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Comment by inter_netuser | Hacker News Reader

you didn't read the article to the end, did you?

about 40% in:

"Because of all the arguments above, we can safely conclude that this threat of an attacker building up a fork from arbitrarily long range is unfortunately fundamental, and in all non-degenerate implementations the issue is fatal to a proof of stake algorithm’s success in the proof of work security model. However, we can get around this fundamental barrier with a slight, but nevertheless fundamental, change in the security model." —Vitalik Buterin, saying the quiet part out loud

Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.

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> you didn't read the article to the end, did you?

I skimmed it. It made no serious arguments. If it had a serious argument, it would have exploited one of the many existing proof of stake systems.

> Security model in PoS = trust the rich. Some like having masters, whatever floats your boat.

You mean...exactly like PoW mining?

No, exactly the opposite of PoW mining.

Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested, should they misbehave.

Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.

You are quite literally being exploited right this minute, by the same methods outlined in the article.

> Miners do not set the rules, they are merely a service that provides immutability to a ledger, with a nuclear option that will bankrupt all the billions they have invested, should they misbehave.

Stakers do not set the rules any more than do large mining pools.

> Large stakers can rent-seek and extract your wealth, PoS is the same system we have now, plus some code.

You know MEV is a thing in PoW too, right?

Miners decide what they mine.

Their contribution is what makes the currency work.

They are some of the main profiteers from the currency.

You can't do a fork or rule change without enough miners going along (I mean you can but it would not have much value).

So in practice have all the governing/decision making power (as a group not a single person).

Sure they might not come up with changes, but they do decide weather any change do take effect in the end.

I'm not really knowledgeable about all this, but mining of PoW currencies right now seems to rely a lot on mining pools. Isn't there a risk that they are "the rich" and people trust them? What's the difference with PoS there?

> Security model in PoS = trust the rich.

Same for PoW.

Crypto currency weather PoW or PoS boils down to "give the few rich all the power while giving the many less rich a illusion of security".

In PoW it just slightly tweaks "richness of money" into "richness of computation resources (which you get through money)".

This difference has complicated effects like:

- benefits anyone with cheap electricity (i.e. either places with no environmental protection, government support in some way, or the few places with cheap clean power)

- benefits anyone with good connections to chip factories

- the investment needed for gaining power being less bound to the currency itself but computation power instead

Observing what everyone else is using isn't 'trusting the rich'.

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