I think it would be much easier for e.g. state actors to take control of a few of the world's PoW mining locations than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.
You don’t really get how mining pools work. It’s not a monolithic thing. well OK MARA is a proprietary pool, but the rest are made up of people contributing hash. If a state actor took over a pool, we could spin up another quick smart. Hash is fluid. Try that with slashing and stake lockups and others nonsense PoS invents to do a worse job.
Bitcoin is not currently mined by "people", it is mined by large specialized companies with razor-thin margins in warehouses with access to bulk ASIC purchase agreements and incredibly cheap electricity.
The last time a "person" was able to mine Bitcoin at breakeven was around 2017 or so. Maybe 2020 or 2022, if you threw the dice on buying ASICs from shady companies, hired an electrician to install a new circuit, then filled your home office with 10,000W of equipment.
In contrast to stake as an individual, you don't need special access to electricity or agreements or anything. Just buy tokens and run them on a mini-PC that costs less than a grand. The minimums are low due to DVT.
> Try that with slashing and stake lockups
I don't see how slashing is relevant to the conversation.
As for lockups, it's much easier to wait a few days for stake to unlock than to try to sell a bitcoin mining ASIC. It's also less counterparty risk and a much more liquid market.
https://bitaxe.org/
I guess all those plebs are just imagining mining sats at the edge. Mining isn’t just farms. And farms are not pools.
You are regurgitating ETH propaganda that doesn’t match reality.
what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing. The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing. PoS is a Ponzi to dump worthless tokens on you. You can’t escape that.
PoS trends to zero. I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…
One bitaxe costs $145 and runs at about 400GH/s. That's $0.02 per day in gross revenue, before electricity expenditure. It breaks even at $0.05 per kWh, which is an electricity rate so cheap it's impossible to get most places in the world. Mining 20 sats per day - which are worth a tenth of a cent each - is completely meaningless.
Even if you could somehow get completely free electricity, you need to buy 1700 bitaxes at a cost of $240,000 to earn a modest $1k per month, or 5% annual return initially, which dwindles quickly as ASIC technology improves year-over-year. You never reach breakeven.
So the bitaxe is a novelty item. Economically viable mining is indeed just farms now.
> what you are missing is that PoS coins are printed from nothing.
Satoshi's coins were printed from running some lines of C he wrote on a desktop computer. That's just as "nothing".
> The original sin. From nothing. Worth nothing.
That's not how economics works. See my other reply about how software also comes "from nothing" but is obviously not worth nothing. All intellectual property comes "from nothing", but intellectual property powers the modern economy.
> PoS trends to zero.
Opinion.
> I can’t believe we are still arguing this with >2T market cap for BTC and ETH has actually shrunk since it moved to PoS. It’s going in the wrong direction…
Cherry-picked timeline… It’s reality dude! It’s the timeline that reflects reality in 2025.
Of course if you imagine a reality where ETH PoS was the best and the coin was worth $100k/ETH post merge you could say that. But that’s fantasy.
It’s worth less per unit than when it was POW.
Satoshi spent real resources to mine, yes they were negligible at the time, but it was real resources. I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1. Vitalik just hit print.
BitAxe is a toy, yes. But my point was that people are mining sats. You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity. That’s the disconnect. PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity. Bitcoin… offers an alternative. ETH PoS is more of the same. I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
> I recall genesis block took 6 days of hashing at difficulty 1.
The genesis block (0) was hard-coded. Block 1 was mined 6 days later, but Satoshi wasn't hashing that whole time, he was just waiting.
Every block after the genesis block itself was subject to the difficulty adjustment process, including Block 1. So technically we know that Bitcoin is actually pre-mined by at least one block, since if anybody else knew about Bitcoin back then, it's certain they wouldn't have waited 6 days to mine Block 1 like Satoshi did.
> You just don’t see the value in the hardware and energy outlay for integrity.
To equal 10% of the current Bitcoin network hashrate (a good ballpark figure for having "enough to matter" when it comes to defending PoW consensus), you would need 2.5 million of these units, plus 2.5 million people willing to pay $145 and $52/yr in electricity to run them 24/7 next to their wifi routers, to earn $0.02 per day. Plus, of course, fiddle with the units every few months/years when they stop mining for whatever reason, like your partner changed the wifi password or a fan goes out.
How many people do you know who would want to take up that deal? It's not just me - nobody sees that value. Nobody wants to donate $200 to create an insignificant, marginal contribution to Bitcoin's theoretical security properties and earn $0.02 per day.
It's a lot more alluring to earn a real return on whatever ETH you're already holding by doing the exact same thing on Ethereum without needing to buy specialized mining hardware.
> PoS has no real world binding, and so must rely on humans for integrity.
Can you be more specific? Ethereum doesn't rely on humans for integrity any more than Bitcoin does. Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't rely on humans any less. Both protocols are nothing more than a set of rules that everyone agrees on, and everyone can collectively agree to change at any time.
> I don’t trust humans, you trust them too much.
You trust the CEOs of large mining farms that grow more and more concentrated year after year through economies of scale. You also trust that governments won't execute a single warrant to take over their country's largest centralized mining operation whenever it's convenient for them.
I trust a large set of of geographically distributed stakers. They can't grow any larger than they currently are, because staking has no economy of scale, and they can't be seized by governments, because it would require them to execute tens of thousands of warrants on tens of thousands of physical locations.
We don’t know exactly what happened between 0 and 1, but it’s not really that important, other than it’s “externally verifiable hash”, eg PoW.
Real Return”. I think the real return is -40% since PoS? And falling? The illusion of yield. It’s the same nonsense they use to get people to buy treasuries with yields under inflation.
It’s Wall Street tricks dressed up as yield. That’s all that’s been reinvented here. It’s not some grand hack to bypass “waste”.
I agree going after the stakers won’t shut it down. But going after the central devs? Remember liberty reserve? Ethereum is just LR, and Solana is LR2 and Sui is LR3?
> We don’t know exactly what happened between 0 and 1, but it’s not really that important, other than it’s “externally verifiable hash”, eg PoW.
Whether or not someone ran a particular piece of software on their computer for ten minutes in 2009, or even six days for that matter, is not important.
> Real Return”. I think the real return is -40% since PoS? And falling? The illusion of yield. It’s the same nonsense they use to get people to buy treasuries with yields under inflation. It’s Wall Street tricks dressed up as yield. That’s all that’s been reinvented here. It’s not some grand hack to bypass “waste”.
When you hold ETH (and stake it, which is easy), your percentage share of all outstanding ETH goes slowly up over time. When you hold BTC, your percentage share only goes down as more BTC are mined.
The "return" is that you accumulate more of the asset's market cap over time. If you don't value ETH, just don't buy it. If you like ETH, staking gets you more of it. The return is real in the sense that it's paid partially by transaction fee revenue, not by simply inflating the network by the same amount as the reward payouts.
> I agree going after the stakers won’t shut it down. But going after the central devs? Remember liberty reserve? Ethereum is just LR, and Solana is LR2 and Sui is LR3?
Alright so Ethereum has ten central dev teams working on ten clients across international borders. Bitcoin has one central dev team working on one central client. Which is more decentralized?
> [...] than to compromise a bunch of people's private keys.
No reason to target many people's private keys. Just find a few insecure exchanges — maybe a single exchange is enough, even — that together hold a majority of stake.
