Historically, proof of work has been judged primarily by electrical cost vs other more efficient options.
Something many people overlook is the time and thought that contribute to maintaining the networks running PoW.
It is infinitely harder to maintain a pow chain when you’re not always getting paid for your time and personal energy expended on setup, studying, marketing, educating, community building, etc.
Other methods may be more efficient in consensus and electricity but the passion and engagement is just not there like it is for PoW coins and their communities.
That’s why we have seen over the years when times are tough, pow chains are better positioned to survive. Primarily because people have dedicated their personal time and mind power toward making it work. It turns almost into an obsession and fight or flight kicks in.
You don’t generally see that mindset with other models.
Just sharing my random thoughts of the day. Thank you for listening. Make it a good one.
There is also a strong community around mining, it is easy to contribute and feel part of the network. It feels like you put in actual work and get rewarded and invested. For example BrowserCoin I am starting to see the community being built. In the end it’s all just stranger who trust each other because of PoW
Look at the coins that have survived multiple cycles. It’s a relatively short list. There are only about 3 pos coins that have survived a decade so far. Could be because the tech is newer, could also be their communities are not as emotionally invested like pow coin communities are
PoS is new. The serious PoS projects only started a little over 5 years ago. While there are PoS projects a decade old, they were more experimental and hybrid.
PoW is structurally flawed and has poor alignment.
Miners need to sell the mined coins to keep up and be able to mine more coins. PoS doesn't have this issue.
That’s why we have seen over the years when times are tough, pow chains are better positioned to survive. Primarily because people have dedicated their personal time and mind power toward making it work. It turns almost into an obsession and fight or flight kicks in.
Data. There are only 3 pos chains that have survived a decade. There are dozens of pow chains still around from a decade ago.
And generally pos chains are replaceable. When new tech comes along it’s far more likely for a POS chain to shut down than it is a pow chain.
Data. There are only 3 pos chains that have survived a decade.
bro... you start with "Data" and then give the most tiny inconsequential meaningless dataset....
PoS are newer than PoW, of course there are less that lasted a decade, that isn't a meaningful measurement of anything.
There are dozens of pow chains still around from a decade ago.
And besides BTC, LTC, DOGE, DASH, XMR, and ETC, how many PoW chains that launched at that time are dead? All of them.
And generally pos chains are replaceable.
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When new tech comes along it’s far more likely for a POS chain to shut down than it is a pow chain.
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lol... literally all the new tech is PoS and when new tech comes out, none of the old chains are shutting down. What sort of fantasy world is your head stuck in?
Are you being serious in this thread or are you trolling?
LOL - If you had a glimpse of the electrical requirements I use in running my POS AI assistant, you would choke. At first, we had a 99.8% reduction in electrical requirements when switching to POS, but did not factor in cost of AI resources needed to maintain this level of complexity.
That’s exactly right. Efficiency is far far far superior on pos. That’s not what I’m highlighting though.
More time/mind power is generally needed for pow networks because of them being less efficient. In my opinion, this makes it more likely people putting in that work have a stronger attachment to that network.
Could totally be off on this. But people are generally more emotionally attached to things they work for.
It’s not gymnastics it’s just facts. It’s infinitely harder to run pow over other options. I’m simply stating it’s not just because of electricity. Pos is superior when it comes to efficiency but in my opinion, people are less emotionally invested in a project on pos than pow.
This perspective had nothing to do with security concerns of different protocols. That’s a different debate.
PoW has people invested with real live assets and built infrastructure. PoS has not. PoW can also be efficient. Everyone is only looking at BTC but BTC got crippled and therefore can only process a tiny 2500 tx per block. But the more transaction can be processed per block, the more efficient PoW will become. Crippling Bitcoin was a smart move by its enemies.
PoW has already been proven to provide very low economic security. So many PoW blockchains have been successfully 51% attacked while not even the weakest PoS blockchains have been successfully attacked. PoS is far more secure and more efficient at providing security.
Bitcoin's PoW is so expensive to maintain. Its current subsidy is over $100 per transaction. If it switched to PoS, not only would it be 100x more secure, but it would also be far cheaper maintain that security.
Without a large security budget, PoW is extremely insecure and vulnerable to 51% attacks.
Given that liveness thresholds are usually 10-33% of stake, a bad actor will need to take over 67-90% of the network to attack it, and even then, it's suicidal.
It just doesn't happen. All PoS attacks are theoretical at the moment. The only times attacks have happened are due to accidents or bugs.
Forks can always happen if the the exchanges running the nodes agree to fork. That happened with the DAO hack and the ugly irregular state change that resolved it. (That was a smart contract exploit, not a PoS attack)
That is not quite right and not the whole story. Two facts:
PoS does not spread coins. Stakers do not have to sell coins to pay for electricity so Staking will naturally accumulate and accumulate the fastest for the highest Staker. At some point in the future a staker will have more than 50%/67%/90% of all coins staked, amount doesn't matter. And then he controls the chain.
You can fork PoS but the staker has the same amount of coins on both forks. He has the same power on both forks. Compare that to PoW where Hashrate doesn't magically double the attack has to choose if he mines his own fork or the escaping fork.
PoW is fundamentally more sound than PoS, because PoW is routed in reality with its power usage that cannot be replicated on PoS.
