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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

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SBF

@SBF_FTX

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

7:19 AM · Jun 20, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

made some excellent points at pleb.fi/miami about how pow may be superior to pos as the externality of hashing from the rest of the system makes certain types of attacks harder to pull off when there is a short term reorg incentive (e.g. a juicy defi arb)

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E.g. imagine a POS network and a flash loan opportunity where you can atomically earn more by slashing yourself and equivocating. You may not even get slashed! Pow such things are harder to pull off profitably. Thermodynamics, Cost of block production can't be reclaimed.

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