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Comment by diegocerdan | Hacker News Reader

Proof of Work (PoW) is inherent inferior to Proof of Stake (PoS). PoW is just the most simple way to archive consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives and that is why first blockchains implemented it.

It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized. On the chain that "wins" you can be penalized for mining multiple chains which is clearly bad behavior.

The main problems of PoS that Casper, the Ethereum implementation, is trying to solve are "Nothing at Stake" and "Long Range Attacks". Both problems are being tackled right now and close to be solved.

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You don't give any support for your initial thesis, nor does the post you're responding to.

Make a technical or economic argument.

Meanwhile: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

What does "close to being solved" mean? These types of problems are either solved or not.

> It is not true that on PoS you can mine multiple forked chains without being penalized.

You're confusing multiple branches competing for being the most-cumulative-difficulty branch, with multiple distinct cryptocurrencies resulting from a hardforking code change.

Penalization only applies to the first case, but the parent was talking about the latter case. E.g. a miner could mine both ETH and ETC once both adopt PoS.

True. OP said hard forks and I talked about natural forks.

I don't see any problem in hard forks and being able to stake on multiple chains. Let people hard fork as much as they want and decide, later on, which chains hold value.

>decide, later on, which chains hold value

How? Who decides?

This is really where every PoS algorithm seems to break down. The whole idea of blockchain is to build a decentralized consensus, and PoS just handwaves it away.

>Who decides?

Every user of the system.

>How?

Mostly by taking in consideration the differences of the software from both chains.

Counterpoint, on the thermodynamics of PoW: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf

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