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POS v POW (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by ISObatteries@alien.top to c/ethereum@blockchained.world

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Relatively new to crypto. Got a loose understanding of the systems.

Trying to differentiate the two but I’m kinda stuck on something. I understand that mining is more energy intensive, as they’re using mining rigs to process transactions.

My confusion stems from how that differs from POS where you still end up using a computer to process transactions. There just happens to be an extra step (32ETH). Which, I guess I should ask just to be sure - are those 32 ETH just parked somewhere as collateral or is it used as part of a liquidity pool?

Of course penalties keep validators in line, but wouldn’t that imply that btc miners have the capability to misbehave in a similar manner to a bad validator (even though they have no stake)?

To me the two methods seem nearly identical. What am I missing ?

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[–] mikkeller@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

You should check this article out as I wrote it to clear up exactly what PoW is doing under the hood, how it works from ground up, and why it's built that way.

How PoW works and why

The 'processing' of transactions isn't what all of the energy in PoW is being used for, the excess energy is the external or exogenous incentive mechanism it uses to ensure people can't spin up infinite nodes at zero cost and overtake > 51% of the network. PoS instead has users put up 32e at stake where the capital can be slashed if there is misbehavior.

PoW miners can continue to attack the network and there really is no penalty outside the waste of resources and eventually you can get booted from the network, where as PoS gets 1 shot at an attack before the stake is slashed/deleted and node removed from the network.