> In PoW coins you permanently lose the "stake". So that just means that to achieve the same level of security in a PoS coin, you have to stake a lot more (since you are only losing the time value of the stake).
PoS network security reduces down to top-down human intervention: because PoS networks are unmined, they lack all hashing power which could otherwise be used to build a quantitative fork ranking protocol. When forks occur in PoS, the network stewards have to “pick” a winning forked chain, and enforce that decision on the entire network.
Because there’s by definition no hashing power involved in reaching that decision, it’s a bit of a wonder why PoS networks rely on blockchains at all. PoS security doesn’t really depend on anything other than the level of trust you have in the centralized authorities who control the PoS network. In the best of cases, it’s akin to trusting a Debian-like organization to annoint a specific branch of a Git repository as containing the true history of changes during any project-level dispute.
Unfortunately it's more complex than that. You can't rely on number of stakers for anything because of sybil attacks. You also can't rely on amount of stake because some of it could be double-staked (you can detect this but it still may not help you choose which fork is legit). The solutions to PoS fork choice don't really fit in an HN comment.
PoS network security reduces down to top-down human intervention: because PoS networks are unmined, they lack all hashing power which could otherwise be used to build a quantitative fork ranking protocol. When forks occur in PoS, the network stewards have to “pick” a winning forked chain, and enforce that decision on the entire network.
Because there’s by definition no hashing power involved in reaching that decision, it’s a bit of a wonder why PoS networks rely on blockchains at all. PoS security doesn’t really depend on anything other than the level of trust you have in the centralized authorities who control the PoS network. In the best of cases, it’s akin to trusting a Debian-like organization to annoint a specific branch of a Git repository as containing the true history of changes during any project-level dispute.