This post originally appeared on ZeMing M. Gao’s website, and we republished with permission from the author. Read the full piece here.
Ethereum is about to switch from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). It is a predictable stage of corruption for an account-based system like Ethereum (see below). But it is incredible that people, even institutional investors, actually thought PoS was going to scale Ethereum.
It’s scientifically impossible, because scalability has to do with parallelization, which is impossible with an account-based system, whether it is PoW or PoS. (See UTXO is superior to account-based).
Ethereum can’t abandon its account-based system without first killing itself. A great number of talented developers with smart ideas are wasting their time and energy building good looking houses on a wrong foundation.
And switching to PoS in essence is what the ruling class has decided to do when they realized that they can reduce their costs (energy) by 100 times or more without hurting their profits. They discovered a simple yet powerful trick: just don’t do work, but collect fees still.
Work is wasteful. Why don’t you allow us to just decide everything by a vote based on how much power we possess, or more precisely how much more we have than you do? Don’t you see that is efficient, and green?
There’s no surprise there, as the human history has always shown that people in unchecked and nontransparent power will cheat.
Communism stirred up a mass with the promise of total equality, but always ended up superbly enriching the new ruling class.
Why? Because communists are not stupid when it comes to figuring out how to make the system more efficient for their own benefits. Power solves a lot of problems, they quickly realize.
Still it took Chinese Communists about 30 years to figure out the trick, a whole generation later. It was because the first generation communists actually believed in the ideology and couldn’t figure out a way to make themselves both powerful and rich without backtracking their ideology. It took 30 years for them to disappear.
But it took less than 10 years for Ethereum to do that, before its funding generation had time to even grow older. Clearly, they never believed in it in the first place.
What is surprising, however, is how people cheered with high excitements when the ruling class did it.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the Only Way to Prevent Corruption (link to the full article for detailed discussions). But if you continue to argue that Bitcoin is wasteful and not green, it’s because you have been misled by BTC, a perverted version of Bitcoin. The real Bitcoin is green and the real PoW is not wasteful.
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