A lot of research was done by heavyweights for PoS in 2012 and 2013. The consensus was that it was a fruitless pursuit and that PoS could not match PoW in terms of security and decentralization.
Well, as you may know it's currently being used in some coins like bitshares [0] and it works fine, Ethereum also is migrating to PoS [1]. So the consensus for a lot of people in the ecosystem is that it works.
