[rfoo]

> but it also get devalued relative to USD when these coins inevitably get sold to pay expenses

Good point. It invalidates the "good" part but does not make it doubly bad IMO.

And for ETH, well, I don't think it's about protecting value, it's more about:

> In both cases, it's gonna be the amount of capital involved that decides how the rewards are proportioned, there's no way around it

Yes. The difference is, PoW requires you to BURN resource proportioned to your rewards, while PoS just requires you to HAVE (but not burn) it. This makes a huge difference IMO.

For example, I would consider it more "ethical" (whatever that means) to add a light PoW part (with constant or slowly increasing difficulty, that is chosen to reduce environmental impact) to the ETH PoS protocol as-is: the random-chosen validators have to solve a PoW in addition to make their efforts proportioned to how much they stake, instead of being mostly constant.

[hanniabu]

Okay so startup capital aside, you like PoW because there's an ongoing cost to participating in consensus and don't like how PoS is more or less free.

I'm not sure how you arrived at this when your initial complaint was the rich get richer with PoS. PoW has much higher costs to participate and after a few years you have more costs when you need to upgrade your mining rigs because they're either burnt out or outcompeted by newer hardware.