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What’s with the hate for proof-of-stake? Seems like the hate is directed towards the fact that those have more to stake, benefit more. Can’t the same argument

What’s with the hate for proof-of-stake? Seems like the hate is directed towards the fact that those have more to stake, benefit more. Can’t the same argument be made about proof-of-work? Those who have the ability to buy more compute, also benefit more. Instead of buying GPUs/ASICs for mining you’re buying into the network you’re trying to secure.

wmf 1y ago
I suspect it's tribalism with layers of rationalizations on top.
sph 1y ago
Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards. Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost. Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.
- D13Fd 1y ago
  With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.
  - kingstnap 1y ago
    Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work. I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity. Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.
    - everfree 1y ago
      > Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work. Why is scarcity required to be physical? And if it fundamentally can't work, why does it seem to be working by the metrics?
    - D13Fd 1y ago
      The reality is, if crypto requires a proof of work system that burns energy for nothing, it’s not a system we as a society should be using.
  - sph 1y ago
    > we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world. Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores. It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."
Mistletoe 1y ago
It’s just ignorance pure and simple. Proof of stake means you don’t enrich chipmakers and electric companies on the way to your security.
- proxynoproxy 1y ago
  Nah you just enrich the founders who did nothing except print all the tokens out of nothing. PoS is worthless, it came from nothing, it is worth nothing.
proxynoproxy 1y ago
Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database. Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age! Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.
- keeganpoppen 1y ago
  Bitcoin proof of work is both the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the entire sphere… and i say this as an enjoyer of all the fancy math et al. in the space. it is genuinely a monumental achievement… one whose value… is indeterminate (at best; and worst). and i wouldn’t dare opine on that point, because i’m “from Switzerland” on this. but that it opened a mathemeatical pandora’s box is undeniable. when i read the original Bitcoin paper (about a year after publication) i was suffused with the feeling that something fundamental was “discovered” in a way i’ve only felt a handful of times in my entire life… (and then i spent all my BTC on drugs)
  - mistercheph 1y ago
    +1 blockchains and cryptocurrencies are super interesting and valuable IMO outside of the present speculative lotteries people are playing. But I suspect even more interesting things than the current applications will come out of the opening of a bridge between pure computation and the material world over the next decades/centuries/millenia.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.
runeks 1y ago
With proof-of-stake, an attacker compromising a majority of private keys results in the attacker taking control of the blockchain. The attacker could publish only empty blocks using this stake majority, and there'd be no way to distinguish these malicious valid blocks from actually useful blocks. This makes proof-of-stake inherently less secure than proof-of-work because for PoW blockchains, consensus is not affected by compromising private keys.
- bawolff 1y ago
  Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. For a smaller chain, purchasing a lot of compute sounds easier than hacking everyone's keys. Not to mention if you can hack someone's private key, surely you can hack their server farm (Fwiw, i think both have a similar level of risk, its just coming from different threats)
  - sph 1y ago
    > Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. It’s easier to accumulate a lot of money than to accumulate a lot of hardware and building a nuclear plant to literally outcompete the rest of the world, no? And at that point you are no longer invisible, so the rest of the world could simply decide to ignore your monopolistic contributions to the blockchain altogether and fork.
  - runeks 1y ago
    > Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. Firstly, no one is offering for sale enough compute to attack e.g. Bitcoin. Secondly, and more importantly, this would be a temporary attack, during which the blockchain in question is rendered unusable. Once an honest majority of hashing power is reestablished, everything is back to normal. But a compromise of a majority stake is a permanent compromise of a chain. No honest actor can conjure up more stake to gain an advantage over the attacker who now sits on a majority.
- everfree 1y ago
  I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.
someone235 1y ago
If someone has 30% of the stake, he can keep his share forever if he wants to. If someone has 30% of the hash power he has to keep innovating and keep up with the competition to keep his share. This kind of dynamics makes PoW permissionless, since you don't need cooperation from other miners in order of joining the game.
- everfree 1y ago
  To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum. To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.
  - proxynoproxy 1y ago
    No, you need to buy from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who printed it from nothing. Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi
    - tromp 1y ago
      In summary: PoW is a mechanism for fair coin distribution (of course, fairness still depends on the emission curve), while PoS is not (its creators start with 100% of all coins).
      - kinakomochidayo 1y ago
        No, not all PoS start with the creators having 100% of all coins. See Ethereum.
        proxynoproxy 1y ago
        Ethereum printed 60% of its tokens day one; sold to insiders. and then mined 40% for the illusion of decentralization. Close enough. Premined scam. (Edit for 60%)

