| > PoS lacks fairness. I dislike the way that cryptocurrencies have managed their initial allocations, but it's way better than the way that fiat currencies have managed their initial allocations (usually encoding generations of violence, rascism and oppression). To 'participate' in PoS (by which you mean mining a block I suppose), you can buy all the stake you need from other people, just like if you want to 'participate' in stock ownership, or land ownership or ownership of nearly anything else in the world. > PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource. Well.... if you try to mine BTC these days with a standard computer on a standard electricity tarif, you're not going to have a fun time. Given the fact that to reasonably 'participate' in PoS you need only the kind of computer you already have and an easily acquired stake, while to reasonably 'participate' in many forms of PoW you need unusual, expensive custom hardware and cheap electricity, I'm not at all convinced that PoW has anything better to say about 'fairness'. |
Just a nit, but I would argue that those encoded privileges are still present; just now with the added indirect layer of "People who were adjacent to the cypherpunks mailing list circa 2009"