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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

Given that bitcoin would also work without a Proof of Work, yes, it's a more stupid way to burn resources than pretty much anything else. Bitcoin without the ridiculous amount of energy consumption is possible, though I'm personally doubtful that will happen.

As an example Cardano and Tezos are two blockchain based on Proof of Stake, they both require a very low amount of energy compared to bitcoin or ethereum (no mining rigs, a node can run on a raspberry pi 4).

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The big problem with proof of stake is that it requires a centralized root of trust.

Suppose for example that I takeover the Cardano website. I could create my own root block and generate millions of 'stakers'. Staking requires ownership but since it's my own new chain, I can generate coins easily without expending any real-world resources. As a new user, how could you differentiate the 'real' Cardano chain from mine?

Isn't this basically the case with github now? i.e all the cryptos have their code public on github so if I wanted to start mining, I'd have to go there to get the code

With Bitcoin, there are quite a few completely independent clients available: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Clients, but the beauty of proof-of-work is that you do not need to trust any of them.

With proof-of-work chains, one can download the blockchain even without a client and write a simple program/script to calculate the total work (hashes) embedded in the chain. This provides a completely independent measure of trust.

With PoS, you must assume you can trust the client or root of the blockchain, which really kills the primary use-case of a decentralized currency.

Proof of work needs to go to the gutter. It was a bad idea to begin with. Proof of stake makes more sense and operates like a bank deposit interest rate

Can you elaborate more? It seems to be that a lot of very smart people think the opposite and are investing huge time and money in it

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