[responding to the pre-edit question about PoW] I just did, you don't need any capital to run a node. The book documents an incident where there was majority hash-rate (miners) wanting to change the rules against the wishes of the users.
But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential.
Now if we could make it Proof of Human, one vote, one person, non-transferable, that would be true distributed consensus. Even then you would get people buying votes with advertising as we see today in “normal” elections.
> But at scale you need lots of nodes/computational power and therefore lots of money. It doesn’t really make a difference whether you buy graphics cards in a pow world or ethereum in a pos world, you need lots of capital to be influential.
You're missing the energy part of the equation (opex), that is continuously required.
more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IT4s-6T__k