Censorship based on stake taint

Proof-of-Stake
1

With proof of work there is a clear separation between the hardware investment and the proof of work nonce. There is no way to trace back the nonce to the hardware and thus the miner (note: not the reward address) can’t be held accountable because of plausible deniability.

However with proof of stake, the block producer is selected based on identity tied to a stake on chain. This stake can be traced and thus made to be tainted if the block producer doesn’t comply with regulations from a powerfully entity.

How is Casper going to resolve this?

2

IMHO there’s absolutely no need to resolve this. Actually, that’s one of the advantages of PoS over PoW. :slight_smile: To make things better, the stake of a dishonest validator is “slashed”, i.e. burned (even worse than tainting buahaha :smiling_imp:). Slashing conditions are baked into the protocol, so there’s no “powerfully entity” that can influence this process. This all is impossible to do in PoW (you cannot slash ASICs of a dishonest Bitcoin miner :slight_smile:).

On the other hand, speaking of censorship of miners/validators by outside entities (e.g. governments), both the PoW miners and the PoS validators can be anonymous, and can even protect their IP addresses if needed. But, PoS has a big advantage here, too - there is no expensive hardware that is hard (sometimes even impossible) to hide and/or relocate. If you have a big ASIC farm in a certain country, the local government can easily locate/confiscate it and even put you in jail (we’ve seen that happening in Venezuela recently). :disappointed_relieved: If you are a PoS validator, it’s extremely hard for a government to locate/confiscate your wallet. :wink:

Hope this helped! :slight_smile:

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