I wrote a too-long answer. Here’s a short version. Long version below the line.
There are a lot of alternatives to proof of work. Proof of stake is one. You can read about the known problems with proof of stake anywhere, so I’ll give you my opinion instead.
It’s too easy for a few people (or one person) to make a lot of money early on, buy a lot of coin. They those few guys control the currency, they make the rules. That’s too easy an attack. In a normal currency, if the few richest people can make the rules about the money supply, there are so many ways that could lead to disaster. It’s already a big problem today that banks have some leverage over the central bank and the rich and lobby governments. PoS makes this already serious problem much much worse.
Bitcoin was revolutionary. It was the first proper working cryptocurrency, so it had to work - it had to be robust and simple. Satoshi chose a simple PoW which is impossible to attack. Nobody has hacked bitcoin mining yet, after so many years. That’s a real achievement. Many much newer cryptographic functions (and currencies) have already been hacked. The downside - it wastes electricity and leads to centralisation. Not too bad a tradeoff. The amount of energy now being wasted on mining just means that bitcoin is much too successful.
If you get votes based on how much money you have, it’s easy for the rich to make rules that give them extra power over the poor. Giving the rich extra powers is historically the problem with everything in the world. It’s led to all the world’s global wars and revolutions. But we are moving slowly towards democracy. Democracy is the contradiction of PoS.
I don’t see the issue with Nano or Cardano’s consensus algorithm, could you elaborate?
I wrote a too-long answer. Here’s a short version. Long version below the line.
There are a lot of alternatives to proof of work. Proof of stake is one. You can read about the known problems with proof of stake anywhere, so I’ll give you my opinion instead.
It’s too easy for a few people (or one person) to make a lot of money early on, buy a lot of coin. They those few guys control the currency, they make the rules. That’s too easy an attack. In a normal currency, if the few richest people can make the rules about the money supply, there are so many ways that could lead to disaster. It’s already a big problem today that banks have some leverage over the central bank and the rich and lobby governments. PoS makes this already serious problem much much worse.
Bitcoin was revolutionary. It was the first proper working cryptocurrency, so it had to work - it had to be robust and simple. Satoshi chose a simple PoW which is impossible to attack. Nobody has hacked bitcoin mining yet, after so many years. That’s a real achievement. Many much newer cryptographic functions (and currencies) have already been hacked. The downside - it wastes electricity and leads to centralisation. Not too bad a tradeoff. The amount of energy now being wasted on mining just means that bitcoin is much too successful.
If you get votes based on how much money you have, it’s easy for the rich to make rules that give them extra power over the poor. Giving the rich extra powers is historically the problem with everything in the world. It’s led to all the world’s global wars and revolutions. But we are moving slowly towards democracy. Democracy is the contradiction of PoS.