quantificationOfConsensusProtocolSecurity VS ValidatedProofOfStake

Very true. However, the situation is worse for PoW. I did quite a bit of work on this subject and found that the best case scenario for PoW is that 0.625% of the supply of bitcoin would be required to buy out enough miners for a 51% attack. Even requiring a few % of the total supply for an attack on a PoS chain would be a substantial improvement in blockchain security. However, while PoW has strict limitations on how much security can be profitably created via mining (because of the high costs of mining), PoS is much less limited in that regard because the low costs of minting mean far more coins can be put towards profitably minting.

Proof of Stake is A. not one thing and B. still in reasearch mode. It would be irresponsible to switch bitcoin over to any proof of stake system without a ton of research and vetting. That work has not been done yet, and so we leave it to altcoins to forge ahead mostly be recklessly ignoring design problems and learning by crashing. Hopefully PoS will succeed someday because it would mean 1/100th the fees and 10+ times the blockchain security. But until we create an indisputably secure PoS consensus protocol, its not for Bitcoin.

These two are the only actual arguments against PoS in the article and they both apply equally to PoW. For anyone that actually wants to learn about the security of consensus Protocols, this research is a lot more in depth.

This is controversial, but it is false, in my studied opinion. The Bitcoin blockchain is certainly the most secure blockchain, but does this mean proof of work is the most secure consensus protocol? No it doesn't. To explain why, its important to understand what security is and critically, how to quantify it. The security of a consensus protocol is the difficulty of attacking it, which can be measured using the cost of executing a successful attack. The critical piece of this security is that both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake have securities that are proportional to the total value of the currency. The more a currency is worth in total, the more value there is in the system to secure it.

I already have a deep understanding because I've already put in the time. I don't want to put in double the time, which is why I think every podcast should put the effort in to make a searchable transcription. That way I can find the interesting 1 or 2 points I haven't heard before that might make for interesting discussion.

I've done much more than 5 minutes of thinking about this. So I'd appreciate less condescention.

I don't know why you think that. In fact, I wrote a paper specifically about how to compare the security of consensus protocols apples to apples.

Look, I agree that proof of stake can work and I also think it can be more secure than PoW. But just wanting to upgrade it does not make it possible. There are a lot of technical and security issues that can't just be wished away. I've done the technical thinking to be confident that PoS can work, but the vast majority of people who tout PoS have not. So please realize that its not that simple.

So to my last point, if an altcoin does come up with something like that and the technical bitcoin community agrees that technology is sound, Bitcoin can incorporate it. However, there are fundamental barriers to higher base-layer transaction speeds, and most coins that offer higher speeds do so because they sacrifice security and resilience against attack. Something that consumes less security is basically going to be some kind of proof of stake. There is massive opposition in the bitcoin community against proof of stake, however if its shown that a proof of stake consensus protocol fulfils all of Bitcoin's the security goals, its possible for bitcoin to be transitioned to a different consensus protocol. I believe that proof of stake has fundamental properties that make it not only less costly but also more secure. However, it will take a lot of time to convince the community, and likely will take running into the limits of bitcoin's current consensus protocol in a much worse way before people take PoS more seriously for bitcoin. Bitcoin's consensus protocol works fine for now and there are a lot of other higher priorities to focus on at the moment.

That is also not at all true. I assume you mean that there is zero net incentive to mess with anything, because there sure is massive incentive to double spend if a miner could. A double spending attack could extract billions of dollars from the economy if done properly. This is certainly a large inecentive to cheat. However, bitcoin's proof of work is secure enough at this point to make the capital requirements of doing such an attack enormous - in the tens of billions of dollars. However, if an attacker or group of attakers is willing to put tens of billions of dollars to work, its certainl plausible that they could make a solid profit.

Coins like Peercoin and Nxt have a system where each coin has a probability each second of granting the ability to mint a block. So those are a couple that don't have that kind of orphan preventing dynamic. Its the ones that use randomly chosen committees that preven orphans. Not that PoS and Nxt are very good - neither solve the nothing at stake problem. This is one that does solve the nothing at stake problem but has a similar random dynamic that doesn't prevent orphans.

Part of the conservatism is good. It comes from a dumb place (bandwagoning and ignorance) but Bitcoin is multiple orders of magnitude more valuable and important at the moment than 99% of experimental coins out there right now. Bitcoin isn't the right place for high-risk experiments. But I hope one day we find a solid PoS protocol we can use for something as important as Bitcoin. Maybe we already have ; )

Many proof of stake currencies do require "staking", which is locking up collateral in order to be able to mine. However, not all do. Some simply do not disincentivize minting on multiple chains (like Peercoin), which is a short sighted design flaw. Some PoS systems are Delegated Proof of Stake, which in principle might require locking up collateral, but might instead opt for punishing bad actors by loss of reputation (like seems to be the philosophy of BitShares), which indirectly leads to loss of revenue, rather than direct loss of coins. Other currencies, like my own Validated Proof of Stake might not use locked in stake, but may still have mechanisms to punish certain negative behaviors or outcomes.

> Yes it is. The more people with coins actively minting in the system, the higher the difficulty of getting chosen.

I'm well aware. But eventually a large validator will get chosen--it's not difficult to get chosen, it's rare. The fact that PoS folks call this "difficulty" does not make it so.

> If you really want to keep discussing this with me, read through the WHOLE of https://github.com/fresheneesz/validatedProofOfStake and show me a full attack on it.

Given your proposed solution is checkpoints from a centralized trusted entity, you're giving up decentralization. Sure, your solution works. But if you're willing to give up decentralization, you might as well just store the transactions in Postgres. It's faster and has more mature tooling.

I don't know of any techniques to prevent stake grinding that trade off security properties. Of course there are PoS protocols that both prevent stake grinding and also have security issues, but that's not the same thing. In any case, I don't see you backing up your claims here, so I guess I'll wait until you do. I'll give you one protocol that doesn't have the unpleasant properties you're talking about. I'd be happy to discuss any security holes you find in it.

So its still unlikely to cost more for energy than gold mining for a while yet. Maybe in 8 years we'll discover a PoS protocol that doesn't suck.

However I do think we can do better than proof of work. I think proof of stake can actually be much more secure while at the same time expending far less energy if designed properly. Granted, I haven't seen any pos protocol that has been designed properly. I have done some work to that effect tho: https://github.com/fresheneesz/ValidatedProofOfStake