| > How does this view of PoS governance explain how Ethereum protocol governance has operated in reality for the past five years? As far as I can tell, the power held by miners has been minimal. Miners have no power because ETH governance is deliberately centralized away from them. 1. Ethereum has a founder (you), who can effectively unilaterally change the protocol. You've been clear for a long time that ETH miners are temporary participants in this project. 2. Very few ETH owners run their own node or participate in actively validating and enforcing governance decisions, so you and the dev team effectively call the shots. Miners have no choice but to follow whatever protocol update Infura and the few other node-as-a-service companies decide to support. > I don't see how that state of affairs would survive any attempt by governments to actually use their jurisdictional power Since the largest holders will be regulated legal entities, it will be quite trivial for governments to do this. Also my understanding is that ETH staking is not delegated, so moving funds is not trivial for institutions since this is highly regulated activity. > so once a single pool does anything disagreeable people can just move their ETH to other pools Deposits at financial institutions are sticky. People and institutions generally aren't going to withdraw their ETH from Coinbase because of some governance debate. > I've heard this argument many times, but.... why does that even matter? Because it's a decentralizing force. To build and pay for a mining operation you need to sell off your Bitcoin to (often new) buyers. A larger mining operation has larger costs and is constantly at the mercy of the energy and hardware markets. In comparison, all stakers, regardless of size, have effectively the same small fixed cost. A big institutional staker will continue to grow their wealth with no increase in cost and no competitive pressures. They just sit on their $$ and keep collecting more in perpetuity. |