It is a much weaker requirement than PoW. Part of the reason PoS (a fitting acronym) is successful is because people are hysterical about Bitcoin's energy usage over time.
Rightly so. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, and it's fair to worry.
But throughout history, people have always capitalized on fears to get something. Careful that you read these proposals with a skeptical eye.
There was an excellent comment on HN that unfortunately I can't dig up anymore, but it went into detail about why PoS has all kinds of subtle issues. Basic issues, like who gets what, can end up with weak guarantees.
It's important to remember that Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is almost unkillable. The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin.
That's it. There's no other way.
PoS weakens those guarantees, and before this gets pushed through, it's good to understand in detail what the tradeoffs are, and game out whether that could give centralization any advantages.
(And if they say there are no tradeoffs and PoS confers no advantage to centralization compared to PoW, maybe research it and decide for yourself.)
This whole auto-drop-my-comments-to-the-bottom censorship is really tiring and just a way to discourage certain people from contributing to HN. I've been a member here since day 2 of the launch of Startup News, and this feels quite unfair. My pleas for reversing this decision have gone unanswered, so I have no idea what to do about it other than rant periodically until I get banned. Nothing good will come of that, but it's just a completely bogus situation. (Yeah, moderation is hard, and I respect that, but jeez. My comments all start out at the bottom and stay there.) </rant>
Rightly so. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, and it's fair to worry.
But throughout history, people have always capitalized on fears to get something. Careful that you read these proposals with a skeptical eye.
There was an excellent comment on HN that unfortunately I can't dig up anymore, but it went into detail about why PoS has all kinds of subtle issues. Basic issues, like who gets what, can end up with weak guarantees.
It's important to remember that Bitcoin, for all its flaws, is almost unkillable. The sole way a government can kill it -- any government -- is to invest >$2B into getting >51% hash power, then launching coordinated malicious doublespends for the purpose of shattering faith in bitcoin.
That's it. There's no other way.
PoS weakens those guarantees, and before this gets pushed through, it's good to understand in detail what the tradeoffs are, and game out whether that could give centralization any advantages.
(And if they say there are no tradeoffs and PoS confers no advantage to centralization compared to PoW, maybe research it and decide for yourself.)
This whole auto-drop-my-comments-to-the-bottom censorship is really tiring and just a way to discourage certain people from contributing to HN. I've been a member here since day 2 of the launch of Startup News, and this feels quite unfair. My pleas for reversing this decision have gone unanswered, so I have no idea what to do about it other than rant periodically until I get banned. Nothing good will come of that, but it's just a completely bogus situation. (Yeah, moderation is hard, and I respect that, but jeez. My comments all start out at the bottom and stay there.) </rant>