It's hard to tell the difference between ETH running on infrastructure maintained by Binance, Binance, and FTX etc and USD going between JPMorgan, Citi, and Goldman.
I read a statistic that over 50% of the Ethereum Mainnet is on AWS (but can't find it now) - hopefully that isn't all in the same Virginia data centre.
With POW a miner needs to continually provide new investments to be competitive, with new and more effective hardware and electricity.
But with POS you can just keep your coins in one place, and it will keep building up with no new investments at all (except running a node, a relatively small cost).
And in POS if someone ever reaches 50%, then it can forever hold that position, and it's essentially game over (baring a drastic hard fork).
It doesn't seem that unlikely that one big exchange will accomplish it.
Fraudsters have a strong incentive to maintain a patina of integrity (for their given industry)
I honestly have yet to see a system that provides a strong decentralizing force. To be fair, I think this is a really difficult task that people don't really give it it's credit. I mean there's resource momentum and resources make it easier to obtain more resources. The problem with that is that it seem to be outside the control of any cryptocurrency and this makes the issue infinitely more difficult.
The continued investment required for PoW is the difference.
If a PoW coin ever becomes centralized, it can become decentralized by new parties investing in more hashing power.
If a PoS coin ever becomes centralized, then it stays centralized. You can't just "buy" more stake unless the 51% player agrees to sell you some.
It really seems like PoS is the rich get richer without having to expend any effort. They stake their coins (costing nothing) and get rewards. If you have more coins to stake than others on average, you'll win the block rewards more often than others, increasing your ownership share.
In PoW, because computers are constantly getting faster/more efficient, your existing mining hardware depreciates with time and you have to continue to invest to maintain your dominance.
But everyone else will also be building up which means that your relative size will be the same.
If a bad actor misbehaves before controlling 2/3 then their stake gets eroded or even erased as punishment. Even merely being offline can result in stake erosion.
But to your point, who should decide who the misbehaving actor is? In what situation can you punish the network with only 1/3, as compared to 1/2 as with Bitcoin?
I assume that isn't the take away, right? Right?
https://twitter.com/thwjanssen89/status/1570426961411067904?...
comment?
you may as well just use a central bank or traditional database, POW is unlike the rest and for good reason
