Long Live Proof-of-Work, Long Live Mining - "there is no meaningful alternative"

[fenican]

Long term, the cost of mining bitcoin will be in advanced chip R&D not power consumption -- and mining may not be Democratic. The company who invested the most in low power / high throughput ASICS may just horde their creation and dominate mining.

[kokojie]

This thread is nothing but PoW miner shills trying to hold on to their waning power, as the crypto world is increasingly moving toward the superior PoS system.

i totally agree, but in all honesty i think something further superior to PoS will surpass PoS as the alternative algo that will challenge PoW.  

its simple evolution.

I don't think it's likely, since PoS has reached nearly perfect efficiency in terms of resources. The further variations are subsets of PoS, such as DPoS, TaPoS, they can improve upon PoS, but the core ideas of PoS is unlikely to change.

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

That sounds like another subset of PoS, but with an added layer of determining which stakes are more important. I think that's still PoS at the core.

This is another advantage of PoS, the specific implementation is very flexible, able to fit different needs and easily be improved upon.

no its entirely written from scratch. according to the devs it wouldnt be possible for PoI to be migrated into existing pos algos due to the difference in architecture or something.

The code is written from scratch, sure. But PoS is not a piece of code, it's a concept. If you are using stakes as the proof, then it's PoS. I think it should actually be called IBPoS (Importance Based Proof of Stake) instead of PoI, the "importance" is not the proof, the stake is the proof. The "importance" part is used to determine the weighting of each stake. Calling it PoI is inaccurate.

[kodtycoon]

This thread is nothing but PoW miner shills trying to hold on to their waning power, as the crypto world is increasingly moving toward the superior PoS system.

i totally agree, but in all honesty i think something further superior to PoS will surpass PoS as the alternative algo that will challenge PoW.  

its simple evolution.

I don't think it's likely, since PoS has reached nearly perfect efficiency in terms of resources. The further variations are subsets of PoS, such as DPoS, TaPoS, they can improve upon PoS, but the core ideas of PoS is unlikely to change.

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

That sounds like another subset of PoS, but with an added layer of determining which stakes are more important. I think that's still PoS at the core.

This is another advantage of PoS, the specific implementation is very flexible, able to fit different needs and easily be improved upon.

no its entirely written from scratch. according to the devs it wouldnt be possible for PoI to be migrated into existing pos algos due to the difference in architecture or something.

The code is written from scratch, sure. But PoS is not a piece of code, it's a concept. If you are using stakes as the proof, then it's PoS. I think it should actually be called IBPoS (Importance Based Proof of Stake) instead of PoI, the "importance" is not the proof, the stake is the proof. The "importance" part is used to determine the weighting of each stake.

its not based on stake. it uses importance as proof, thus its proof of importance. the stake an account has is only a (small) part of the calculation, hence why a merchant could have 10 or 100 nem but have a higher weighting than a hoarder with 1,000,000 nem or even 10,000,000 as far as i know at least. because of this it is easy to see that the other calculations in PoI are weighted higher than the stake of an account so it cannot be considered PoS. if the stake an account has was the biggest piece of the puzzle i would agree with you but its not.

[saddampbuh]

Exactly, PoS is a try to get rich scheme and is a complete failure compared to PoW and its superior security

what's so secure about a couple of pools run by asic manufacturers controlling the network one having already gained control of 51% just a few months ago

government or anyone with bad intentions could spend a few tens of millions to buy or build enough asics to destroy the bitcoin network for fun but buying 51% of all the coins would take tens of billions

people think pos is a bad idea because they saw some 20 btc market cap ponzi alt get forked , that's all it is

[dwma]

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

this also plays into things like the asset exchange. with pos, scammers would be listed exactly the same as genuine vendors and therefore have a high chance of scamming, thus assets could not be listed and require users to know the asset ID.

with proof of importance, assets can be listed by importance score, as well as volume, importance gained from or history of past assets among other methods, merchants that do not meet the minimum requirement would not be listed until they meet the minimum requirement which vastly reduces the chances of scammers being listed. PoI will open many doors when it comes to online marketplaces/asset exchange that would not be possible with PoS.

