Though my understanding of POS is not very technical, it's been starting to warm up on me (cool me down?). After all, why would banks and governments want to lose money minting their own money?
Someone posted Gavin Andresen's Devcore devcore talk on youtube the other day and I'd love it if someone could explain to me what he's getting at there. Is he hinting at something technical or intuitive?
POW is intuitive in that it just makes sense that the person running down the hall faster than everyone else gets to pass their note along. Heck, we could prove who ran the fastest down the hallway and got there first. There is proof. That's the gist I got from him, but no more. Anyone got something more detailed on why POS isn't theoretically sound?
If you'd rather read his words...
if you think about it, I wonder if there are other uses for old, unspent bitcoins. I think this is an area that’s pretty much unexplored. We might be able to leverage them for more denial of service attack prevention on the bitcoin network. you could imagine before you’re able to join the network, you have to prove that you have some unspent bitcoins. You don’t have to spend them, you just have to prove that they’re kind of sitting there, kind of as a security deposit, um,
the proof of stake folks think it might be a good idea to use this as ah, for determining the best chain, to get consensus on kind of what the ledger history is. so far, we’re pretty sure that’s a really bad idea, and when i say we, i mean the people who hang out in the bitcoinwizards irc chat channel.
it looks like theoretically, as long as everything’s on the chain and you’re looking at chain history to determine what should be the best chain, bad things will happen. umm, we have a really good anchor in bitcoin with our proof of work, which proves that some real-world thing happened.. umm.. and which gives you a real world cost that kind of gets injected into the system, magically, via this proof of work, um, ….. if you think about identity, ..
*The steak was Clickbait
