6/ Similarly, PoS promises ledger immutability without requiring any upfront cost, basically creating ledger security out of thin air.
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Over a large distribution, the amount of hash power required to rewrite X blocks is *exactly the same as what was required to mine those X blocks in the first place*. That's a fact and what I meant by PoW having 100% efficiency in terms of protecting the ledger against rewrite.
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No one disputed that. You're fixating on one tiny part of the security system. A key question is based on the structure, does the system naturally gravitate towards one in which there's a monopoly or oligopoly on hash power, and what incentives does that create?
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That's a completely orthogonal issue. Whether a PoW ledger was written by a single powerful miner, or by a diverse group of miners: that still does *not* negate the fact that to attack that ledger you need to spend an equivalent amount of hash power that was expensed.
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Now that doesn't mean that mining centralization is not an issue, and the nature of the PoW hashing algo *might* have some impact on the degree of centralization. But what doesn't have centralization tendencies?
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If you know some alternatives to PoW mining that doesn't gravitate towards centralization, I'm all ears.
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And surely, whatever that solution would be, it's *not* PoS.
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FWIW, Satoshi couldn't foresee how much mining would centralize (the "one CPU, one vote" dream). It's possible that *nothing is safe from centralization forces*.
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Maybe the best we could do as a community, is to keep the barrier-to-entry as low as possible for mining. And hope that a competitive industry will keep centralization forces in check.
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No one disagreed with this one narrow point. What I'm pointing out is that raw energy consumption is just one side of the equation. You're ignoring the complex relationship about energy consumption and security implications, like *who* ends up with the mining hardware.
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