I looked a few months ago and not a whitepaper was published from what I saw.

POI seems quite likely to be sybil attacked.

When you determine POI algorithmically then it can be gamed algorithmically.

[kodtycoon]

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

this also plays into things like the asset exchange. with pos, scammers would be listed exactly the same as genuine vendors and therefore have a high chance of scamming, thus assets could not be listed and require users to know the asset ID.

with proof of importance, assets can be listed by importance score, as well as volume, importance gained from or history of past assets among other methods, merchants that do not meet the minimum requirement would not be listed until they meet the minimum requirement which vastly reduces the chances of scammers being listed. PoI will open many doors when it comes to online marketplaces/asset exchange that would not be possible with PoS.

I looked a few months ago and not a whitepaper was published from what I saw.

POI seems quite likely to be sybil attacked.

When you determine POI algorithmically then it can be gamed algorithmically.

no whitepaper yet. i cant comment on the likely hood of nem by sybil attacked as i dont know the tech details havnt been released yet. but the dev team is in a league of its own.. nem is the only 2.0 coin so far thats stable bar nxt of course. crypti, exo, and all the rest are falling apart. if its been a while since you looked at it you should check out the latest beta release.. the pace of development is astounding.

anyway the proof will be in the pudding. launch is soon so whitepaper and open sourcing shouldnt be long after.

[dwma]

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

this also plays into things like the asset exchange. with pos, scammers would be listed exactly the same as genuine vendors and therefore have a high chance of scamming, thus assets could not be listed and require users to know the asset ID.

with proof of importance, assets can be listed by importance score, as well as volume, importance gained from or history of past assets among other methods, merchants that do not meet the minimum requirement would not be listed until they meet the minimum requirement which vastly reduces the chances of scammers being listed. PoI will open many doors when it comes to online marketplaces/asset exchange that would not be possible with PoS.

I looked a few months ago and not a whitepaper was published from what I saw.

POI seems quite likely to be sybil attacked.

When you determine POI algorithmically then it can be gamed algorithmically.

no whitepaper yet. i cant comment on the likely hood of nem by sybil attacked as i dont know the tech details havnt been released yet. but the dev team is in a league of its own.. nem is the only 2.0 coin so far thats stable bar nxt of course. crypti, exo, and all the rest are falling apart. if its been a while since you looked at it you should check out the latest beta release.. the pace of development is astounding.

anyway the proof will be in the pudding. launch is soon so whitepaper and open sourcing shouldnt be long after.

develop first, then when stakes are finally sold you release white paper?  How is that supposed to work ?

There is no reason to think the dev team is in a league of their own when they're all anonymous.  What previous projects did they work on?

The release does little for me if the innovation is tied into POI which still has not been explained.  White papers aren't that hard, they don't need to be thoroughly researched.  You just present your idea in a well thought out paper.  Why code it all up first ?   "Someone will steal the idea" ?

I am highly skeptical POI will work without a real life identity tied into this importance metric.

[kodtycoon]

develop first, then when stakes are finally sold you release white paper?  How is that supposed to work ?

There is no reason to think the dev team is in a league of their own when they're all anonymous.  What previous projects did they work on?

The release does little for me if the innovation is tied into POI which still has not been explained.  White papers aren't that hard, they don't need to be thoroughly researched.  You just present your idea in a well thought out paper.  Why code it all up first ?   "Someone will steal the idea" ?

