Required reading
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
HN Discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16451187
Also newer article http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pos-still-pointless/
Happy to walk you through what PoS looks like in 2020, but you can look up the information yourself too.
ps. Using the word "maximalist" immediately shrinks your audience to other die-hard crypto fans.
edit: how can something that is being discovered be late? The work on PoS is almost completely greenfield and far from trivial. Many people made many far too optimistic comments about how long it would take to get it right but no one can say it's late...
edit: I mean, several dPoS networks went live without spending enough time considering the game theory attacks, but now we've seen them used on EOS and more recently on Steem so thats why I (personally) believe a real PoS is still a few months away at best.
Unfortunately, many people don't understand the actual dynamics of all of this and they equate ETH2 phase 0, which is supposed to see the light of day this year (I'm personally doubtful of even that), with the 'end' of PoW. Nobody in their right mind would trust many billions of value to some brand new unproven consensus model.
That said, if they think they can make it work, I'm all for letting them try.
The one PoS system I'm (edit: deeply) familiar with is Ethereum 2.0's, I wrote about it a couple of years back: https://medium.com/@jpa_of_snc/consensus-casper-and-cryptoec...
There are testnets using this already: https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/ethereum-2-0-phase-0-testn...
I wish I had an Alveo board. Sheesh, now would be the time. You could fit the whole DAG into HBM.
Even with HBM on the card... while it will hash fast, you're still going through the memory controller. What you need to do is skip that. Get rid of the memory hardness entirely. Generate the DAG on demand.
[1] https://github.com/ethereum-cat-herders/progpow-audit/blob/m...
Interestingly, Maker is currently built on top of (Ethereum) PoW. Some day, ETH2, which is PoS (proof-of-stake), will solve all the same issues you're talking about. Or at least that is the dream. We will then have a pretty amazing digital rube goldberg machine where we can sit back and watch the gears turn.