Relatively new to crypto. Got a loose understanding of the systems.
Trying to differentiate the two but I’m kinda stuck on something. I understand that mining is more energy intensive, as they’re using mining rigs to process transactions.
My confusion stems from how that differs from POS where you still end up using a computer to process transactions. There just happens to be an extra step (32ETH). Which, I guess I should ask just to be sure - are those 32 ETH just parked somewhere as collateral or is it used as part of a liquidity pool?
Of course penalties keep validators in line, but wouldn’t that imply that btc miners have the capability to misbehave in a similar manner to a bad validator (even though they have no stake)?
To me the two methods seem nearly identical. What am I missing ?
Consensus methods are voting models and PoW and PoS are just the methods used to decide who gets to vote.
PoW says anyone who is able to produce a block with a hash containing a certain number of leading 0’s gets to vote.
PoS says anyone who has locked up a certain amount of stake gets a random chance to vote.
They are just ways to limit the number of voters so people can’t just set up thousands of virtual nodes to overload the vote. They are sybil protection methods.
The rewards and penalties are just further incentives to keep the voters aligned with the underlying protocol and to not do things like double vote or post empty blocks. Ethereum’s PoS slashes users who double vote. With PoW it costs electricity to even vote so it’s difficult to double vote in the first place.