The same argument could be made of all scarce assets that rocketed in price in the past years. Watches, the stock market, and real estate don't inherently "centralize wealth". Their price appreciation was only a symptom of the reduced cost of debt, which naturally favors the wealthiest, which reflects in the price of what wealthy people buy when they have too much money (scarce assets).

The base concept of cryptocurrency is enabling free market economies by bypassing government regulation, and at least in the case of Bitcoin and Ethereum, regulating inflation by setting it in code, instead of being opaquely decided by a few wealthy people (some of them convicted of insider-trading[1]). Those two things tend to favor bottom-up wealth creation, rather than the trickle-down model fiat currencies encourage. That's a wealth decentralization force, not centralization like you claim.

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a-timeline-of-the-federal-res...

In principle, inflationary currencies have a force pushing away from wealth centralization, while deflationary currencies have a force pushing towards it, which is why everyone who thinks they'll have the centralized wealth likes deflationary currencies.

That depends entirely where the new money gets injected. If it gets injected at the top, like with our current fiat currencies, then there's nothing wealth-decentralizing about it, all the contrary. [1]

Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever mines them, which could be anyone (less true with the current state of Proof of Work, but still true in the case of Proof of Space), thus the wealth-centralizing mechanism of fiat inflation is removed or at least mitigated.

[1]: https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/89070/what-is-the-cantillo...

While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.

That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it?

> Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.

This is not a problem if the reward distribution is proportional to the investment from miners, which happens when the mining competition has low or inverse economies of scale, and a low barrier to entry.

In PoW and Bitcoin especially, the economies of scale are huge. "Industrial" miners are greatly more profitable than home miners, and ASICs require an upfront investment which comes with risk that smaller operations might not want to take. The result of this high barrier to entry and economies of scale are empirically verifiable by looking at the hash rate from block wins.

A correctly designed PoS system almost completely removes economies of scale (notice I said correctly designed, because many other PoS cryptocurrencies actually explicitly favor larger stakes), but might add some artificial barrier to entry, like Ethereum's 32 ETH minimum. The wealth centralization effect is also amplified in PoS by how directly acquiring the scarce resource required to participate in the competition influences the value of existing stakers' investment.

In Proof of Space consensus protocols (PoST) [1], the scarce resource is storage space. This can have minimal or even inverse economies of scales relative to money invested, as the running costs become almost as minimal as a PoS operation. And since the quality of the storage material is also irrelevant, what matters most is the cost per Tb of acquisition of storage space. The best savings are done on second hand drives, which makes investment in free time rather than money the profit differentiator. The free time to wealth ratio scales inversely, so smaller PoST miners can have a proportional advantage over larger ones. This decentralization effect is empirically verifiable with how much more individual mining nodes the biggest PoST cryptocurrency Chia currently has than Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite the comparatively very low absolute amount of rewards its consensus delivers to its miners.

[1]: full name: Proof of Space and Time, with Time referring to a competition required to get reliable timestamps on the blockchain happening in parallel to the competition over Space.

I know precisely that I see the same old arguments against crypto time after time, but somehow despite all of these scams, carnage, etc. it still refuses to die somehow.

Maybe companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe, Monegram, and even the regulators want it to succeed? If not, they would have banned all the exchanges, coins, and removed all wallets off of the apps stores a long time ago.

So I'm afraid that it is here to stay, with some survivors existing for a long time under certain compliance requirements and other crypto projects withering away.