I'm not saying this is you, but many people on HN will cry out "Use Boring Tech!" while also not understanding why Bitcoin is king.
Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_.
Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.
Your point could be truth in theory, and/or in the future.
However, in practice, it seems that it almost works the other way around.
To mine on BTC, you cannot enter the game with 10$ to your name. You can't buy a mining rig, it is way too wasteful to mine on your existing CPU, etc.
However if we look for example at staking in Ethereum, there are decentralized (no trust required) pools that allow you to stake however little amount of ETH. The chain itself will require at least 32ETH to run a single meaningful staking contract, but through pooling this is directly practically accessible to anyone with even small amount of ETH.
There's a difference between merely making money and being your own sovereign node in the network that is not reliant on anyone else (other than your source of electricity :P).
Just making money, yes you can pool together. And that's a great feature of smart contract networks. But we are also seeing smart contracts being brought into Bitcoin that allows the same things. I just think sovereignty and making money shouldn't be conflated.
Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources? This is why people argue PoS blockchains are (besides being more eco-friendly) actually more decentralized.
>Doesn't the same hold for PoW systems, except the X amount is in the form of mining resources?
That's not as true as I would have thought. Surprisingly, a single person can have a profitable mining setup on Bitcoin today. It might only be $10 USD per day profit, but it's something. To me, that is an achievement.
Bitcoin is old, secure, proven, and most importantly _simple_.
Of course what you sacrifice with Proof of Stake is sovereignty. A random person cannot participate in the network unless they have X amount of existing resources. So that's the trade-off as I understand it. Depends on where your values align. No doubt that existing financial institutions would prefer to be core partners with a performant PoS chain.