Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowkit | Hacker News Reader

>Basically it will make rich richer and more centralized.

So PoW doesn't have this problem? It costs money to run mining hardware and supply electricity. The more valuable a PoW coin is, the greater incentive there is to run more hardware. With Bitcoin specifically the block rate is limited via the difficult adjustment. With this in mind it sounds like whoever is mining will get richer faster and centralize the competition.

PoS just abstracts all of this into the code itself. I don't buy the quoted argument.

View on HN

You right, but I will write how I think. Incentive in not only to run more hardware, but to run more effective hardware. This incentivises innovation. In POS you don't need to do anything else. Just stake coins. No innovation, you can always be a monopoly if you have the cash to make a one-time investment. In POW you always have to invest to be competitive and have the most competing hardware.

> This incentivises innovation.

It's only innovation into how to extract more profit from that specific pow function. Why would we care about it? (Or why call that innovation?)

> In POW you always have to invest to be competitive and have the most competing hardware.

I struggle up find a positive impact of this. There's been a number of negative side effects though.

> This incentivises innovation

What useful innovation has come out of mining? Mostly I see very innovative ways to cheat energy markets and create ewaste.

While you need to be rich to be able to mine Bitcoin, you also have to dump those mined coins on the exchanges to cover your running costs (electricity, hardware, server operators, etc).

> While you need to be rich to be able to mine Bitcoin, you also have to dump those mined coins on the exchanges to cover your running costs (electricity, hardware, server operators, etc)

You don’t have to be rich to mine physical bitcoins, you just won’t mine very many of them. Same as it works in PoS — join a mining pool.

Or buy mining equities, e.g. Blockstream’s BMN token (not an investor).

It’s funny how much flak PoW networks take from PoS investors, and it’s pretty blatantly due to investors investing in things which aren’t PoW. None of the PoW criticisms in play today save for the environmental ones — and even those are subject to considerable astroturfing [1] — are supported by fact. In spite of what PoS investors commonly tout, PoS as a technology is neither theoretically sound, nor practically proven in any sense [2].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26649379

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27144921

Reply on news.ycombinator.com