No, they are far from the same. It's true that BTC mining is capital intensive, yet it is highly competitive and risky, and most miners get a decent profit, yet need to sell the vast majority of mined coins to run their operation. Miners can never move on some parabolic increase of wealth as the very protocol itself prevents this.

Rather, we should look at holders. Bitcoin is fair in the sense that it does not have rich get richer built in.

If I'm rich and own 1,000 BTC whilst some poor slum has 0.001 BTC, neither of us has an advantage within the protocol. The rich person does not get free extra coins just for owning lots, nor do they have any additional say anywhere within the protocol.

With PoS, just having lots of money means you get free new money, as well as an extra say in the protocol itself.

Further, you should speak of electricity consumption combined with the energy mix. Electricity consumption does not automatically translate into pollution.

> If I'm rich and own 1,000 BTC whilst some poor slum has 0.001 BTC, neither of us has an advantage within the protocol.

Why would we care about "advantage within the protocol" while ignoring the whole world around it? A similar absurd description is: one person is holding $1B in their hands, another is holding $1 - neither has more say about the money nor any advantage within the system as long as they don't spend it. It's true, but not very meaningful - we do things with money we own.

Because the protocol is software and only dictates rules inside its sphere of influence. It's a good rule that owning lots of coins does not automatically give you even more coins.

That rule does you no good if the net effect of the interplay of the rules with the rest of reality is that having more coins gives you more coins. This will be the case as long as coins can be used to purchase the means of production.

Having more coins as in Bitcoin does not give you more Bitcoin, but you're obviously right it buys more non-Bitcoin goods and services.

Bitcoin's premise is scarcity and software-enforced rules that are equal to all. It isn't going to "fairly" distribute existing capital, that should go without saying.

But with 1,000 BTC you can get more coins from within the system by buying lots of rigs with those 1,000 coins & hence mine more coins. So PoS and PoW are quite similar in that regard.

I think the problem with PoS is not "rich get richer" but the lack of fair redestribution. In PoW miners are economically forced to sell their mined coins to pay for energy bills. This redistribution is fair as it happens on the free market (exchanges). This doesn't really happen in PoS.

I wouldn't call that similar. Mining new Bitcoin is a very competitive, risky and intense business practice. Price swings greatly affect operations and there's always regulation around the corner.

Whereas staking is more like bringing fiat to the bank and collecting interest for doing nothing at all.

Still, you do have a point in the sense that if you're as wealthy as having 1,000 BTC, you have ample ways to further grow wealth. You could sell all BTC, go into real estate, take profit and buy back BTC cheaper. There's a million ways to grow your portfolio.

It's just that Bitcoin doesn't give you more Bitcoin based on wealth. Most Bitcoin held is not held by miners.

I wouldn't say BTC is fair, but it is clearly fairer. With PoS coins, it is clear that minting new coins will heavily centralize for exchanges and big holders. With BTC, miners are clearly categorized as separate economic actor, where the skillset and capital needed to mint new coins is very different from let's say operating an exchange.

I have a feeling that there's far too much emphasis on mining from a wealth perspective. The vast majority of Bitcoin is owned by a few thousand whales combined with many millions of smaller holders.

There seems to be this narrative where some people believe miners are minting and then holding all the coins, getting ever richer, but this is plain false.

It would be true with PoS though, so agree.

That factor of “competitiveness” exists on Ethereum 2 as well. The more ether that is staked, the less the yield is from staking. If half of all ETH is staked, the APY will be below 2%, for instance. At a certain point bonds would overtake it.

1. Including sarcasm in your post didn't achieve anything except to increase the reader's blood pressure and make people like you less. Let's keep this polite, please.

2. You're right that the rich get richer with PoW as well, but I think we can agree that the connection between existing wealth and increasing wealth is stronger with PoS--PoS is almost literally just a statement of "the rich get richer".

3. The "it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution" argument is simply incorrect. Much of existing mining is already done with renewable energy--it's the most cost-effective way to mine anyway in most cases.

1. It helps get the point across just _how crazy_ this is. Sarcasm isn't only a tool to personally attack people - it's also a tool to verbally emphasize objectively valid arguments.

2. That's the beauty of it! We arrive at the same result, but just skip the part where people need to buy tons of custom silicon that can't do anything other than burn energy for mining, and then burn energy. That part has a lot of not-so-nice side effects on the real world out there, from silicon shortage to environmental pollution.

