Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proof of work
by
ranochigo
on 15/08/2021, 02:22:22 UTC
@ranochigo

An argument for PoS and against PoW is that the upfront cost required to attack the network is greater for PoS than PoW.

For PoW, the upfront cost is the ASICs and electricity.

For PoS, the upfront cost is the coins.

Article below shows a comparison and shows that the cost of the required coins > (ASICs + electricity). I'm unable to find anything to disprove these figures at the moment. Ignoring the author for now and if we just consider the argument, do you agree with the above conclusion?
No. The argument above assumes that it is simple to acquire and manage the resources needed to attack the network. As we know from sufficiently secure coins, this is impossible. Solely by the fact that the electrical consumption is so massive that it becomes practically impossible to support it, ignoring all other factors required, space, labour, etc. It is also not realistic to assume depreciation for ASICs, they would probably be rendered worthless. The difficulty of acquiring (and set up) that many ASICs isn't comparable to that amount of coins.

The shortcoming of PoS is that miners have no need to support any single fork. Since their coins exists across all of the fork, they can support every fork.