[raedah]

"Clearly, this expenditure pattern is a massive misallocation of resources. The last 20% of network hashpower provides vastly less value to the ecosystem than those same resources would if they had gone into research and core protocol development. So why not just.... cut the PoW budget by 20% and redirect the funds to those other things instead?"

"even though we could easily identify some valuable public goods to redirect some funding to as a one-off, making a regular institutionalized pattern of such decisions carries risks of political chaos and capture that are in the long run not worth it."

He gets the premise entirely wrong here. The chaos in these blockchain protocols is due to there not being a clear and well defined process for doing consensus rule upgrades. PoW miners control these chains. The power over the chain by PoW miners has become centralized into increasingly smaller number of participants with their own selfish interests. No upgrade will happen without their embracing it. Overriding the miners then becomes a vague and undefined matter of 'economic consensus' which means different things to different people and is not measurable.

Decred has consensus rules for upgrading its consensus rules. The hybrid PoW/PoS system allows for the security and fair distribution provided by PoW while allowing PoS... the economic stakeholders with the the most to lose, to make the decisions about the future of the chain.

Lead Developer for Decred, Dave Collins, outlines this concept nicely. (4 min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJs4T0WGe7k