I am highly skeptical POI will work without a real life identity tied into this importance metric.

the white paper could not have been written prior to stake registration as the code hadnt even been written.. people signed up for a trivial fee of between free and 700 nxt.. that was back in febuary time.. and stakes wernt sold. there were no stakes at that point. there was nothing. people signed up to the movement for trivial fees and it was done then to give everyone a fair chance at signing up regardless of how much money they had. also it was supposed to be a clone so fewer people bothered to create sock puppets. imagine how many sock accounts would have signed up now if they knew stakes were worth near 1000 dollars?

well.. actually.. yes there is.. they have released cutting edge tech thats insane stable and far beyond what most other coins have months after they have launch. as for previous projects, many of them worked on the nxt source code finding bugs(and found many) including the injected flaws afaik. but a lack of previous projects is no way to determine the quality of the developers. especially in this environment.

they didnt do the white paper first because many things were going to, and have, changed a long the way. what ever they would have put on the white paper back then would probably not be accurate to what is released now. and not to mention they had no intention of coercing people into investing as people were not investing. a trivial fee of a couple nxt is not investing. people signed up "just in case" and it payed off big time.

why would real identities be needed? poi is working and fully functional right now. you can test out the beta software. we are currently preparing a competition with a prize of 1 nem stake. so you can test poi all you like and see it working with out any real identification. (and i think you miss understand PoI if you think real ID is needed.)

[dwma]

develop first, then when stakes are finally sold you release white paper?  How is that supposed to work ?

There is no reason to think the dev team is in a league of their own when they're all anonymous.  What previous projects did they work on?

The release does little for me if the innovation is tied into POI which still has not been explained.  White papers aren't that hard, they don't need to be thoroughly researched.  You just present your idea in a well thought out paper.  Why code it all up first ?   "Someone will steal the idea" ?

I am highly skeptical POI will work without a real life identity tied into this importance metric.

the white paper could not have been written prior to stake registration as the code hadnt even been written.. people signed up for a trivial fee of between free and 700 nxt.. that was back in febuary time.. and stakes wernt sold. there were no stakes at that point. there was nothing. people signed up to the movement for trivial fees and it was done then to give everyone a fair chance at signing up regardless of how much money they had. also it was supposed to be a clone so fewer people bothered to create sock puppets. imagine how many sock accounts would have signed up now if they knew stakes were worth near 1000 dollars?

I understand.  It is hard to tell who is whose sock puppets.  The main guy got caught with sock puppets and claimed he had burned the passwords so would be unable to grab the funds.  (lool, right?)

The other guy was just giving out random stakes to new accounts on accident <cough>.  This should have been caught after a couple of scam attempts, but it actually took a thirdy party to do it.  So AFAIK #2 guy was giving out stakes to his own socket puppets.

So #1 and #2 were dirty. 

well.. actually.. yes there is.. they have released cutting edge tech thats insane stable and far beyond what most other coins have months after they have launch. as for previous projects, many of them worked on the nxt source code finding bugs(and found many) including the injected flaws afaik. but a lack of previous projects is no way to determine the quality of the developers. especially in this environment.

You claimed they are in a league of their own.  If they are anonymous then the only metric we have is what they worked on previously

they didnt do the white paper first because many things were going to, and have, changed a long the way. what ever they would have put on the white paper back then would probably not be accurate to what is released now. and not to mention they had no intention of coercing people into investing as people were not investing. a trivial fee of a couple nxt is not investing. people signed up "just in case" and it payed off big time.

White papers are often outdated by implementation time but that doesn't say anything for their value.  When you lay it out there you let other great minds critique your approach before it has been worked on.  They're doing it completely backwards and the absolute farthest thing from a 'league of their own' 

why would real identities be needed? poi is working and fully functional right now. you can test out the beta software. we are currently preparing a competition with a prize of 1 nem stake. so you can test poi all you like and see it working with out any real identification. (and i think you miss understand PoI if you think real ID is needed.)

Without real identities you'll get sybil attacks.  Having a coin network working doesn't mean much which is what you don't understand.  It does nothing to comment on the viablity of whatever POI actually is, except to say someone has written code that they've named POI and hey it works for now!

I'm not a FUDer,  I'm just stating my opinions.  If you're going to pump POI over POS, then we at least need a white paper.  After everything I've seen I'm impress the market price on NEM is still so high.  You guys have done a good job.  Maybe it will be something new.

[kodtycoon]

develop first, then when stakes are finally sold you release white paper?  How is that supposed to work ?

There is no reason to think the dev team is in a league of their own when they're all anonymous.  What previous projects did they work on?