wmf 1y ago

I suspect it's tribalism with layers of rationalizations on top.

sph 1y ago

Capital (stake) can be accumulated infinitely, without friction, and usually the more you have the more its value accelerates upwards. Work can be increased, certainly, but you pretty much hit major physical blocks to its increase, whether it’s productivity, lack of capital, energy costs, competition finding new ways to do the same work for less cost. Really, the parallels to real world wealth disparity are reflected in why proof-of-stake is just a bad idea, unless you are one of the “1%” of crypto mining, then you just have to sit and wait for your stake to increase indefinitely. Then why not lend it for interest? You can get it to grow even faster. Whoops, we have reinvented the global economy and the wealth disparity.

D13Fd 1y ago
With proof-of-work, we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels on a warming planet just to ensure people don’t cheat at various distributed spreadsheets. Even if you don’t participate in crypto, those who do are polluting your environment, increasing your electricity costs, and generally making the planet worse all to run their distributed spreadsheets With proof-of-stake, all of the annoying crypto folk are basically harmless. They generate near zero economic value (moving money from place to place, which can be accomplished without crypto) but they don’t hurt anybody except for other crypto folk.
- kingstnap 1y ago
  Proof of Work provides scarcity that makes crypto work. Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work. I think proof of storage or something would be more interesting as a (partial) solution to the crypto folk wasting electricity. Ideally as proof of RAM though. We don't want them abusing cloud storage plans.
  - everfree 1y ago
    > Stake just removes the physical scarcity so it fundamentally can't work. Why is scarcity required to be physical? And if it fundamentally can't work, why does it seem to be working by the metrics?
  - D13Fd 1y ago
    The reality is, if crypto requires a proof of work system that burns energy for nothing, it’s not a system we as a society should be using.
- sph 1y ago
  > we as a society are doing insane things like burning large amounts of fossil fuels Period. Shutting down Bitcoin won't solve global warming, and Bitcoin doesn't require fossil fuels necessarily to run. This is a tired argument that blames the ills of the world on one thing that you don't particularly like or see the benefit of. Bitcoin just likes abundant, cheap energy just like everything else in our modern world. Technological societies require increasing amounts of energy. The issue is that fossil fuels are easier to generate electricity out of, favoured by governments, lobbies and voters alike, so renewables are more expensive. If your issue is burning large amounts of fossil fuels, you should work on this problem rather than complaining about one user downstream of the problem. It's easy to point the finger because it's easy to calculate how much energy bitcoin uses (transactions per day * energy per transaction), so it's easy to make a one-line viral tweet blaming all the ills of the world on it, while there are much more wasteful businesses whose energy usage is hard to quantify that everyone conveniently ignores. It is so tiring to have to explain this every time on every HN thread, but I guess it's always so easy to convince oneself there is a simple solution to very hard problems. "Just shut Bitcoin down, I don't see a use for it so it's useless."

