I have been hitting POS hard for the last month and so far I see many benefits to it but also a few downfalls of it. In this article I am going to go over those and show you how to start POS yourself!
Is POS Better then POW
First lets clear up the lingo POS = Proof of stake you hold coins in a wallet unlocked and are randomly selected via weight such as age of coins and how many you hold. When you stake you process that block yourself and your staked coins reset for however many hours for example gridcoin is 16 hours.
POW = Proof of work where you take hardware and mine for coins which increases in difficulty as more enter to mine.
Positives and Negatives
POS to me is better since it creates a more equal opportunity. Everyone can buy the coins and then mine with very little hardward you just need to keep your wallet open and connected to the internet. Heck people run wallets on small raspberry pi 3 devices which cost under $100!
While POW seems to have gone out the window in fairness ever since ASIC came around. If a coin could really be centered around CPU only usage then it would create a more fair ground as everyone has to have a CPU in order to operate a computer. But since ASIC came out both CPU and GPU mining is totally worthless and will cost you more in power and air conditioning bills then it is worth!
In order to attack a POS coin you must own 51% of the coins which is very hard to do if even possible as more coins get minted and only so many people sell them. As for POW a 51% attack is actully suprisingly easy. In fact about 95% of POW coins are at risk of being attacked for under $1,000 or worse!
Example with Gamecredits the system would be 51% attacked fro just $600 or less!
Bitcoin Gold Under $4,000!
Bitcoin Cash $72,000!!
Bitcoin itself nearly 1 billion dollars.
Dogecoin $40,000
And so forth...
It is pretty crazy when you think about what could happen and for how little money while POS would require larger sums of money and at least 51% of the coins to be bought up on the market.
So which one is better? What is your opinion on this?
Interested in POS without having to own a billion coins and keeping your own computer running? Try a POS pool such as BTCPop
As you said, both have their advantages and disadvantages. I personally prefer PoS for environmental and fairness reasons. This is why I think projects like Steemit, EOS and others have a lot of potential!
is EOS POS when it goes mainnet? Ill have to read up on that some more thanks!
looks like it is DPOS so only a few people actually stake EOS like they do here on steemit im not a big fan of that system it seems to centralized.
More like DPOS yeah it is more centralized but users are able to vote for their favorite block producers. So in a way the community still has power, depending on the distribution of the tokens
Yeah but id love to sit there and make my coins work for me as well no reason my system cant do what theirs is lol
Very Helpful information. thanks for share
Proof of work is a protocol that has the main goal of deterring cyber-attacks such as a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) which has the purpose of exhausting the resources of a computer system by sending multiple fake requests.
Proof of stake is a different way to validate transactions based and achieve the distributed consensus.
It is still an algorithm, and the purpose is the same of the proof of work, but the process to reach the goal is quite different.
Proof of stake first idea was suggested on the bitcointalk forum back in 2011, but the first digital currency to use this method was Peercoin in 2012, together with ShadowCash, Nxt, BlackCoin, NuShares/NuBits, Qora and Nav Coin.
Unlike the proof-of-Work, where the algorithm rewards miners who solve mathematical problems with the goal of validating transactions and creating new blocks, with the proof of stake, the creator of a new block is chosen in a deterministic way, depending on its wealth, also defined as stake.
Conclusion
1 Energy savings;
2 A safer network as attacks become more expensive: if a hacker would like to buy 51% of the total number of coins, the market reacts by fast price appreciation.
I'm also leaning towards more of POS, i think bitmain and all these miners are making way too much money centralising mining and its become a frenzy and a bit of a shitshow.
We're also seeing hybrids of POS now with proof of credit and a few others as well. So i think POS is the way to go, its by no means perfect but im sure it can be improved on over time.
This site www.crypto51.app shows the cost of a 51% attack on pow coins and you can see that the lower marketcap coins are really cheap to attack thus I think that pos should be the way to go longterm to save yourself from such an attack.
Proof of work seems very costly to many but the security benefits outweight the negatives in my opinion.