Talk:Proof of stake

Edit request: Addition of staking explanation to "Description" section

Request: I propose adding a brief explanation of staking to the Description section.

Proposed text:

In Proof of Stake blockchains, participants can engage in staking, where they lock up a portion of their cryptocurrency holdings to support the network's security and operations. In return, these participants, often referred to as validators, receive rewards, typically in the form of additional tokens. This process not only incentivizes honest participation but also discourages malicious behavior through economic penalties, such as slashing.[1]

Justification:

  • It seems like the term "staking" is commonly used in discussions about Proof of Stake but is not explicitly explained in the article.
  • Not being an expert in the field (and somewhat COI-biased), I'd prefer for another pair of eyes on this. There might be better sources as well, feel free to change.

Thanks! /Urbourbo (talk) 17:25, 8 February 2025 (UTC) Urbourbo (talk) 17:25, 8 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done. I have added the text to the article with a minor edit. --MtPenguinMonster (talk) 12:01, 10 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, I have reverted this change. Consensys.io is not a reliable source. If you find a reliable source, summarize what that source says, instead. Grayfell (talk) 06:11, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm good point. How about using CoinDesk instead? Say, In Proof of Stake blockchains, participants can engage in staking, where they lock up a portion of their cryptocurrency holdings to support the network's security and operations. These participants, often referred to as validators, may operate individually or as part of staking pools. By joining staking pools, even those without substantial holdings can participate in the staking process. In return, validators receive rewards, typically in the form of additional tokens, which are distributed among pool members. This process not only incentivizes honest participation but also discourages malicious behavior through economic penalties, such as slashing.[2]
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Urbourbo (talk • contribs) 14:56, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Coindesk is not reliable either, per WP:COINDESK. To put it bluntly, cryptocurrency websites are dominated by undisclosed conflict-of-interest editing, churnalism, AI slop, and several other issues. This makes the topic difficult to cover to Wikipedia's standards. Even superficially academic sources, such as journals, have more than their fair share of problems. If a detail is not covered by a reliable source (in simple terms this means a source with a positive reputation for accuracy and fact-checking outside of the pro-crypto bubble) the detail probably doesn't belong in a Wikipedia article. Grayfell (talk) 21:03, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, how about Britannica then? [1] /Urbourbo (talk) 22:40, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Realising now that staking is also covered in one of the article's existing main sources:[3][4] /Urbourbo (talk) 12:26, 20 March 2025 (UTC) Urbourbo (talk) 12:26, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
 Not done: There appears to be significant overlap between the proposed addition and the existing first paragraph of the section. Perception312 (talk) 15:02, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ "What Is Staking?". Consensys. 2023. Retrieved February 8, 2025.
  2. ^ "Crypto Staking 101: What Is Staking?". CoinDesk. September 16, 2022. Retrieved March 18, 2025.
  3. ^ Deirmentzoglou, Papakyriakopoulos & Patsakis 2019, p. 28714.
  4. ^ Deirmentzoglou, Evangelos; Papakyriakopoulos, Georgios; Patsakis, Constantinos (2019). "A Survey on Long-Range Attacks for Proof of Stake Protocols". IEEE Access. 7: 28712–28725. Bibcode:2019IEEEA...728712D. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2901858. eISSN 2169-3536. S2CID 84185792.

"Security" section needs to be updated

There is now considerable evidence that Proof of Stake is much more secure than Proof of Work. PoS has already been thoroughly battletested.

While numerous Proof of Work networks have been successfully 51% attacked and reorged (including Bitcoin Cash in 2019, Bitcoin Gold in 2018, Bitcoin SV throughout 2021 and 2022, Vertcoin in 2018 and 2019, Expanse in 2019, and Litecoin Cash in 2019), there have been no instances of a successful attack on a Proof of Stake network.

Proof of Stake offers symmetric economic security where the people providing security to the network have a strong economic incentive to protect it because they are also stakeholders of the network. In contrast, Proof of Work miners can often attack the network without taking any significant damage due to its asymmetric security.

