As opposed to Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake is not as simple as it sounds. Any implementation faces a myriad of design challenges and potential attacks. Things like "nothing-at-stake", "costless simulation", "stake grinding", and "long-range attacks" [1]. And in the end, there is no objective truth about the state of the chain, as there is with PoW's simple longest chain rule.
There is nothing simple about a Bitcoin "transition" either, as should be evident from the endless blocksize debates, and resulting Bitcoin Cash chain splits. That was only about changing a single parameter. Now you're talking about changing the very essence of Bitcoin, with dozens if not hundreds more dimensions of choices and opportunities for disagreements.
(But I agree that Bitcoin is unlikely to change.)
Proof if stake is either really proof of work that is less secure and obscured, or more often dimply giving the creators of the coin the power and your trust.... which reverses the entire point of the creation of bitcoin.
PoW’s purpose isn't to distribute coins (though rewarding whales is the purpose of PoS).
PoW’s purpose is to decentralize control so nobody can control and make the system trustless.
The same applies to Eth2's PoS network, as block proposers are randomly selected with on-chain randomness. Block rewards are also not a major source of income for a staker on Eth2 — the majority of income (>90%) comes from simply attesting the chain correctly. This attesting occurs once an epoch for every validator, or every 32 blocks.
>Proof if stake is either really proof of work that is less secure and obscured, or more often dimply giving the creators of the coin the power and your trust....
PoS vs. PoW is really only a matter of how you ensure your chain can't be attacked. For PoW it's equipment cost, burnt electricity, and opportunity cost for losing rewards due to attacking the chain. For PoS, the security is ensured through a high-enough buy-in cost (32 Eth), and penalizing attackers harshly through slashing.
You can imagine how expensive it would be to accumulate enough Ether to attack the current PoS chain. There is 3.3 million Ether staked across over 100,000 validators, and one would need more than half of that total stake to have a chance at attacking the network, a failed attack resulting in massive slashings. This is made even harder as the attesting validators are shuffled continuously.
I personally loathe the energy consumption of PoW, and believe PoS to be the future. The fact that hundreds of validators can be run on just 5 watts of power should say enough.
If all validators on the current Eth2 PoS chain were run on individual machines, the energy consumption would be ≈4.4 GWh yearly vs. the current PoW chain's ≈25 TWh — a 5000-fold decrease. This is decrease is in reality probably even larger since pools, decentralized and centralized, will be running multiple validators on a single machine which affects resource usage very minimally.
The consensus mechanism serves two distinct purposes. The first is to keep global monotonic time (which is what you call "protect from attacks"). The second is as an inflation protocol. Any time you create value where there previously wasn't you have inflation.
> a failed attack resulting in massive slashings
That's not a good mental model for adverse actors in blockchain systems. Failed attacks are normally not published, so they won't exist unless the conditions are right.
My understanding was that malicious validator has to publish votes for two different blocks in one round; which then can be used to slash them. Unlike PoW they can't "sit" on their second vote, because voters are known ahead of time, and once vote is done, opportunity is gone.
They also can't choose transactions to go into block unless they're the proposer, so that's only time they can control whether attack will even benefit them.
So they'll have to wait to get randomly assigned as proposer, in a committee where they control enough of the other randomly selected validators, and have pending txns at the ready to double spend (while receiving party has been sitting waiting for funds).
And even then, won't that just create a fork where the minority of the validators recognize the double vote, and slash them anyways? And what users / services will stay w original fork given that proof?
Actually 1/3rd to disrupt consensus, and 2/3rds + 1 to take control of the chain like you could with a 51% attack on a PoW chain, only you'd get almost immediate and complete control over the consensus.
As bitcoin wasnt valued in 2009-2011, its value in USD was basically zero. Yet the cost of attacking the PoW even during that time was the cost of electricity which was higher than zero.
PoS, if it was released in 2009 instead of PoW, the cost to attack it would have been zero, as the price of bitcoin was.
There is a solution to this but none of the shitcoins have it implemented, instead chosing to give the creators all the power and majority stake.
What is the solution you are thinking about? Interestingly enough, IIRC, the very first PoS coin did not give the creators all the power and majority stake.
If it is good enough you and others will be able to find it, without anyone needing to name-drop or shill it. If it isint easy to find, well it isnt and deserves to die. But please if/when you find it, dont shill it, dont mention it.
At some point, the mining rewards will dry up, as this paper points out. Then the game theory mechanics for BTC will change such that transaction ordering and execution become the main competition for miners to fight for, with some blocks being much more profitable than others despite electricity costs remaining static for each block. That's a huge problem, and PoW doesn't have the fix for that.
Ethereum's current proposal on this is to burn transaction fees. This is possible because ETH doesn't have a capped issuance, so block rewards will never dry up. Bitcoin doesn't have this option. It will have to, at some point in the future (maybe 20 years, I dunno), either give up 21 million capped supply or Proof-of-Work to sustain itself.
It would be interesting if someone would research why this hasn't already happened? It's not like that alternative hasn't been available for a long time now.
But the real reason is that there is no real solid formally written and proven ,,proof of stake'' algorithm so far.
Over 100,000 as of a few days ago!
Bitcoin had a halving, which was very sifnificant energy usage decrease measured in BTC (which caused the significant price increase).
Malicious stakers could indefinitely conduct a censorship attack. To address this, the PoS equivalent of changing the hash function would be to fork the chain and leave out the attackers' stake.
... well except for these guys https://www.bitcoinpos.net/
pos = centralization risk.
pos = shitcoin.
If you want to read in depth: https://voskuil.org/cryptoeconomics/cryptoeconomics.pdf.