We are currently paying 80% of new coins generated for a service we don't need! What is the benefit of having POW at all in comparison to having the MN network handle block generation?! A good point made by crouton is that even having POW is actually a weakness and creates an attack vector. Dissenting opinions are not only welcomed but sought!
PoW still has value because it involves outsiders. Without that, one could say the network just makes more coins for itself for no reason. Kinda like the Federal Reserve. It's just printing more money... There should be effort done to create money, a value provided in exchange for it, and the party who does the most gets the most. It's an external contribution that assures the network is honest and by sheer force of computing power, cannot be broken. Everything has an attack vector...
You're aiming to fix the part that's working just fine instead of the part that's busted.
Allowing the mining pools to determine the distribution and function is part of the problem. PoW should always be a part of the process that validates a block. It shouldn't be the only process that validates a block. The answer is not to change metrics, but to combine more than one metric such that even if there is a successful attack on one aspect, that attack is dead in the water because it's only part of the game. PoW works. Don't throw it away just because it's gotten clumsy and nobody has un-clumsied it yet... MNs can un-clumsy it while also facilitating the voting system as a hybrid metric. Mining is a genius idea, but like so many others, when it stands alone, it's kinda stupid. We've gotten by with it so far because that's all we've known and brute-force has been the decider and it works, but a hybrid proof would be better.
Block proof is the issue we're really discussing. PoW works. It's crude, but that's part of why it's so great. We wouldn't have mining pools if nobody wanted to do it. The problem is that mining pools are a bandaid and a point of much consternation, disproportionality, and failure. If the MNs handled it, there wouldn't be one poll getting more than another. Everyone would remain an individual hashpower contributor to one network, no pools.
Mining is not the problem. How we're handling BTC's flaw of needing mining pools is the problem. the raw brutality of it is part of the paradoxical ruleset that makes crypto work so well. Even if it can be defined as vestigial, it still serves us better as part of a hybrid proof, than to abandon it and have another solitary proof system. That's the lesson we should be learning; no single proof system will ever be as good as a combined hybrid proof system, no matter what it is. You can't get rid of the attack vectors, but you can make them impotent by requiring that several be accomplished at once in order to break it. No one is going to go 51% AND spoof the whole MN voting system at the same time. But one or the other might be possible. Even if mining is stupid, it's still useful... Like shojayxt.
