PoW vs. PoS: Is the PoW consensus mechanism gradually abandoned?

Everyone is concerned about the small partners of the computing power, today, the power of the small class to give you a topic of the first grade of the primary school in the industry: pow (proof of work) proof of work mechanism. Miners know that the hash collision method for bitcoin mining is the pow consensus mechanism. In addition, like Ethereum ( ETH ) and Litecoin ( LTC ), this mechanism is still used, but in specific rules. There may be optimizations, but from the development trend of blockchain technology, there are fewer and fewer projects using the pow consensus, and the pow consensus has an illusion of being marginalized by the industry.

One: PoW mechanism, Nakamoto Satoshi's Utopia!

When designing the bitcoin mechanism, Satoshi Nakamoto made assumptions and defenses against countless possible problems, such as time-stamping mechanisms to prevent duplicate transactions, complex bitcoin zeroing mechanisms, and so on. In the consensus mechanism as the core of the whole system, Satoshi Nakamoto chose PoW, and the facts prove that the bitcoin under the pow mechanism is indeed safe and stable and widely recognized by the public.

What is the core idea of ​​the pow consensus? The calculation of Jun Li believes that this should be traced back to the original intention of Zhong Bencong's vision of Bitcoin. Nakamoto's positioning of Bitcoin is a set of decentralized, monetary systems that rely entirely on the consensus of all participants.

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Because of the financial crisis in 2008, the relevant countries have issued large amounts of money, causing serious inflation in the world. Nakamoto also deliberately limited the total amount of Bitcoin to 21 million, and never overtake!

The workload proof mechanism just fits perfectly with Nakamoto's vision.

1. In pow mode, everyone can participate without entering the threshold

If we use the voting behavior to understand the consensus mechanism, pow stands for everyone who has the right to vote on the Bitcoin network. Of course, with the advent of the ASCI chip, it means that the voting population (computing power) is rapidly expanding, and the ticket (computing power) in the original individual will be diluted.

2.Pow mode means equal rights for all

Computational power is still understood in accordance with the mechanism of voting. In pow mode, the chances (weights) of each unit of power (voting) are equal. Under the Hash Collision Rule, the probability of each collision is the same, ensuring the equality of opportunities.

3.Pow mode means that the minority will obey the will of the majority

Pow follows the longest chain principle. When a fork occurs, according to the choice of all participants (computing power), the main network will default to the largest number of sides as the main chain and discard other bifurcation blocks. This means that on the main line of Bitcoin, a small number of people will always obey the consensus of the majority.

Nakamoto's choice of pow consensus is to build a system of participation, equality of rights, and minority obedience to the majority, and realize his highest pursuit of utopian society in the true sense.

Nakamoto chose Pow as a consensus mechanism for Bitcoin because of his ideals, but with more and more imitators in the latecomer, he followed the pace of Nakamoto in the consensus mechanism, but in fact it seems Not smooth.

Two: Why does pow end up only BTC?

In the later generations of imitating digital currency, the tokens were much more popular, but they were advertised with the banner of upgrading and improving bitcoin, but they basically chose to apply the whole mechanism to the core consensus mechanism.

BCH, LTC, and BTG all use pow as their consensus, but there are frequent problems in the running process.

BCH, as a mining machine manufacturer Bitcoin's own hard-forked bitcoin, has been questioned by the outside world to master more than 50% of its computing power, violating the spirit of the blockchain to go to the center.

BTG (bit gold) is even more excessive. It was successfully launched by the hackers last year as a "double flower attack". The pow consensus was completely broken in it, and it also caused people to doubt the security of the pow consensus for the first time.

Ethereum (ETH) is currently in the state of pow consensus, but at the beginning of its development, it has planned the path of consensus change, slowly coexisting with pow-pow and pos – complete pos transformation, Ethereum will change the process of consensus Divided into four stages, Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, and Serenity, it is in the process of transitioning from home to tranquility.

Why does the PoW Consensus appear to be out of tune or even fail in other digital currencies? The computing power believes that the problem is still in the POW mechanism itself.

1. The PoW mechanism is costly and consumes a lot.

The biggest drawback of Ethereum founder V God once said that the POW mechanism is too costly. The energy consumption is too high. Bitcoin consumes billions of dollars in machine and energy costs every year to ensure its safe operation. . This is because the head effect of Bitcoin embodies the most consensus in the industry, and no other project can withstand such consumption.

2. The power of the PoW mechanism will naturally concentrate in the operation process, and it is suspected of centralization.

BCH's overall network computing power has not been low, because it is backed by the mining machine factory. But the community has always questioned its concentration of power and turned it into a private territory for a small group of interests. Even the bitcoin's PoW mechanism is constantly concentrating. At present, the calculation power of the large mines and mines accounts for more than half of the total network computing power, and there is a risk that the computing power is manipulated.

3. Pow is naturally limited by the triangle of the blockchain, and efficiency becomes its biggest constraint.

Pow's process is linear, requiring the entire network computing power to confirm the A blockchain before the B block can work. It is impossible to multi-thread simultaneously process the data on the chain, and sacrifices the security and decentralization. The nature of efficiency.

At present, Bitcoin can only produce one block every ten minutes. There are tens of thousands of transactions in the chain waiting to be confirmed every day. In terms of efficiency, it is far from being able to meet the real-time nature of a currency in a transaction.

According to the calculation of the power, the current pow consensus is difficult to maintain other projects besides bitcoin, so the mainstream consensus is to develop towards pos and DPOS consensus. Of course, it is not just that the pow consensus has fallen. On the contrary, it is considered that this is the precious part of the pow consensus and the fundamental guarantee for the value of Bitcoin.

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