I entirely agree. PoW is a total disaster. Thanks to a lot of discussions with @iamnotback I realized HOW MUCH it is a disaster.
Indeed. Moreover, as I recently saw, Satoshi even foresaw that this mining would become totally centralized, defeating the purpose ! It is totally ridiculous to introduce PoW to avoid a sybil attack, and then come to the conclusion that only a few big players will decide on the consensus as a consequence of his "solution".
This is why I think that Satoshi, after he finished the outline of his invention, accepted to modify the design criteria he put forward himself, because his design didn't fit it, but now that he made it, he didn't want to discard it.
That is like wanting to make an airplane, finding out it will not fly, but it will float very well, and declare in the end that your were actually designing a boat !
In the same way, Satoshi wanted "money for everyone to use" and then put in a 1 MB block limit, making it impossible for this to be used as money for more than a few geeks on a few obscure trading places.
Of course, all this can be the work of an evil genius. But Occam's razor makes me believe that this is just a guy in his basement, doing the best he could, and the best he could, he realized, wasn't good enough for what he set out to do, but that wouldn't stop him. Don't put on the shoulders of conspiracy, what can be explained by ignorance.
But you see it's here I see something that still is weird.
If you are a guy in your basement, and that you want to find a solution to keep the chain coherent, and you choice between à simple well proven determinstic solution , or a solution that is completely off chart, super costly, and risky, why he would choose the second ? Why going through all this bother with pow and block reward who introduce huge complexity ? Why ?
Cause if it's too sélect between block header A and B, it doesnt even matter, any can be chosen arbitrarily as long as everyone agree.
Between tx A and B, same, anyway there is one that is a fraud, so any can be picked up.
That could be just be as simple as selecting block and tx based on which have the lowest hash. Period. No pow, no reward, no mining craze.
Why in the name of ocam razor to insert this whole pow in the system ?
If it's not to introduce some kind of un certainty on purpose to encourage speculation. Toss a coin and watch the fools making bets.
If we had to deal with a stream of chaotic random data that make no sense in itself, ok for the pow. Because it need strong power to establish the good stream.
But in the case it doesnt make much sense in this perspective of consensus.
The rule to make the decision could be 100% hard coded in the protocol and basta. The few case where there can be ambiguity are not really that hard to solve.