I think the whole PoS finality layer thing got out of proportions because people heard PoS and flipped.
At the beginning, the Monero Research Lab was just gathering ideas on how to deal with the situation and that was one of the ideas proposed.
People heard PoS, and it went viral, with all the misunderstanding that virality and oversimplification bring.

If you listen to KabayaNerve on MoneroTalk you will see that he proposed that and immediately said that the PoS finality layer will not get community approval and is very unlikely to be implemented.
You still have people on Twitter saying that some undefined people that may or may not be Monero devs are pushing for Monero to become a PoS coin like Ethereum. It's simple, it's emotional, it got viral, the only issue is that it's wrong (it's not an accurate description of what is happening).

For BTC, I think that the huge network effects are the main reasons for it maintaining its price and thus security budget until now (as for any coin, you could say).
As you said, it will be interesting to see how the situation develops after 2 more halvings.
A conclusion in my article is that BTC now has a king, and its name is Blockstream. They control the network and will update it as they see fit, what the plebs and jealous people like us think is of no importance. They will never let that much power evaporate from their hands, and will rather hardfork into PoS than letting that happen because some miner does not make enough money.
The original Bitcoin is dead, long live Bitcoin

I agree that a PoS consensus is not suitable for what Monero wants to be.

BTW, how come you have a laser eyes profile pic, but you can critically analyze things about BTC? I always thought that people with laser eyes profile pics where maxis that did not accept any criticism of BTC. It's refreshing to see a change!

A community effort to gather resources to counter the hostile mining pool, led by antimoonboy

Xenu is the host of antimoonboy, a well known Monero focused podcast.
For this Monero Defense fund, he was using moneroocean and you can actually visually see the bump in hash on mining pool stats when he started.

This is very close the the finality layer idea being discussed currently.
The idea is to record somewhere that this or that block has been seen and is considered final. At that point, even if someone publishes a longer chain afterwards, the longer chain will be ignored as it does not continue from the blocks that have been finalized already.

It is an interesting and good idea @qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de. There are some technical and community details that need consideration as to how exactly to implement that, but it's one of the good options on the table.

For example, one of the technical details is were/how should we record that a block is finalized.
For this, we need to align a lot of decentralized nodes on a common state of things (which block is finalized), so that they are aligned on what has happened and what has not.
We actually already have a solution for that: a blockchain. Blockchains are a solution to the byzantine general's problem (a.k.a aligning decentralized actors with each other on a shared state of things, even though they do not all communicate with one another, they communicate at different speed, etc).
So we could use a blockchain to record that this or that Monero block is finalized.
It needs to be a different blockchain, and have some characteristics like fast enough block time, a way to avoid deep re-orgs (POW with enough security budget or POS),...
Right now if you directly apply these conditions, you end up on the bright idea of using Ethereum or something like Litecoin.
The Monero community does NOT want to have to rely on ETH or LTC for security.
That would feel like a huge blow and a huge let down...

But yeah, if need be, for me, this is still a perfectly acceptable temporary solution.
What do you think?

If I remember correctly, that's partly because p2pool requires access to a full node with the whole blockchain, while a lot (or some?) of the current hash rate is not running their own nodes.
If you somehow force everyone to p2pool we are not sure of the distribution and decentralization of the remaining miners, as some mining will drop out instead of running their own node.
Sometimes it's because they don't have the 200gb available for storing the blockchain. Sometimes they are mining multiple blockchains and requiring a full monero node is too much hassle.

Granted, with p2pool you can mine using someone else's full node and let it spy on you a bit. Do we want that?

The other big issue is that you would have to hard-fork changes to the protocol to impose p2pool and that's a big change that should be carefully considered, not done in a rush.

We have to remember that Monero is fine for now (as in not dying right now), we are preparing mitigations for POW centralization issues and the cure should not be more severe than the disease.

Wait! You don't know about the blocksize war?
You will be amazed after reading Hijacking Bitcoin

Thank you for supporting the network!

Right now the difficulty setup of the mining is the same for all the miners.
All the miners are trying to solve the same equation, randomly trying this or that value to see if it matches.
The first one to propose a value that solves the equation gets to mine the new block and gets the block reward.
When new miners join in, there is no mechanism to differentiate them, from the protocol's POV. If a miner joins p2pool there are things there to identify them, but not on the general Monero protocol.
In the general Monero protocol, you just need to be the first to find a solution to the equation and propose the new block. You don't even have to be the one that mined it (found the solution and proposed the block) you just need to send it, so someone could do all the heaving mining and send you the new block and you will be the first one to send it to the network.

The way the protocol manages miners arriving and leaving is via the difficulty adjustment. When a lot of new miners join, the increased hash rate will make it easier to find the solution to the equation, so new blocks will come more often.
That means that the time between blocks will be less than the desired 2 minutes. After a while, the protocol will notice that and increase the difficulty so that we get back to 2 minutes. The same happens when miners leave, there is less computational power to find the new blocks, it takes more than 2 minutes, and the protocol will reduce the difficulty to get back to 2 minutes.

Right now the difficulty is not for single miners, but for the network as a whole. There is no easy way to implement this idea, I am not sure adding name tags to this or that hash power would be a good thing, and it looks easy to bypass.

p.s: Thank you for no longer keeping to yourself, we are glad to have another voice to chat with, and this forum will grow thanks to that!
KabayaNerve (Monero dev) has made a github issue where people are invited to post their ideas. You can get more inspiration from there.

Well, as long as you understand the consequences of that choice, that's fine.

I've lost count of how many evil, nazi or literal genocidal companies I have been giving my money to, every month for the past several years.
These include everyday companies with bad goals like Nestlé working to privatise your access to water.

You may dislike the devs of Lemmy, but at least they are offering something great to the world without requiring users to give them money in exchange, or requiring users to agree to the sale of their personal data.

BTW banning users they don't like on their instance, or blocking them is perfectly expected behaviour on the fediverse.
lemmy.ml is not special, no instance is special.
Everyone is free to create or join his favorite nazi, piracy, neoliberal or whatever lemmy instance, and on each instance, the mods are free to act as they please.

If you don't support the Lemmy software because the devs are tankies, that's still fine.
For me personally, it's still worth it to send them 5 bucks in Monero for all the value I get out of this.

Imagine if we had to pay for Reddit 🤣

It’s still there for them to use if they want.

Also, the capitalist overlords of our time (right now) already "seek control over others" and are actively dissuading people from using Monero.

I don't know any commies against currencies though.

In any case, it's still there for them to use if they want.

Please read it, and let us know if that changed any of your views, particularly about decentralization. Right now, it seems that you think btc is very decentralized while Roger thinks it's very centralized around Blockstream.

Feel free to make a new post, I am genuinely interested in other POVs.