3. It is entirely correct. Even if some mining in some places is done with renewable energy (which is far from the majority - otherwise: please provide proof for your statement regarding just "how much" mining is renewable-based), that renewable energy is removed from the market and thus can't be used to power other consumers, which then must use fossil-fuel based energy sources. It's not like there's not enough demand for energy in the world, especially of the renewable kind.

The second point is objectively wrong. PoW needs participants to spend capital in order to keep the organization running, thus not the rich get richer, but the more efficient get richer. PoS participants have no sell pressure and no way of being "better" than their peers, which is why it is incredibly broken.

In a PoW system you have fierce competition and the drive to the cheapest energy. Which today is stranded energy, that the market would never buy.

It is hard to estimate what percentage is truly renewable. The biggest source of energy was hydroelectric. It is estimated that during rain season the renewable percentage is up to 70%. However even if you look at the lowest estimate of renewable energy (~25%) you get double the percentage of the best country.

Bitcoin is the true solution to monetizing cheap energy production. It removes a large risk associated with investing in renewables as the network is a buyer of last resort. Thus you know that your energy always sees 100% usage (which is a big problem with grids today)

Just a small thought experiment. Lets assume you want to build a charging station for EVs powered by your own solar farm at a somewhat remote location. 4 hours of the day you have a peak consumption of 100 units, the rest you only have 80 units consumption. Moving energy over large distances is incredibly expensive. Having a buyer for your energy (Bitcoin network) means that the investment carries a lot less risk.

1. People are more likely to recognize they're wrong if you don't also call them crazy.

2. Uh, okay.

3. You've significantly adjusted your statement from "it adds the necessity to cause unnecessary environmental pollution", which remains incorrect.

> (please provide proof for your statement regarding just "how much" mining is renewable-based)

I don't need to provide proof for things I didn't say.

Keep in mind that proof of stake as a trustless consensus mechanism is largely hypothetical at this point. All the major "live" implementations (Polkadot, Cardano, Tezos) have large numbers of trusted validators.

We agree that carbon emissions and other pollution are a problem. What we don't agree on is the solution to that problem.

> [R]enewable energy is removed from the market and thus can't be used to power other consumers, which then must use fossil-fuel based energy sources. It's not like there's not enough demand for energy in the world, especially of the renewable kind.

Wrong. The energy that's cheap enough to make mining profitable is cheap because nobody else wants it. In extreme cases, electricity produced in ghost cities in China will literally be dumped into the ground if it's not used by miners. It takes very little competition from consumers to make mining unprofitable.

Re 3), there is not anywhere near enough renewable energy to go around to phase out fossils is there? So make Bitcoin harmless you would have to postulate:

- The energy could not have been transferred to reduce use of fossils

- The energy could not have been stored to reduce use of fossils

- Production of other, more necessary goods (batteries, aluminum, datacenters serving humanity in better ways) could not have been moved to the source of clean energy

Energy is not a fungible resource. Energy produced by hydroelectric plants in ghost cities in China is not useful for other purposes.

To be clear, I'm not saying that all or even the majority of energy used to mine cryptocurrency is currently renewable. I have no idea what the current state of things is. What I'm saying is that if we're looking to solve the problem of cryptocurrencies producing carbon and other emissions, using renewable energy is arguably just viable a solution as PoS, without some of the security problems that PoS has.

I do know that some Bitcoin mining operations are investing heavily in renewables, and given the cost of fossil fuels, I suspect that will give them a significant advantage in the long run.

I would think my three bullet points should imply that I already know that energy is not a fungible resource. But there are still better uses than Bitcoin.

There is not a problem with shipping hydrogen from ghost cities in China. Neither is there a problem with running datacenters that we need for other purposes than Bitcoin.

We are currently failing at combating climate change; but to have a hope of avoiding the worst case scenarios, fossils need to be replaced with renewables at an unprecedented scale. Not only current electricity use, but also energy used in transportation. It's a huge undertaking, where you need to ramp as quickly as you can in every way you can.

The train is starting to finally move now, and in a few years, investment into renewables will not be the limiting factor. The limiting factor is how quickly it is possible to construct. Since the limiting factor is not investment; every kwh spent on Bitcoin is a kwh lost to combating climate change.

> I would think my three bullet points should imply that I already know that energy is not a fungible resource. But there are still better uses than Bitcoin.

Okay, my apologies, I did respond a bit too glibly there.

> There is not a problem with shipping hydrogen from ghost cities in China.

