[kyledrake]

One addendum here: If I was personally Satoshi, I would come back and try to convince everyone to switch to proof of stake instead of proof of work and then subsequently disappear again. If you need a non-politicized reason why (something other than climate change), just go with my joke one of solving one of the outcomes of Fermi's Paradox (distant civilizations don't send signals because all energy is used to mine cryptocurrencies).

[nullc]

Proof of stake doesn't solve the problem bitcoin set out to solve.

A proof of stake system is essentially just a rehash on the earlier centralized digital cash systems where a quorum of key holders engage in a consensus that determines further updates to the system (including the set of keys allowed to authorize further updates).

We didn't need Satoshi to come up with that, that idea was already known.

[kyledrake]

I don't follow your reasoning. It seems to me that at an abstract level, Satoshi set out to solve the problem of government meddling in currencies by creating a distributed digital currency not managed by a governmental agency with a predictable and well documented amount of money supply growth. Whether it uses a PoW or PoS approach seems irrelevant to that goal? PoS can lead to centralization if larger stakeholders have more influence over the network, but the same problem applies to PoW as well, and the large miners' substantial influence on Bitcoin development politics feels more like corporatism than distributed consensus. I haven't really been following things lately, but Ethereum seems to be transitioning to PoS as a distributed system just fine?

Neither approach seems perfect, the important difference to me is that one approach, sans some technological advance like fusion energy, presents a major ecological problem that has existential risks for humanity.