Quote from: Ix on August 26, 2018, 07:57:33 AM

Quote from: Zin-Zang on August 26, 2018, 07:23:53 AM

You have to buy or steal the PoS coins to stake them?
Their is a cost involved.

Not necessarily. Or not a necessarily large one. Someone could buy up a large amount of the currency when it was worth less than pennies, or even the currency creator could be a threat if a significant amount were distributed to them at the start. This is different from bitcoin because the cost to attack the network is always relative to how popular the network currently is. There is no early stage adopter threat to the network itself. (Although I have argued in the past that Satoshi is a significant threat to bitcoin economically because he can wipe out the market.)

ZEITCOIN is currently less than a penny and I firmly believe anyone attempting a 51% attack will fail.
The easy way is to try and buy the coin, which people seem to forget, that the danger there is it drives up the price and makes more people stake therefore increasing the difficulty. There have been many exchanges that zeitcoin outlived, so our host could go after one of those to try and steal old coins.

That why I offer it up to the topic host as a real world test for his theories.
If he could crash zeitcoin , he could prove to the world PoS is invalid as a consensus, but if not ,
it kind of proves their is an underlying cost in either money , time, or skill, that he was unable to meet and therefore way more difficult that speculated.

Bitcoin has had over 51% majority belonging to the chinese miners for years, and people ignore it , but yet when it comes to PoS ,
they pretend like every attack is more dangerous , when from my experience PoW has proven more vulnerable especially if you are not rich.

The Fact is PoW miners value is in their ASICS, a Proof of Stake value is in the coins itself, meaning destruction of that single coin, wipes them out , verses a PoW miner that could 51% attack bitcoin on Tuesday and move to bitcoin cash on Wednesday or vice-versa.

Now there are some proof of Stake coins that have been hit with a 51% attack. (Because their chains were weak.)
Eccoin
Bottlecaps * Hybrid PoS & PoW, funny thing the PoW did not protect it. *
* Want to know what is funny , even with a successful 51% attack , both of those coins survived and are still running today. *
* Also many PoW chains that have fallen to 51% attacks: Verge, Bitcoin Gold, Monacoin. *
https://news.bitcoin.com/proof-of-work-coins-on-high-alert-following-spate-of-51-attacks/

(PoS or PoW weak chain and 51% is likely.)

But zeitcoin has never fallen to a 51%, so anyone that wants to , can take their best shot for the bragging rights. Cheesy

But be forewarned it won't be zero costs.

FYI: Here is a Thought for Consideration. Wink

The Renting of Hash Rate makes all PoW coins Vulnerable to 51% attack.
(Which would not be zero cost either unless you hacked their miners and use their hash for free.)

Conclusion:
Security of any coin is only strong if the majority % that either mine it or stake it are altruistic toward said coin.
IE. No real difference between PoW or PoS in that regard.