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 ?

  • louiswil@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    32 ETH is sent to the staking smart contract. If your validator misbehaves, the protocol will slash your ETH.

    One big difference is that PoS has this slashing ability while PoW does not. A PoW attacker never gets punished, they can just keep using their rig to attack the PoW network infinitely.