Saturday, 15 May 2021

Why is no one talking about, that the energy consumption of Bitcoin is a security mechanism against specific network attacks?

There are multiple reasons why the energy consumption makes sense, since it prevents certain network attacks, like following:

  • You really have to invest much in hardware & energy to mine blocks - and unlike with POS coins, it's therefore not possible, to f.e. arrange with other big POS-validators and just say that a specific old/alternative chain is the valid one - since the energy is already burned.

  • unlike POS, you have a big investement in hardware, so if you attack your own network, your own hardware investment gets hurt. With POW there is no nothing-at-stakes-problem.

  • POS leads to centralization due to staking (f.e. on exchanges), this is not possible with Bitcoin, so the power distribution is much more equal with bitcoin - and much less controlable for states or big companies (f.e. if all big POS validators belong to the G20 countries - they could easily implement specific financial regulations to force these validators to follow specific rules).

There are also more reasons to go with POW instead of POS (see here https://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n6vm71/arguments_for_proof_of_work/gxapd4z/ - long range attacks, short range attacks , stake grinding attacks) but I really wonder why no one talks about these points and only counters with "ah, around 74% of the miners use renewable energy sources". I this these security measures are pretty important.

See also these links for more infos:

Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake: https://youtu.be/hMge7LfiRT8?t=60

https://www.danheld.com/blog/2019/1/5/pow-is-efficent

https://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n6vm71/arguments_for_proof_of_work/gxapd4z/

https://reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/n6vm71/arguments_for_proof_of_work/

submitted by /u/BitcoinReminder_com
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