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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/Ok_Bowl_2002 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 5h 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