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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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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?

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and

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

7:15 AM · Jun 20, 2021Twitter Web App

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(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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SBF

@SBF_FTX

Jun 20, 2021

so I'm confused -- AFAIK PoW concentrates it in the miners, which are a select few wealthy people: blockchain.com/pools

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and

I'm arguing (a). Because mining is a computation, while staking is more like a BoD vote, even if the current set of miners collude they can't rewrite the entire chain history. That requires years of compute. See Poelstra on "costless simulation" here. download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

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and

Hugos article about this subject is great :

hugonguyen.medium.com

Work is Timeless, Stake is Not

Much has been written about Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

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The COMPUTING of POW is long-term security theoretically, The VOTE of POS is getting possibilities of cheating theoretically. For real peer-to-peer, POW is the only choice in long term view.

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