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I hadn't really thought of the legitimate cryptocurrencies that way. The early adopters would explain their large holdings as just being an unavoidable conseque

I hadn't really thought of the legitimate cryptocurrencies that way. The early adopters would explain their large holdings as just being an unavoidable consequence or necessary for them to keep the project alive. But you're probably right that they deliberately set things up to be entrenched powers over everyone. When I think of it that way, the Proof-of-Stake looks like it benefits mostly the large, early holders. I could be wrong but the current 6.1% return Ethereum gets is a very nice mining profit available to large stake holders. It seems like staking would be most easily done by people who already have large holdings and want to generate income from it. In that sense it's almost kind of feudal and I am wondering if POS was at least partly set up for that purpose.

chrisco255 5y ago
I think when a blockchain network begins as POS, this is correct. It's almost impossible to distribute the funds in a way that doesn't benefit the early adopters, because they need to stake a large chunk of the available supply to secure the network against attacks. But Ethereum didn't begin as POS, it began as POW and has been POW for 6 years now. They allowed anyone to participate in the pre-sale in 2014 and got BTC deposits from thousands of people to bootstrap the network. As a result, no one has more than 1% of ETH supply. Vitalik himself has about 300K ETH or so (less than half a percent). BTC Proof-of-Work today requires large amounts of capital to earn new coins and already ~89% of the supply has been mined. To mine the last 11%, you need massive datacenters filled with ASIC miners, access to massive amounts of electricity, and you need to spend capex on upgrades the whole way. There's no perfect solution as each approach have trade-offs, but at least Ethereum is a platform. Anyone can launch a token on top of the platform, create a protocol like Uniswap and turn it into a multi-billion dollar DAO.

chrisco255 5y ago

I think when a blockchain network begins as POS, this is correct. It's almost impossible to distribute the funds in a way that doesn't benefit the early adopters, because they need to stake a large chunk of the available supply to secure the network against attacks. But Ethereum didn't begin as POS, it began as POW and has been POW for 6 years now. They allowed anyone to participate in the pre-sale in 2014 and got BTC deposits from thousands of people to bootstrap the network. As a result, no one has more than 1% of ETH supply. Vitalik himself has about 300K ETH or so (less than half a percent). BTC Proof-of-Work today requires large amounts of capital to earn new coins and already ~89% of the supply has been mined. To mine the last 11%, you need massive datacenters filled with ASIC miners, access to massive amounts of electricity, and you need to spend capex on upgrades the whole way. There's no perfect solution as each approach have trade-offs, but at least Ethereum is a platform. Anyone can launch a token on top of the platform, create a protocol like Uniswap and turn it into a multi-billion dollar DAO.