Proof of stake is incapable of producing a consensus
This is a silly article.  Only working in a weaker security model does not, a priori, mean that proof of stake is a scam; it just means you need to convince yourself that the weaker security model holds.  You can read the post linked (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ethereum.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ethereum.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;11&#x2F;25&#x2F;proof-stake-learned-lov...</a>) and decide for yourself.<p>Personally, I think this kind of &quot;quiescent&quot; knowledge, letting you differentiate the real chain from the fake chain on long enough timescales (which basically amounts to knowledge of a single hash, when you get right down to it), is perfectly reasonable to assume under realistic circumstances, for the same reason that synchronized time is not a remotely difficult problem on long enough timespans.  The only problem lies in new nodes (that enter the system when there&#x27;s <i>not</i> a quiescent state, and the longer chain is being withheld) being exposed to fake chains.<p>By using a VDF as mentioned below to make sure it takes just as long to construct a new chain as it took to construct the old one, one can ensure that as long as <i>at the time the stakers held their keys</i> (rather than for all time) a majority were trustworthy, then the probability that they were able to maintain a longer chain becomes vanishingly small.  Therefore, nodes will be able to reliably choose the longer chain on reconnecting to the system.  This trust model seems pretty realistic to me, and it&#x27;s not like Bitcoin can handle the case of a continuous partition to begin with.<p>So this just reduces to &quot;once a majority is not trustworthy, the chain can&#x27;t be trusted anymore&quot; which is the <i>actual</i> security tradeoff of PoW vs. PoS (PoW puts trust in hashpower rather than staked coins, so by definition it&#x27;s immune to this sort of issue; if your private key is stolen you &quot;only&quot; lose your coins, not any voting power).  I don&#x27;t think this is news to anyone who&#x27;s done much research into cryptocurrency.