Hacker News Reader

Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

PoW was worse because it had an economy of scale. For example, it is far cheaper to add mining power if you already own a big mining centre or buy ASICs in bulk.

PoS does not have this: your rewards are always linear to the amount of ETH you stake.

This means that, while PoS is still controlled by those with the most money, it does not trend to centralisation as harshly as PoW.

View on HN

Pos is controlled by those with the most money, and they continuously gain more money through staking rewards (i.e. the rich control the system and automatically get richer).

With PoW, you have to sell/spend some of the coins you earn in order to pay for operation expenditures.

PoS is more centralizing.

That's the same in both cases. Both times you are turning money into more money. Literally the only difference is that in PoW you have external costs. But since these costs are physical and out of the scope of the chain, they do not scale linearly.

I don't see how it is beneficial to anyone (other than ASIC developers and energy companies) to build a tax paid to ASIC developers and energy companies into the protocol.

The energy expenditure anchors the money into the real world, making it a hard money like Gold, and it also facilitates decentralization.

Energy is naturally decentralized all over the world.

A "tax to energy companies" is a subsidy from the energy company's point of view. If you want more of something, subsidize it. A world with more energy is better than a world with less, as we're all in the process of relearning.

There is no evidence that the exchange value of any PoW coin has anything to do with the energy used to mint it. In fact we have counter evidence, for example that there are PoS coins that have value

You're arguing against a point I never made.

I don't understand what you mean then

PoW is just PoS with an extra step.

As long as Bitcoin doesn’t implement ASIC-resistance, it’ll always be a rich gets richer.

Yes, that’s correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com