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Comment by gtrubetskoy | Hacker News Reader

The only problem here is that Proof-of-Work is the evolution of Proof-of-Stake, not the other way around.

PoS is how Paxos and RAFT work, and it was described in Wei Dai's b-money in 1989 [1]. But it didn't work for an adversarial byzantine network, and so it wasn't until Satoshi invented a Proof-of-Work based solution in 2008 that we had a crypto-currency.

1. http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

  "Each server is required to deposit a certain amount of money in a special account to be used as potential fines or rewards for
  proof of misconduct."

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PoS is also plutocratic isn't it? Money would always flow to those that already have the largest stake. Economies already naturally do that, so also coding it into the monetary system would double the exponent on the effect. Winners take all, and are then the arbiters of all transactions.

Money flows to everyone, just more goes to those with more money. However that isn't as bad as it sounds. If you own 10% and someone owns 1%, after the money has been given out you will still have 10% and they 1%. From a relative wealth perspective it actually just maintains everyone's position in society, neither benefiting nor disadvantaging anyone...

That's the spiel at least...

If I have 10% and you have 1%, I might be able to keep 5% locked as my stake and 5% liquid, where you need 0.9% liquid and can only lock 0.1%. What was a 10:1 ratio in capital becomes a 50:1 ratio after we each chunk some out for liquidity.

Depends on how it is set up. If you require stake to be locked up for a long time then the plutocracy doesn't mean much since the stake is inaccessible (having 10 million $ doesn't matter if the box it's in is indestructible and locked)

I don't think that works. Only the very rich can take large sums of money and lock it up like that.

Paxos and RAFT aren't generally considered to be PoS systems. I can see that there are some similarities but saying "PoS is how Paxos and RAFT work" isn't correct by the usual meaning of PoS.

I don't see how Paxos or RAFT could be considered proof-of-stake? Nothing is staked in Paxos or RAFT, and there is no disincentive for bad actors.

I was referring to the concept of delegating decisions to a (somehow selected) single node, though in those particular cases there is no "stake".

Okay, got it. I wouldn't call that PoS, but I see what you mean.

I think of the crux of PoS as the incentive system that keeps bad actors out -- if you act maliciously, you lose your stake.

It seems disingenuous to refer to that as proof-of-stake.

Errr, no. That's leader election, and is not a consensus algorithm by itself. It's part of the algorithm, which is nothing like PoS at all. That's like saying UDP and TCP are the same because they send packets.

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