In Feb 2024, even though Bitcoin's marketcap was 5x greater than Ether's marketcap, it was estimated that it would cost over $34B to Ethereum while only costing $5B-20B to attack Bitcoin.[2]https://unchainedcrypto.com/51-attacks-on-bitcoin-and-ethereum-impossible-coinmetrics/ In addition, attempting to buy up stake to attack the network would further drive up the price of the security token, making it even harder to attack the network. HSukePup (talk) 06:06, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Unchainedcrypto.com" is not a reliable source. Please cite and summarize a reliable, independent source. Please also keep in mind that Wikipedia doesn't publish original research. Thanks. Grayfell (talk) 06:13, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm at a dilemma. The problem is that the current "Security" section references a quote from Bloomberg article where the source is an investment manager and has no other credentials. There's no research backing it; it's pure speculation.
Here's the full quote:
Critics say these alternatives may be less secure than proof of work. The computer code underpinning proof of stake is so complex that there’s a greater risk of undetected software bugs, says Chris Bendiksen, a researcher at digital-asset investment manager CoinShares. And such systems are more susceptible to censorship, because once an entity or group acquires more than half the tokens, “there’s no way for them to be unseated as the controlling entity,” he says. “Bugs and vulnerabilities in system-critical infrastructure like monetary systems can be catastrophic.”
What can we do about this this section?
Unfortunately, it's very hard to find mainstream news about this topic, and only crypto news sites talk about it.
There are other articles that suggest Proof of Stake is more secure or just as secure.
Research Paper 1: Proof-of-Work versus Proof-of-Stake: A Comparative Economic Analysis
There's also a newer 2025 version of this paper
Its abstract keeps it very simple:
We develop an economic model to compare equilibrium security of Proof-of-Work (PoW) versus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. We derive general conditions to determine when PoW blockchains are more secure than otherwise equivalent PoS blockchains and vice versa. Applying real-world parameter values to these conditions, we demonstrate that PoS blockchains are more secure than otherwise equivalent PoW blockchains. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PoS’s security advantage over PoW is particularly salient for high-scale blockchains.
Research Paper 2: Breaking BFT: Quantifying the Cost to Attack Bitcoin and Ethereum
In section 6.1.4: Cost to attack Bitcoin: "the attacker’s production costs would surpass 20B USD" using inefficient S9 miners. Would be easier with the newer S21 miners.
In section 6.3: Cost to attack Ethereum: "we estimate it would cost the attacker 34.39B USD to 34% attack the network" for 33% liveness attack.
CoinTelegraph summarizes it as $20B to attack Bitcoin and $34B to attack Ethereum, but there's not a single mainstream news site that reported on this research paper.
How do we resolve a Reliable Source issue where a mainstream site reports on bad speculation while "less reliable" crypto sites report on better research? HSukePup (talk) 21:11, 19 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You've convinced me that the Bloomberg source is being misused, and "Critics have argued that the proof of stake model is less secure compared to the proof of work model."[1] was far too vague, and far too WP:WEASELish, anyway.
For clarity, I do not think the source itself is inherently bad or anything, I just don't think it is being summarized properly for this one sentence.
The way to expand this would be with WP:SECONDARY sources (but put a pin in that). SSRN papers are not generally useful for Wikipedia, and it's almost always better to cite published papers. The Review of Financial Studies is fine as a journal, but that paper is not actually contradicting the point which was made by the Bloomberg source. One issue is that no such model can account for bugs and errors which haven't yet been identified.
Putting "less reliable" in scare quotes kind of undermines your case here. I could just as easily put "better research" in scare quotes to emphasize my point, which is that these sources aren't all that compelling when placed in their larger context.
At the end of the day, our goal is to summarize a complicated topic for the benefit of disinterested readers. Practically speaking, the best approach for this is to focus on sources outside of the pro-crypto bubble.
The current article over-relies on primary sources, in my opinion, and this is part of a deeper issue, here. Before expanding anything, think about the intended readership of this article. This article has inherited some of the major flaws of other blockchain and cryptocurrency articles on Wikipedia. Would anyone who isn't already deep, deep in the weeds of crypto be able to make sense of the opening paragraph of this article? I doubt it. The article immediately jumps into technical details that presume a large quantity of prior knowledge and context. The body of the article starts out better, but by the third paragraph, the article is lost in the sauce again, and it never finds its way back. Most crypto articles have this issue, and I'm not the first and won't be the last to mention it.
So yes, the section on security could be expanded, but who are you expanding it for, and why? Grayfell (talk) 20:35, 20 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you.
My main purpose is to fix misleading statements that might be picked up by secondary sources and AI. You're right. I probably don't need to expand on other topics others wouldn't normally look up.
And you make a good point about SSRN. Those papers aren't reviewed yet.
Every blockchain has errors and bugs to fix, and it's not inherently any different for PoW or PoS. Of the top of my head, I can think of the 2010 and 2013 Bitcoin hard fork reorgs to emergency fix critical bugs come to mind, as well as all the Solana outages and the Ethereum finality bug in 2023. Ethereum in particular has high complexity due to having 11+ different teams working on execution clients and consensus clients, but that complexity is due to development decentralization, not a PoS issue. HSukePup (talk) 20:00, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest looking for reliable, independent sources which give an overview of security issues. Only use primary sources for specifics when necessary to clarify an existing point of confusion. If you can go without citing a primary source at all, even better. I often recommend the essay WP:BACKWARDS as a way to explain this approach. Hopefully, this will make the article easier to understand without over-complicating an already complicated topic and without resorting to jargon and circular explanations. Grayfell (talk) 23:32, 21 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ "Crypto's Energy Guzzling Sparks an Alternative That Merely Sips". Bloomberg. 17 November 2021. Archived from the original on 2022-01-29. Retrieved 2022-01-22.

