Mining & Consensus
3 guides and tools on mining & consensus.
Proof of work, proof of stake, validators, staking and the economics and energy debates around securing a network.
Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake
Both answer the same question — who gets to add the next block, and why should anyone believe them — with completely different economic…
Mining & ConsensusCrypto Staking: How It Works and What It Risks
Staking rewards are payment for a service — securing the network — and like any payment, they come with obligations and risks attached.…
Mining & ConsensusCrypto Mining: How It Works and Whether It Pays
Mining is a competitive industrial business with thin margins, not a way to generate passive income from a spare computer.…
About this section
Consensus is the problem every public blockchain exists to solve: how do thousands of independent computers agree on one version of a ledger when any of them might be dishonest?
The two dominant answers make the same bet in different currencies. Proof of work makes adding a block expensive in electricity and hardware, so rewriting history costs more than it could possibly earn. Proof of stake makes it expensive in locked capital that the protocol destroys on misbehaviour. Ethereum's move from the first to the second in 2022 cut its energy consumption by over 99.9 per cent and is the largest live demonstration that such a transition is possible.
Which is more secure is a genuine and unsettled disagreement among researchers, not a question with a tribal answer. Both also concentrate in practice — proof of work into mining pools and regions with subsidised power, proof of stake into large staking providers and exchanges — and each community tends to point at the other's version of the problem.
These guides set out how each mechanism works, what mining actually costs at domestic electricity prices (the answer for Bitcoin is that it is not viable), and what staking rewards really represent once issuance, commission, lock-up periods and tax are accounted for.