> Taken to its conclusion, PoW and PoS are exactly the same.

> In a PoW environment you can take some of your coins, 'stake' them by buying a share in a mining pool [...]

Playing devil's advocate: there's a small but important difference in that, for PoW, you can "stake" coins from outside the system (for instance, by buying an ASIC miner with real money), while for PoS, the coins you "stake" must come from within the system itself. That is, PoS is a closed system.

PoW is an openly leaking system that requires participants to leak system value to external ASIC producers and external electricity producers.

The PoS system keeps value in the system. PoS also has more ability to reduce influence of malicious miners/validators by slashing what is needed for a bad validator to continue to participate.

You can buy GPUs/ASICs with $, so can you buy coins with $. PoS is as "open" as PoW, except the means of exchange is different. For PoW, you convert electricity (capital) into coins, whereas PoS you convert money (capital) into coins.

Small quibble but broadly agree. In PoW you convert capital into electricity which then gets converted into coins. In PoS you convert capital into coins which then gets converted into more coins. Same starting material, same ending material, different intermediate steps. That's why my argument is that they're basically the same at the limit.