this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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How does proof of stake not become more expensive, slow, and power hungry the more people use it?
In PoS the constraint on mining is proportional to the amount of tokens you own. Not the electricity/computational power you have.
Tokens are confiscated if you mine dishonestly.
The more people who use proof of stake blockchains the more power it will require, same as the more people who visit CNN.com or the more people who turn on a light bulb, but it's not nearly as much as proof of work.
The difference between proof of work and proof of stake is that the first one in order to function requires showing that someone did a bunch of processing on their computer. By attaching a financial cost (literally expending energy) to mining new coins, PoW helps avoid someone fraudulently taking over the network and issuing as many new coins as they want.
Proof of stake works by people who already hold coins putting some of them up as a kind of collateral, so it's nowhere near as processing intensive.