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If you wanna explain stuff ... go ahead! I'll read it! You may find yourself writing something that belongs in its own post (perhaps just in a technology community) which you can then link to here.
Gladly. Though bear in mind that although I'm a professional programmer, I haven't programmed anything for blockchains specifically before so my understanding is at the "very interested outsider" level. :)
Regarding proof-of-stake:
Early blockchains relied on proof-of-work as a way to ensure that the people validating them were being honest. They had proof-of-work algorithms where you had to do an enormous amount of computation to validate a block. Anyone who wanted to produce a fake block would have to do a similarly enormous amount of costly work, so you could be reasonably sure that the blockchain was secure on account of it costing way too much to break that security. This had the downside of wasting an enormous amount of electricity, though. Lots of people who hated cryptocurrency hated it because of that.
A year and a half ago, though, Ethereum switched to an entirely different system called "proof of stake." Under proof of stake you don't have to prove that you spent a lot of resources to validate a block. Instead, you put up a bunch of money (in the form of Ether) and stake it on the validity of the blocks you produce. If you produce a block that isn't valid, your staked money is taken away and destroyed. This reduced the energy usage of the Ethereum blockchain down to just the routine cost of running ordinary servers. Folks who haven't been keeping up with cryptocurrency developments often aren't aware of this, though (and Bitcoin is still running on proof-of-work, which doesn't help. But Bitcoin has fallen way behind other modern cryptocurrencies in a lot of ways, IMO it's surviving purely on name recognition at this point).
Thanks!
FWIW, I was vaguely aware of ethereum’s movement to proof of stake. But not very aware! Thanks!!
No problem. I split my comment in two because I ran into the 5000 character limit, BTW, in case you didn't see the other half.