean you have a stake in the future of the cryptocurrency.
- max51 4y ago>The catch is that people will notice 51% attacks. The thing about crypto is that the majority hashrate/stake gets to decide what is an "attack" and what isn't. This behavior isn't a bug, it's a feature and it's what separates crypto from fiat. With PoW, sooner or later the attacker will run out of money. When they stop paying for the hashrate, their votes all goes away, they don't get extra points for being the top miner at one point in time. With PoS, getting a majority means that your majority will actually increase over time unless someone actively decides to burn the cash necessary to stop you. The longer the community waits/debate over it, the harder it will be to remove the "attacker".
- hot_gril 4y agoRight, the majority decides what is an "attack" in that it decides which chain to use, and the longest chain wins. But that's not the issue. People (or automated systems) can decide on their own what is an attack. They see transactions being reversed after several confirmations and say "the blockchain is compromised, so I won't use it anymore." Yes with PoS it's harder to remove the attacker. But the attacker also stands to lose far more money than the attack can possibly be worth.
- jereees 4y agoRecommend you read about slashing staking and zero-knowledge proofs to understand why this is not a problem at least from theoretical point of view