>However, we were discussing mining revenue, not profits in general.
If you are talking about mining revenue then you are completely wrong about what you have been saying so far, because the rate at which you receive mining rewards is usually around 5-10% pa.
What you're trying to do is have your cake and eat it too. You admit that you are not talking about early adopter profits in general, but you complained above about cost basis of early adopters being low (that's how early adoption typically works).
This is the same as complaining about someone investing in 10 year government bonds and then the underlying currency increasing in buying power.
You could go buy Argentinian or Venezualan bonds right now and hope the peso or bolívar goes up in value. It's no different, all you need is seed money to get started.
In spite of what PoS investors commonly claim, stakemining $COIN isn’t “fair” merely because Joe Bob can earn the same X% per annum that $BIG_VC can earn, where $BIG_VC was able to invest at pennies on the dollar in an ICO, pre-ICO or pre-mine.
PoW mining is fundamentally more fair than PoS mining because $BIG_VC has to spend money to mine at all. To mine a PoW coin, $BIG_VC needs to pay for electricity, for ASICs and for datacenter running costs. Conversely, in PoS, there is no true “mining” — investors essentially park their cash and start earning a yield on it cost-free. Ergo it adversely impacts fairness of mining when a PoS coin is 50% premined by investors at pennies on the dollar.
It’s an incredibly dubious narrative that the situation with PoS mining here is as fair as Bitcoin mining, let alone more fair than Bitcoin mining.
By that logic, diligent savers who put their money in a savings account to earn interest isn't "fair". It's fundamentally more fair to invest in expensive heavy machinery and dig precious metals out of the ground.
> By that logic, diligent savers who put their money in a savings account to earn interest isn't "fair". It's fundamentally more fair to invest in expensive heavy machinery and dig precious metals out of the ground.
If by “diligent savers” you mean the Queen of England who was given 10% of the total supply of British pounds on day one, then yes, it very much isn’t fair. The Queen’s fortunate genetics in relation to her preferential access to British pounds, and the interest income generated from that preferential access is just one step removed from $BIG_VC getting in on an ICO, pre-ICO or premine by virtue of having insider connections.
Also: of course digging up gold out of the ground is more fair than effortlessly profiting from your country’s political system.
In PoW coins you permanently lose the "stake". So that just means that to achieve the same level of security in a PoS coin, you have to stake a lot more (since you are only losing the time value of the stake).
> In PoW coins you permanently lose the "stake". So that just means that to achieve the same level of security in a PoS coin, you have to stake a lot more (since you are only losing the time value of the stake).
PoS network security reduces down to top-down human intervention: because PoS networks are unmined, they lack all hashing power which could otherwise be used to build a quantitative fork ranking protocol. When forks occur in PoS, the network stewards have to “pick” a winning forked chain, and enforce that decision on the entire network.
Because there’s by definition no hashing power involved in reaching that decision, it’s a bit of a wonder why PoS networks rely on blockchains at all. PoS security doesn’t really depend on anything other than the level of trust you have in the centralized authorities who control the PoS network. In the best of cases, it’s akin to trusting a Debian-like organization to annoint a specific branch of a Git repository as containing the true history of changes during any project-level dispute.
Unfortunately it's more complex than that. You can't rely on number of stakers for anything because of sybil attacks. You also can't rely on amount of stake because some of it could be double-staked (you can detect this but it still may not help you choose which fork is legit). The solutions to PoS fork choice don't really fit in an HN comment.
If you are talking about mining revenue then you are completely wrong about what you have been saying so far, because the rate at which you receive mining rewards is usually around 5-10% pa.
What you're trying to do is have your cake and eat it too. You admit that you are not talking about early adopter profits in general, but you complained above about cost basis of early adopters being low (that's how early adoption typically works).
This is the same as complaining about someone investing in 10 year government bonds and then the underlying currency increasing in buying power.
You could go buy Argentinian or Venezualan bonds right now and hope the peso or bolívar goes up in value. It's no different, all you need is seed money to get started.