The reality is that the energy used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain (or the energy "wasted" according to many here) is important and makes a 51% attack prohibitively costly.
While Vitalik coming with this potential solution is great, the reverse of that coin is that the developers have very significant control on the blockchain which is far from ideal.
The case for BTC in this regard is no different from ETH. In both cases developers put together an upgrade, then miners can either upgrade or not.
In Ethereum, developers run the show. They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.
This is how it works in Ethereum as well
> They decide what gets pushed to miners via the All Core Devs call.
Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different.
So is Ethereum not going to PoS if miners say no?
> Blockstream does the same, it's literally no different.
Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers provide the code, but it only activates with miner consent.
Miners who refuse to adopt the new PoS system have the right to not upgrade to it. At that point, the system "forks" (the article calls it a 51% attack, but I think that's a little inflammatory). This literally already happened with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic; Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. It isn't a new situation.
The reason why some miners are dissenting this change is, first and obviously, because they disagree with it. So, why not just fork? Because no one talks about Bitcoin Cash; they talk about Bitcoin. They want to stay on PoW because it will return the best revenue for their mining operation, but if they're busy mining a coin that has little value, that also hurts their revenue. In other words, the only way for them to win is to get the community against the change, which is a losing bet because the change is widely supported.
Miners want money. Ethereum, like every currency, is worth what it is because of people. The value of Ethereum goes where the money velocity goes; in other words, where the users go. The critical question is not what the developers or miners support; its what the users support. Well, barring any major conflicts of interest, they'll/we'll probably support the developers; their power comes directly and only from the trust that the collective democracy of ethereum's users has in them. If Vitalik demonstrated extreme prejudice against ethereum's users, then the users would (probably) revolt, and new developers would be installed, but critically: Ethereum, like all blockchains, enables that in a way which doesn't involve the war, death, and bloodshed that overthrowing governments typically requires.
Miners want to have their cake and eat it too. They don't give a shit about Ethereum's users. They want a high ETH token price, wholly and totally supported by Ethereum's users, but without this RFC, which both the developers and most users support. They could fork, give the middle finger to the users, and their secondary TRASH-ETH blockchain would be worth nothing, because it doesn't have users, but at least they'd have proof of work. That's why they'll lose; not because the developers are on the other side, but because the users have put their faith in the developers, not the miners. And that's a very healthy position for ethereum to be in right now.
Asking because one huge advantage I see in Bitcoin's upgrade procedure is that developers alone can't change the monetary policy -- i.e. developers can't just bribe users to screw over investors. I'm curious why the "All Core Devs call dictates software releases" upgrade process is considered an acceptable alternative?
Correct
> Every soft fork was voted on by miners. Developers provide the code, but it only activates with miner consent.
Again, it's the same process with Ethereum.
Not sure if this is just a misunderstanding or if you're reading something that says this isn't the case, but if it's the latter then I suggest taking a good hard look at continuing to use this source for information.
Bear with me here, but I strongly suspect that this is not the case. Because PoS doesn't need miners, it seems the system can transition to PoS at any time and there's nothing miners can do to stop it. So unless the miners also happen to control over 50% of the staked ETH supply, miners don't have a say at all.
EDIT: Don't get me wrong -- I wish Ethereum could only upgrade with overwhelming miner consent. It would check the power of developers to alter the monetary policy as capriciously as they have done so far.
Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty aggressive no matter how you look at it. As a user, I really hope it works out without major issues.
That's a funny way of saying BTC doesn't innovate.
> Going from PoW to PoS in such a small timeframe is pretty aggressive no matter how you look at it.
It's been the plan for years. I first heard of it in 2017 and if I'm not mistaken I think it was also in the whitepaper. So it's neither coming out of the blue or an aggressive timeframe.
Or another way of saying you can expect some stability (and majority consensus) when there's more than a trillion dollars worth of value at stake.
It's been discussed for a longtime, yes, but the expectation is that it would roll out in phases over the next year or two, not rushed out because of a potential 51% attack.
and that is supposedly advantage of pos over pow?
In philosophical view the pow -> pos means taking power away from the more technical and giving it to the more business oriented group/approach. That has happened to Internet for example, and I just personally dont like such transitions.
The people who hold the majority of the stake are the majority, not the minority.
On top of that the costs of attack are much greater in PoS than PoW, making these attacks much harder to begin with.
Bottom line, ADA is a proof of stake chain. It is upgraded in place based on proposals and consensus of stake pools.
Same thing with Tezos.
ADA hasn't fully rolled out all the features of the ETH blockchain yet -- I believe we're a couple of months away from the smart contract upgrade.