Absolutely, not to mention Eth just rolled out a major update last week. This rambling, bizarre article boils down to a few very basic, extremely played out arguments.
Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work.
You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read.
Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest.
Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking.
The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.
While reading the article all I could think about was that it sounded like it was written by a bitcoin maximalist, so many things were framed in bad faith that it makes it difficult to take for granted that it is an honest attempt at discussing the issues surrounding Ethereum, especially when it is basically rehashing things that have been discussed many times before. It makes me wonder how this got to the top of HN, maybe an enemy of an enemy is a cryptocurrency skeptic's friend or something.
Thank you for taking the time to type this. The topic of PoW vs PoS is very misunderstood and I see a lot of dishonesty in online forums.
I am very optimistic about Ethereum. It is not perfect but it is massively and consistently improving. The past few years, all crypto innovation was incubated within the Ethereum community.
I'll preface that I somewhat dislike how Ethereum has established their PoS consensus. The lack of first class support for delegated staking poses a problem IMHO as it requires handing control of your coins over to a third party considering this is the only option for people without 32ETH(102k USD) that they can tie up. I also have opinions on locking periods but until we see some extended battle tests proving where the sweet spot is (I'm for no-lock staking personally), I won't consider this a major issue. These aren't criticism of PoS itself but rather critiques of this particular implementation.
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Now that that is out of the way, I don't necessarily believe that Argument 1 is inherently true (I know you aren't necessarily supporting it but I figured I'd throw my 2p in).
Ultimately Proof of Stake is just moving from a system with an external resource to one with an internal resource. This theoretically allows you to largely divorce the system from the harsh realities of the outside world (whose rules those external resources are bound to). By isolating the system you can better structure the rules of the game (from a game theory perspective) without being influenced or bound to rules from the outside system. Of course this isolation is only as strong as the network (larger market cap makes attacks harder) but generally once the network reaches scale it is largely independent of the outside world.
How a system influences the distribution of wealth ultimately depends on those rules in the system and by PoS largely granting the system the ability to decide those rules for itself, you can theoretically design a system with an expected steady state at or around the middle class at which the system can help lift those with less wealth up and weigh those with more wealth down. Balance it incorrectly and you run into issues one way (concentration of wealth) or another (lack of staking support opening up risks for attack) but theoretically it can be done right.
One of the key features of that balance is that wealth is worth the same whether it is held by many people or one person. It should be just as viable for a thousand people to lend 100 dollars as it is for a firm or wealthy individual to lend 100k with both groups exposed to the same amount of risk all other things the same.
Various mechanisms of the network including staking (including delegation), access to a democratically controlled treasury, first class support for governance primitives, and other such features are essential for making such a system work. Proof of Stake on its own may generally provide an accrual of wealth but in combination with the other forces on the network it should be perfectly viable to create a network that promotes distribution towards a reasonable steady state (with deviations due to merit of the individuals or just outright luck and not maintaining such deviations long term).
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/rant
I'm generally pretty cynical but no matter how hard I dig into it, I can't find a reason why PoS shouldn't be one of the last pieces of the puzzle to produce such a system and if it's even just a chance I think it's exceptionally valuable that we pursue it. Or maybe I'm just a crazy Crypto-LibSoc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>The lack of first class support for delegated staking poses a problem IMHO as it requires handing control of your coins over to a third party considering this is the only option for people without 32ETH(102k USD) that they can tie up.
You should take a look at RocketPool. It is a project that will introduce decentralized staking pools allowing people with >0.01 ETH to trustlessly stake (except for smart contract risk, of course).
Support for delegated staking is already here, it's just not widely used yet. The trick is that you specify a contract address as your validator's exit address, and that contract keeps track of who has partial "ownership" of the validator and thus is allowed to withdraw their fraction of the stake after the validator exits.
Lido for example, a staking provider, already keeps their new deposits in custody of a contract like this.
But hasn't dPOS shown that people don't care that much about governance and will just hand their coins to someone, anyone who promises to reward them? The current crop of dPOS coins leaves a very stale taste in my mouth as they all seem to be run by an oligarchy of validators who conspire to let no one else in.
Staking services like RocketPool just bring the idea to ETH but if you were early, you can stake on your own.
Argument 1: Proof of stake concentrates wealth more than proof of work.
You can make that argument, but POS advocates have for a long time argued that proof of work mining has more economies of scale than proof of stake and therefore the opposite is actually true. Equating proof of work miners to the working class & stakers or developers as wealthy elites or rulers is so massively cringe it's tough to even read.
Argument 2: Ethereum is in active development, is planning to switch to proof of stake, has things like difficulty bombs, and therefore is somehow dishonest.
Decentralized blockchain communities come to consensus around different values and philosophies. Eth has for a long time been a community which values consistent iteration and improvement around fundamental aspects of the protocol. The transition to proof of stake has been known for years and years. There's nothing dishonest about any of this. If anything the community has been asking for faster iteration to solve high transaction fees and improve usability. Bitcoin's development stagnation works fine for bitcoin. Ethereum is clearly making the right move in continuing to improve the base protocol. Which as you mention is a huge, extremely complicated undertaking.
The article goes on to some cognitive dissonance about how Ethereum doesn't deliver on promises despite the fact that it just delivered a major protocol update last week... might as well throw in the dao hack and icos and whatever else in there and see if anything sticks. I guess with nothing to develop or build, bitcoin maxi's have a lot of time to ramble incoherently about Ethereum. And they probably always will.