this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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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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[–] wood8@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Blockchain is a decentralized database. People use vote to determine what content is in the database (99% of the time there is only 1 candidate). People setup rules to tell their computers how to vote, and leave them on "auto-vote" mode. That is basically what mining and running a validator is.

The problem is what count as a vote. There are many ways one computer can pretend to be 100 computers with very little cost, but that 100 computers combined still only have 1 computer's computing power.

PoW asks miners to find a number, that on average need X amount of guesses to find every block. The longest chain is actually the chain that received most "total guesses". Essentially, 1 guess = 1 vote.

To maximize the number of guesses per second, miners need to 100% load their computers, even invent no-other-purpose computers that specialized in guessing. Those computers use 0.001% of their power to process transactions, and 99.999% to guess numbers.

On the other hand, PoS use X amount of coin as 1 vote. So no crazy number guessing. All powers are used to process transactions. Most validators use less than 5% of their CPU.