Mistletoe 1y ago

It’s just ignorance pure and simple. Proof of stake means you don’t enrich chipmakers and electric companies on the way to your security.

proxynoproxy 1y ago
Nah you just enrich the founders who did nothing except print all the tokens out of nothing. PoS is worthless, it came from nothing, it is worth nothing.

proxynoproxy 1y ago

Because it’s not external referencing. It’s all on chain, and any external price of tokens is all in humans minds. Of course, true of Bitcoin too. However, energy is the external thing that links time and computation to the chain data. Really, Bitcoin PoW is an amazing discovery. Proof of Stake is self serving self referencial database. Bitcoin through Proof of Work is a global computational one-way valve for a ledger, which enables a fuzzy decentralized time, by which we can enforce digital scarcity! The ledger record becomes the digital commodity. What an age! Proof of stake ends up as chain where 26 dudes in discord can freeze accounts, lock the chain, etc, etc. it’s not really different than 26 banks doing the same. And really you have to ask yourself about the purpose of any of this if you are trading 26 banks for 26 dudes in a discord.

keeganpoppen 1y ago
Bitcoin proof of work is both the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the entire sphere… and i say this as an enjoyer of all the fancy math et al. in the space. it is genuinely a monumental achievement… one whose value… is indeterminate (at best; and worst). and i wouldn’t dare opine on that point, because i’m “from Switzerland” on this. but that it opened a mathemeatical pandora’s box is undeniable. when i read the original Bitcoin paper (about a year after publication) i was suffused with the feeling that something fundamental was “discovered” in a way i’ve only felt a handful of times in my entire life… (and then i spent all my BTC on drugs)
- mistercheph 1y ago
  +1 blockchains and cryptocurrencies are super interesting and valuable IMO outside of the present speculative lotteries people are playing. But I suspect even more interesting things than the current applications will come out of the opening of a bridge between pure computation and the material world over the next decades/centuries/millenia.
throwaway290 1y ago
PoW is supported by two things, belief that waste of energy is valuable and criminals using it to workaround sanctions.

runeks 1y ago

With proof-of-stake, an attacker compromising a majority of private keys results in the attacker taking control of the blockchain. The attacker could publish only empty blocks using this stake majority, and there'd be no way to distinguish these malicious valid blocks from actually useful blocks. This makes proof-of-stake inherently less secure than proof-of-work because for PoW blockchains, consensus is not affected by compromising private keys.

bawolff 1y ago
Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. For a smaller chain, purchasing a lot of compute sounds easier than hacking everyone's keys. Not to mention if you can hack someone's private key, surely you can hack their server farm (Fwiw, i think both have a similar level of risk, its just coming from different threats)
- sph 1y ago
  > Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. It’s easier to accumulate a lot of money than to accumulate a lot of hardware and building a nuclear plant to literally outcompete the rest of the world, no? And at that point you are no longer invisible, so the rest of the world could simply decide to ignore your monopolistic contributions to the blockchain altogether and fork.
- runeks 1y ago
  > Instead, it can be attacked simply by purchasing a lot of compute. Firstly, no one is offering for sale enough compute to attack e.g. Bitcoin. Secondly, and more importantly, this would be a temporary attack, during which the blockchain in question is rendered unusable. Once an honest majority of hashing power is reestablished, everything is back to normal. But a compromise of a majority stake is a permanent compromise of a chain. No honest actor can conjure up more stake to gain an advantage over the attacker who now sits on a majority.
everfree 1y ago
I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.

someone235 1y ago

If someone has 30% of the stake, he can keep his share forever if he wants to. If someone has 30% of the hash power he has to keep innovating and keep up with the competition to keep his share. This kind of dynamics makes PoW permissionless, since you don't need cooperation from other miners in order of joining the game.

everfree 1y ago
To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum. To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.
- proxynoproxy 1y ago
  No, you need to buy from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who printed it from nothing. Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi
  - tromp 1y ago
    In summary: PoW is a mechanism for fair coin distribution (of course, fairness still depends on the emission curve), while PoS is not (its creators start with 100% of all coins).
    - kinakomochidayo 1y ago
      No, not all PoS start with the creators having 100% of all coins. See Ethereum.
      - proxynoproxy 1y ago
        Ethereum printed 60% of its tokens day one; sold to insiders. and then mined 40% for the illusion of decentralization. Close enough. Premined scam. (Edit for 60%)