Zawy expressed:  Finally, I see bright minds who understand: “Both Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are sybil protection mechanisms to establish an identity in a distributed environment.” PoX by itself is NOT a consensus mechanism, PoW is only one ingredient in Nakamoto Consensus.

Just like PoS, PoW, when put to good use, could be powerful. Sadly, people always think PoW is all for the consensus. Then some went one step further, sell “Proof-of-Some-Cool-Term” concept hard and tricked the public into believing that can achieve consensus. So many projects.

Feel free to list all such “PoX” propaganda you’ve heard of in this thread. 🙂 I’ll start with PoA, Proof of Space, Proof of Space-Time. Please continue. While they may be legit by themselves, people have mistaken these as “consensus” mechanism, but they’re just Sybil prevention.

Community response:  POW enables the only known permissionless consensus. Each honest node being able to unilaterally reject advanced timestamps by itself is the only other ingredient. Each hash is both Sybil protection & a lottery ticket for picking the consensus winner.

This is an over-simplification of the consensus problem. And “permissioned” vs. “permissionless” is the admission/membership/churn control, a separate problem from “consensus” (because it always requires economic argument)

Community response:  Definitely. The POW “consensus” is an economic consensus rather than order of transactions consensus.

The sum of descendant work in a POW DAG where each asynchronous tx is a block gives correct ordering despite being asynch. POW is only known mechanism that gives permissionless consensus. Each hash is proof of “worthy identity”. Largest sum of hash is proof of largest quorum.

Largest quorum in descendants (sum of descendant work) tells us which transaction came first.

POW is proof of value spent that can be used to get perception of value for coins, Sybil, &/or consensus. You lose efficiency when you try to divorce Sybil from consensus. POS is same except not permissionless. It’s also an economics-based Sybil protection that Avalanche requires.

I’ve long promoted the initial thought in XPOW which is to let POW create coin & use POS like AVAX to do Sybil-consensus. But an open-source project should use POW-generated coin as the stake in POS which makes the POS more permissionless, less like a public company w/ shares.

I don’t know that researcher. But I guess good researchers all know about these basics. I, however, sometimes take some chance to try to spread out the actual common sense in this field.