[arcticbull]

Yeah, I agree with that assessment.

I'm just saying that 'staking' in proof of stake isn't materially different than taking your Bitcoin and purchasing a share of a company that mines Bitcoin. [edit] you can always un-stake by selling your share.

[atweiden]

Staking is similar to buying lottery tickets at the store, except you need never leave your home or pay any money for the tickets. It’s all about passive income generation.

Mining is a business, with real costs and logistics to fret about.

People should really stop doing the mental gymnastics to make push-button passive income generation seem extraordinarily challenging and, even more egregious, extremely equitable (“it’s _at least_ as fair as Bitcoin”).

[arcticbull]

Buying shares in a mining company eliminates all the challenges you describe for the would-be PoW “staker.”

[atweiden]

And that would constitute buying an equity. We’re not mining in your example, we’re buying shares in a mining company.

[arcticbull]

You own part of the mining entity - you’re mining.

[dropnerd]

anyone who has run a validator node on a slashing network knows there are real costs and logistics to pos staking.

[atweiden]

You’d have to be doing something seriously wrong in your staking endeavours to break even due to “staking costs” even over the course of 1000 years.

The primary cost of staking is the initial investment in the stake, handedly.

The initial investment in the stake dwarfs the cost of even the most sophisticated staking infrastructure.

[dropnerd]

how does the capital cost being mining hardware and electricity rather than a pos token make the system more equitable?

[atweiden]

> how does the capital cost being mining hardware and electricity rather than a pos token make the system more equitable?

Every well known proof of stake system today was either premined, ICO’d, sold to investors in private rounds at “special” prices, or some combination of these.

Naturally, if you were autoyielding passive income by staking pos coins you had a cost basis of effectively zero in, either because you participated in an ICO, or worse, because you had the right connections, or exploited your privileged position as developer to hard code coin balances for yourself into your own ledger prior to launch, you’d _love_ proof of stake and trumpet its supposed equity and fairness in public.

In reality, the most privileged and exploitative of investors who have the lowest entry price get the highest rate of return on staking (effectively ∞ in the case of premine recipients).

To insinuate this situation is “equitable” is beyond ridiculous.

[dropnerd]

no one in this thread is promising utopia. i am merely pushing back against assertions of bitcoin being "most equitable".

late entrants add value to networks, and some of that value accrues to early entrants. this is the same for any network. a publicly accessible ico is just as equitable as someone mining btc with their cpu on low difficulty.

once the price of the token goes up, the difference between someone who was invited there early versus found their own way in does not matter to the new adopters. the inequity is felt purely based on the token price difference rather than the security mechanic.