I'm not OP but this doesn't seem to answer the question. You presented a lot of speculation and mentioned two things that I've never heard of
Gas prices are transaction fees. Right now, both Bitcoin and Ethereum have high transaction fees - too high to use those currencies for small purchases. The high transaction fees are also delaying "Web 3.0" - new decentralized applications that use blockchains as databases. Once transaction fees go down (and Bitcoin's transaction fees have gone down a lot in the past couple of months), that will make cryptocurrencies practical for more purchases and applications.
Doesn't this mean that those who don't have the funds to be able to safely stake their coins see their balance depreciate as the incoming coins go to people who have the ability to stake their wealth, implying that the most efficient way to use the system is to concentrate wealth?
The goal of proof-of-work is to prevent supermajorities from taking over the chain's verification by turning verification into a lottery of labor. Proof of stake doesn't seem like it solves that problem.
Not necessarily. If the currency's market value keeps increasing, then even if you don't stake your coins, your balance will still appreciate.
> The goal of proof-of-work is to prevent supermajorities from taking over the chain's verification by turning verification into a lottery of labor. Proof of stake doesn't seem like it solves that problem.
From the Ethereum website:
"The threat of a 51% attack still exists in proof-of-stake, but it's even more risky for the attackers. To do so, you'd need to control 51% of the staked ETH. Not only is this a lot of money, but it would probably cause ETH's value to drop. There's very little incentive to destroy the value of a currency you have a majority stake in. There are stronger incentives to keep the network secure and healthy.
"Stake slashings, ejections, and other penalties, coordinated by the beacon chain, will exist to prevent other acts of bad behavior." [0]
[0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms...
Go ahead and google "L2 ethereum" and "ethereum proof-of-staking migration". If you want to dive deep into the ecosystem it's all in plain sight for you to do so.
There is a lot going behind the scenes and I simply don't have time to regurgitate the information.
The solution you have come to is a fair one (which is that truly developing a decentralized infrastructure that is reasonably priced to run apps on has too many challenges to succeed, at least the current solution that ethereum is providing).
I have hope that these problems can be surmounted by the ethereum development team. There are lots of challenges, and that is why everyone says we are at the beginning stages.
I think it's worth a shot, and if it succeeds I do believe we'd live in a better society.
Im particularly fond of Hyperledger Fabric, though it is quite antithetical to the crypto narrative.
Layer 2 Rollups
> Layer 2 is a collective term for solutions designed to help scale your application by handling transactions off the Ethereum mainnet (layer 1), while taking advantage of the robust decentralized security model of mainnet. Transaction speed suffers when the network is busy which can make the user experience poor for certain types of dapps. And as the network gets busier, gas prices increase as transaction senders aim to outbid each other. This can make using Ethereum very expensive.
So it makes Ethereum cheaper. As someone who doesn't really get the hype, this doesn't help at all. Making Ethereum cheaper doesn't help me if I don't have a reason to use Ethereum.
After Googling "ethereum proof-of-staking migration" my take away is that moving to proof-of-stake will make it more robust and more energy efficient. Again, it doesn't tell me anything about why I should use Ethereum (or any other cryptocurrency) in the first place.
Everything I read about crypto talks about how it's currency that can be produced by anyone* and blockchain inherently makes it possible to know who did what and when. As a layperson, none of this is interesting or useful. The average person isn't going to start mining, the average person isn't going to speculate on a very volatile market, and the average person has no way to spend any crypto that they own. I'm not saying it's your job to fix the optics here but I've read a ton of comments in this thread and not a single person has pointed to something that made me think "I could use that" and I'm the kind of person who likes to browse Github looking for weird things to try out.
* Provided you have enough money to build a powerful PC and afford the electricity cost
Sushi, yearn, aave.
Right now with the current function invocation costs, ethereum ecosystem cannot support meaningful apps outside of trustless banks which is why L2 is extremely important. It's going to unclog a massive drain if done right.