To participate in PoS, you need an existing stash of coins, which is inaccessible for many individuals from countries where cryptocurrencies are outlawed. Not forgetting to mention that participation in consensus would indirectly require going through KYC.
PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.
I dislike the way that cryptocurrencies have managed their initial allocations, but it's way better than the way that fiat currencies have managed their initial allocations (usually encoding generations of violence, rascism and oppression).
To 'participate' in PoS (by which you mean mining a block I suppose), you can buy all the stake you need from other people, just like if you want to 'participate' in stock ownership, or land ownership or ownership of nearly anything else in the world.
> PoW, on the other hand, is akin to buying Bitcoin with electricity - a borderless natural resource.
Well.... if you try to mine BTC these days with a standard computer on a standard electricity tarif, you're not going to have a fun time.
Given the fact that to reasonably 'participate' in PoS you need only the kind of computer you already have and an easily acquired stake, while to reasonably 'participate' in many forms of PoW you need unusual, expensive custom hardware and cheap electricity, I'm not at all convinced that PoW has anything better to say about 'fairness'.
Just a nit, but I would argue that those encoded privileges are still present; just now with the added indirect layer of "People who were adjacent to the cypherpunks mailing list circa 2009"
Wow, I never knew ASICs grew on trees.
Those three things would give a government interested in banning cryptocurrencies plenty of leverage to disrupt mining operations in their country.
All they would need to do is regulate the import of ASIC mining hardware; sinkhole any traffic that looks "bitcoin-y" (damn the collateral damage, we're fighting fascist communist pedophile terrorist drug traffickers here!) and similarly block access to any known mining pools.
They could go even further and introduce severe and draconian penalties to anyone producing, possessing, or using cryptocurrencies (which of course would be selectively enforced).
At this point, once you factor in the real-world element, the fact that, in theory, you only need electricity to produce bitcoin becomes such a small part of that equation.
I think at that point why not use PoS (or better yet, a DPoS scheme), if there isn't any real-world benefit to PoW? I think the tradeoff of introducing a small amount of revocable trust in exchange for RADICALLY reduced energy consumption is pretty clearly worth it, given the real world constraints.
There will be independent PoS validators who can afford upfront costs, but there are independent miners too who purchase lots of hardware. In PoS the next block is randomly distributed, so those with better hardware dont outperform. So you can validate off a solar powered raspberry pi or nuc if you'd like and not underperform someone with a highend gpu, so the hardware cost is much lower, added to this in long run it will be cheaper to participate in staking than having to replace gpus/asics to mine with.
I don't see how this leads you to think it is unfair in comparison to mining? Upfront costs pretty similar, running costs cheaper, long term hardware replacement costs much less.
I'm not seeing much difference in terms of accessibility. In theory PoS is easier because PoW requires actual hardware and/or more technical knowledge.
Hydro, wind are other possibilities.
Sure. You can easily create your own conventional fiat currency too, you just need to set up your own nation.
(For values of "we" denoting various constitutional democracies of the so-called free world.)
Further, whether or not some folks move to ethereum is more or less irrelevant to whether BTC carries on doing what it's doing. The problem is not individuals making the switch, it's getting enough people to switch in order to reduce the energy footprint of BTC.
The other big change on the way is a massive increase in scalability, which I'm hoping will help move the market in a more sustainable direction.