The release does little for me if the innovation is tied into POI which still has not been explained.  White papers aren't that hard, they don't need to be thoroughly researched.  You just present your idea in a well thought out paper.  Why code it all up first ?   "Someone will steal the idea" ?

I am highly skeptical POI will work without a real life identity tied into this importance metric.

I understand.  It is hard to tell who is whose sock puppets.  The main guy got caught with sock puppets and claimed he had burned the passwords so would be unable to grab the funds.  (lool, right?)

The other guy was just giving out random stakes to new accounts on accident <cough>.  This should have been caught after a couple of scam attempts, but it actually took a thirdy party to do it.  So AFAIK #2 guy was giving out stakes to his own socket puppets.
......................................................................

So #1 and #2 were dirty. 



You claimed they are in a league of their own.  If they are anonymous then the only metric we have is what they worked on previously


White papers are often outdated by implementation time but that doesn't say anything for their value.  When you lay it out there you let other great minds critique your approach before it has been worked on.  They're doing it completely backwards and the absolute farthest thing from a 'league of their own' 


Without real identities you'll get sybil attacks.  Having a coin network working doesn't mean much which is what you don't understand.  It does nothing to comment on the viablity of whatever POI actually is, except to say someone has written code that they've named POI and hey it works for now!

I'm not a FUDer,  I'm just stating my opinions.  If you're going to pump POI over POS, then we at least need a white paper.  After everything I've seen I'm impress the market price on NEM is still so high.  You guys have done a good job.  Maybe it will be something new.

there was 3 months of taint analysis that removed 100's of sock puppets and recently another round that was not seen coming so another couple 100 sock master were caught using a different method. fairly certain the vast majority have been caught.

for utopian, it was an easy way out. after the fact and his immediate departure it was quite obvious he set himself up.

as for pat, he was, and still is, in control of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stakes.. why would he go through the hassle of creating sock accounts to steal ~3-4k dollars worth when he could dump all the stakes he is in control of and run? that just doesnt add up.. so i would not say #1 and #2 are dirty..

by real identities do you mean passport verification??? sounds like your trying to find excuses to argue against it..

il come back with the whitepaper and source code when its released.. we'll continue then!

[cryptogeeknext]

Good article!
Author obviously gets it.

Mining is not only an initial distribution, but more importantly - control over network.
Keeping that an "ongoing battle" allows future generations to inherit this control on the basis of skills and competition, rather than relying on mere inheritance of wealth within the established bloodlines.

You know why people turn to evil? Because it ain't fun winning in a rigged game.

Remember, freedom requires you to stay vigilant,
and while many people are easily tricked into selling their freedom for a bit of comfort,
at the end of the day it's not important what they do, it's important what you do!

[johnyj]

Very nice article, especially this part:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For Auction: 100 US Dollars

Whatever “it” is, if it creates $100 worth of value, but costs <$100, everyone will be doing it as fast as possible. Applied to blockchains, if X dollars of coins are being released by each new block, then X dollars are going to be spent mining that block.

It really is that simple. It would be obvious to anyone who understood economic rent and opportunity cost (for example, as applied in the Law of Rent).

Why isn’t this widely known in the Bitcoin community? Well, it would seem that prevailing disagreement with today’s FED Policy (a contentious, real world, imperfect attempt to execute on one particular strategy [chosen among many] – a strategy, confined completely to the applied half of the “monetary policy” subset of the “policy” subset of the “macro” discipline of the field of economics) has led to a sort of groupthink-powered, willful ignorance of economic science.

