Quote from: Ix on November 07, 2014, 11:21:37 PM

Quote from: BombaUcigasa on November 07, 2014, 09:22:57 PM

At no point could one of the entities take complete control over the blockchain by themselves and they had to agree to switch lanes together by majority vote.

That is quite the rose-colored view of the situation. From my remembrance, it was the one or two major pools on the "correct" chain that had to be persuaded to move to the forked chain to preserve the network unity. In doing so they were giving up all of the blocks they had mined, so this was not a no-nonsense decision. The decision was in the hands of a couple of people--that is not the bastion of decentralization that you make it out to be.

Consider the three components:

Miners - should the miners decide to stick to the incorrect chain, developers and users would still not use it and the coins would become worthless as mining does not convert bitcoins to value, it does the reverse. Miners can provide security for their majority chain, but nobody would use it. Users and developers would wait hours for a transaction on the "good" chain and would start paying for miners to come there. Nobody wins if miners do not form a consensus with users and developers.

Developer - the developers can change the protocol or chain rules as they want, but without miners adopting and enforcing the rules or users using the rules, they mean nothing. The software is open source, it has been forked over 2000 times already, developers can't go rogue on their own, there is no gain.

Users - (I mean here mostly exchanges and payment services) can only use the software the developers provide and the blockchain the miners support. They can veto any change but this causes loss of apparent value. Any competitive developer or mining pool will then be on equal value capability and allow switching.

While I agree the number of people required to keep bitcoin running in a consesus is small, none of them can go rogue for more than a few hours, the majority decides.

In PoS, it isn't the majority that decides, it's the majority stakeholder entity which once appeared can't be erased from history. Once the majority condition has been achieved ONCE, it will be available as an attack vector FOREVER. In PoW, a majority condition achieved ONCE will provide temporary reversible benefits and is very easy to spot and eliminate.

The cost to fork and keep up a hidden PoS blockchain is less than 5 USD a month for ANY coin.
The cost to fork and keep up a hidden PoW bitcoin blockchain is 30000000 USD a month.

Do you still need to compare the two?

Only lazy bums thinking they can become shitcoin millionaires have dreams of springing fortunes out of literally doing nothing all day. Do you really think someone will pay thousands of dollars for you to do effectively close to nothing useful? Wake up silly fanboys, read some simple economics...

If someone thinks about the economic cost of stakes, consider this: each and every PoS coin user can pass around the majority of coins through direct transactions, at which point they can attempt an attack. The developer can checkpoint that? Well guess what, he controls everything, it's not a consensus anymore, it's a useless governed monopoly money system.