Quote:
Originally Posted by serialk11r
The high level explanation is really simple. Blockchain is a database that a lot of people maintain copies of and have to agree on. The question is how do you make it costly for a potential attacker?
Proof of work's solution is have everyone waste some significant amount of money mining, so that it is very expensive to acquire a majority of mining computing power.
Proof of stake's solution is to take away all your staked tokens as punishment for being wrong.
The weaknesses depend on the details where you do need to know the technical bits.
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I've since found those explanations, but I still need to dig into proof of stake a bit more. It's unclear to me how it reduces power consumption which was my major complaint with Bitcoin (and others). Wasting an enormous amount of energy for every transaction isn't cheap, and having to wait minutes to validate a transaction isn't fast, and that limited bandwidth to process transactions doesn't scale.
Bitcoin will fail to sufficiently meet the economic definition of a currency, and therefore it's doomed to failure, just that bubble hasn't burst yet. I don't know enough about Ethereum 2.0 to know if it has staying power. If I had to bet long term on any crypto, it would be Ethereum, perhaps only due to my ignorance.