The founder of Chia.net has doubts PoS is sound. Check out Chia’s low power Proof of Space + Time.
The whole idea of creating artificial digital scarcity by basing it on physical scarcity of resources is just horrible.
It’s a terrible plan and very shortsighted. Making hard drives isn’t free of environmental externalities.
> if that case ever came true, the total energy waste would still remain less than PoW by orders of magnitude.
Yes less ongoing energy use, but it does reward creation and effective waste of hard drive space, which isn't without environmental knock-on effects, both some energy use and for chemical byproducts etc.
This is not an 'extremist rationale', if you give people a direct financial incentive to get as much storage as possible, what do you think would happen?