>Well if we are fantasizing about huge pools of capital shelling out the money necessary to get enough mining equipment for a majority hash rate, there is no reason the same pool of capital can't purchase stake at a premium
There simply isn't enough for sale. Premium - premium to what? Try to buy 10M eth after mining is gone and price is going to increase several times. Staked amount is constantly increasing and eventually I expect most of eth's supply to be staked.
Even if an attacker somehow acquires enough stake, everyone else can simply fork them out. That's not really possible in PoW - a fork from an asic PoW to a gpu PoW is possible, but it would start with negligible security, and most likely the attacker would secure enough gpus before the (asic) attack to kill the fork. Nothing can be done after a gpu/cpu PoW chain is controlled by a censoring attacker.
>rational actors will sell to the highest bidder, who may be anonymous
Unlike bitcoin, staked eth generates yield, so the principal doesn't have to be sold - ever.
>Bitcoin's value will increase when mining is more decentralized (which is heuristically determinable enough to take the risk), which will increase mining decentralization.
Not sure what was the intention of this sentence - that as bitcoin goes up, mining decentralizes? In any case, mining has infinite economies of scale so it always centralizes. The recent China ban accelerated the process, most likely in the much more dangerous direction - with majority of mining to be done in America or under American control. So far, only America sanctioned crypto addresses, and there are already some American miners that explicitly enforce them.
Staking ETH isn't risk-free or hassle-free -- you have to keep a validator running and online, on pain of getting slashed. If you're not going to outsource your validators to $CLOUD_PROVIDER or $EXCHANGE (which you shouldn't, since why trust them?), then you have to be forever vigilant of your uptime.
This is painful enough that most people will happily outsource it while collecting yield. What will almost certainly happen is ETH holders will self-organize into a handful of large well-connected staking pools run by exchanges. Heaven forbid your exchange gets hacked or goes offline.
There simply isn't enough for sale. Premium - premium to what? Try to buy 10M eth after mining is gone and price is going to increase several times. Staked amount is constantly increasing and eventually I expect most of eth's supply to be staked.
Even if an attacker somehow acquires enough stake, everyone else can simply fork them out. That's not really possible in PoW - a fork from an asic PoW to a gpu PoW is possible, but it would start with negligible security, and most likely the attacker would secure enough gpus before the (asic) attack to kill the fork. Nothing can be done after a gpu/cpu PoW chain is controlled by a censoring attacker.
>rational actors will sell to the highest bidder, who may be anonymous
Unlike bitcoin, staked eth generates yield, so the principal doesn't have to be sold - ever.
>Bitcoin's value will increase when mining is more decentralized (which is heuristically determinable enough to take the risk), which will increase mining decentralization.
Not sure what was the intention of this sentence - that as bitcoin goes up, mining decentralizes? In any case, mining has infinite economies of scale so it always centralizes. The recent China ban accelerated the process, most likely in the much more dangerous direction - with majority of mining to be done in America or under American control. So far, only America sanctioned crypto addresses, and there are already some American miners that explicitly enforce them.