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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

I feel like proof of work reduces to proof of stake because the rich get richer, there's just an intermediate step of buying miners with your dividend.

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PoW is generally even less balanced than PoS, because poor people can't afford to take advantage of economies of scale with ultra-efficient mining farms. Meanwhile everyone will get the same % return in PoS.

Both are "rich get richer" schemes in the grand scheme of things, except that Bitcoin PoW started out as a completely open network which anyone could start mining from, so technically it's our own fault that we didn't realize the potential of Bitcoin in the early days and jumped onto Bitcoin. Otherwise we would be all billionaires. So I don't think it's the same. Just because you can label two things "Rich get Richer", doesn't mean they have precisely the same quality of "rich get richer scheme". Bitcoin PoW is completely capitalistic where people who mined to get their bitcoins deserve their wealth--they "worked" for their coins. So in Bitcoin it is true that "the rich get richer", but also "poor can get richer" too, as long as they started out mining early. This is not the case for PoS systems where bootstrapping PoS requires external capital, so this one is truly "Rich get Richer" in a sense that ONLY the rich can get richer.

That said, talking about this "fairness" is totally missing the point. As I mentioned, in the grand scheme of things it's all "rich get richer" and that's how capitalism works. The truly important question is how immutable an stable the ledger is, because that's what makes these blockchain projects meaningful.

If you ask anyone who has a thorough understanding of these technologies they would say PoW is superior to PoS in this sense. And Yes, this includes even the guys who are working on PoS blockchains. The only reason people bother with PoS is because PoW is having a hard time scaling and many people think maybe there may not even be an ultimate solution just with PoW.

... there's the other small detail of the appalling electricity consumption of PoW. Blockchains with PoS are more appealing to people who care about the rest of the world.

Congrats you've just repeated myself. Look for the part where I said PoW doesn't scale.

You probably didn't even read my comment. Because it wasn't about whether PoW or PoS is more efficient.

That’s a rude way to say “thanks for clarifying, I agree with you.”

“doesn’t scale” usually refers to technical difficulty with throughput. If you meant that Bitcoin et al cause massive environmental damage, you sure didn’t say it clearly.

I suggest that you would get a lot of mileage out of improving your writing skills first before trying to flame people. As it is, you’re just playing yourself.

PoW is theoretically better in this regard.

I mean, in theory the market should push the profit down to a minimum, forcing the miners to spend their revenues in order to keep mining.

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