> Needing to do it at all, at the beginning, means there is no mathematically pure way to validate the consensus state and nobody can affect the concensus unles

> Needing to do it at all, at the beginning, means there is no mathematically pure way to validate the consensus state and nobody can affect the concensus unless it's rooted in this initial distribution. You also need to validate the software binary or source code out of bound at the beginning, so having to additionally validate out of bound the state makes little difference. > Yes, this is exactly the censorship that is available in PoS and not PoW. I help minority PoW protocols integrate PoS features for this reason, and it's also the reason there will always be PoW chains. Because some social networks demand uncensorable participation that can't be selectively hard forked away. As I said, a PoW chain isn't any more resistant to censorship via hardforks. You can literally hardfork a PoW chain into a PoS chain. It is impossible to make anything secure or whatever if you consider hardforks as something an attacker can execute at will and force people to move to the new fork.