SwagtimusPrime

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to learn that the r/bitcoin sub, bitcointalk.org, and several other bitcoin communities are owned by one and the same person that have a history of censoring dissenting opinions. Just read up on the r/bitcoin history.

Bitcoin is the illusion of decentralization.

Lol. Can you personally verify what your bank is doing? No you can't. If it was on the blockchain, you could.

That, and a lot of his ETH. The illiquid shitcoins are still worth a couple hundred million at the very least. +$200k in ETH.

mining is actually worse because of economies of scale. rich miners don't need pools so they don't pay fees, they get bulk deals and earlier access to the newest ASICs, they can pay personnel to optimize their operations, etc.

so over time, the rich miners get richer at a faster rate than poor miners.

whereas under PoS, everyone gets the same % return (unless you stake with a pool, but even then you don't have these economies of scale like with mining.)

benefits like killing the environment.

and UASF are a thing in PoS as well, if some entity/entities acquire a majority of the staked coins users can simply fork the malicious actors out. It's functionally equivalent except that it's an order of magnitude more expensive to acquire the required coins as opposed to getting the equivalent in hashpower.

Yeah sure, let me just buy a container full of ASICs worth hundreds of thousands of $$$ and I'll start mining: https://twitter.com/SGBarbour/status/1390504269925654532

It also costs a couple hundred bucks to run an Ethereum node. You are confusing running a validator and running a node, those are two independent things, just like mining and running a node.

And Satoshi, just one person, owns tens of billions in BTC. That is the top 0.01%.

Yes. Any action performed in the network will consume 99.95% less energy after this change has gone through.

>because bitcoin users actually validate blocks

so do Ethereum users.

>In a PoS system there is an incentive for large stakeholders to increase block sizes.

this doesn't work because of Ethereum's social contract, just like it wouldn't work with Bitcoin.

Just because you stake a lot of ETH doesn't mean you suddenly have unilateral power to increase block sizes. There is a thing called consensus, and the entire community needs to achieve it to implement changes. Good luck trying to convince the community that bigger blocks that make it harder for small users to validate the chain is a good idea.

>but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'.

PoW is just as much depending on fiat currencies. You can't get electricity without paying for it, you can't get a mining rig without paying for it, etc. This is one of the more common critiques against PoS and it just doesn't hold true at all. With the decentralized finance ecosystem, you can put any supported asset to work and earn ETH or stablecoins or anything else you want and accumulate that way.

it's not like solutions are heavily being worked on: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-r..., https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/04/07/sharding.html, https://ethresear.ch/t/complete-revamp-of-the-stateless-ethe...

it's also important to note that stakers can not withdraw yet. once withdrawal functionality is enabled I expect many more folks to stake their ETH because the uncertainty will be gone.

>However it still is dominated by the "haves" vs the "have nots". Proof of stake is awarded to those with the largest stakes, which favors state-sponsored miners and works against decentralization.

where is the difference to mining? To mine you need GPUs and electricity which you can equate to $$$, just like capital you lock up under PoS. it effectively makes no difference.

and everyone earns the same percentages, whales only earn more in absolute terms.

there is in fact a fast-merge proposal that has community & dev support with a preemptive date of October 2021, if we're conservative February 2022. Once the merge happened PoW will be shut down and all transactions will be validated by the Proof of Stake consensus.

there will be decentralized & trustless staking pools such as RocketPool, where even if a loss of funds occurs the loss is subsidized through the entire protocol.