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Comment by fredfoobar | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole book written about the history of this: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57429394-the-blocksize-w...

"Roughly 90% of the hash power once threatened to change the rules of #Bitcoin believing the users didn’t matter in the decision. The users spun up 10s of thousands of full nodes & told them to go f*ck themselves." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/13940065488763084...

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That was about users' nodes being able to validate blocks; that's an orthogonal issue from PoW vs PoS.

Coins that no ones' nodes validate are worthless, aren't they?

This is only relevant if people aren’t holding their coins on exchanges. Most users are and that concentration will increase as transaction fees are designed to do over the next decade.

I'm here to help that transition, It's already happening, many folks I know are transitioning to a hardware wallet. I've personally helped people onboard on to lightning and running their own node.

The whole process of running your own node has improved so much nowadays: getumbrel.com comes to mind.

Why wouldn't a similar "takeover" be possible in a PoS system? You really haven't addressed the parent's point.

[responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users.

more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k

But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential.

Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes with advertising as we see today in “normal” elections.

> But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential.

You're missing the energy part of the equation (opex), that is continuously required.

> you don't need any capital to run a node

Please point me in the direction where I can find some of these free ASIC miners.....

full node != miner

Run your own full node,

easiest option: getumbrel.com

Did you mean PoS? Parent was talking about a PoW system.

Yes, editted.

You can do much worse things in a PoS system since power in the system is tied to the asset (ETH). Ethereum DeFi toys are hacked on a daily basis and millions upon millions of dollars worth of ETH is stolen.

It's exactly why the DAO hacker was censored -- they controlled more ETH than any single account in the system.

You're smart, I like your comments.

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