[everfree]

To join a PoW chain as a profitable miner, you need cooperation from a chip fabrication factory, a local courier, your local government (customs), and your local electricity company, at minimum.

To join a PoS chain as a profitable staker, all you need cooperation from is literally one person anywhere in the world who wants to sell you some of their coins. Then you can stake on commodity hardware.

[proxynoproxy]

No, you need to buy from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who bought from an insider. Who printed it from nothing.

Meanwhile PoW needs real work. Real resources. Real effort. PoS is a Ponzi

[everfree]

Of course if you want to buy something useful you have to pay someone who created it or someone who is reselling it.

It sounds like you're basically describing the software market, and more broadly, intellectual property in general. When you write software, it creates something using near-zero physical resources and physical effort, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme.

Your description could also apply to all fiat money, too. You're born with zero of it, and you have to buy it from someone who ultimately got it from someone who printed it out of thin air. That doesn't mean all money everywhere is a Ponzi scheme.

Expenditure of real resources isn't an indicator of a product's worth. If it was, Microsoft would be burning coal to power Microsoft Word.

[proxynoproxy]

It’s good that you have identified that PoS and the global fiat financial system are pretty much the same microcosmic scam.

[everfree]

Society is a scam. Everyone else already owns all the good stuff by the time you're born.

Wake me up when you can manufacture a Bitcoin mining ASIC by yourself starting with sticks and rocks.

[tromp]

In summary: PoW is a mechanism for fair coin distribution (of course, fairness still depends on the emission curve), while PoS is not (its creators start with 100% of all coins).

[kinakomochidayo]

No, not all PoS start with the creators having 100% of all coins. See Ethereum.

[proxynoproxy]

Ethereum printed 60% of its tokens day one; sold to insiders. and then mined 40% for the illusion of decentralization.

Close enough. Premined scam. (Edit for 60%)

[everfree]

I am a random nobody, I was there at the time the Ethereum presale happened, and they were accepting purchases from people just like me.

In fact the presale was so open that it was drawing substantial criticism at the time. People were worried about the legal ramifications of them selling to literally any member of the public, without any KYC or vetting process. It was the polar opposite of selling to insiders.

That's aside from your metrics for the sale being wrong as well.

[proxynoproxy]

I was also there. Seemed like a scam, like all those other premined coins that were popular when ETH launched. I stand by that assessment in 2025.

I guess technically if you had traded Bitcoin for ETH at launch and then back to Bitcoin before merge you could have made more sats than holding the sats alone. It’s true of many low cap tokens. But for anyone touching ETH since the merge, they have been burned.

We can marvel at the innovations introduced by the tech, yeah, contracts are interesting (yet still don’t seem to have a use case beyond accounting and tokens.. [primarily fiat stables]).

[tromp]

Ethereum didn't have a "PoS start", as it started out as a (70% premined) PoW coin.