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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

> I'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those)

You know that one of the major motivations for Proof of Stake is environmental, right? Proof of stake eliminates the energy waste problem. That is one of its major motivating factors.

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yes, definitely, and that's why I'm excited about it. What I was writing about when I posted that comment was more about how the environmental impact is often just left out of the conversation - and I was surprised that the original article didn't even give it a mention.

Ah, I guess I just assumed it was implied at this point. People in the space consider it pretty important, I think, and it's well understood as one of the principal motivations for the switch to proof of stake.

Proof of stake may not involve energy costs directly but it has far worse consequences - costs are just shifted into political plane. Which is essentially what bitcoin was designed to avoid.

You do know that idea of pos is older than PoW, yet nobody cared for it exactly because you end up with financial system run by politicians - exactly where you started.

I see people say this sometimes, and then provide no real evidence that it is at all true. PoS systems exist now, they don't have political problems to speak of any moreso than PoW coins. I see no reason to think that PoS would induce any sort of great political struggle that PoW wouldn't.

A PoS that actually matters will turn into a political game as large stakeholders play negotiation games of where the project goes next. Much like stockholder corporations today.

How is that different from PoW?

It's not.

Bitcoin has a history of huge factional schisms over changes that should have been a no brainer (increase block size to increase tx throughput).

Instead political wars have been fought as the Core dev governance gridlocked and stagnated leading to the Bitcoin Cash fork (amongst others).

It’s natural way of life. If a system is subject to being controlled by political process, which PoS is unlike PoW, it will eventually be overrun by politicians. Just common sense.

And which political processes exactly is PoS subject to that PoW is not?

Ordering transactions.

Hm? How so? PoW miners can reorder transactions too. How is this different?

they cannot without expending large amount of energy and even then it will look extremely shady to both old and new nodes. in pos you can generate an entire new blockchain from genesis and new nodes won't have a clue which chain is "real" while old nodes will be very much confused having to make a decision on the split and reorg.

point is - pos is based on trust, pow is based on laws of physics.

> you end up with financial system run by politicians

At least, in case of pos, it is run by politicians with skin in the game...

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