What are the advantages / problems of proof of Stake and what are the disadvantages of proof of Stake?

What is the difference between PoW (Proof of Work) and PoS (Proof of Stake)?

Everyone is just talking about Blockchain and cryptocurrencies now a days. This is an era of big revolution after internet. Couple of theories are present in this world and one of the most popular and oldest one is proof of work.

Proof of Work

Everyone might have heard about the bitcoin miners to mine the blocks and earn out of it. To find consensus of 51% nodes really consumes huge computation power and resources. It really depends how you are looking at this side of the coin. Some giants are planning to use the renewable energy to run miners but again its a matter of investment.

Problems

• One of the largest flaws in the Ethereum protocol (and other PoW based cryptocurrencies) is that any attacker with 51% will be in control of the overall network.

• While the blockchain is immutable and recorded blocks cannot be changed this attacker could potentially do other things such as making sure no legitimate traffic comes through (DDOS attack)

• Considering anyone with the same genesis block could join your network.

• Electricity and other resource con

These type of attack is very feasible and and can hit you sooner or later.

Proof of Stake

This is probably a solution of the resources consumption issues of the POW. Ethereum have decided to the transition to this concept very soon. Big threat of the POW was, giants can deploy special hardware and machines as a miner and can take over big Stake of work and hence again the original concept of decentralisation might be violated.

Advantages

• Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm will resolve the issues of PoW public network.

• People who wants to be a miner will add/deposite a number of ether into a smart contract and if a miner is deemed to be malicious the network simply locks this ether away.

• As there is no race to solve hard mathematical problems there is less incentive to issue new coins, a miner/validator will earn their ether from transaction fees.

• It does solve the electricity problem

• It protects against 51% attack up to certain level.

DisAdvantages

• Anyone on the chain can be a validator with some ether if they have enough ether in to the validator contract.

• It does not offer the level of control and security required

I am going to write about Proof Of Authority in my upcoming blog.

Devendra R.

Blockchain Tech Team.