I really don’t think so, ASICs are cheap but not that cheap, and they open you up for an arms race.
PoW is also more resilient to hostile take over since you can counter it by investing in more miners, while with PoS if some one gets 51% or w/e number is needed to control the consensus it’s game over and there is nothing to do about it.
So while you might think China can just take over all the mining pools it’s true but it’s reversible whilst if the Chinese population would come to own 51% of any currency and China would say comrades would you kindly turn over your ECoins there is nothing you can do about it other than fork over which would devastate the currency.
Actually both cases are deadly. I don't think that miner take over is reversible if done right. I haven't seen a single step by step article explaining the actions in case of large double spends. Do we get air drop from some twitter account that now we do different PoW? Who decides and when? That's the thing - blockchains aren't built to be modified off-chain. Hard forks is a death and birth of a new coin. So first thing Bitcoin would die but will it be born with new PoW? Will this PoW be decentralized from china? A looot of questions.
So yeah both cases with stake/hashrate are deadly enough with no plan B.
Yes if someone gets to 51% it’s game over but with PoW you can more easily handle a takeover in progress and it’s easier to combat it’s potentiality it by simply constantly increasing your own hashrate.
My biggest concern with Bitcoin is that atm we have no guarantee that the Chinese mining cabal doesn’t have 51% already.
With PoS you can’t use the same strategy without negative consequences since you would harm the liquidity of the currency in the process.
You can have some PoS system which would tie the number of new coins created to the liquidity of the network and a few other attributes but I don’t see how this could not be fooled by simple moving currency around the network within wallets in your control or to side channel attacks (primarily gaining controls over wallets in the real world rather than only on the block chain).
