The future is PoS

in #proof7 years ago

This is a repost of a post that I made on nuventures.org .

http://nuventures.org/news/archives/28

The rise of Proof of Stake in 2018 with Peercoin.

We are seeing the beginning of the end for the paper-based FIAT money.
Crypto-currencies are growing in terms of total market cap (https://coinmarketcap.com/) every day.
However, as Cliff High (

) says, it is not that they have an intrinsic value per se but rather than their value is derived relatively to FIAT money which is losing value everyday by hyperinflation that has been put in place to keep the system afloat after the subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2008.
Interestingly enough, Bitcoin was released right after, in January 2009.
Next year in 2018, that will be 10 years since the era of hyperinflation began and that will be the end of the cycle.
However most the market cap (around 85~90%) is still generated by Proof of Work assets.
Proof of Work needs you to have a lot of computing power in order to be able to participate into the network.
The learning curve is very high. Only the nerds do mining.
In order to democratize nodes verification which is the basis in a blockchain to get rewarded by coins, we need other types of consensus.
Here comes PoS or Proof of Stake.
In PoS, which could be regarded as virtual mining, you are eligible for block verification based on the stake of the network you own.
This idea was first introduced by Peercoin which has been running since 2012 without any issues . However most people have been ignoring it because of the nothing at stake issue, which can be regarded as a false problem.
Several solutions have been proposed, including the double minting detection mechanism by Peercoin or Casper in Ethereum.
Interestingly enough, most of the new kids on the block, Cardano, NEO, EOS have a consensus mechanism based on proof of stake.
Also, Ethereum is scheduled to shift to Proof of Stake in June 2018.
Also, Tezos is a pure Proof of Stake.
Let us not forget NEM, which is running on Proof of Importance, a derivative of PoS.
That means something for the significance of PoS.
Needless to say that I have been a huge proponent of Peershares and Nushares which are based on Peercoin source code, though they have yet to get off the ground but recently NuShares has been seeing a rapid increase of price and NuBits (https://nubits.com/), the pegged crypto issued by Nu, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization that is controlled by shareholders who hold NuShares, has seen a significant adoption increase.
After 2 years of being absent from the peercoin community, I am back (https://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/7hibrm/a_sponsor_will_fund_development_of_the_peerassets/dqssbye/) after having seen the significant achievement of the community in between.
I have the feeling that PoS will be instrumental in democratizing cryptos for the masses, though Proof of Work will coexist together with it.
However I predict PoS will be even more important that PoW and we will see a huge competition from PoS to PoW starting in 2018, and I believe Peercoin, being the first proof of stake crypto asset with a growing momentum, a community and a perfect history with no hack or issues could be instrumental in promoting Proof of Stake for the masses.