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I don't really get your point here as you don't have to buy ASICs every X years with PoW consensus. A friend of mine mines with his 3070 in a mining pool and makes a small plus with it. Hell, you can even mine with a 7 year old PC. Will you ever find a block? Probably not, but you're still securing the network and may get lucky. I don't see how this incentivizes centralization any more than PoS. With PoS, you have to be part of the network by spending money on a token while with PoW, you just need an existing PC with some compute power.


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In a PoW coin, if the cost of electricity < price of coin, more people will start mining, and vice versa. So let’s assume that over time, the price of a coin = cost of electricity to mine it + amortized/opportunity cost of the hardware (and assume that cows are spheres - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow).

But electricity costs can be very different in different parts of the world. This leads to miners in areas with high electricity costs shutting down, and mining operations opening up in low electrical cost areas. This can lead to a majority of the network falling under one political jurisdiction. PoS avoids this problem entirely.


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