Charles Hoskinson Stated:  This video is made for Jack Dorsey.  Yesterday, Jack Dorsey said Proof of Work (PoW) is better than Proof of Stake (PoS). He stated that proof of work is less centralized and more secure. This is a common thing stated by people who have been doctrine-ated in the Bitcoin School.

Normally, most people laymen don’t have strong opinions on consensus protocols in computer science.  It is kind of saying what is your favorite surgical procedure or method to stitch up a patient. If you are a surgeon you are probably aware of going about that. However, if you are a layman – it is like I have no idea.  Someone will say, I like cholecystectomy – who knows.

Since everybody wants to be an expert and everybody wants to talk about these things – unfortunate conversation, which is really difficult to converge in to anything meaningful. How to think about these things?

If you are actually curious of doing the hard work of developing a good opinion about hard work. There are some great resources for that.

Charles points to a paper titled:  Times, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System.

The abstract goes like:  The concept of one event happening before another in a distributed system is examined, and is shown to define a partial ordering of the events. A distributed algorithm is given for synchronizing a system of logical clocks, which can be used to totally order the events. The use of the total ordering is illustrated with a method for solving synchronization problems. The algorithm is then specialized for synchronizing physical clocks, and a bound is derived on how far out of synchrony the clocks can become.

It has about 12,000 citations.  It is one of the most cited papers in the history of computer science.  This really outlines kind of a difficult problem. And it discusses the ways you can go about thinking about it and solving it.

When you are just a single person and observing something and you see an event A and event B and this is occurring in a local setting.  Alice can order this and say when event A happened and then event B. However, when more actors are introduced and they are looking at it from their perspective, Bob saw event B first and then event A and therefore the ordering changes.

Charles makes it very clear that if you are curious about building right opinions you have to know the facts covered in the paper in terms of a single computer first, before discussing a collection of papers.

The full video runs for 46:27 minutes – worth watching for those who are curious.