Why proof of work is non-negotiable

Now if you understood Bitcoin, if you REALLY understood Bitcoin, you understand why proof-of-work is fundamental to its design. You understand why it's indispensable for any public, permissionless blockchain that's serious about decentralization.

I could write all day as to why but I don't mean to waste anybody's time for something so rudimentary that there couldn't possibly be an argument about this. I'll keep this as clear and concise as possible.

Fundamentally Flawed Fiat Money

Let's take a first-principles approach to why we have Bitcoin.

What exactly was Satoshi trying to solve that he, as many cypherpunks who contributed to what eventually became Bitcoin, thought for decades was fundamentally broken about money? Trust.

Trust is a consequence of centralized, focused issuance and control of monetary supply, exacerbated by trivial cost of issuance.

While issuance entails no cost, the money remains at the mercy of the basest of human qualities, self-seeking greed. All corruptive tendencies of fiat money are a direct consequence of the trivial cost to issue infinite money.

So the two fundamental flaws of the fiat system Bitcoin solved were trivial cost of issuance and centralized, focused injection of money, aka Cantillon Effect.

Satoshi's Solution

Satoshi's PoW algorithm solved for them by implementing an ingenious cost of creation/issuance algorithm that forever somehow scales in proportion with Bitcoin's value to humanity as a trustless global monetary network and ensuring that the cost incurred in creating money prohibited the recipients of the new injection of money from hoarding it all.

Nothing would prevent Bitcoin miners from hoarding the bitcoins they mine if they weren't required to cover recurring real-world costs. These costs also scale perfectly in proportion with the network's value, would you believe it?

A Fatal Compromise

Proof-of-stake is a hermetic system abstracted from any interface with the real world that walks back on these two solutions. There's no cost of creation/issuance and no disincentive to prevent hoarding. If anything it incentivizes large stakers to hoard and perpetually amplify their power within the network.

The largest staker would always be the founding entity/company if the project was launched unfairly through an ICO/premine.

It is little more than a regression back to the fiat paradigm, if not worse.

Further, any proof-of-stake coin, even those that were not launched through an ICO and/or premined, would qualify as a yield generating asset, meaning that the SEC would have every authority to regulate all proof-of-stake blockchains.

One man's momentary ingenuity, humanity's timeless inheritance.

Let's not be so foolish to throw it all away to slake the self-seeking greed of private companies that launched unfairly and privately issued for themselves all the native tokens at launch and masquerade through crafty social engineering chicanery today as anything even remotely resembling Bitcoin.