There is the same problem with this that exists with many energy storage solutions: often the storage creates more carbon usage and other environmental effects than simply burning fossil fuels closer to the location where the energy is needed.

> Neither is there a problem with running datacenters that we need for other purposes than Bitcoin.

There are a bunch of reasons all the FAANG data centers are near population centers, but the two ones that are most obvious to me are:

1. Internet infrastructure is near population centers, because the people in population centers are the ones the internet it intended to connect to. If you want to hook into the backbone of the internet, you have to be located near the backbone of the internet. This is necessary for latency.

2. Data centers require technical maintenance, and technical workers capable of doing that maintenance tend to live in population centers.

> We are currently failing at combating climate change; but to have a hope of avoiding the worst case scenarios, fossils need to be replaced with renewables at an unprecedented scale. Not only current electricity use, but also energy used in transportation. It's a huge undertaking, where you need to ramp as quickly as you can in every way you can.

You're preaching to the choir here.

> The train is starting to finally move now, and in a few years, investment into renewables will not be the limiting factor. The limiting factor is how quickly it is possible to construct. Since the limiting factor is not investment; every kwh spent on Bitcoin is a kwh lost to combating climate change.

This is where we disagree, I think. There's a lot of limiting factors. Even if there's massive investment into renewables, there can always be more money and more efficient use of the money you have. One of the biggest inefficiencies of renewables is that they tend to be time-bound: as you probably know, wind produces the most at night, and solar produces exclusively during the day, and neither production cycle perfectly matches with the energy usage cycle.

(As you probably know), two popular areas of exploration here are storage and changing usage:

1. Every major storage solution either doesn't work yet, or is horribly inefficient in some way. Batteries are inefficient in output/input, and have downsides in terms of metal pollutants and disposal of retired batteries even when producing the batteries isn't the limiting factor. Gravitational storage requires huge amounts of space. Thermal storage simply doesn't work at scale yet.

2. Changing usage, i.e. running networked hot water heaters when other forms of usage are low, is a promising area of development, but so far the improvements in efficiency are very modest.

A third solution which I think you're maybe underestimating, is to simply produce more energy, and use the excess production at low usage times to mine bitcoin. The profits from this can be used for a bunch of purposes, for example to reduce the cost of renewable energy to consumers (thereby increasing adoption) or to build more renewable energy.

I'll add that while nuclear energy is not technically a renewable resource, it can be part of a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is arguably the most important aspect of renewables. Nuclear power solves a bunch of problems that renewables don't solve, but it also has the problem of mismatch with the consumption cycle: nuclear power production isn't cyclical like solar/wind, it's not adaptable: it's extremely expensive to spin up and down generation: there have been a bunch of times in Germany where it was cheaper for nuclear power plants to pay consumers to take their excess power than to spin down generation. Bitcoin mining has the potential to power consumption for nuclear power plants as well, which could greatly decrease the cost of running nuclear power.

The profit margins of a miner is pretty slim. If the price increases, mining becomes profitable, competition increases bringing down the profitability, likewise in reverse.

So yes, you need money to mine, but whatever you mine, you pretty much have to turn around and sell it right away to cover your costs and keep a small profit.

That's exactly what I meant with "all crypto holders pay for it": in the state of equilibrium of costs and rewards, the huge costs are effectively paid by devaluing existing crypto holdings and via transaction costs. Is that good for crypto holders? No way! It's also not too good for miners of course, as they are in it for profit, not for rewards equaling costs.

But fortunately for the miners, crypto mining is rarely in that state of equilibrium. In reality, mining does allow for a hefty profit margin to be reaped most of the time. Ask the miners if you don't believe me, they're not exactly used to just making "small profits". And who pays for that profit margin? Crypto holders and those making transactions with it - again!

However you want to look at it, this coin looks crappy from both sides. Unless you're a miner.

> However you want to look at it, this coin looks crappy from both sides. Unless you're a miner.

Depends on what you are comparing to. For me, Bitcoin is easier to understand than the fiat system we are currently using, and that's why I'm heavily invested in to it.

In addition to miners making huge profits, there have been also cases where miner operations have turned sour, KnC Miner being one example.

Yes, there might be better systems out there. But BTC has very clear and simple protocol rules which are easy to understand, and it has properties which are very lucrative (permissionless, decentralized, limited supply, easily verifiable and transferable and so on). Other consensus mechanisms fail to deliver their promise in as effective way.