Question for the developers/moderators/anyone who really knows what's going on... =o)

jimmy24651

Over the last few days, I’ve started digging into setting up masternodes.

I am interested in the opinion of folks who know more about crypto in general than I do as to what are the benefits of POW vs POS.

I am not knocking the idea of mining. I am just trying to understand why a developer would choose one method over another.

Wellenreiter

Basically it is a different philosophy behind POW and POS.

With POW the miners compete to mine the next block, and the more hashrate they an effort, the bigger is the chance to mine a block.
The drawback is, that this means to invest more power, as high hashrates can be archived better with GPU based mining than with CPU based mining. I rememeber times where my PC with just one GPU took 400W when mining with highest intensity possible.
This drives up the cost of mining as well as having a bad carbon footprint, so it’s not really ‘green IT’.

With POS the idea is, who ever has more Value at stake has a higher chance to mine the next block. Value here means Coins, disk space, or even number of posts in a given Forum ;)

Well nobody designed a coin using a post count as POS measure, but it would be possible.

The idea behind is, that who has added the most Value to a coin has the best chance to mine the next block.

The advantage compared to POS is, that less power is required to mine and therefore the carbon footprint is better.

The disadvantage is, that people who already own a lot of coins will get more coins, while people not having coins already simply don’t have a chance to mine a block.
Most POS coins use the number of coins a miner reserves as measure for the POS.

wrapper

POW is the original method defined by Satoshi and has a lot of work to make it secure. It did have problems for coins that are not the top coin, in that miners could switch coins and mess with the coins difficulty, stealing coins at low difficulty or driving difficulty up then leaving long block times. This is why no Bitcoin forks got going before Litecoin with its different algorythm, or why eHRC and Kimoto Gravity well was invented so coins could exist with highly variable mining powers.

POS is a newer less developed system that could eventually help reduce the cost of mining. Although there have been a few attack mechanisms, I see proof of space POS to be fairer than paying to those with wads of cash.

ChekaZ

In my opinion masternodes are kinda centralizing the network. At TZC we are running a new combination of PoW + 0% PoS which secures the network. It doesnt give a annual %, but gives the holders a chance to mine blocks via PoS and get the same blockreward as the PoW miners.

Feathercoin is running well with PoW, the network is strong. If PoS is considered at any time, Iam happy to hop into and help get it running tho. Ghostlander did an awesome work with 0% PoS, everyone at the TZC community loves it.

So you have to consider, what do you want to achieve with the coin, Feathercoin is always adapting when its necessary. So maybe some day there is a need for PoS or something which comes up in the future, but for now I think FTC is completely fine.

Just my few cents.

Kindly regards,
ChekaZ

jimmy24651

@chekaz I wasn’t saying that I think FTC should change to POS in any way, I was just wanting all of you to try and explain to me the benefit of each, and why someone would choose one method over another…

Thanks for all the replies!

wrapper

I still think FTC is the only coin to have changed algorithm, so by bringing PoS up in discussion on the forum it is naturally going to lead to the question of weither FTC could integrate that feature.

jimmy24651

@wrapper True…I don’t know enough about all of this to have any real opinion as to whether it would be beneficial to the coin. I’m simply on a hunt for knowledge at this point.