[nootropicat]

This is a good point and I think only ethereum has sufficient distribution. The sole advantage of PoW over PoS is distribution - miners sell, dumping the price, which is also likely to make other people to sell. Even many ethereum founders sold very low - Vlad Zamfir in particular sold ~100% below $20 (he tweeted about it, can't find it now).

Ethereum had 6 years of PoW now - most likely nothing else can repeat its distribution, ever. The time of PoW is visibly over.

Another point is that ethereum was icoed when crypto was tiny, few people believed smart contracts could have value and VC stayed away. Normal people are much more likely to sell just to buy a house. Now new coins start with coins distributed to VC and they are prepared to hold for years hoping for eth-tier returns. There's an argument that not that many people even knew about the ico - but the same is true for bitcoin mining early. It's very hard to quantify precisely but I think both have almost identical coin concentration.

Be wary of manipulative statistics that ignore the inherent differences between the utxo vs account model - like percentage of coins held by top x%. The assumed practice in an account-based model is for one user to use one address, while the current practice for utxo coins is to use one address per received transaction. Same is true for value sent per timeframe - because utxo relies on change addresses the actual transferred value is much smaller.

[WanderPanda]

> The time of PoW is visibly over.

Thanks for pointing this out! I never thought about this. To me the biggest long term threat to btc is the shift in block rewards from mined coins to transaction fees. I am assuming a possibly much smaller security budget available for “wasting energy”. But at that point it still might be enough as there is no network effect supporting new pow chains anymore, that could threaten btc security by having more sha hashpower.