If Chia is meant to be green by means of saving energy, isn’t that what proof of stake consensus is for? Why isn’t PoS the ultimate algorithm in energy consumption?
What’s keeping someone from buying 51% of the available ETH?
Is that the only reason why? Is it more viable in PoS than in PoW?
Also, it’s kind of ironic that Hpool is almost capable of pulling off such an attack.
It’s the major reason why. Nothing could stop a nation from doing it. Hpool has incentive not to because it would tank the price. A government that wanted to topple a threat to their fiat could do it easily.
I still think that’s a soft argument.
If anyone entity posses 51% of the coins, that sounds just as plausible as posses 51% of the hash rates. Also, there’s no way a government could possess 51% of all coins unless something’s wrong from the inception (like premine). To circumvent premine/uneven early distribution, simply switch the network to PoS after the coin has stabilized like what Ethereum is planning.
Read the link I posted. It’s easier than you think and they certainly have the motivation.
Secure consensus through PoS has a lot of tricky complications compared to PoW. It’ll probably work out for ETH 2.0 in practice, given enough time to work out the kinks…but it’ll always lack the simple objectivity of Nakamoto consensus (longest chain is the truth, full stop). Here’s an old post of Vitalik’s that’s still highly informative today.
Chia’s protocol is a bit more complicated than PoW (e.g. with proofs of space and time involved) but otherwise preserves that essential idea of Nakamoto consensus, while also substantially flattening the energy drain.
We want both to succeed and compete IMO…still way too early in this revolution not to keep exploring ‘all of the above’
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It seems to me that:
- A lot of people talking about POS vs POW vs XYZ , doesn’t actually really understand trade offs , because its honestly hard.(I don’t have a clue either)
- A lot of a discussion is about theory but in real world is not run by distributed system engineers things work out differently.
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I don’t think so. Even if the government prints all the money it wants, buying up enough coins to conduct a 51% attack is completely disadvantageous. As if printing billions/trillions of dollars worth of currency isn’t enough to destroy it’s own economy, crypto markets are extremely thin. Good luck buying up even 1% of all coins at market price. People will very quickly see that someone is buying up coins at all cost and they will jack the price up sky-high, and if the government is truly suicidal just to cripple a cryptocurrency, they will render all pre-existing fiat currency worthless.
A 51% attack is pretty dam powerful. Hell, why not dub spend millions of dollars of Chia when you only make about 3 thousand dollars daily from fees?
Explain to me in detail how mounting a 51% attack on a PoW network is easier or more advantageous to the attacker than a 51% attack on a PoS network.
My point is that PoS isn’t necessarily practical to plan for a 51% attack. As for PoW, if say the US wants to cripple BTC, it could just buy all the brainpower and industrial resources to produce extremely efficient ASICs/chips to overtake the SHA blockchain. Keep in mind BitMain doesn’t necessarily want to roll out the best ASIC immediatly. Intel and AMD combined stock market volume is worth about 120 billion dollars. The US prints money nowadays anyway so it’s a viable project to me if they are determined. Buy up Intel and AMD or BitMain, produce classified extremely high-end ASICs, produce them, and mine with them. All in all the cost including power consumption, I would imagine it’s still below one trillions dollars at least, and you should possess more than 50% of the hashing power. Does that sound reasonable to you?
Or even easier, buy up 7 billions dollars of GPU from Nvidia and attack the Ethereum network with them. My RTX 3060 Super hashes at 35 MH/s and it’s about 399$(government exempts their own tax 
). The ETH network hashrate is about 600TH/s. 7 billion dollars of RTX GPU cards should get you at about that rate.
I don’t think the reasoning in the article you linked is accurate. It’s true that Nvidia doesn’t want the miners to take away cards from gamers, but the premise to that statement is that there are limited cards to begin with. This is very situational as we happened to be a period of GPU shortage. Wait a couple of years or just set the order now and I am sure Nvidia will crank out those cards. Incoming orders never businesses or the long run.
Hell, in PoW, you can at least buy resources at a reasonable rate.
So instead of buying/manufacturing/powering/maintaining a hardware PoS attack, you think just buying up 51% in a very smart way to attack a PoS network is much harder? Think about that for a second.
Still makes sense to me. My argument is that it’s far more practical to buy up resources to perform a 51% attack on PoW(miners) than in PoS(coins). Refer back to my post on price jacking if you don’t see how buying up 51% of all coins is impractical.
I am guessing you meant to ridicule how I think buying up resources to perform PoS attack is harder than that of PoW?
I’m asking how you think it’s easier. That’s it.
It’s not easier. It’s more doable and advantageous. For PoS, even if you can type in zeros to your bank account to increase your balance, I still don’t think you have enough sellers to sell you coins. Even if there are, exchange will probably ban your currency since it would be pretty much unless and no one would want to trade coins to that currency ever.
All you have to do is spread your buy out over a year or more. Thousands of different wallets. People wouldn’t even notice it happening. When you print your own money that’s extremely easy. In my experience harder=less doable. It’s like taking down a company by buying enough controlling stock and forcing a sale. It happens all the time.