if the PoS system is indeed viable and superior
as some claim, we should see it start to gobble up market share...right?
This is what we see now, share of PoS coins keeps growing.
We are? What coin do you see doing well?
The 365 day chart of NXT is certainly nothing
to write home about.
This is wrong i think.
Imagine you have two coins only.
Coin A is POW, it is 10 years old, it has 100 billion market cap, it has 5% inflation, it costs 1 billion to attack it and every merchant on earth accepts it.
Coin B is POS, it is 5 years old, it has 1 billion market cap, it has 0% inflation, it costs 1 billion to attack it and no merchant accepts it.
You can switch from one coin to the other one for free or very very cheaply.
In this scenario every rational investor would chose to have most of his savings in coin B and he would switch to coin A only when he needs to spend.
As time goes by almost everyone moves from coin A to coin B, coin B market cap grows to 100 billion, coin A is slowly abandoned, merchants forget about it and start to accept coin B only.
This is why i thin the coin that will win the crypto race is the coin which provides the strongest network at the lowest cost.
Network effect might not be enough to save bitcoin.
Hold on, you are mixing PoW/PoS with issuance.
It is possible to have a PoW coin with no more
issuance (Bitcoin will be like that in 100+ years),
and it also possible to have a PoS coin that issues
new coins for a period (or indefinitely).
The shorter the issuance period, the more people
will question if the distribution is fair.
Personally, when I first heard about Bitcoin, one
of the things about it that sold me was that miners
had to do some actual work to get coins... it wasn't
just some dudes high on a hill somewhere declaring
they invented a currency and saying everyone should
go use it.