Proof of Authority might be better than staking. There are some interesting winner take all like properties in both systems. One is easier to regulate for the broader good when things go awry.
At that point haven't you just reinvented the banking system?
That's exactly what a lot of bitcoin critics want.
You can still have smart contracts and shared ledgers. There are efficiency and collaboration gains. This will likely happen anyway, regardless of what happens in the public permissionless space.
Sort of, but with transparency.
Really? Random crypto companies in the cayman islands are less transparent to me than banks which are subject to a huge amount of regulation.
Interesting, hadn't heard of it before. What gets slashed in PoA? Is there some kind of quantified reputation that you lose through misbehavior?
It's a permissioned system, so there is a cartel like group who decides who can do what. It's very similar to what we have today. It's also not like anyone can add code to Bitcoin, so there are permissioned parts of the system.
PoA is centralized, by definition. You are approved to be a validator by some trusted entity. In theory, this can be a group or consensus (you could imagine a PoA scheme where the set of authorized validators is passed around like a HOSTS file), but you still need to trust the mechanism that authorizes validators. You lose your right to be a validator through misbehavior; you are removed from the list of authorized validators, and hence can't do it anymore.