Which is a shame, because just by visiting certain corners of Wikipedia, certain 2.0 “designers” could have saved themselves a lot of time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Most of the people's mind of money's value has been twisted by the fiat money that is created out of thin air, thus they think that they could also create some similar money and get its value out of thin air. But they usually forget about one thing: Fiat money's value actually comes from the law that forced people to accept them in payment, and the cost of making that law might be a war or even more, it is not cheap at all if you consider how much energy were wasted in a war

[johnyj]

The whole point of the 'wasted' energy is because of how difficult it is to mine coins in the first place, just like with precious metals mines are probably having to piss away tons of electricity just to get at a few precious veins deep beneath the earth, this is how Bitcoin simulates it's rarity. I do think though that if people are that conscious about the electricity they should just support coins like Primecoin and Curecoin which are pretty good alternatives. I think donating all that hashing power to scientific projects is probably going to be the way forward, but the main thing to do would be to make it so that electricity isn't so rare to get your hands on in the first place.

Those energy will not be wasted, they will be used to provide heating in future. I have seen miners build their center heating system based on a closet full of miners

However, once it costs less to produce each coin, the coin price will fall, so those energy MUST be spent in order to maintain bitcoin's value: As long as there is a much cheaper way to get coin, all the demand will go that route thus reduce the buying support and increase the sell pressure on market, until the exchange rate get close to manufacturing cost

[cryptogeeknext]

Requiring external energy makes PoW a dynamic self-balancing system and at the same time encourages real-world tangible innovation in energy-efficient computation. Further advancements in electronics beyond silicon will make piles of current mining equipment obsolete, so there is hardly any long-term entrenchment in PoW, unlike PoS, where once established entrenchment would be very hard to eradicate.

The debate of PoW vs PoS is somewhat similar to that of gold vs fiat.
If history has anything to teach us, we should be looking very closely at PoW derivatives and stay away.

PoW is grounded in reality, while PoS seems pretty spineless.
Proof of World versus Proof of Snake?

[bluemountain]

This thread is nothing but PoW miner shills trying to hold on to their waning power, as the crypto world is increasingly moving toward the superior PoS system.

i totally agree, but in all honesty i think something further superior to PoS will surpass PoS as the alternative algo that will challenge PoW.  

its simple evolution.

I don't think it's likely, since PoS has reached nearly perfect efficiency in terms of resources. The further variations are subsets of PoS, such as DPoS, TaPoS, they can improve upon PoS, but the core ideas of PoS is unlikely to change.

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

this also plays into things like the asset exchange. with pos, scammers would be listed exactly the same as genuine vendors and therefore have a high chance of scamming, thus assets could not be listed and require users to know the asset ID.

with proof of importance, assets can be listed by importance score, as well as volume, importance gained from or history of past assets among other methods, merchants that do not meet the minimum requirement would not be listed until they meet the minimum requirement which vastly reduces the chances of scammers being listed. PoI will open many doors when it comes to online marketplaces/asset exchange that would not be possible with PoS.

It sounds like PoI will essentially centralize the mining of the coin in a way so that certain people will control the network. Granted these people would generally not want to attack the network however the same disincentives of attempting to launch an attack are not there that are there in PoW

[jabo38]

I think that PoW is really an interesting idea and experiment in how to secure a blockchain.  But I am not sure if it is the best.  Don't get me wrong, I am still a big fan.

Really PoW comes down to the fact of whoever can waste more computer power and energy is the person that can make the next block.

And the chain is secure because people waste a lot of energy and computational power.  To take over a PoW blockchain, an attacker must be willing to waste even more computational power and electricity than what is already being wasted.  This does actually make the chain secure though. 

It just seems like to me where a system of, "you can't attack my blockchain because you can't waste more electricity than me" might not be the best way. 

It is a pretty interesting proof though and so far it is working, so I am willing to ride it out for a while. 

I still think though there must be other proofs that can be used to protect a blockchain.  Stake is one, but there could be lots of other ways a blockchain might be supported supported and protected by a community.  I think someday some novel ideas will be released. 

[jabo38]

This thread is nothing but PoW miner shills trying to hold on to their waning power, as the crypto world is increasingly moving toward the superior PoS system.

i totally agree, but in all honesty i think something further superior to PoS will surpass PoS as the alternative algo that will challenge PoW.  

its simple evolution.

