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Comment by pulsarmx | Hacker News Reader

> uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining

I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.

Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.

What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?

Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?

It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.

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Because it's not really an efficiency upgrade like you've envisioned.

The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.

A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.

Well, because it's not like PoS is just making PoW more efficient. You have no way to turn that extra energy into more stake.

It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.

Thanks, I think I kind of get it now. But now my follow up question is, what stops me from just recruiting, say, nine other people at least as old as me, give them each 10 strawberries, and then collecting the payout afterwards?

Haha, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that as an analogy for PoS. Just to make the point that it's two resources which can't be converted.

Mining economics depend on the mining reward. It doesn't get bigger if more people mine. The rewards just get spread out over more/larger participants until profits are tiny via difficulty adjustments.

The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.

PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.

Non proof-of-work "mining" typically requires another resource. Proof-of-stake rewards you based on your holdings, so additional mining compute power doesn't help.

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