this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Proof-of-Stake is not a great match for Bitcoin because it fails at being neutral, it's a plutocracy system and is not as resilient as PoW.
You know what other global industries consume more than small countries ? All of them, including banking. This is an unfaire comparison in my opinion. Also the energy consumption is not the most interesting factor, the source of the energy is more interesting in my opinion.
Here is a comment I just made under OP's post to list a few academic peer-reviewed paper about the positive environmental impact of Bitcoin's PoW for financing renewable energy production and cleaning methane from the atmosphere. I've also included some articles from mainstream media.
Do you happen to have a source showing that Proof-of-Work (PoW) is more secure than Proof-of-Stake (PoS)? Most comparisons I've come across seems to show that PoS is more secure, especially when it comes to cryptoeconomic defense.
For example, PoS has built-in economic deterrents:
This is unique to PoS and doesn't exist in PoW, where the cost of an attack is external and doesn't get progressively more difficult to attack.
I don't have a source, I've made those assumptions after countless conversation with various actors across the blockchain space both from PoW chains and PoS ones.
It's not much about security but more about permissionless, neutrality and resilience. PoS isn't insecure but it's less resilient and tend to have neutrality issue that we don't have seen yet on Bitcoin PoW for exemple.
There is different things here. First with PoS you don't have a link to the real world, atoms and stuff. You don't really have a physical cost to secure the network, you don't have external factors like you have on mining farms. The competition is completely different where you have to find the cheapest energy source and the most stable places to mine. In PoS validator gets richer and gets more influence, in PoW this isn't exactly the case due to physical reasons.
If for some reasons like a bug or a global disaster and that all the nodes went offline when the validator start to come back online they will have to communicate and choose what is the real chain. With PoW miners will simply mine the longest chain as it's the consensus. Bringing more resilience.
Also in PoS like on Ethereum an issue is centralization of the validator, on PoW this is more about concentration while not an ideal thing this isn't as bad as Lido and AWS centralisation.
I agree with a lot of your points, but I’d add that money is a limited economic resource tied to the real world, atoms and all that. Buying stake in a network carries a real, physical cost similar to buying mining equipment.
Also, I don’t think PoS’s more flexible recovery models are necessarily a bad thing. They actually provide adaptability in case of problems.
But if we look at resilience historically, PoW chains have been vulnerable to 51% attacks, like we’ve seen with Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold. Where as with PoS, noone has even been able buy up 51% of a chain for an attack.
Sorry but you can't compare the physical ressources of PoW and PoS, mining isn't buying a shit tons of ASICs and getting bitcoins.
How it's recovery model is more flexible ? How does mining can't adapt to issues ?
51% on Bitcoin has been highly improbable from decades now, miners will see it comming fast enough to adapt. Forks and 51% attacks are two very different concept. You had it with ETH PoW and you'll probably get new fork even after PoS chains.
Again I never said that PoS was less secure, I said it was more neutral and resilient. Bitcoin needs to be neutral and resilient as a network. PoS is a different consensus mechanism that have different tradeoff.
I mean in general, Bitcoin aside, PoS is more resilient than PoW. The only major resilience issue I know of in PoS is when validators came offline for Ethereum and couldn't reach finality. But I don't think that's a fair comparison to PoW because PoW doesn't have finality in the first place. Also, because PoS has finality, it's resistant to long-range attacks, even if someone did a 51% attack (which has never happened for a PoS chain), they wouldn't be able to rewrite finalized blocks.
Do you understand what it would need to change multiple blocks on 51% attack. Getting 51% of hashrate is a thing, maintaining long enough is another. Also if 51% attacks happen in a PoW consensus it can recover from it, not without any damage but it can recover. On PoS systems, once it happend it's done.
PoW has probabilistic finality. The deeper a block is buried under subsequent blocks, the less likely it is to be reversed. Deterministic finality is not a universal upgrade — it trades off with flexibility and recovery mechanisms.
Main risks regarding PoS resilience are in my opinion :
Centralized staking: Yes, it’s a concern, but so is centralized mining. We’ve seen real-world 51% attacks on PoW chains due to mining centralization.
Weak subjectivity: True, it’s a real factor, but not a showstopper. Clients just need to use a recent finalized checkpoint.
Slashing risk: It exists in theory, but we haven’t seen it hit honest validators in practice, even on smaller PoS chains.
What chains are you referring too ? Cuz except some SHA-256 mining coins like BCH I can't remember hearing about that.
Here's a list of a number of them: https://99bitcoins.com/wiki/51-percent-attack/
I should note that I'm lumping in security as part of resilience, since being able to recover from problems includes being able to recover from attacks and limiting damage from attacks. If something is not as secure it's not as resilient, either.
Thanks for the link, interesting stuff.
So yes that's mainly unknown tokens, chains that forks from popular chains. Also 51% of hashrate from a pool doesn't mean malicious actor to easily do a 51% attacks. While the pool dominance isn't an ideal situation it's usually not as bad as some people like to tell.
But there is no explaination on how PoW is less secure than PoS chains (especially with most tokenomics launch), PoW is indeed a better design to recover from attacks.
Sure, those attacks happened on lesser-known chains like Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold, but doesn’t that actually suggest PoS is more resilient in practice, even if can be argued that it’s weaker in theory?
In PoS, to extract value or compromise finality, an attacker needs to control 67% of the stake, which has never successfully happened, even on unknown tokens or forks from popular chains. That’s a pretty strong track record for security and resilience.
The lack of successful 67% attacks on major PoS chains is indeed a positive sign. However, this could also reflect social deterrence, early-stage economics, or insufficient adversarial incentives — not necessarily intrinsic robustness.
Anyway my initial argument was that Bitcoin have no interest to move away from its PoW and especially not to transition to PoS. PoW isn't perfect and has its drawbacks but PoS is not a better system, it's an alternative with other drawbacks that doesn't meet every chains needs.
True, I agree that PoS has tradeoffs and isn't a perfect solution. And I totally understand that Bitcoin has lots of reasons to stick with PoW. I was speaking more generally about resilience and security in PoW vs. PoS.
I don’t think what happened to Ethereum is a fair comparison, because PoW doesn’t have finality to begin with. When Ethereum temporarily lost finality, it just reverted to a PoW-like model, where finality is probabilistic. It was a degradation, not a catastrophic failure.