LogFAQs > #965032134

Personally, I see value in Proof of Work systems. For the Bitcoin network, the cost is absolutely necessary because it aims to be a decentralized financial network. You don't want the US nor Chinese nor Russian nor whatever governments taking control to freeze transactions. Proof of Stake, it's too easy to take advantage of if your network is new and doesn't have a large and diversified community. There was a hack the other day, Beanstalk, where a hacker did a flash loan attack to borrow enough governance tokens to make a proposal to transfer the protocol's reserves to the hacker's wallet. The proposal passed since the hacker owned the majority of the governance tokens needed to pass it. This isn't to say PoW isn't susceptible to their own hacks, but it's just something that came to mind of the difficulty in kickstarting a PoS project.

That being said, the low costs means it's 100000x easier to build tools to manage PoS.

Bankless did a great talk pitting 2 experts between PoS and PoW models for an almost 2 hour debate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m12zgJ42dI

But honestly, this wasn't really a debate of which model was better. It felt like the "debate" was a heated conversation of "Here's the economy that was derived as a consequence of the BTC's implementation of PoW" versus "Here are all tools we're developing for ETH 2.0 to make proof of stake fair for everyone".

I always have a preference towards PoW but the episode did open my eyes to how flexible the PoS model is so it's all about how you use it. But generally, I don't see many applications needing PoW.

That being said, if you're looking for investments, I'd be paying attention less to Layer 1 blockchains and more to tools developers are using to building innovations. but do note that I missed out on the bull run last year since I'm a filthy stinky chainlink holder.