this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Do you happen to have a source showing that Proof-of-Work (PoW) is more secure than Proof-of-Stake (PoS)? Most comparisons I've come across seems to show that PoS is more secure, especially when it comes to cryptoeconomic defense.
For example, PoS has built-in economic deterrents:
This is unique to PoS and doesn't exist in PoW, where the cost of an attack is external and doesn't get progressively more difficult to attack.
I don't have a source, I've made those assumptions after countless conversation with various actors across the blockchain space both from PoW chains and PoS ones.
It's not much about security but more about permissionless, neutrality and resilience. PoS isn't insecure but it's less resilient and tend to have neutrality issue that we don't have seen yet on Bitcoin PoW for exemple.
There is different things here. First with PoS you don't have a link to the real world, atoms and stuff. You don't really have a physical cost to secure the network, you don't have external factors like you have on mining farms. The competition is completely different where you have to find the cheapest energy source and the most stable places to mine. In PoS validator gets richer and gets more influence, in PoW this isn't exactly the case due to physical reasons.
If for some reasons like a bug or a global disaster and that all the nodes went offline when the validator start to come back online they will have to communicate and choose what is the real chain. With PoW miners will simply mine the longest chain as it's the consensus. Bringing more resilience.
Also in PoS like on Ethereum an issue is centralization of the validator, on PoW this is more about concentration while not an ideal thing this isn't as bad as Lido and AWS centralisation.
I agree with a lot of your points, but I’d add that money is a limited economic resource tied to the real world, atoms and all that. Buying stake in a network carries a real, physical cost similar to buying mining equipment.
Also, I don’t think PoS’s more flexible recovery models are necessarily a bad thing. They actually provide adaptability in case of problems.
But if we look at resilience historically, PoW chains have been vulnerable to 51% attacks, like we’ve seen with Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold. Where as with PoS, noone has even been able buy up 51% of a chain for an attack.
Sorry but you can't compare the physical ressources of PoW and PoS, mining isn't buying a shit tons of ASICs and getting bitcoins.
How it's recovery model is more flexible ? How does mining can't adapt to issues ?
51% on Bitcoin has been highly improbable from decades now, miners will see it comming fast enough to adapt. Forks and 51% attacks are two very different concept. You had it with ETH PoW and you'll probably get new fork even after PoS chains.
Again I never said that PoS was less secure, I said it was more neutral and resilient. Bitcoin needs to be neutral and resilient as a network. PoS is a different consensus mechanism that have different tradeoff.