Why Lisk gets it

Many “Altcoins” out there are challenging the idea of Bitcoin’s PoW (Proof of Work). They are expanding the blockchain with their own set of features. This was mostly without much success or adoption, since most of those projects were mere copycats, expanding or optimizing the mining algorithms. Nevertheless, some of those Altcoins implemented new concepts for consensus among their users. Peercoin was the first cryptocurrency to make use of PoS (Proof of Stake), which is way more energy efficient than PoW. Since then many cryptocurrencies played around with hybrid versions of PoW and PoS, without really opening up a new market independent from bitcoin.

Ethereum to the rescue

Then Ethereum came and introduced “smart-contracts”. Ethereum became a huge success, rising to a market cap of over 1 Billion $ and opening up a whole new market for app (or “dapp”) developers, with potentially endless oppertunities. But while this is impressive and good for the crypto community, I see a major flaw.
Ethereum still uses PoW. This essentially means people are mining ethereum for profit. While many in the crypto community don’t see a problem with that, it’s a major setback for the ethereum community.

Introducing Lisk’s DPOS (Delegated Proof of Stake)

Lisk uses DPOS instead of PoW as their consensus algorithm. There are, at any time, 101 active delegates “forging” Lisk. This means they receive a reward for their effort in forging blocks on the blockchain.
These 101 active delegates are voted by the Lisk community, which just might be the single most powerful concept for the longterm success of the Lisk project.
To become an active delegate, people have to “give back” to the community. Since an active delegate receives quite a large amount of Lisk each month, without having to burn a lot of those proceeds for electricity, just taking cash in their own pocket (like with PoW or other PoS concepts) is not an option anymore. They have to actively engage in the community and the development of Lisk to have the slightest chance of receiving votes.
This means a lot of the money delegates make is going to end up in projects supporting Lisk. That’s a huge advantage over Ethereum right now, which up until now did not see a large adoption from developers, or a large amount of apps.
If the Lisk team and community driven active delegates handle it the right way, Lisk just might be on the fast path to success. (and this does not mean, Ethereum and Lisk can’t co-exist, I just see a “cleaner” (not only in the environmental sense) path for Lisk right now the longer Ethereum stays on PoW).

What do you think? Write down in the comments below!