Quote from: msin on January 22, 2014, 10:07:04 PM

To me, POW is such a waste of resources, we are spending millions on resources to mine BTC, it doesn't seem like the direction we should continue heading as the world struggles with limited resources. The amount of power wasted mining BTC is absolutely atrocious.

Limited resources = electricity gets more expensive = mining isn't as profitable = fewer miners waste electricity mining. As the mining rewards decrease, resources spent on mining will decrease too. Do you know how much power we are wasting supporting the current financial system? All the energy used to run the bank wire and credit card networks and servers, all the power needed to cool and heat banking buildings that to the same accounting and security that's done automatically by miners, all the money spend on security, bank vaults, guards, armored vehicles, etc. How much of that power are we wasting, compared to bitcoin?

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Regarding your concerns with POS, read up on Transparent Forging.

Hmm, that is a good idea. So, if I have a majority of the coins in a PoW system, I would need the majority of other users agreeing not to use me to forge the next block in order for my fork change not to go through? What if I own the majority of coins, but they are split up in thousands of smaller amounts, each of which asks one of my own addresses to forge the neck block? How will my thousand "sock puppet" wallets compete against normal users?

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POW is completely susceptible to corporate control, look at the mining pools, you are close to 51% with Ghash.io alone.

Mining pools aren't mining hardware. They aren't the ones securing transactions. All they provide is a place for miners to coongregate, but miners are free to switch from pool to pool as they wish. This prevents pools from doing bad things, because doing so would cause miners to abandon them, and make the pool lose all its income. Look at the mining pools. They are close, but never go above 51%, because miners keep moving to keep the % below 50.