A question to the community. If Casper works out should we adopt it? What do you think?
Personally I’m skeptical of Casper, but I do wonder about the “what if’s”. PoS does have some big advantages.
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“casper” has shape shifted many times over the past 3 years. It would be better to go with a provably secure PoS like ouroboros, with the huge caveat that PoS has zero place in a main chain and offers zero benefit over PoW compared to the implied trade offs.
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Hi Cody,
I agree that it would be better to go with Ouroborus over Casper (whatever it turns out to be) from a security perspective. I’ve got a feeling that Casper would be easier from a dev perspective to implement, but I’m not sure.
I’m curious about why you believe the following?:
Although maybe your belief is stated here:
My understanding is that there are some benifits:
- It can offer cheaper transactions;
- You don’t run the risk of having a Bitmain sort of problem;
- Less electricity usage;
- Lower barrier of entry for users to “mine”.
I hope my question does not come across as rhetorical. I’m honestly curious about why you’re so against PoS?
Specific to your points:
-Transaction fees are the same. Gas price is fixed per opcode and is priced to prevent malicious use. This is still needed in pos.
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pos allows for much worse levels of collusion and centralization than mining. Mining requires resources, equipment, personnel, maintenance, and electricity. Miners typically break even or make a small margin. If mining were easy or predictably cheaper than buying a coin on the open market, more people would mine. The hashrate market is very efficient.
PoS only requires capital investment and offers a return. This works great for one particular type of user, banks. Since banks can trivially produce/acquire more fiat currency, it quickly becomes a situation where 3-5 banks control the system and are then allowed to make updates to the network as they see fit. This also doesn’t include that 75% of coins in ethereum were premined. -
miners are incentivized to lower the cost of production to increase their margin. Using renewable energy is the cheapest you can get. Currently projects are focused on geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, and well-site excess. Proof of work is like bribing people to be innovative in the energy space. The often quoted numbers on energy usage skip the nuance of what type of energy is being used. Also smelting aluminum still accounts for 10% of world energy use, unarguably mining is securing billions of dollars in wealth at a fraction of that number.
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predictions for Casper staking are minimum 1000 ethernet per staking account(there’s little incentive to stake more than minimum in an account). It costs ~$300 usd to get into mining.
I mentioned that it had no place on main chain mostly because of point 2. That doesn’t mean it is useless. Sidechain and p2p/b2b channels are a great place for pos due to the fact the economics of value transfer are different in those situations. For instance, if you and I agree that we want to do business together often and generally agree that etc is awesome, we could decide to form a sidechain (like testner where we assign an arbitrary number of coins between us) and anchor this to a contract on main chain. At genesis of our sidechain/private channel we could both ‘stake’ a number of coins in a hash time locked contract, and log epoc block headers to the same. Gas price per operation could be set to zero in our channel as well if we desired. When the channel is eventually closed, we will both have our record of the sidechain as well as the attestations stored forever on the mainchain.
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I see your point(s) about Casper. It’s probably not a good idea even if it does ‘work’. I’ve got a feeling that even ETH holders are worried about Caspers staking dynamics. Delegated PoS similar to Cardano would be better.
I can see why you believe this:
…this idea irks me too. Although staking does not come without risk and I’m aware of the risk avoidance culture in these organizations - so I don’t think the Banks have an advantage here. I can’t imagine Banks holding massive amounts of a decentralized coin (I believe Ripple is centralized).
When it comes to PoS in general, I’m more open to the idea and think it’s probably a good time to start discussing it. The first point (about centralization) is an economics debate. The way I see it, PoW suffers from Economies of Scale. Whereas PoS has a more linear relationship between mining operation size and return. Also, to keep your ‘mining power’ in PoS you must ‘HODL’ whereas with PoW, you can still be a very powerful miner while dumping the coin. The last two points are the most concerning for me.
With regards to energy use. I don’t think PoW mining has worked out so that they’re speeding up the development of renewable/clean energy adoption/tech. I’d be willing to bet a lot that the majority of power is coming from fossil fuels, and that it’s cheaper in almost every case. Iceland geothermal is an outlier here. Neither PoW or PoS comes without con’s.
Anyway let’s leave the energy/environmental aspect alone as it requires us both to have a very good understanding of the whole energy system, from the production of the raw materials involved to the decommissioning of machines and their recycling capabilities.
About the cost - I’m talking about this from an ecosystem perspective. Surely you agree that a crypto ecosystem is cheaper with PoS. The users don’t indirectly pay for electricity!
I can see how the side-chains can work out using PoS. I think it’s worth considering it for the main chain too. If you’re right about the centralization aspect about PoS then Cardano will be a failure. We can learn from Bitcoin as it has been doing PoW longer and we will soon be able to objectively identify any possible negative economical aspects of PoS networks.
Hi buddys i just register to this forum to try understund what is “casper” and “ouroboros” (I played some resident evil games 
thats lookslike interesting .So can u share me some info to knows what is that. Im not a native english speaker and i have some difficulties but np
ty guys
hi there guys, new here!
if i can be honest, i prefer Pow mainly cause i am 3x6 rigs miner…so it is clear my position ^^… i have been supporting ETC from my birth like a miner…so i will keep beeting for Pow!!
Long life to POW! XD
from the other hand… POS is fucking antidemocratic blockchain conception… OMG 1000 ether to be “miner” in casper…actually it means about 640 000 $… only some whales will be keep mining eth… very sad…and think that POS always benefit more to people with a lot of money…
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It’s Important to note that all PoS systems don’t require 1000 ether to be a miner (that’s just Casper). Mining is awesome. The question we need to answer is if it will continue to be the best (cost effective/ decentralized/ environmentally friendly et cetera) way to validate transactions. If it is not the coin could loose it’s value. Obviously this is much worse than us not being able to mine anymore.
