Proof of work keeps the network fair. Non mining nodes have the final say. Proof of stake lets players with the most money have the most say.
If you follow the link, you'll see a picture of 7 people that controlled 90% of Bitcoin hashpower at the time. Remind me how that's more fair to an arbitrary holder of Bitcoin, than say, letting the holders have the power with staking?
Honestly, I don't see how the status quo in crypto actually improves on that at all (unless you are in the ransomware business, of course. Then it makes sense.)
It is also the closest thing we have in practice to the "Ideal money" proposal by Nash, that Nash spent 20 years giving lectures about around the world.
Nash's notes and slides on that: http://web.math.princeton.edu/jfnj/texts_and_graphics/Main.C...
The improvement of status quo is quite obvious. Bitcoin is a potential solution to the Triffin's dilemma.
This is something of the scale that can alter the course of history and impact every country on Earth.
Money shouldn't be democratic. I'm not OK with a majority deciding that they're entitled to my money.
More generally, private property is a good thing. I don't want majority vote to decide whether I can keep the house or car that I own.
No, it’s much more than that. For example, by creating money, and using it to buy bonds, you can push down the rate of interest. This has nothing to do with taxes. It’s an interference with market coordination, because interest rates play a central part in this.
For example, let’s say you have a business worth one billion dollars, and you earn 50 million dollars in profit per year (a 5% yield per annum). By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business and deposit the proceeds in a bank account, hereby earning one percentage point more in yearly returns.
The government shouldn’t have the power to halt economic activity in this manner, because it amounts to central planning, ie. communism. Which has been proven to be a disaster.
Of course it does. It's all just wealth redistribution. Lowering interest rates redistributes wealth from lenders to borrowers, i.e. from savers to debtors.
> By setting the Federal Funds rate at 6%, the government can make it profitable to sell this business
The government can do exactly the same thing with tax policy. The only difference is that tax policy is more flexible (because it has many degrees of freedom rather than just one) and hence more powerful. The power to control the money supply is a proper subset of the power to tax. You can't support the latter but not the former and remain logically consistent.
All they can do is refuse to work. Anyone can do that. They cannot force any new changes on you. Proven in forkwars with billions at stake.
PoS have not yet had such a test.
I guess Joe has the other 64.71%, or perhaps there are a whole bunch of other founders that I'm unaware of...
Would honestly love to see the details.
With the usually apathetic voters/stakers, one such loud voice can sway a PoS network easily.
Do you have a better estimate?
Total amount of fundraising ETH did initially was about 20 mil? 1-2 mil sounds like a feasible early VC check to get 10%, not including games you can play later to increase your stack further.
What makes you think eth stakers are apathetic?
read up on the DAO exploit and carbon vote. Even in a drastic situation turnout was low.
It's a permissionless industry and I suppose people can try different things, but one thing that sets apart Bitcoin from everything else - it is not a democracry.
Democracy was designed for cities of 50-60k in size, where only rich landowners got to vote and everyone else was basically peons. It doesn't scale and is not particularly great.
PoS is just another string of boneheaded attempts to make democracy great again...by marrying it with plutocracy? idk.
Would you care to vote with your measly stake if you know the insiders have over 50% anyway?
In any distribution, the small number of players usually controls most of the wealth, as we've seen throughout the history.
What are the odds it will not be a handful people, coordinating their interest vs everyone else? That's inevitable.
Okay, and what do you think the mining equipment is acquired with exactly?
PoS malicious stakers lose nothing in case of a split. Miners should they attempt a 51% attack will lose everything.
Not even in the same category.
You can only support one side of a fork in PoS and if you try to play both sides anyone can form a proof showing you mined both forks and your stake gets slashed. This is the Nothing At Stake problem and well understood which makes your comment pretty confusing.
There are no attackers or victims in the scenario of the chain forking and a block producer gooing out of their way to mine both chains with the same stake.
how do you know which one to continue staking on to avoid getting slashed?
If miners's new block isnt accepted by the network - they've just lost millions.
Rules are enforced by block verification of the nodes that accept - or refuse to accept mined blocks.
It's amazing that in 2021 people still do not understand the basics of it.
That's all miners are. Mercenaries hired for 10 minutes at a time.
Not sure if you realize the implication of what happens if you arm a bunch of mercenaries and then fire them and turn your backs on them.
The breakaway hostile fork is now worth 2 percent of the original work.
So..nothing?
Anyway I don’t think reality is as simple as your last comment suggests. There was a lot going on at the time including a lot of misinformation.
In the Etherium world, which has more changes, they do. Bitcoin, not so much.
For example, I think cars contribute very significantly to global warming and use lots of fossil fuels, do I get to say, let's ban all cars and force everyone to use public transport? No!
We are going to have ICE's for a long time.
Mindless bans like that, if overzealous, will just push even more of industry to Asia/China, where most of pollution happens today anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised if China funds quite a few green causes, big boost for their industries, and they get to just ignore all emissions rules.
This has lead to things like [1] where it is significantly more economical for long-haulers to electrify their existing fleet than continue using diesel fuel. I suspect long-haul will reach 90% electrification long before last-mile trucking and private-use automotives.
That said, I imagine you are spot on regarding farming - and pushing industry to less restrictive jurisdictions.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/29/swap-...
It doesn't matter if bitcoin mining specifically uses renewable energy. What matters is used in total by everyone. And bitcoin mining will always make things worse, no matter what kind of energy it uses.
All the electricity gets mixed together in the power network anyway, so if you buy 'renewable' electricity you are effectively just paying a premium to say yours came from the pool of renewable electricity. If you increase the power load on the network though, and in-aggregate the power requirement increases, chances are that increase still comes from fossil fuels.
I think we will be waiting a long time until global electricity is 100% renewable, although I hope it happens quick and it's good that you are more optimistic than me :)
Bitcoin does three transactions per second while using the energy of an entire country. The bitcoin network could be run on a single PC from 2004, but it uses, again, an entire country's worth of energy.
There is nothing in the entire history of humanity that has been as obscenely inefficient and wasteful as bitcoin.
Banning it is a no-brainer. The lowest hanging of low-hanging fruit for environmental improvement.
It has little to do with tps.
They do not have any real property rights, unable to access world's financial market, unable to save, unable to better their lives by accumulating wealth, and whatever little wealth they are able to accumulate is confiscated on the regular by the oppressive regimes.
Of course, your dishwasher is much more important than their human rights.
Penetration of crypto in Turkey was 18% (page 9) in 2018, likely a lot higher now. Expected to own in the future 45% (page 10): https://think.ing.com/uploads/reports/ING_International_Surv...
One in five own it, half expect to own in the future.