Quote from: andytoshi on October 31, 2014, 01:52:50 AM

Quote from: inBitweTrust on October 31, 2014, 01:46:27 AM

I am curious to hear other's opinions on Vitalik's PoS proposals that attempt to address these severe security weaknesses:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/03/slasher-ghost-developments-proof-stake/

These proposals do not address the fundamental concerns in the document that gmaxwell posted. They do add a fair bit of complexity, making them hard to analyze (and making a concrete attack too intricate to describe). IIRC Vitalik has backed away from these proposals because they do not provide the security benefits he originally thought they did.

It's worth noting that by writing a well-defined security model and working toward it, it is possible to create a "working" PoS which is only broken when the assumptions of the security model are violated. If one were to do this, it would then be easy to point out how the security model is not applicable to the real world. But Vitalik's posts --- and no PoS writeups that I'm aware of --- actually do this.

No PoS system that I'm aware of, has actually been attacked, all the theories remain theories, the real world has said "no I can't attack a PoS system".

Many PoW systems have been attacked, the real world has provided many successful attacks, lots of PoW systems have basically been attacked to death.

How can anyone still claim PoW security is superior to PoS?

PoS may not be a perfectly secure system, but it's clearly superior in a security sense and also economical sense.

PoS scales beautifully, while PoW struggles to waste more hardware and electricity, and transfers more value out of a crypto eco-system.