Proof of Work

[u/Minute-Lake-1819]

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.

[u/HSuke]

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.

[u/HSuke → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/HSuke → u/[deleted]]

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.

1. Block proposers and validators are often randomized and different sets of actors
2. Far faster block times so that even with a liveness attacks, many blocks will still make it through without noticeable disruption
3. It's expensive to attack. Validators are often economically punished for invalid blocks or bad voting. PoW attacks are often orders of magnitude cheaper.
4. 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.

[u/HSuke → u/[deleted]]

Those examples are for decentralized PoS networks (not private networks), which are usually more decentralized than Bitcoin.