> For the example of proof of work the assumption is that every human can own and dedicate about the same amount of computing power. I'm not aware of anybody p

> For the example of proof of work the assumption is that every human can own and dedicate about the same amount of computing power. I'm not aware of anybody proposing that bitcoin would be a democratic protocol. There were other proposals that were intended to be democratic, but this was explicitly rejected for bitcoin. You might say that bitcoin was intended to be computationally secure against democracy itself. > Everyone else now trusts the miners on the basis of aligned incentives Not really. It's on the basis of cost. Let's say you want to reverse a transaction. First you have to have >50% of the network hash power, which means you need to procure >100% of the current hash rate. That would take at least 2 years and $10B. But let's say you bought 300% of the network hash rate, so you own 75% of it. Great. Now you're two years behind, and at 75% it will take you 4 years for your fork to catch up, so 6 years total. Congratulations, now you've caught up and have the longest chain. Oops, nobody cares; only the main chain coins can be traded for coins, cash, goods, or services. You just spent a huge amount of money to prove that there is no such thing as a 51% attack on a UTXO blockchain. BTW, not so for a stateful blockchain like ETH/ETC. 51% can take control immediately. The difference is that verification on a stateful blockchain doesn't require proof of origin, just consistency with state. A 51% attacker can easily manipulate the state if they maintain control long enough, just by broadcasting their chosen state to any incumbents. Sure, they could do full verification, but, nobody does that. Most full nodes take a while just to sync from the snapshots, never mind genesis.