This just begs the question that while Vitalik and co. always knew that what they were promising (smart contracts) is only possible in a centralized system like this, why'd they galvanize the community with the promise of decentralization. Like, all of this community was shown a vision of a decentralized, permissionless compute-on-the-blockchain system.
Why POS makes the system centralized in your opinion? Because rich people will own majority of "shares/ stock/ equity" = voting power?
When talking about centralization/ decentralization, i think it is always about who can control the chain. In PoS, all you need to control/ re-org the chain is stake. In PoW, even if you need a lot of resources for mining, you do not invest those resources into "stake", you invest it into hardware which provides you an income. It does not give you a "say" in the network.
Isn't it even worse with POW, where rich people with resources can set mining farm in most profitable location all around the globe, negotiate lower hardware prices, negotiate lower energy price = can mine cheaper than others with less money?
My line of thinking is that having the ability to mine more coins does not make you have control over the chain. In PoS, there will always be a central party, a corporation, a foundation deciding on a variety of parameters to set which determine how the chain proceeds. Those decisions can easily be influenced by those who have the most money to invest into buying "shares".
If you see what has happened with MEV (Bots essentially bribing miners for transaction bundles that sandwich other people's transactions), it seems to me that even PoW is not suitable for something like smart-contracts on-chain involving huge transactions. It is not a purely decentralized version that is sold to investors and people around the world. Its an esoteric world where bots are making 100s of ETH at the expense of users. Nobody talks about it and nobody cares. Imagine if a bank infrastructure provider was guzzling away millions of dollars in transaction fee, would it be considered trustworthy?
I think the problem of MEV will only exaggerate with PoS. If you think its otherwise, then I'll be glad to discuss. You see, I have been looking for a good Pro-ETH user on the Altcoin section for sometime to discuss this stuff. Yet, there are mostly just farmers and spammers here. Good to have you.
With POS you need 32 ETH and you can mine as efficient as a hodler with 100k ETH (profit from 1 ETH will be constant).
I agree that from the "fee distribution" point of view, this sounds better. Yet, how is this different from mining where you can have the same earning by directing your hashpower to a pool and getting the BTC depending on your portion of the hashrate??