Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake - Why You Should Know The Difference

This is going to be a pretty beginner topic, but hey there's plenty of new folks out there joining, and to that I say welcome!

So there's a few different proof of concepts that cyrptocurrencies utilize - the most commonly known one, bitcoin utilizes proof of work. The "work" is the fact that it requires computing power to mine a bitcoin, the "work" is in the mining, which is done by computers.

Proof of stake is a bit different, the reward for a new block is chosen, somewhat randomly by some algorithmic model, from the existing supply of coins. So essentially if you own a coin that is proof of supply, you can discover a new block and thus be rewarded for it. The more coins you own the higher the likelihood of you getting the reward. In essence all you have to do is keep your proof of stake coins in their respective wallet, keep the wallet open, and ta-da, you get paid a reward (in the coins) for doing basically nothing.

Now I won't pretend to understand the technical details of it, because frankly I don't, but it's not necessarily to understand it on a micro level to understand how to make profit off of proof of stake coins - which is why most of us are here in the first place.

So to sum it up - with proof of work coins you would need to run a miner, spend some money on a rig with a decent gpu etc, and then mine for coins and get rewarded that way.
With proof of stake you just have to make an investment, and you basically get paid dividends for keeping your wallet open. But the best part is the dividends are paid in coins - and if you pick good coins you will likely make more money over the long run!

One of my favorite Proof of Stake coins is Neo, they payout their "dividends" in the coin called gas (which, theoretically should be worth more than neo after a certain period of time, but that's beyond the scope of this post, just a good thing to know that what you're receiving will likely be worth more than what you bought in the long run).
So let's use Neo as an example, they average around 15% ROI for the year, in coins. So if you owned 1,000 Neo coins, you'd receive roughly 150 Gas tokens in 1 year. At current prices Gas is worth ~ 30 dollars, so that's 4500$ for doing nothing. However it's not absurd to think gas could be somewhere around 300$ in a years time - that could turn out to a whopping 45,000 on the year for again, doing nothing. And that's not even counting Neo's capital apprection - 60 dollars now, 4 figures at some point? Very possible

And that's really all you need to fundamentally know about Proof of stake coins, from an investment/profit perspective. I'm not going to shill a bunch of coins in this post, but you can easily google proof of stake cryptocurrencies, get a big list and research em and see which you like for the long term.

The way I see it is, there's more than a handful of great PoS coins that have just as good a chance of exponential ROI as any other coins out there. So with that in mind, it seems logical to at least own a handful of PoS coins. If there's parity in the probability of a PoS coin's capital appreciation matching the capital appreciation of a PoW coin (or any Proof of whatever coin), then why not get paid dividends as well? I think most folks see Neo as a long term powerhouse, up there with ethereum and the others, and the odds of it going 10x in value are as good as any, except with Neo you get free dividends too - see my point ;)

Now I'm not trying to shill Neo, I own some, it's a good coin, but most people know that already, but they may not know it's a PoS coin or what that means. So I'd encourage anyone who doesn't to do some research and pick out some PoS coins and get your hard earned money! Or erm, not so hard earned, but hey green is green. $$$