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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Right, so you're telling me it's the latter case.

That means you can't tell what the correct chain is just by counting hashes. You have to ask someone what the currently correct software is, and then you can find the correct chain for that software.

This puts you in the same position as someone on a proof-of-stake chain.

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That's not really how it works either. Everyone makes decisions individually based on their understanding of the best rules and also tries to keep the network from splitting. There aren't any competing chains, because issues are debated and solved externally. If this consensus fails, then the network splits and there's a fork. After that, everyone can choose either Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. Neither of them is "correct". Everyone chooses whichever version they like most. I call this economic consensus, because I believe that this consensus tries to find rules which would maximize long-term economic demand for the currency.

This is completely different issue than chain consensus disputes, which means that inside the chosen rules there's disputes on which history is correct. I.e. it's the double-spend problem, which PoW solves. PoS is subjective, and it's impossible to determine the correct history without asking someone. [0]

[0] https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engin...

By "correct," I mean the chain used by the community I'm interested in. To know that, I have to ask a member of that community for the correct software.

Honestly, the thing kinda breaks if you have several sets of rules aka Bitcoin clones. No, ideally, the thing works if you have > 50% computation resources of the planet consumed (and of course, controlled) by miners using one set of rules. This way you cannot have competing chains at all, and the correctness of the set of rules is kinda obvious - they're correct if they make sense to me (paying arbitrary rewards to oneself does not make sense, obviously) - no need to ask anyone - I see an enourmous chain with enourmous burned computation and I see the code.

In this sense there could only be Bitcoin. PoS cannot come close to that at all.

P.S. To clarify a bit more - I don't think the most-difficult chain can be with broken nonsensical rules, not in the long term.

I concede that PoS is not as secure as a hypothetical future Bitcoin consuming over half the computation on the planet. That would also have the advantage of making 51% attacks flatly impossible.

Compared to Bitcoin as it exists in the real world, PoS has advantages.

Choosing between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash is a completely different matter. You choose whichever you like, and you can verify yourself that the software follows those rules. There's no chance that users wouldn't converge into their chosen blockchain, because both forks follow the longest chain in their forks.

You assume that the community somehow can agree which chain is the correct one in proof-of-stake. This is not true because there's no longest chain rule. Without an authority, users would never be able to converge into the same chain, after a split has happened.

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