The idea that Proof of Stake is more secure against attack is beyond absurd, frankly. However you feel about the energy usage of proof of work consensus mechanisms, they are far more resistant to attack and centralization.
When the mining rewards peter out, big ASIC farm miners leave the network, the mining difficulty goes down, and so does the energy and hardware investment required to mine a single block. But at the same time, smaller time miner can enter the network and mine with less powerful hardware.
If all miners were to quit tomorrow, the difficulty would go down so much that you could mine a block, in 10 minutes, with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
edit: Blacklisting UTXOs is entirely possible as I mentioned, and as I said, it should be achievable by soft fork. This would be the proof of work equivalent of slashing. I have a hard time believing Vitalik doesn’t know this. Is he being dishonest? I don’t know.
You can target the UXTO so that their value in crypto starts back at zero. But because they still have the mining hardware, they still control 51% of the hash power that secures the network. They can just mine from a different address and it won’t be clear who to target until they once again begin to produce majority blocks on the chain. This way they can continually attack the chain and render it useless.
When you burn a PoW miner’s crypto addresses, you aren’t burning their capital and stake, because it’s in the form of mining hardware, not tokens. When you burn a PoS staker’s crypto, you are burning their capital and stake which is in the form of tokens.
Many meanings of "attack". A year ago China attacked the miners and they mostly left China. A nation attacking the btc network is real, and the miners physically moved.
It is easier to move a PoS validator, and harder to locate the validator in the first place.
The argument that it is easier to move a validator than a miner is a very surface level argument, honestly. The incentives of mining ensure that miners will spread to every corner of the world, in every jurisdiction, in search of cheap electricity.
Meanwhile, proof of stake validation has no such incentive. It is financialized and it even has a guaranteed yield component. Since validators are financial and not industrial like miners, they will be incentivized to locate near other financial centers, like New York and London, and they will certainly comply with sanctions and other financial practices.
I'd say it's much easier to single out PoS validators. Especially when they are congregating under unified capital and they are US based. Also, argument could be made that they are responsible for the transactions that they are making. The same can be hard to argue for Bitcoin, since anyone with a bit of a hashrate could generate a block and it's permission-less to contribute to the hashrate (and also anonymous)