Sadly, there are very blockchains that focus on simplicity. Most seem to think that more features is better.

How many do we need? Bitcoin works great

Bitcoin is obsolete by now. Monero is everything it was supposed to be.

But Zcash is everything Monero was supposed to be. ;-)

Monero just makes different trade-offs [1], mostly more privacy at the cost of more bloat [2].

[1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html

[2] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart

this line of thinking is quite difficult to get by in the modern world, same applies to vaccines, or to your car, or to the food you eat the browser you use, etc, in fact if you randomly look in your room right now it is very likely that you will be shocked (e.g. the complexity of the HDMI cable)

My HDMI cable is not asking me to trust it with my hard earned money ;-)

Vaccines and cars and everything else you hint at have been around a long time and the trade-offs are pretty well understood. Proof of stake (and it's various implementations) have a long way to go before they reach that status

IMO complication is due to lack of good explanations and lack of understanding of the subject. Bitcoin’s PoW is complicated, the idea is simple but in practice you run into many insecurities (forks, confirmation time, lack of verifiable light client, rule of more work vs longest chain, 51% attacks and how to bootstrap a new chain, centralization of miners, etc.)

On the other hand the hotstuff protocol is much more easy to grasp IMO (check my explanation in the book Real-World Cryptography)

PS: oh and also Bitcoin proof of security seems like a nightmare. It’s nice to create protocols that look simple but if you can’t prove their security it’s a bit dumb :) on the other hand the safety proof of hotstuff is quite comprehensive : https://www.davidwong.fr/lbft_safety/

Bitcoin's proof of work is not that complicated, even though you threw out some words that are peripherally related to it. Nice try though.

I had to look up hotstuff proof of stake. As far as I can tell that's not what Ethereum (the coin we are discussing here) uses? Not sure where you are going with this.

Hotstuff is the state of the art BFT.

Bitcoin is not complicated until you try to implement it yourself and prove it.