Why is it taking so long for proof of stake to happen? They've been talking about it for many years and the fact that none of the mainstream coins have moved to proof of stake and there is no rising new coin that uses it, make me think there's a fundamental issue with it.
It's comically complicated once you get into the details of moving an existing chain over from PoW; the Ethereum developers have really been working on it for years and only now have it in a shape that works for multiple Ethereum clients on a shared test network.
If PoW weren't a climate disaster it would have very obvious appeal due to its orders of magnitude simpler implementation.
So why hasn't there been any new POS coins? If the complexity is in maintaining the history, new coins wouldn't have that problem.
Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
That's the majority of actual chains in the top 20, since many of the rest are tokens running on top of other chains (USDT, USDC, SHIB, BUSD, &c)
In general, starting a clone of proof-of-stake Ethereum is a very popular way to make a new chain.
As for the philosophical point, PoW isn't really different. It takes tremendous capital investment to produce enough hash rate to ever mine a BTC. These are all more or less systems in which the rich get richer and the not-rich get to gamble.
> So why hasn't there been any new POS coins? If the complexity is in maintaining the history, new coins wouldn't have that problem.
There are dozens of new networks launched over the last two years, they are all PoS.
> Even outside of any hypothetical technical complexity, a system that explicitly pushes all the power to those with the most money seems antithetical to the point.
What power do PoS stakers have? They select the order of transactions. That's it. The goal is to distribute this role across enough people so that they cannot collude to censor a transaction. That's essentially the only goal.
Doing it in a truly decentralized way with consensus from the community on how to do that on a chain already in motion is no easy task I guess. Vitalik has showed a slide from many years ago with his way too optimistic dates for when proof of stake would be here.
