Opinion on proof of stake in future

Summary:

There is a lot of misinformation and bias against Proof of Stake (PoS), even though there is a difference between "proved to be impossible" and "have not achieved recognized success yet". Most of the arguments levied against PoS are out of date or rely on unproven assumptions. While it may not be wise to experiment with bitcoin by switching to PoS, research suggests that there is a proof of stake consensus protocol that could be built with substantially higher security while costing far fewer resources without compromising any of the critical security properties that bitcoin relies on.While some people argue that PoS tends towards oligopolistic control, there is no centralization pressure in any PoS mechanism. In fact, proof of work has clear centralization pressure and more barriers to entry than any PoS system. The tendency towards oligopolistic control is worse for PoW.Bitcoin's energy usage at present is warranted, but the question is whether we can do substantially better. If we can, we probably should eventually. PoS requires other trade-offs that are incompatible with Bitcoin's objective (to be a trustless digital cash) - specifically the famous "security vs. liveness" guarantee. PoS only requires 1/3 of the network to demonstrate a Byzantine Fault, while PoW is resilient up to the 1/2 threshold. However, there are PoS designs that should exceed that up to nearly 50% as far as is known. Also, the best PoW can do is require an attacker to obtain 33% of the hashpower because of the selfish mining attack discussed in depth in the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243. Together, both of these things reduce PoW's security by a factor of about 83% (1 - 50%*33%).It is not true that you cannot gain tokens without someone choosing to give up those coins - a form of permission. Some nodes may reject you, but there will likely be more that will accept you. Both PoW and PoS could mine/mint blocks twice as fast if everyone agreed to double their clock speeds. Both systems rely on an honest majority sticking to standard time.

Updated on: 2023-06-14T21:26:59.308684+00:00