Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency

There actually is an estimate of this floating in the chia Keybase channel. I remember it being very low, but there are many variables. Even at 100x the estimate it came down to less than 10 million USD in CO2 offsets.

>If the devs have a 51% share of staked ETH and they never sell any ETH then even if you buy all ETH on the market you will never get beyond 49%. The only way that can happen is if the devs to decide to hand over control to you voluntarily.

In that case the currency loses value to other currency competition because currency, Eth in this case, doesn't exist in its own ecosphere. The big holders still have an incentive to sell some portion of it.

PoS signifies the power of currency just as PoW does. The whole basis of PoW is to expend work and in return exchange and project power. Stake is projected power earned, sometimes not because not everyone is said to earn what they get, from other expended power. The whole world works on powers, be it financial, physical, etc and we're all exchanging one for another. As long as those powers have power to project themselves and protect themselves enough to propagate well, either through military or math (through the network), they are valid. The network is its own authority (much as the military or government is a network) and through various governments, hard powers, cryptocurrencies have also recently earned some legitimacy that way.

To me this all seems silly. You can trade sticks and if someone imbues them with symbolic powers and everyone agrees, it can just as well become a currency. We can disagree from here to the moon on what currencies or methods therein should or shouldn't have legitimacy but if no one cares, you have little to no power to change it. If you can get a big network behind it, there's legitimacy of authority whether you agree or not.

> Therefore information can enter the Blockchain and be stored there, but it cannot have impact outside the blockchain because the world isn't being simulated inside a decentralized blockchain.

And to reiterate, economic predictions are very hard due to us not living in a closed economic system, other powers influence economics, they don't exist just within their own sphere. You seem to imply this but seem to forget that your same argument could also be applied to traditional fiat. Blockchains may be decentralized but they have their own authorities and realities to which they're bound to. What happens in the crypto world very much affects the non-crypto world as we've seen.

>Another common trap is to build a programming language where the only significant project written in that language is the compiler.

The common theme here seems to be that you're railing against domain discretion, which itself, is a valid strategy within certain domains but I've reiterated that it has its own negatives in that nothing is totally discrete in reality, you can't have your own perfect domain without influence of other domains. Eth in this case, or PoS specifically, doesn't and can't exist within its own reality, it's no more a feedback currency than traditional fiat which is exemplified in that the rich tend to get richer, a theme which exists in many other domains, power attracts power, there's no escaping that. Yet there is a universal fairness in that more power for individual benefit means more power that can turn against you, which is a whole other topic. I think you're trying to argue against something more universal and it's pointless because it's so embedded in the universal machine. PoW, PoS, whatever, both require vigilance to acquire and maintain power that are ultimately derived from some form of work in the real world, regardless of method. PoS is old money, it can perpetuate decadence in the real world by relying on what's done while PoW, new money, may exemplify newness and chaos by relying on change or what's to become, both can work as methods of power transactions in crypto just as in the real world.

Silly argument, I spent way too much time talking about this so guess that means I'm silly, no doubt about that.

> And yet, anyone who buys these proof-of-stake coins now, years after they were launched, suffers from having a cost basis orders of magnitude higher than that of the early investors. Yeah, they’re all superficially earning “the same staking ROI”. But in relative terms, the earliest investors are mopping the floor with the later investors, because the earliest investors can stake orders of magnitude more coins.

Sure, but how is that any different than proof-of-work early adopters becoming rich and being able to afford more mining hardware and electricity?

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.

> I don't know anyone who says PoS is "more fair"

And I don’t know anyone who uses Bitcoin for illicit purposes. Imagine that.