this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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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.