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Very weird submission, the linked post is 2 years old. Received no attention whatsoever, then the Copyright is updated to CC0 4 hours ago and suddenly gets posted to Hackernews.

Furthermore, the proposal is a bit non-sensical. It's still possible to fork Ethereum, as a staker you must choose which chain you want to stake. You cannot stake in both because you would get slashed. But if you decide that Ethereum-fork is your preferred version of Ethereum you can turn-off your Ethereum validators and only validate on Ethereum-fork. That's OK.

The market will decide which network is most valuable.

There are no miners on Ethereum for years already.

The money is owed to our future selfs or generations to come, who pay the interests.

If the money obtained through debt is well invested such that it creates growth that outpaces the interest rate then all is good, as future tax payers will have a larger economy to be taxed in order to pay that debt. But if it's not, we are just stealing from the future.

When a country acquires debt to finance its pension system, that's just plain and simply inter-generational robbery. It's pensioners voting to give themselves money at the expense of the younger generations. It will become more and more pervasive across the west given our demographics and is crippling entire economies across Europe.

Stagnate in what sense?

What you are missing...

Physics is practiced by hand, pen and paper or chalk and blackboard. There is no IDE or auto-completion.

The short hands, abbreviations, and obscure syntax raise the difficulty to enter into the field but simplify its practice a lot. In fact, it would be nightmarishly verbose if you had to use more explicit terms to the point of making it almost not feasible.

Furthermore, the complexity of learning a few shorthands is incomparable with understanding the underlying concepts. Just because you name things in a more verbose manner and used a more explicit type system you wouldn't be any closer to understanding what any of this means. The effort of learning a short-hand notation to express a concept that takes years of advanced math to grasp is negligible in comparison with the speed up it offers day to day.

The notation is not what is stopping you from understanding it.

> That's just a more polite way to say tax. Being permissionless is cool, but it's still tax in my dict.

It most certainly is not. They are doing a work for the network and getting remunerated for it. That's not a tax. That's what is commonly referred to as a job. A kid that delivers newspapers over the weekend is not taxing the kid that decides not to. Both make a free decision on what to do with their time and effort given how much it's worth to them. Running a validator takes skill, time, opportunity cost, and you assume certain risks of capital loss. You are getting remunerated for it.

> And, who is going to be able to have a larger percentage of their funds staked, a poor or a whale? You need a (mostly) fixed amount of liquidity to use the thing.

Indeed, the protocol cannot solve wealth inequality. That's an out of protocol issue. It cannot cure cancer either.

> In short, I don't see anything preventing me to run 10000 validators with 32 ETH each with very similar cost to running just one. It's certainly not linear.

There are some fixed costs, indeed. But they are rather negligible. You need a consumer-grade PC (1000 USD) and consumer-grade broadband to solo stake. Or you can use a Liquid Staking Derivative which will have no fixed costs but will have a 10% cut. The curve of APY as a function of stake is very flat. Almost anything else around us has greater barriers of entry or economies of scale.

> Sure, friends also won't let friends skip the fact that circulating supply of ETH is now decreasing instead of increasing.

This changes absolutely nothing of the calculation. Furthermore, the change in circulating supply last year was of 0.07%.

> Also, only ~30% tokens are staked.

Correct.

> The 30% who chose to stake essentially tax the other 70% in use.

There is something called opportunity cost. With the existence of liquid staking derivatives the choice to stake or not is one of opportunity cost. Plenty of people may consider the return observed by staking insufficient given the opportunity cost and additional risks. Participating in staking is fully permissionless, stakers are not taxing non-stakers. They are being remunerated for their work.

> Each of the validator do exactly same amount of work (that's the point, right) except what they receive is proportioned to how much they stake.

Incorrect. A staker does proportionate amount of work to its stake. That's why it gets paid more. A staker gets paid for fulfilling its duties as defined in the protocol (attesting, proposing blocks, participating in sync committees). For each of those things there are some rewards and some punishments in case you fail to fulfill them. If a staker has more validators running you simply fulfill more of those duties more often, hence your reward scales linearly with number of validators.

How do the rich become gradually richer under PoS? I'm flabbergasted by the level of math education.

Assume we have 2 validators in the network; the first one owns 90% of the network, the second one owns 10%. Lets call them Whale and Shrimpy, respectively.

To make the numbers round let's assume total circulating supply of ETH is 100 initially and that the yield resulting from being a validator is 10% per year. After the first year, 10 new ETH will have been minted. Whale would have gotten 9 ETH, and Shrimpy would have gotten 1 ETH. OP is assuming that as 9 is bigger than 1, Whale is getting richer faster than Shrimpy. But, let's look at the final situation globally.

At year 0:

Total ETH circulating supply: 100 ETH

Whale has 90 ETH. Owns 90% of the network.

Shrimpy has 10 ETH. Owns 10% of the network.

At year 1:

Total ETH circulating supply: 110 ETH

Whale has 99 ETH. Owns 90% of the network.

Shrimpy has 11 ETH. Owns 10% of the network.

Whale has exactly the same network ownership after validating for 1 whole year, the network is not centralizing at all! The rich are not getting richer any faster than the poor.

TL;DR: Friends don't let friends skip elementary math classes.

Very likely, but if they get it sorted out one day he will be using it without knowing.

If you have no interest whatsoever and they start explaining to you all the cryptography behind establishing a secure connection to your bank most people would dismiss it as mumbo-jumbo. But now you can tell your grandma to look out for the little green lock on the web that makes her account secure.

Providing global instant settlement for sub-cent fees? Doubt it.

If you ascertain some value to the permissionless and self-custodial value of cash. And you see value in the internet's ability to connect the entire world. Then it follows immediately that you see value in cryptocurrency.

Because you cannot use cash to transact globally, and you cannot use digital forms of central bank issued currency permissionlessly or have self-custody. Cryptocurrency gives you all those three properties.

So you must give up something. HNers typically are willing to give up the permissionless and self-custody properties. After all, most of HN audience lives in developed democratic countries where personal freedoms are considered fundamental pillars and protected. But at a minimum you should consider that, not all the world lives under those circumstances. And that there are no guarantees that those circumstances will always be preserved in your cozy first world country. Certainly if you are willing to give them up so easily.

Don't be so quick to assume it cannot happen where you live. One day they may go after some fringe truckers protesting in Canada. Another day they may go after some camgirls earning a living in ways that some executive board of a payment processor considers reprobable. Maybe one day they will tell you in what you can or cannot spend your money or where you can invest it and how much.

You can backup your account with passkeys.