It’s not still the early days of blockchain

interest rate at 2-4 % will do the trick. not so long.

the final paragraph seems to summarize the article :

"The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down."

I spent some time looking into Proof-of-Stake coins. Specifically, the Proof-of-Stake system advocated by Tezos. Give it a lookover, it's actually a fairly quick read.

https://tezos.gitlab.io/active/proof_of_stake.html

Unfortunately, it's also very flawed, and nulls most of the security properties we thought we would get by switching to "Blockchain Technology": if someone captures 50% of this chain, it is quite easy and trivial to turn that into a full chain attack, since all future seed data comes from past chain data. The RNG is seeded deterministically, meaning a motivated attacker can maintain influence forever by maintaining control over the seed.

When you usually bring this up, people usually say "yeah, but it would be against the economics interests of the miners to crash their own coins". Aka, the technology isn't providing the security, we're back to the same "no banker would ever be evil enough to crash the economy for small economic gains" security that most cryptocurrency enthusiasts usually claim is evidence of corruption at work. So, no, I don't see what the blockchain is adding over a typical database.

I've tried multiple times to read through the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake FAQ [1], but I have a sneaking suspicion it's intentionally obfuscated, just so people like me bounce off of it.

[1] https://eth.wiki/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs

I feel like even after zooming out and seeing the big picture, it's hard to imagine blockchain solving real world problems. Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain. Anything that has the government in the loop (like buying houses or property) is a non starter and anything that runs on centralized servers (like game NFTs) also doesn't make sense.

Thank you for saying this, this point seems to be completely glossed over frequently, but it’s literally the point of blockchains.

To be explicit, the reason blockchains exist is to have a globally consistent database that doesn’t require trusting the operator.