I don't think it's likely, since PoS has reached nearly perfect efficiency in terms of resources. The further variations are subsets of PoS, such as DPoS, TaPoS, they can improve upon PoS, but the core ideas of PoS is unlikely to change.

you should take a look at proof of importance. Its founded on the concept of pos and is as efficeint but the method by which people are chosen to forge blocks is vastly different. Those who are most important to the network are the most likely to forge apposed to who has the most coins. So a merchant that does thousands of transactions but little balance could end up with higher weighting than a hoarder with loads of coins. Its not just how many transactions that are factored in to decide importance but who the transactions are with and their importance, much like a web of trust.

this also plays into things like the asset exchange. with pos, scammers would be listed exactly the same as genuine vendors and therefore have a high chance of scamming, thus assets could not be listed and require users to know the asset ID.

with proof of importance, assets can be listed by importance score, as well as volume, importance gained from or history of past assets among other methods, merchants that do not meet the minimum requirement would not be listed until they meet the minimum requirement which vastly reduces the chances of scammers being listed. PoI will open many doors when it comes to online marketplaces/asset exchange that would not be possible with PoS.

It sounds like PoI will essentially centralize the mining of the coin in a way so that certain people will control the network. Granted these people would generally not want to attack the network however the same disincentives of attempting to launch an attack are not there that are there in PoW

As far as I know PoI is only being implemented with an IPO style release of all the coins at once and there won't be any mining.  The PoI is used to determine who will form the next block and collect the fees if there are any.

Also, as far as I know the disincentives to attack a PoI blockchain will be greater.  With PoW a person need to gain 51% of the miners.  In PoS a person needs to gain 51% of the coins.  I don't know very much about PoI but I think a person would have to gain 51% of coins, and be highly active in the network sending and receiving from accounts that have been proven trustworthy via Eigentrust++ peer reputation management.  ( A p2p algo for proving which nodes are trustworthy).

[Fernandez]

Mining promotes centralization and single point of failure. Right now all the government has to do is to blackmail or hack and take control of two pools and Bitcoin can be destroyed.

Supporters of mining now are mainly those who have already invested in it and have to rely on having this continue to not get broke.

[cryptogeeknext]

Mining promotes centralization and single point of failure. Right now all the government has to do is to blackmail or hack and take control of two pools and Bitcoin can be destroyed.

Supporters of mining now are mainly those who have already invested in it and have to rely on having this continue to not get broke.

It's quite the opposite actually. Pools are dynamic structures capable of restructuring and splitting in response to any hostile outside action. Owning mining equipment now, doesn't make you eligible to receive the improved mining gear in the future, thus you need to stay vigilant and make decisions over time to either reinvest or skip based on your market assessment. Mining is a game of skills.

With stakes however, once acquired, there is no amount of innovation or competition that would allow outside actors to regain control of the money flow from the established stakeholders, while they can maintain their position indefinitely at virtually no cost. Staking is a game of luck.

EDIT:

Regarding "waste of mining", there is a good analogy - "waste of gaming".
A lot of people would consider shooting aliens in a video game utterly useless and wasteful. With hundreds of millions graphics cards sold annually, humanity likely "wastes" an order of magnitude more energy on gaming than it does on mining. However the result of this gaming endeavor is a new breed of energy-efficient processors or GPUs that are now slowly replacing conventional CPUs in supercomputers and aid to solve scientific challenges.

Now, with Bitcoin ASIC chips reported this summer to be the first to come out on a state of the art 20nm technological process, there is a strong indication that mining will create enough incentive to drive humanity towards breakthrough in electronics beyond silicon as well as development of new energy sources. And if you think gaming has a positive social component to it, then you might consider mining as a way for nerds to socialize.

[Fernandez]

With stakes however, once acquired, there is no amount of innovation or competition that would allow outside actors to regain control of the money flow from the established stakeholders, while they can maintain their position indefinitely at virtually no cost. Staking is a game of luck.

Thats quite incorrect. If that was the case it would have stopped at vanilla PoS, and there wouldn't have been innovations like TF, DPOS, PoI etc. You are also assuming that rich get richer in case of vanilla PoS, which is not the case in some of the variants.