Author: Billy Tetrud 2021-06-22 17:45:51
Published on: 2021-06-22T17:45:51+00:00
The argument that proof of stake is not permissionless is being challenged. The premise being put forward is that if there is a healthy exchange market for PoS Coin X with tens of thousands of participants, there is no significant permission needed to enter the market for minting blocks. In this scenario, if someone refuses to sell their coins to a bidder, they can easily move on to any one of the other tens of thousands of people in that marketplace, making it a non-permissioned situation. It is argued that participation in any decentralized system requires at least one user's permission and that no one considers bitcoin "permissioned" because of this. Cloud Strife argues that the barrier to entry in PoS is being given permission by the previous owner of a token for you to have it via transfer or sale, which could be an infinitely high barrier to entry if the previous owner refuses to give up the token they control. He also states that PoS is not relevant to permissionless protocols and, thus, not possibly relevant to decentralized protocols where control must be distributed to independent parties. James MacWhyte argues that both PoW and PoS have professional/expert ways of participating and fraud-prone, amateur ways of participating. The only difference is that with PoS, the professional/expert way is accessible to anyone with a raspberry Pi and a web connection, which is a much lower barrier to entry than PoW. Overall, the discussion centers around whether PoS is truly permissionless or not, with differing opinions on the matter.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T20:49:53.627215+00:00