Gold was money; Gold was equivalent to the USD when the USD was sound. In other words, a sound money is not something that could be defined in fiat terms.
An unsound money, is a money that could be debased, at will, through inflation.
Bitcoin is the closest thing we have to a perfect sound money. This makes Bitcoin 1000x better than Gold. A sound money should be hard to produce. In other words, a fiat currency that could be printed to infinity with a simple keyboard, can't even compete with Gold, and Gold is obsolete... "Proof of Work" is what makes Bitcoin Sound, and state level resistant!
F.A. Hayek in 1984: "I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop."
Proof of stake is viable only with full centralization.
In a PoS system, participants are incentivized to compute the most advantageous state for themselves, because it costs nothing to do so.
This is solved, in the current implementations, with a node more equal than the others. In other words, the security model is the same as our regular centralized databases.
Post 1971 monies are by definition a con; This is reason why people like Bill Gate would have been unable to maintain his wealth without the Fed and the Cantillon Effect.
Could you at least prove that Ethereum is not a scam? Only short-term traders (or paid shills) are trying to push this. This makes the point that this is non investment grade digital asset.
It makes sense, only if they don't have the proper engineering knowledge. Otherwise, this is the same as trying to sell an airplane propeller, as the final and only product, while ignoring everything else composing the plane.
Cryptocurrencies are not the significant application. As a matter of fact 99.99% of these cryptocurrencies are not decentralized, and are only reinventing the concept of database.
Instead of defending Bitcoin, ask people to defend a monetary policy that REQUIRES endless printing and manipulation. https://twitter.com/JeffBooth/...
"Here's what I continue to tell people: name to me a business that was analog and got digitized, and the digital version is smaller than the analog version. It doesn't happen. It's because digitization brings all kinds of advantages. It's a market-expanding technology." Pompliano