| I definitely do think centralization is a risk of PoS over PoW. > It's not in the interest of Kraken or Coinbase to disrupt one of these PoS networks, but there is some barrier to entry for staking ETH2 or other PoS coins on your own, vs staking them on an exchange. In the case of ETH2, if your staking node goes down, you get slashed and lose some ETH. If there isn't slashing (not all PoS coins have that), I don't see what guarantee of network security or uptime there is. This is actually one place where ETH has tried to incentivize independent staking - the penalty for downtime is equal to the incentive for mining. In an extreme example, if you are down for 6 months of the year, and up for 6 months, the downtime costs should cancel out the earnings from the other 6 months. One caveat to this is that there are larger penalties for correlated downtime (ex: if a large portion of the network is down). This is to de-incentivize centralization of mining. That said, as someone fairly technical that could run his own staking node, I am seriously considering using a centralized service, or at the very least using a vps. This makes me think that the the majority are going to be independently run on a slew of hosting providers and via centralized hosting providers. There are also some interesting "decentralized" options like Rocketpool that haven't launched yet, but will allow staking via smart contracts against a pool of random nodes. And then at the end of the day, the choice in staking providers should allow the network to at least react to centralization risks. Say a locality forces a provider to censor transactions in some way - I imagine folks will move their funds to a provider in another country, or switch to something like Rocketpool, effectively working around the issue. |