Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [SDC] ShadowCash | Welcome to the UMBRA
by
Automatic Monkey
on 14/10/2016, 21:59:12 UTC
Why is it that POW coins are preferred more than POS coins? Newb here, just curious. Is it because one can profit more with POW mining? I'm holding some of both.

A few reasons, none of them really good. One is just tradition, Bitcoin is a pure PoW coin and I suppose in the days of CPU mining it was believed to be a perfect system, but now that every CPU in the world couldn't keep up with one big ASIC farm the imperfection of it is apparent.

Another is certain alternative political and social beliefs where interest/inflation are the root of all evil, it's all controlled by the you-know-whats and the rich get richer, all of that stuff.

Another is that there is less distribution of the coin when people can't mine, but I think that's a carryover also from the old days of CPU mining. Although another popular anon coin is CPU mined, we don't know how much of that is being mined by malware and distributed to just a few bad actors. It's happened to other good coins.

Another is a perceived risk of forged blocks, but I don't think that would ever happen being to do it you would need to buy an enormous amount of coin, only to summarily make your coins worthless by corrupting the blockchain and destroying the reputation of the coin.

This might be true, but I am also prefering PoS coins because:

  • They don't burn such insane amount of electricity just for the sake of keeping the network secure. PoS coins are much "greener" than PoW ones; I really like that (we're fucking up the planet enough as it is)
  • While the "rich get richer" is true, I still think PoS is more distribution friendly than PoW. In PoW nowadays, you need a massive budget to buy mining equipment (ASICs) and keep it running (electricity) to mine coins. In PoS, you just directly buy coins and that's it. I think this is more fair for people (meaning that the entry barrier to start mining PoW coins is really high and costly).
  • Regarding the inflation – I don't think it's such a big problem, when it's stable. If devs could change PoS rewards (inflation) as they would please, that would be bad of course. But this is not the case.

All in agreement. While they say PoS creates inequality of access, there is also inequality of access to mining equipment and cheap electricity. Although a CPU mine eliminates a lot of that, if Monero were to get big enough how long do you think it would take to make ASICs to mine that too starting the arms race all over again?

Interesting thing about SDC PoSv3 is that not every coin gets the stake so it is inflation for some uses, interest for others. The people who leave their coins on exchanges for rapid trading are paying interest to those who hold on their own machines, as are the people who hold them as SDT or actively spend them. Seems fair to me, the coin has value and value doesn't come without a price. It's about 7.5% overall return on staked coins now, subtract the SDC 2% inflation and you get 5.5% return before fiat inflation, not a bad investment even if SDC doesn't rise at all relative to fiat.