For all my criticism, I love that crytpocurrencies started a discussion about designing money. Unfortunately, all proof-of-work schemes allocate new money only to people who already have a lot of old money. We can do better.
It's useful to be more precise here. Proof-of-work rewards those who invest in and operate physical capital. Proof of Stake is a reversible allocation that literally does as you describe.
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Proof-of-work rewards those who operate the capital, yes, but if a) it requires huge investment to get into the game and b) the rate of return is well beyond zero economic profit, then it exacerbates inequality relative to, you know, any other payment system.
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The minimum capital investment to GPU mine is a few thousand at the moment, with payout between 9 and 12 months. That's real money, but, less than a food truck or a six-light grow op.
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All of this is rapidly changing and could be more or less true in a month. My point is there's a distinction between operating real equipment, and proof of stake, which is literally rewarding those who have money and don't spend it for awhile.
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I see the distinction, but in practice most of the work of proof-of-work is done by very large, very rich mining consortia.
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Mining (the name sucks) is a specialized sort of server, so the economics are similar. The Internet is open/decentralized but we still have AWS.
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I'm keenly interested in engineering distributed systems that are resistant to consolidation. It's difficult!
End of conversation
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