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> Bitcoin already provides a global currency and distributed ledger-- there is no need to re-invent those wheels.

Yeah, at a cost of several million dollars per year of burned power. You'll find the less BTC someone owns the less likely they are to bring up non-arguments like "more hashes = more security!" Let's stop pretending there isn't room to innovate.

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I wouldn't say those are non-arguments, just not conclusive arguments. Vitalik of Ethereum brings up the nothing-at-stake problem, in the context of proposing a solution:

http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof...

"more hashes != more security" is true even if POS does not work (or rather, security scales sublinearly with hashes - economies of scale + diminishing returns on value of security). Nothing-at-stake is solved by DPOS, the ethereum team lags behind POS development by a few months it seems (they just mentioned using TAPOS a few weeks ago when the inventor has moved past it a few months ago).

What are DPOS and TAPOS?

DPOS = Delegated Proof of Stake. Owners of the majority of the stake (stake = all the coins) designate a limited set of servers to handle the blockchain operations.

Thanks to this, there can be just 100 nodes interacting very quickly with each other and yet just as trustworthy - if not more - as the current bitcoin system.

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