As an outside observer, my biggest takeaway from the threads here is that apparently the Ethereum devs have managed to create a technology so complicated that proponents can't concisely explain why it works and detractors can't explain why it doesn't.
As Tony Hoare already wrote in the 80s: “There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
The previous post is completely making up the concept of slashers being an exclusive role. People should not be coming to any conclusions from a thread that starts off so wildly disconnected from reality.
I feel like PoS has always had this problem, it will be interesting to see how this goes. Certainly PoW has some hairy details as well, but the backbone of "you can only run computations so fast" makes it simpler to reason about.
The question being asked is also a harder one to answer than just explaining PoS. Similar to a PoW scheme where only one or two people control all of the hashing power, it could be decentralized in theory but not actually in practice, and it doesn't seem like there are any super hard numbers on this aspect.
Different question. I don't see people regularly arguing about whether TCP does the job it claims to. Sure people propose alternatives they believe to be superior, but fundamentally most agree it works.
That's not related to the complexity of the thing. Imagine Token Ring had a token, and there were a bunch of people invested in the idea that it was better than all the alternatives.
Aren't there loads of things where you can't concisely explain how it works? Fundamentally this is a hard problem, we shouldn't be too surprised if the solution does not fit in a hackernews comment. (Especially when so many people on this site seem desperate to misunderstand anything related to cryptocurrencies).
