David Sønstebø, Co-founder of IOTA, explained the reason why they opted for Proof-of-Stake [PoS] over Proof-of-Work [PoW], in an interview with Anthony Pompliano on Off the Chain Podcast.
On choosing Proof-of-Stake, the Co-founder stated that it was partially an experiment in 2013 as there was no real-world use case for blockchain back then, despite some gambling and darknet markets using it. That “was kind of the blockchain” space back in 2013, he remarked.
He further stated that over the same time period, they realized that Proof-of-Stake was more efficient than Proof-of-Work, adding that it was one of the ways to get rid of mining pools and the centralization that is present in bitcoin. He said,
“[…] because ever since the beginning, bitcoin and other blockchains have been saying, ‘this is decentralization’, but then you look under the hood and you see the consensus mechanism and how the incentives are structured in bitcoin and then you realize it will always end up centralized around hashing power which is the mining pools […]”
Sønstebø added that there were other concerns that led them to take a different route, contrary to a majority of the community. This included the energy consumption involved in mining, which could become a problem if worldwide adoption were to be set as the goal. He further stated that there were concerns surrounding regulatory actions as well, adding that the space was currently witnessing these problems, citing the rumor of China’s ban on mining farms as an example.
[…] So we thought, okay let’s actually explore this proof of stake route and we implemented it, it worked very well. Of course, it was still very early days […] We just didn’t see the reason to waste insane amount of computation that could be otherwise outsourced via the ledger to carry out actual computation. So that why we explored PoS early on.”
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Published at Fri, 26 Apr 2019 14:31:10 +0000