Hello Gandalf,
Casper FFG will check the members’ legitimacy to always finalize to prevent long range attacks. This is far from Bitcoin’s point of view that trust is unnecessary.
I check whether I trust the other party every 100 blocks or not. This closely resembles a mechanism like a secret society.
Also, it should be noted that PoS mechanism can proliferate protocols regardless of machine power. Since PoW has limited hash power, any promising protocol is chosen, but PoS is not.If the balance is left forked, any chain can be activated at the same time. This is equivalent to a long range attack.
A fork happens arbitrarily and there is a possibility that a favorable community may be formed for someone (eg a specific country, dApps etc.).
PoW is a decisive advantage over current Ethereum and should never change. In other words, the precious spirit of ETC not to give any arbitrary fork will be lost.
Combine “Code is Law” to “PoS” is suicide.
Casper is a mechanism that brings meaning with the premise that you can easily fork.
Is not real decentralization meaning not to just think that “this chain” is protected, but to eliminate the need to copy and operate the protocol.
Shoud not it be called “consensus”?
Hi suisai,
Firstly you should know I’m not a fan of Casper either. I still think it should be discussed. The other thing I think we should discuss is PoS in general. I don’t think anyone can be certain of how it’s going to work out until we see it in action for some more time. For example, we should be paying close attention to Cardano.
As I said earlier PoW, is proving to suffer from the economic reality of ‘Economies of Scale’ (please read past discussion). This is a real issue that we have the luxury of seeing in advance by watching a longer running system. I’m very open minded to how we solve the issues related to PoW. It does not necessarily mean we need to 100% get rid of PoW, but we should be open to the idea that it’s not perfect and we should be open minded to systems that offer improvements.
I’m not trying to say that we should switch to PoS now. I’m not certain of the solutions to the systems imperfections. I realize that in a community such as ETC, getting consensus will be a slow process. I hope to slightly increase the pace at which our community embraces progress by discussing real issues sooner, rather than later.
i agree in the point that looking from the point of view of market competition, if stake is demostrated as more efective than Pow, we should change to keep being “a good choice”, cause as u say, if the cryptoenvironment massively change to stake, ETC if dont do, maybe it will mean to loose all its value…i am quite ignorant, but there isn`t something that POW gives and POS not? (just a cuestion).
I dont know the thecnical reasons, but it is said that Pow is more secure blockchain than Pos… but as I say, i am quite ignorant in thecnical space, so if you can ilustrate me (honestly) i will be very greatefull to you!
sorry my super very bad english…^^
the link is or censured in my country or it doesnt works… there is any other way to share the video? i would like to see it and learn more about this cryptofield! 
And in other hand, we have sidechains like callisto… just making them pos, will not enough to benefit from pos advanteges mantaining the mainnet POW? (sorry again my ignorance)
I have updated the link in the original post. It seems that the uploader reuploaded the vid. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/M3EFi_POhps
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Same here. I am a firm believer in “Code Is Law”. POS is good for those who are rich. Not for those of us who are invested in mining. A huge part of the community would abandon if ETC went POS and ETH knows this as well. I do not think moving to POS will benefit anyone other than the environment and those who have already amassed a bunch of coin. Do not forget those who brought you here is my take. I believe ETC is the coin to HODL and one day may really give ETH a run for its money.
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my only cuestion is, what will happen with all these miner that in 2016 threathened ETC mainnet with 51% attack, while these miner were supporting eth?? what will they do when theyr lover ETH fuck off hem cause he is casper and he doesnt need them any more? what will they do with their supermegatherahash/s mines??? they will fuck come to us?? i only hope that if they come to us just for rentabilice their equips just to do with their faces looking at floor…just only casue they were threatheners… it is funny…now the weak will be the strong…as Christ said: the last will be the firsts!!!
long life to POW!!
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The thing is, almost everything is good for those who are rich. It’s just not as easy to see with PoW. The question of how to not exponentially favor a party based on wealth is the real thing we need to solve. As I mentioned earlier “Economies of Scale” exist for mining.
sorry my english Gandalf, but i would like to understan all your message and i get lost in: “The question of how to not exponentially favor a party based on wealth is the real thing we need to solve”… in other words what it want to mean??
sorry me and my english…
First I will explain with a similar situation.
If the game is to dig holes, a poor person will buy a shovel for $100. A wealthy person buys a bulldozer for $10 000. The bulldozer costs 100 x more than the shovel. BUT, it can do 1000 x the work (power) that the shovel can do. This sort of situation is known to have a sort of exponential effect. The rich person then puts the poor person out of business, invests in building a patented bulldozer. No one can compete. This situation can be thought of how PoW seems to be starting to play out.
Now imagine this. You can only buy shovels my mathematical law. A shovel that cost’s 100 x more does 100 x the work. A shovel that costs 1000 x more does 1000 x the work. This is a linear relationship. This relationship is more like PoS.
My PoS example does a assume that the staking rewards are spent as they come in. This may or may not happen. It’s really about choosing the most fair option, not the perfect option. The good thing about an entity holding lot’s of coin is that they reduce supply which generally up’s the price. With PoW an entity could control the network while liquidating the coin.
I feel like a Maths teacher again. Haha. Hope that was not too dense @cannakid22
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cheers! apreciate your explanaition!!! thank you very much!!!