Delegated-Proof-of-Stake as an altrnative to PoW and PoS: comparison and perspectives (p. 4)

Below we provide a thorough comparison of the three most widespread consensus protocols.

	PoW	PoS	BFT DPoS
Examples of projects	Bitcoin, Ethereum	Peercoin	NEO
Block creation time	Bitcoin: ~ 7–10 min Ethereum: ~ 12–15 sec	~ 9 mins	~ 15 sec
Bandwidth (tx per sec)	Bitcoin: 7–10 Ethereum: 15–30	7	1000
Transaction cost	Bitcoin: ~ $0.168 Ethereum: ~ $0.066	~ $0.006	Optional
Number of trxs in a block	Bitcoin: up to 4424 Ethereum: from 30 to 200	from 2 to 10	up to 500
Energy consumption (KW/h per day)	Bitcoin: 69 974 983 Ethereum: 51 765 837	~ 18 630	50,4
Number of full nodes (block-producers)	Bitcoin: 10102 Ethereum: 12754	12	7 consensus-nodes
Governance	Bitcoin: informal offchain management Ethereum: informal offchain management	Onchain voting	Onchain voting + element of offchain management
Primary qualities	Decentralization, security	Scalability, low energy consumption	Scalability, low commissions

Advantages of DPoS

The main advantages of DPoS are a democratic form of management, scalability and relatively low energy costs for network maintenance.

Flexible form of onchain control

DPoS can be called a form of onchain-self. This is a flexible version of representative democracy: participants choose delegates (validators) and can withdraw and redistribute their votes at any time. The ability to arbitrarily remove and select validators leaves real power in the hands of all holders of tokens. The validators themselves are a kind of hired employees, who receive compensation for fair data processing.

We invited an expert from the Minter team to comment on this management model.

“16 validators participate in the minter’s network. Every 518,400 blocks 4 new places in the pool of validators will be added, while the number of places will not reach 256. All of them undertake to maintain network operation and perform
regulations. Among other things, validators vote for changing parameters of the system. In fact, they represent the interests of users who voted for them. If the validator does not meet the participants' expectations, he will be removed from his duties "


-explains the CTO and major developer of Minter, Dan Pashin

In addition to controlling the validator pool, their voices network members control the technical parameters of the system: block size, hardfork network, reward validators and their total amount.

Scalability and processing speed transactions. The DPoS algorithm allows you to reach a consensus on new blocs faster than PoW and PoS. In practice in DPoS system is relatively small the number of network nodes must agree with the validity of the block so that all transactions in it could be considered included in the main chain.

The challenge of blockchain network scalability is the optimization of three related parameters. It is described by the so-called trilemma of scalability proposed by Vitalik Buterin. According to the trilemma, the blockchain can show a good result only in two of the three parameters:

• security - vulnerability to manipulation of unscrupulous nodes
• decentralization - the total number of block producers
• scalability - the overall speed of processing and finalizing transactions by the network

To increase the speed of transaction processing, the system must sacrifice either decentralization or security. This is similar to the situation when the customer wants the work to be done qualitatively, quickly and inexpensively, but in fact, you can choose only two points out of three.

Saving of resources

In the long run, it is important that DPoS based blockchain systems consume significantly less energy than their counterparts on PoW.

In simple terms, validators in DPoS use their computing power directly to process transactions, and PoW-miners spend
most of the power and energy on solving the puzzle and it only needs to meet artificial conditions system.

For comparison, the energy consumption for Bitcoin blockchain service comparable with energy costs small of the state.