Proof-of-stake and delegated-proof-of-stake are consensus variants that work basically like shareholder votes.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 2018-04-25 against the standard technical description of these mechanisms. True: authoritative sources show that in both proof-of-stake and delegated proof-of-stake, influence over consensus (who produces or validates blocks, or how governance goes) is weighted by token holdings, so it works like votes weighted by shareholding. Mostly true: the analogy fits DPoS (token holders vote for delegates in proportion to holdings) and broadly fits PoS (stake-weighted selection or attestation), with small technical caveats, such as PoS selection being stake-weighted random choice rather than a literal vote. Mixed: the analogy fits one variant well but is clearly misleading for the other. Mostly false: stake weighting exists, but sources show the mechanisms work in a way materially unlike shareholder voting. False: consensus in these systems is not weighted by token holdings at all.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget arXiv (Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith, research paper) · 31 January 2026
“and the influence an agent has is proportional to the number of coins (or “stake”) it holds.”
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E2 Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) BitShares documentation · 1 January 2019
“A total of N witnesses sign the blocks and are voted on by those using the network with every transaction that gets made.”
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E3 Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPOS) Definition | CoinMarketCap CoinMarketCap Academy · 21 August 2021
“Users lock a certain number of coins as a stake — and at given moments, users with stakes are randomly assigned validation rights for the next new block.”
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E4 Proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work | ethereum.org Ethereum Foundation (ethereum.org) · 3 November 2026
“To come to consensus, at least 66% of the total staked ether has to vote in favour of a particular set of blocks.”
Reasoning
The Casper paper (E1) says that in proof-of-stake an agent's influence is proportional to the coins it holds, and ethereum.org (E4) describes consensus as a vote by a two-thirds share of staked ether. Both fit a vote weighted by holdings. For DPoS, the BitShares documentation (E2) describes network users voting for the witnesses who sign blocks, which matches the shareholder-vote analogy. However, E3 describes users who lock coins as stake being randomly assigned validation rights for new blocks, which suggests that selection in some stake-based systems is a random assignment rather than a literal vote, close to the small caveat the criteria name for "mostly true."
Cite this claim
Balaji Srinivasan, “Proof-of-stake and delegated-proof-of-stake are consensus variants that work basically like shareholder votes.” (said 25 April 2018). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_c81897e5ec70, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_c81897e5ec70
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
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