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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Thanks these are helpful in understand that PoS the consensus enables the the financial instrument known as "staking."

Would the following be a correct summary then?

By holding more tokens you become a preferable verifier node because you hold more tokens. And the way you hold more tokens and burnish your reputation as a verifier is by borrowing those assets from the actual owners and then paying the asset owners double digit interest? Is this correct? The idea is that you will make enough in transaction fees on the network to payout something like 18% interest to asset owner and still make a profit?

If so this seems wildly circular.

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The person who replied to you originally is confused.

"Staking" originally meant participating in a proof-of-stake consensus and you get rewarded by the network with the new blocks that are mined.

All the Terra / Luna / NFT / exchange "staking" was people latching onto DPoS to make their schemes sound more technologically sound. Its an overloaded term at this point thats nearing meaningless unless you are clear you mean actual proof-of-stake.

> people latching onto DPoS to make their schemes sound more technologically sound

overloading technical jargon for marketing, just on its own, seems like a strong scam signal. or at least a signal to stay away

It is really not surprising that the term got overloaded when the underlying principle is the same: put money down, do nothing, then come back and your money is magically multiplied. It is as blatant a scam as they come, except the scam is built directly into the consensus protocol itself.

The principals aren’t the same. In DPoS, you literally do nothing other than lend your coins out. In PoS, you run and maintain a node that runs the rules of the network to secure it. If your node is down, you’ll leave rewards as punishment. If you run the wrong client or don’t upgrade, you’ll get slashed if any consensus rules change. You also have to pay for electricity, bandwidth, and have to have monitoring in place.

PoS is like running your own whitelabel SaaS offering.

Hm, I'm not sure I'd go that far. I'd use "staking" for anything that's done programatically as part of a smartcontract, regardless of whether you have to run a node yourself. For example, The Graph (GRT) where you attach your tokens to a node to strengthen its signal and share of the rewards.

And yes, I know, it's fighting an uphill battle to discourage the use of "staking" for lending out on a centralized platform. "Words drift in meaning, deal with it". But it's also important for people to be able to know what you mean, and there are pretty substantive differences between that kind of staking and "anything that earns a return on your coin" and it's helpful to have a separate word for it.

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