Poll: Crypto Community Prefers BTC Switch to PoS than ‘Let it Die’

A Twitter crypto influencer, Dan Robinson, posted a poll asking people to vote for a change they would accept, supposing it became impossible to have a secure proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain without a block reward for Bitcoin.

The options outlined were “Remove the 21M cap,” “Switch to proof-of-stake,” “Let it die,” and “I’m bad at hypothetical.”

At the time of writing, 9,430 respondents voted, and the result so far was neck in neck. Interestingly, the second majority vote was “Let it die” after the “switch to the proof-of-stake” option.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the PoW network, Ethereum argued that a hybrid of PoS and PoW would be desirable. He said:

Why not hybrid proof of stake, of the 2013-15 era designs where you have interwoven PoW and PoS blocks, so an attacker needs something like ‘work_share + stake_share >= 1’ to do a 51% attack? Still politically sellable as PoW, but may get you enough of the security gains.

Another user retorted to his comment, “why would PoS be secure when PoW isn’t? higher hedging cost?” Buterin then shared a document comparing the two mechanisms of security of the blockchain. The gist of the paper was that PoS offers more security for the same cost.

Proof of work and proof of stake are consensus mechanisms for verifying new crypto transactions on a network since blockchains lack any centralized authorities.

PoW requires miners to solve a complex mathematical equation, while PoS requires users to purchase and stake network tokens to validate transactions. The more coins a user risks, the more their chance of validating a transaction and ultimately winning the reward. Hacking into a PoS system becomes too expensive because the hacker will need up to a 33% share of the network’s token to only bring the network to a halt, which is close to impossible.