LTB#387 POW, POS and Self Fulfilling Counter Prophecies

##On Todays Episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin...Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Stephanie Murphy join Adam B. Levine for an in-depth discussion on the ups and downs of consensus reality and the two "big" methods (Proof of Work and Proof of Stake) which we use to define it.Topic 1: Proof of Stake and Proof of Work DiscussionTopic 2: Ethereum Update and Upgrade Path---Partial transcript from about 35 minutes in...ANDREAS M. ANTONOPOULOS:"The problem with proof of work as a system is that it's so poorly understood and it's very difficult to see what benefits it offers.... Immutability and resistance against state level colluding actors are benefits you don't really see until somebody tries to attack them. The fact that they don't attack them, in bitcoin, is not something you can celebrate because it's like proving a negative. Another way to put it is that no one really pays attention to a surgeon until their patients start dying. It's very difficult to say 'look at how good I am because none of my patients have died lately', but it's very easy to point to the surgeon famous for performing an operation with the 300% mortality rate. He did an amputation in 25 seconds, during which he managed to also amputate some of the fingers of one of his surgery assistants... And it was such a horrific scene that one of the audience members died from shock. Then the patient and the assistant died from sepsis days later, making it the only surgery with 300% mortality rate... Now, you can point to that and say "That's not a good surgeon" but it's very difficult to look at a surgeon and say "Well, nobody's died yet so that's a good surgeon". This is a general problem with security, because security working means that nothing bad happened. And the absence of something bad happening is not a provable thing. SO you can say that Bitcoin is secure. How do you know? well, it's hasn't been successfully attacked yet. Could it be successfully attacked? Could someone amass 51%? And we can point to examples of smaller systems which have been attacked like Classic Recently, but the problem is it's really hard to see that value. Same thing with immutability...---Tip LTB:1FZGD64BA7B9GdwDhGGGF92amt9X6VH38Kor Via the Lightning Network at tipltb.tokenly.com/---Thanks for listening to this episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin, content for todays show was provided by Andreas Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy and Adam B. Levine.This episode was edited by Dave/Adam and featured music by Jared Rubens and Gurty BeatsSend questions or comments to adam@letstalkbitcoin.com