>but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'.

PoW is just as much depending on fiat currencies. You can't get electricity without paying for it, you can't get a mining rig without paying for it, etc. This is one of the more common critiques against PoS and it just doesn't hold true at all. With the decentralized finance ecosystem, you can put any supported asset to work and earn ETH or stablecoins or anything else you want and accumulate that way.

>This is one of the more common critiques against PoS and it just doesn't hold true at all.

Maybe I'm an edge-case (I don't think so), but I was able to use the hardware I already owned, and the electricity already included in my utilities bill to acquire enough Ether that would allow me to deploy a smart contract. That won't be possible anymore in the future. So you're factually wrong, at least in my case.

Globally, very few people have gaming GPUs. You're super-privileged and you're effectively arguing for locking in your privilege and making the other 90% of the world worse off. PoS puts everyone on an equal footing. You want to stake? Buy in.

PoS does not put everyone on an equal footing. PoS privileges those who got in early and had the money or hardware to acquire a large chunk of the coin.

It's ridiculous you talk about financial privilege. Who the hell do you think owns most crypto? You think it is people living on the streets in India? Children in Africa?

You sound super delusional. I can't believe it.

You definitely are an edge case if you were already paying your utility bills in cryptocurrency. Otherwise, you spent fiat currency to bootstrap your use of Etherium.

I didn't mean that I pay my electricity bill in crypto. I meant that my small apartment has a fixed electricity rate so that I don't have to pay any extra for running 2 GPUs, and that I already owned the hardware to mine, independent of crypto. So I didn't invest anything. Sorry for being unclear.

Frankly, right now anyone who isn't already in the game isn't able to acquire Ether without paying for it.

Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment, and is already out of reach for the average person. Setting your desktop computer to mine definitely won't pay for your small smart contract.

> Mining at a rate necessary to get any reasonable amount of Ether is a huge investment,

I started mining on my own PC a couple weeks ago, with the GPUs I already had (2x 1080ti) and made about 0.5 Ether so far. So it's definitely not impossible to get enough currency that enables you to interact or even deploy a smart contract on a consumer PC with a little bit of time.

Same goes for staking in ETH2 as you don't need 32 ETH. You can join a stake pool.

What mining software are you using?

I just use PhoenixMiner. Anything that has the feature of reducing memory latency ('-straps 2'). Getting 47 mhash/s per 1080ti with that.

I actually had to spin up a Virtual Machine with GPU passthrough to launch Windows because I couldn't get the GPU tweaks working on Linux. Really nice how vfio is now in the Linux kernel, it's been a breeze going through the setup (compared to a couple years ago when you needed a custom kernel.)

I too have been skeptical of PoS, but IMO the thinking behind it has gotten better and better and there are pretty large chains that have been running without compromise.

Thankfully with ETH 2.0 the cost of publishing data on the chain will drop dramatically (there will be ~63x increase in throughput of publishing data, not transactions) so contract creation should be cheaper.

But really if you are interested in the space it might make sense to just publish on an L2 like polygon.

>but comes at the great cost that people who aren't already in the game won't be able to acquire Ether without basically paying cash for it. That's a weird dependence on fiat currencies for a 'decentralized ledger'. (And yeah, there might be other means, but none of them are really practical for the average person.)

There's no inherent weird dependency on cash, there's only a dependency on whatever currency people choose to pay each other for work, which currently happens to be cash.

If people started paying each other in Ethereum-based tokens, you could close the loop and cash would not be a dependency.

You can do pooled staking with small additional risks:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/ethereum-2.0-staking-and-stake...

It is a scam -- all current crypto is a scam for the same reason. One of the other things that people don't understand is that currency and government are inseparable. When you buy Eth (or any other crypto) you're buying into a new system of government.

Do you want to be a citizen of that new government? What will they do for their citizens? Do they plan to build roads or anything else?

Seigniorage should go to the people not the capital holders.

Also, if people don't think there will be validators for each wallet with 32 coins -- which are producing Co2 -- then they are wrong. It just changes the game, not the incentives.

Currency and local government can be completely divorced and I think crypto will prove this in the future. I don't think governments will begin to care one way or another as long as they get theirs and taxes are paid. If you can score currency from around the globe and bring it home to a more local domain and pay in to the system where you live, they should have no problem with it.

And the validators, PoS anyway, use very little energy even compared to traditional coin minting.