Why I’m so “against” Ethereum

They didn't do it by themselves either. They got miners and exchanges on board as well.

Also if you disagree and you think there's a better way to develop it you can by creating a fork or sell your coins. There is nothing stopping you.

> they’re talking about (imo) how it’s “safe” to put money into because “no one owns the crypto coin” and if anyone still believes that latter part, well, they probably aren’t paying attention.

There's a difference between believing nobody has significant sway over how the cryptocurrency should be developed and you personally having full control over your own coins.

By the way, not much mentioned in the discussion but I'm for Ethereum and kind of anti Bitcoin because of the awful environmental impact of proof or work which the Ethereum folk are at least trying to find a solution to.

The validator set changes as people bond or unbond coins in exchange for stake. Running a fair and secure initial distribution is a somewhat orthogonal problem; perhaps you can run an open auction. Any Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake systems has issues with low security in the beginning. Consider that until late ~2012 the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network was less than the hashrate of a single Antminer S9.

> This is the general problem of proof-of-stake: it assumes the presence of consensus in order to arrive at consensus. This is because consensus is reached by utilizing the scarce resource that is the chain’s token, but without consensus in the first place this token isn’t scarce at all.

Consensus and scarcity are tightly related. The consensus process and protocol spec are what make the token scarce, since by definition the majority agree on the token's inflation rate, supply, block reward, etc.... What happens when validators try to fork and change these parameters? They are directly incentivized to do so, yet similarly, what happens when Bitcoin miners try to change the block reward? Of course, they don't hold all the power; with sufficient cause and collaboration, users can signal a user-activated soft fork, or simply choose to follow the original unmodified fork.

> Proof-of-work uses something external to its chain as the scarce resource that determines consensus (energy), while proof-of-stake uses something internal to its chain (the chain’s token). This means that when a PoW chain forks, the two chains have to share the external resource, while the resource is copied for PoS chain forks.

Yes, this is called the "nothing-at-stake" problem, and it is solved by punishing validators who equivocate. This enforces scarcity of voting power across forks. The point is they can't exercise their voting power on both chains. As soon as they vote on one fork, they are committed. The validators on the other fork are incentivized to delete their stake if they vote on the other fork simultaneously.

However, as someone now deeply involved in the tech, I'm pretty confident that the use cases are coming and are delayed solely because of peculiar obstacles that will likely get resolved in the near future.

From the Cardano paper [1] p. 47,

> Even if the attacker could find a strategy to generate an alternative chain with valid leader selection data, presenting this chain and its blocks generated at slots that are far ahead of time would not result in a successful attack since those blocks far ahead of time would be rejected by the honest stakeholders and the final alternative chain would be shorter than the main chain.

At first glance, the attacker then needs to gain the keys for almost all of the bonded stake at some point in the past. This is obviously a stricter requirement than holding keys for 2/3+ of the stake at some point in the past, but still seems remotely plausible when targeting the small set of validators in the early bootstrapping period. Remember also that these early validators could be totally cashed out of the system and thus have actually have no disincentive not to sell their keys.

Actually, even controlling only 2/3+ of some past stake, the attacker can likely grind on the randomness beacon outputs (since they control all the shares) to ensure his controlled keys have near 100% of the slots in the next epoch. Then the long range fork would be of a similar or possibly even greater length than the honest fork.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf