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Proof-of-work is absolute truth, proof-of-stake is relative truth. Both have their role. But for the most important transactions it's better to produce more clean energy than to give up on the undeletable history that accumulated work provides.

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Balaji

@balajis

Jun 20, 2021

It's hard to express this compactly to a non-technical person, but basically: it's harder to fake the results of a massive calculation done over ten years with datacenters full of hardware than it is to convince a fixed set of humans to change their minds and rewrite history.

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SBF

@SBF_FTX

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@balajis

I think I'm missing something here, would love some more color! As I understand, PoW could re-write history the same as PoS if you got the right "fixed set of humans". For PoW it's 51% of miners, for PoS it's 51% of stakers. Maybe one is more robust than the other -- why?

7:14 AM · Jun 20, 2021Twitter Web App

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I guess what I'm wondering is, are you arguing: (a) there's something very fundamentally different about blockchain security via miners vs via stakers (b) in practice, one is much safer (why?) than the other, although in theory they have similar strengths/weaknesses

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and

(also obv I'm oversimplifying -- some PoS networks use thresholds other than 50%, maybe you only get access temporarily, etc. -- if those nuances inform your view feel free to cite them!)

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That's where my thoughts were going. Enjoyed the thread and answers 👌👍

Saurav Bhatia - Crypto Edge Hunter

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and

As the chain gets longer and more established it gets more expensive to change the record as it will impact the upstream hashes. Try estimating the effort needed to change the first block on Bitcoin now. Effectively that history is set "Really Set in stone)