Page 334/389 in #SoftWar. It’s ramping up, and the meat is definitely towards the end.

Still a bit to go and formulating my final thoughts on his #Bitcoin thesis.

You may disagree with his arguments but I can say…he’s no dummy and certainly understands PoW. An excerpt below, annihilating PoS, was particularly satisfying (sorry, it’s a long quote from a whole chapter).

Curious for others thoughts who have finished it, should be done by tonight.

“Ironicaly, proof-of-stake systems recreate the exact same type of systemically exploitable, trust-based, permission-based, and inegaltarian abstract power hierarchy that it was ostensibly created to replace. Instead of creating a decentralized system, a proof-of-stake system gives unimpeachable control authority over the system to an anonymous group of people who control the most “of an imaginary object called “stake," which is really just another name for rank (i.e. abstract power) and administrative privileges. Instead of creating a decentralized organization, proof-of-stake systems like Ethereum have created a system that masquerades as a decentralized system because those who control the majority supply of

"stake"can take advantage of disembodied nature of software to obfuscate how centralized and consolidated that "stake" is.

…

To repeat the same point using the concepts introduced in section 4.5, "stake" is nothing more than Inaginary power masquerading as real power (watts).

…

It's systemically endogenous to the software which instantiates it, making it highly vulnerable to systemic exploitation and abuse by the people who write the software. It’s physically

unconstrained and thermodynamically unsound, bounded, zero-sum, non-inclusive, inegalitarian, and non-attributable. This makes proof-of-stake protocols physically and systemically opposite from proofot. work protocols.”