Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Is PoS dead?
by
jubalix
on 29/06/2014, 22:05:50 UTC
Proof of Stake coins have many issues here are some:

PoS is not backed by anything other than the belief there are worth anything and there will be an endless supply of PoS coins because one created today does not have a significant advantage over on created tomorrow, next week, next month.......
What currently is happening is new coins are created with PoW, mined for a week until a fixed number is reached and then change to PoS and then you can claim your stake at buying xyz coin. The only advantage a coin released today has over on made sometime in the future is; somebody already bought into it. The advantage quickly disappears if the new coin has a better catch phrase a flashier webpage or bigger marketing capital....
There is no end in sight for stake claimed coins and all promising x % return if you know a bit of programming you will have your very one coin too and everyone can buy into your claim based coin completely deluding the marked.
Its a barrel without bottom and once it clicks by the herd run for the hills if you own a stake.  
  
With a PoS the richer get richer. The most significant flaw of any proof-of-stake system and any system that diminishes coin rewards, is it can't distribute currency from the hoarders to the users of the currency, thus it will end up with the hoarders (the banksters) accumulating all the coin and the currency usage dying.
This is because the wealthy spend a much lower % of their net worth than the masses do.


PoS is a technological dead end. Once the coin is released the only thing to do is "claim your stake" no research, no new capital outside the buy in, no evolving industry...

PoS can NEVER remain decentralized. Satoshi's Proof-of-Work is the only known solution to the Byzantine General's Problem (was a known unsolved problem since at least the 1970s).

To 51% PoS is dead easy:
You start buying aggressively or "willy" style until you have 51% of a PoS coin, and then sell off your coins so that you no longer have 51%, but your history of having once owned 51% makes it possible to attack the network at any time in the future at next to no cost only some computing resources (and thus electricity costs, etc.).
As you once had a 51% stake, you can build a better blockchain than the other 49% can, starting from the point where you owned 51%. You develop this blockchain in secret, after you have sold off your coins (and profiting from it); and then release your secret blockchain to the world, and nodes will pick it up because it carries more stake than the 49% blockchain.  Now not only do you have your profit from the original sales of the coin, you have your 51% back (to the extent that it's worth anything).  Not all coins need to be in one address, in fact, doing so would prevent the attack in most PoS implementations.
Unlike bitcoin where everyone can see if anyone comes dangerously close to 51, in PoS its all hidden an attack can happen incognito.
There is no way of knowing if any PoS chain is already "dead", as it could have been done at any-time in the past.
And then there's is also the possible social 51% attack
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But then there's the social 51% attack where a tiny majority hold a massive percentage of the currency. When this occurs the market is open to extensive manipulation for the benefit of the few, as with real world economics (the 1%).

NXT is a good example of the social 51% attack, the top 33 accounts hold 51% between them. The top 50 accounts hold 61.2%. I'm quite sure the top 1% of accounts (400 ish) hold almost everything, with the other 99% playing with spare change. source

  
PoW is backed by energy. There is no better backing than energy because everyone needs it, wants it and i will never have any problem selling it. To create a PoW coin you need x amount of energy and you can not cheat. The best you can hope for is to have  a more efficient miner. Because the energy has been spent, the coin has a base value (many other things on top) and is a kind of a storage medium.



Edit:

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The only truly universally accepted wealth is energy (does not matter in which form as it can be converted), and Bitcoin is a store of it.

you really don't get it.

ok firstly pos coins are no more "infinite" than pow coins. It all depends on the parameters you chose. Eg at them moment the number of peercoins being produced is less than LTC and BTC.

secondly the parameters that you choose are all important for any coin, it like the boundary conditions for the navier stokes equations. Eg nothing has the boudary condition of Peercoin, ulike multiple coins that are near exactly BTC.

there is no difference to buying into a mining early or pos coin early how you spend your effort is up to you.

Accordinlgy your arguments do not stand up to logic or the material facts.

As long as a POS coin can function as a distributed ledger then that all it has to do.

POW coins are backed by exactly same belief you decry POS for.

Also wealth is energy when that energy can produce useful work, so has a low entropy. Eg guel can spin an axle to do something for you, farm, drive, move, etc.

Low enthalpy energy like the exhaust heat from and asic is near worthless.

Further you can easily squander energy on projects that have no value. So low entropy energy can be easily squandered on high entropy projects. The possession of low entropy energy is no assurance it will create wealth.


go and do at least thermodynamics 1 and 2 before you make statements about energy use and wealth.