Please read up on UASF and Bitcoin. People can buy tons of mining factories, but if a very large amount of nodes start rejecting blocks and therefore the rewards, miners start to rethink their stance very fast. There is no discussion here, history proves it.
and UASF are a thing in PoS as well, if some entity/entities acquire a majority of the staked coins users can simply fork the malicious actors out. It's functionally equivalent except that it's an order of magnitude more expensive to acquire the required coins as opposed to getting the equivalent in hashpower.
Sure they can. It's easy to only mine on top of blocks from certain sources, and if most of the network does this then those are the only blocks that matter.
Sure but the difference with mining is that having a majority of hashrate doesn't allow you to maintain that majority in perpetuity. You have constant operating expenses that require you to sell your Bitcoin, along with constantly growing competition. Just look at the rise and fall of large Bitcoin miners. With PoS if you are the biggest on day 1 you will probably be the biggest on day 1,000.
It might mathematically keep you in charge forever, but if you can stop almost anyone from being able to profit then it's very unlikely people will invest enough to override you.
And the motivation not to do it is the same, people will get mad and stop using the grossly manipulated coin.
It's very relevant. Mining is very easy to geographically diversify. PoS coins will almost all be controlled by US based custodians subject to US regulations. PoS coins will be controlled by the US financial industry at the end of the day
This is completely false, late/end game PoW centralizes mining around the cheapest electricity. It is impossible to mine profitably in the overwhelming majority of the world now.