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 17 August 2025

« In the Description section, please add the following paragraph before theoneshowing bulletpoints for généralisations »

Riposo and Gupta[1] that a formal PoS mathematical model can derive a metric for the expected gain of a staker. They introduced a forward-method model that computes staking rewards as the staking return per block-validation period and proved that the resulting interest equals the ratio of the average staking gain to the total staked coins. The model incorporates PoS-specific factors such as slashing (penalties for misbehavior) and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV), showing that slashing reduces expected rewards and that MEV links transaction-fee extraction to the average staking gain. In addition, the authors illustrated the model using Ethereum 2.0 and presented an analogous derivation for PoW consensus. 212.205.49.114 (talk) 10:11, 17 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

 Done Thepharoah17 (talk) 04:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Riposo, Julien; Gupta, Maneesh (2024-02-15). "A Crypto Yield Model for Staking Return". FinTech. 3 (1): 116–134. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/fintech3010008. {{cite journal}}: Check |doi= value (help); External link in |doi= (help)

"Attacks" section is misleading

The "Attacks" section is misleading according to the same sources being used. Most PoS networks are immune to Long-range and Bribery/Short-range attacks because they have finality.

Long-range attacks: This attack only affects tiny portion of Proof-of-stake networks that don't have finality. In fact, the source already being used in that section ("Survey on Long-Range Attacks for Proof of Stake Protocols") says under its "Moving Checkpoints" section:

"Moving checkpoints or simply checkpoints is a mitigation technique used by almost all PoS protocols....

This defense mechanism partially mitigates Long Range attacks as it allows for some block reorganisation to happen. Nonetheless, with Moving checkpoints, Long Range attacks are downgraded and now fall under the category of Short Range attacks as the reorganisation does not start at the Genesis block. With the use of moving checkpoints, the main chain becomes truly immutable up to the latest n blocks."

The second source used, "A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks" says something similar: "general long-range attacks (and costless simulation as a whole) can be resolved by checkpointing"

So nearly all PoS network are immune to long-range attacks due to having finality/checkpoints, and PoS networks with instant finality are immune to both long-range and short-range attacks.

Bribery attack: According to the 1st source being used, this is just another term for a short-range (51%) attack that can only happen if blocks can be reverted. It can occur on both PoW and PoS networks (according to the original source) that don't have instant finality. But for some reason, the editor wrote this section as if it's a long-range attack, requiring going back in history to rewrite blocks. According to the source, short-range attacks can be mitigated on PoS networks: "PoS tackles this issue by either enforcing a slashing condition or by releasing violators from their position". HSukePup (talk) 07:38, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Additional section:

I would recommend including a section for this much more notable and realistic attack vector for PoS networks:

Liveness / Censorship attack: The same 1st source also talks about this. HSukePup (talk) 07:38, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Two small improvements

As of https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proof_of_stake&oldid=1335662968 I see at least two problems with this article. I haven't read the whole thing attentively as I don't feel it to be very (reliably) informative.

The first one is in the Description where, on the 2nd paragraph, PoW is said to use more computational prowess -- this should be changed to power instead. (I'm no native English speaker, however, prowess is not something that some CPUs/GPUs have and others don't -- they're all static, not smart, nor brave, nor particularly skilled. I haven't looked through the page history to find when it was introduced.)

The other one is under BFT-based PoS: the 3rd point reads "The BFT consensus is used to finalize the most-voted block.", suggesting that some kind of a BFT consensus process/algorithm exists that solves the BFT problem. (to the best of my knowledge, it still doesn't) I searched for "consensus" in the whole page, there's no indication the word is being used with a meaning specific to PoS (rather than that used in the field of distributed computing). I checked the referenced source, and "BFT consensus" (pp.124-128) appears to be something other than BFT. The list of steps is probably directly derived from p.336. This subsection should be rewritten to clarify what is meant by BFT consensus (no suggestions). And, at the very least, the "Main article" link to Byzantine fault should be removed. o_andras (talk) 14:53, 12 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Content Disclaimer

Informasi ini disarikan dari Wikipedia dan disajikan kembali untuk tujuan edukasi. Konten tersedia di bawah lisensi CC BY-SA 3.0. Kami tidak bertanggung jawab atas ketidakakuratan data yang bersumber dari kontribusi publik tersebut.

  1. The information displayed on this website is sourced in part or in whole from Wikipedia and has been adapted for the purpose of restating it. We strive to provide accurate and relevant information, however:
  2. There is no guarantee of absolute accuracy. Wikipedia is an open, collaborative project that can be edited by anyone, so information is subject to change.
  3. It is not intended to constitute professional advice. The content displayed is for informational and educational purposes only. For important decisions (e.g., medical, legal, or financial), please consult a professional.
  4. Content copyright. Wikipedia is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC BY-SA). This means that content may be reused with appropriate attribution and shared under a similar license.
  5. Responsible use. Any risk arising from the use of information from this website is entirely the responsibility of the user.