Proof-of-stake will ultimatumly fail. The majority stakeholders can change the protocol at will to their benefit, and there’s no defense
(without mob theft). With proof-of-work, at least miners can defend or fork. Best of luck to them though.
With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker by just throwing more hashing power at bitcoin
You could do a hard-fork and slash their stake. In PoW, you can't do this.
> With PoW, an entity could theoretically out mine the 51% attacker
Not in the case of "selfish mining attack", where you may never know that an attack is happening until it's too late, you'll have little chance in defending with hashpower since the attackers will have a significant head start...
So ... theft?
you're being intellectually dishonest or even outright manipulative here.
there were never 184 billion coins created on bitcoin chain, there was a bug in validation logic of bitcoin client that made it follow the chain that was invalid.
are you seriously trying to compare that to stealing coins from somebody on a valid chain?
really?
They're not stealing coins from someone on a valid chain, they are forking away to another chain and slashing the user's stake. The user will still have all their coins on "their" chain and it's up to everyone else to decide which chain is "the right one". If the 51% user is truly malicious, the majority of network participants will move away to the new chain, rendering the 51% user's tokens (near) worthless.
so being successful is punished by destroying all wealth of the richest participant in the network? nice.
> If the 51% user is truly malicious
Having 51% doesn't automatically make you a malicious user. People also wouldn't move away to another chain simply because someone or some group owns 51%. They would move if said person or group abuses the power they get from owning a majority.
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQs#wh...
There's a lot of misinformation regarding PoS. Vlad Zamfir has spoken a lot on cartel attacks and how they're mitigated, but the biggest, and I mean bigger than biggest, argument against all of these attacks is that it's always detectable by honest nodes shy of 2/3rds attack and it defaces the value of the coin itself to attack at that volume.
It won't surprise me at all if a PoS blockchain ends up looking just like a two party political system, where every now and then you get to choose which fork/party has the least objectionable outcome for you, but where both choices leave you worse off than you started...
You and I can go fork Ethereum right now and now just tell people it's great, but show them it's great. It's like if we could fork the US government, refactor all the policies and let it run to demonstrate how good it is, and then people can come on board. You can't do that in politics, but you can absolutely do it in crypto.
It is not clear at all that a small political experiment will scale to a super power. It is equally unclear that a small crypto currency experiment will scale.
This is without even touching on how easy, or difficult to it is rally support for a new system. Quite difficult, I'd say.
It holds because you can demonstrate its utility on a small network.
PoS is way more secure.
Whilst this is great for decentralization, I've read interesting arguments in favor of ASIC mining. People who buy ASICs are committed to a coin. This leads to a stable base of mining. Meanwhile, GPU miners tend to mine whatever is the most profitable at any given time. This leads to large fluctuations in mining rates.
The Ether switch to POS has some people worried, as it might free up a lot of GPU power, which might overwhelm other GPU based POW systems.
Then again, any argument regarding mining algorithms is filled by people who have biases to the tune of 100 000$ of hardware investments.