Re: [bitcoin-dev] Opinion on proof of stake in future

[James MacWhyte <macwhyte@gmail.com>]

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@Lloyd wrote:

Of course in reality no one wants to keep their coin holding keys online so
> in Alogorand you can authorize a set of "participation keys"[1] that will
> be used to create blocks on your coin holding key's behalf.
> Hopefully you've spotted the problem.
> You can send your participation keys to any malicious party with a nice
> website (see random example [2]) offering you a good return.
> Damn it's still Proof-of-SquareSpace!
>

I believe we are talking about a comparison to PoW, correct? If you want to
mine PoW, you need to buy expensive hardware and configure it to work, and
wait a long time to get any return by solo mining. Or you can join a mining
pool, which might use your hashing power for nefarious purposes. Or you
might skip the hardware all together and fall for some "cloud mining"
scheme with a pretty website and a high rate of advertised return. So as
you can see, Proof-of-SquareSpace exists in PoW as well!

The PoS equivalent of buying mining hardware is setting up your own
validator and not outsourcing that to anyone else. So both PoW and PoS have
the professional/expert way of participating, and the fraud-prone, amateur
way of participating. The only difference is, with PoS the
professional/expert way is accessible to anyone with a raspberry Pi and a
web connection, which is a much lower barrier to entry than PoW.

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