Proof of [physical resource] vs Proof of Stake

Random Topics
21

You could’ve said that earlier.

I still think that’s still very circumstantial. Possessing half of all coins in circulation is just sketchy to begin with regardless of PoW or PoS. You could easily manipulate the market if you have that many market share. But other than that, buying up ASIC to attack PoW can be just as timely (in the time it takes for you to buy up half of market, the GPU industry would probably have had another big turnaround). NEO is a coin I just looked up and it has a market cap of about eight billions dollars in circulation. You can spend 4 billion dollars destroying NEO for nothing or destroy ETH and at the same time help out the economy by stimulating the GPU industry and reselling those cards after they’re used.

Are you aware of any PoS attacks? I know BTC gold and ETH Classic were attacked.

22

One important note to interject: to do a 51% attack a PoS chain, you don’t need 51% of all coins in existence. You only need 51% of all staked coins, which is a small percentage of the total.

To do a 51% attack on a PoW chain, you need 51% of the hash power. In Bitcoin’s case, it would be extraordinarily difficult, maybe even impossible, to procure that much hardware, regardless of how much money you have. It would be far easier to physically attack the owners of the 3 or 4 largest pools and force them to attack the chain together.

2 Likes
23

Great point about staked coin %!

24

Ok. That makes a lot of sense.

25

Actually you would need 100%+ of the value of the network.