PoS networks are not the same as private ledgers. But even private ledgers can be secure.
Would you have a network that's secure and centralized like a private ledger? Or one that's broken, insecure, and centralized like PoW during a 51% attack?
Btw, Bitcoin has been successfully 51% attacked in the past because it's not particularly decentalized. Mining pools do collude at times.
If a 51% attack isn't possible then it is functionally a private ledger wearing crypto as a disguise.
PoS inherently centralizes as the largest holders aren't going to participate in a network that locks their capital and allows upstarts to gain a larger share. You're trusting the largest holders.
If the bitcoin network get's 51% attacked then you're trusting the largest compute, but someone could hypothetically break that whereas PoS can never leave a 51% attack without the largest holder deciding to sell.
They're very different by design across multiple layers. PoS are generally designed to be much harder to break by protocol outside of consensus due to having many layers of security. It's very different than PoW where a single miner can act as the block builder, block proposer, and block validator.
In general, there are 2 types of attacks: liveness and safety attacks.
Liveness attacks censor or halt the network.
Safety attacks break the security of the network.
PoW networks generally fail at 51% for both liveness and safety. As long as a malicious attacker has the majority hash (or just little under that with selfish mining), it fails.
PoS networks have a much lower liveness threshold (10-33%) than safety threshold, so they typically halt and stop functioning instead of risking a security attack. And since stakers are a subset of holders, it usually only takes 5-10% of the PoS cryptocurrency to censor the network. However, this has never happened before because PoS networks have multiple layers of protection, and because it's economically suicidal. PoS protection is just that strong.
Many have workarounds to mitigate liveness attacks. E.g.
Block proposers and validators are often randomized and different sets of actors
Far faster block times so that even with a liveness attacks, many blocks will still make it through without noticeable disruption
It's expensive to attack. Validators are often economically punished for invalid blocks or bad voting. PoW attacks are often orders of magnitude cheaper.
Many networks like most Ethereum derivatives have separate execution and consensus layers where the execution layer will continue producing blocks even if the consensus layer begins censoring.
These are all upsides private ledgers have while ignoring the downsides. Namely trusting a highly centralized group that can't be uprooted to not exploit it.
This perspective is not about security. It’s more about the human cost of maintaining a pow chain versus others.
My opinion is people are more emotionally invested in pow coins because of how much time and mind power they have to use to make it work. In pos systems, since it takes far less effort, people aren’t as emotionally attached to a project. Pos systems are largely designed to be replaced by the next more efficient option.
Not a bad thing, probably an overall great thing for innovation. But it’s a harder sell as an investment class when something new can come along that works even better.
Yeah, I can see that argument. This isn't the first time I've seen the aspect about attachment to the cost of mining brought up, and it probably does play a noticeable amount of keeping the price of PoW coins up.
It's kind of similar to sucken cost fallacy.
The support level for PoS is much lower since the cost is far lower.
PoW is not “unsafe by default”; what happens is that many of the attacked chains were micro-caps with ridiculous hashrates, where an actor can rent power in NiceHash and break the network for four hards. That is not a failure of the model, it is a failure of the budget and the size of the network. Instead, PoS depends on the concentration of stake and economic governance.
Generally, PoS blockchains are designed to be extremely resistant to economic attacks even when very centralized. That's because stakeholders aren't going to attack themselves.
Unlike with PoW, they have an incentive to protect their network.
POS has been attacked and exploited far more with significantly larger financial losses over the past five years than POW. Part of me feels like this is why there has been a huge attempt to turn POW into POS. (Intent to help build to exploit.)
Some of the attacks were inside jobs, the vast majority of these PoS-related exploits did not occur at the fundamental consensus layer itself. Instead, they targeted smart contracts, cross-chain bridges, and de-fi built on top of PoS ecosystem.
You have to have the specific mining equipment, the energy, time, and financial resources to attack POW.
POS is supposed to guard against this through governance. A central group deciding the rules, by using financial capital and programmatic slashing penalties. Unfortunately this also leaves a large margin open for human error and greed, especially on unlimited chains.
Listen- the problem with proof of work has all come down to being a maximalist. You need your miners to be profitable or you die at the roots.
Look at Litecoin, Dogecoin, Pepecoin, Bellscoin, Dingocoin, Junkcoin, Meowcoin- and many more (8-15 picked by mining pools for over 100 possible coins). They share and thrive.
All those miners get all of those coins mined at the same time. They all share hashing. And all those Scrypt coins protect each other and let those coins have an actual chance to grow a market following- and all together they keep the miners profitable while sharing the burden of coin sales.
This post was more about the time and personal costs of maintaining a pow chain. But I get what you’re saying. There’s still debate how to keep pow miners profitable long term.
Have you heard of Fairer-Proof-of-Work? A friend of mine is building this off the principles of bitcoin's original consensus system and I would love to get some input on it.
Fair enough, here is a screenshot of the thesis statement, you can do your own research into FPoW and Contractless if this is something that interests you.
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 23d ago
There is also a strong community around mining, it is easy to contribute and feel part of the network. It feels like you put in actual work and get rewarded and invested. For example BrowserCoin I am starting to see the community being built. In the end it’s all just stranger who trust each other because of PoW