An alien can come to Earth and use its UFO compute to mine bitcoin if it wanted.

Not if it wants to win a block reward in any reasonable length of time.

First of all it would have to set up manufacturing to produce 7nm asic chips generating the SHA-256 algorithm.

Someone in their garage could come up with a vastly superior way to compute hashes and mine bitcoin.

This just means your hypothetical Tony Stark gets richer. It doesn’t help the aliens you invented earlier.

Large mining farms could be banned and made illegal and smaller operations can instantly become profitable again.

You still need human interaction to buy the necessary mining equipment.

Face it. Your idealistic objections to PoS apply equally (if not more so) to Bitcoin.

The specialist equipment can be built by anyone at any time.

No no. This is a highly specialised industry dominated by Bitmain. Unless you are using the latest hardware you are vastly overspending on mining costs.

You can also still use a computer to mine, though you will never mine a block now days, there is still a chance.

There is almost zero chance. The only practical to get BTC using a normal computer is to buy it from someone else.

Anyone should be able to enter the network assuming they have the knowledge to do so.

Anyone can verify the network, but a there is no opportunity to obtain BTC without interacting with a (harware) gatekeeper.

Has been for a long time. Only now is the isoamyl acetate smell becoming unbearable.

If you want to take a “purest” approach then bitcoin has similar problems. To gain any chance of mining BTC you have to buy specialised equipment from someone.

I would also put joining a mining collective in a similar “human consent” category

Monero is opt-in privacy so not ideal, but it’s the most popular privacy preserving coin, so it’s most popular for illicit dark web purchases

• Bitcoin for market cap

• Solana for transactions, throughput and scalability

• Polkadot or Cosmos for interoperability

• Ethereum for everything else (developer, activity, economic activity, regulatory, governance, decentralisation etc.)

From a user perspective yes to all 3.

From a infrastructure perspective,

1. You need capital to keep people honest. Nothing at risk means people can lie

2. Some power is still needed, but Ethereum has gone from the consumption of Chile to a single windfarm.

3. ZK proofs now allow anyone to create an anonymous token. Most blockchains are opt in for anonymity.

Your point is valid for new, immature blockchains. Censorship/access restrictions are possible and it’s very easy for PoS to turn into nothing at stake.

In practice mature PoS chains don’t require any human consent.

Agreed. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive

Now those windfarm can be batch processing AI instead of BTC.

Btw PoS is also bullshit, in a completely different and inferior class of crypto. It requires HUMAN CONSENT to enter the network.

That is specific to delegated proof of stake, not PoS in general.

It’s wasting useful energy, and you think that’s a good thing?

It’s been surpassed by new blockchains in all dimensions except market cap

It’s a catch 22 solution. It only allows bitcoin to scale if hardly anyone settles back on the bitcoin network.

Mining hardware is the bigger cost for bitcoin. Tokens are the largest cost for PoS.

Your post applies to Bitcoin specifically, not crypto in general.

A lot of crypto relies on greater fools, but not all of it.

The cartoon is misleading. There are more alternatives to Mastercard/Visa than crypto.

Euro has PSD2 which seems to be a step in the right direction

This is true. Whoever decides the questions and determines the correct answer holds a lot of power.