> If so, why does it make sense that people can "generate" cash by proving some amount of work done?

Think of it this way: If you pay with physical cash, there are people somewhere who do the work of digging ore out of the ground, smelting it, shaping it into coins, cutting and printing paper and so on. All these people do that, because they get paid in the same currency that they themselves have minted.

It turns out that nobody has yet found a way to create a digital decentralized currency that that works without incorporating a similar concept of incentivizing the creation of currency.

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Hilliard_Ohiooo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

ETH is trying right now with proof of ownership.

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littlecranky67 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Which automatically makes in possibly centralized (you can never ever guarantee that not a single entity - or group of colluding entities - hold the majority stake and thus excert control).

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tsimionescu 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The same is true for PoW, though. You can never guarantee that a single entity or a group of colluding entities will not gain control of most of 50+% of the compute power required. If the compute hardware is useful for other purposes than mining your particular coin, the risk is in fact greater - someone could build or buy up this compute power, destroy the currency, and then use the assets for other purposes, recouping some of their investment. With PoS, at least this much is not possible - anyone who would want to destroy the currency would lose their whole investment.

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AureliusMA 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are mechanism in place to prevent attacks, that require more than 51% control of staked ETH. The team behind ETH probably stayed on PoW for a long time to build the market cap such as to make attacks unlikely by the sheer amount of capital required.

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Orygin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn't the point of Proof of Stakes that you hold some amount of coin to exert that control. If someone or some group get majority stake, doing anything nefarious would result in crashing the coin value, and thus nuke their own coin value?

	▲	dragonwriter 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but thinking this is a safeguard presumes the exchange value of the coin must outweigh any other concerns the actor has.
	▲	tardedmeme 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, but they can make it up with some other gain in value. For example if you're a US state agency tasked to destroy the Chinese economy, you might overall benefit from buying a ridiculous amount of Chinese money and then setting it on fire, if it means everyone else's Chinese money catches fire too.