Those aren't miners but mining pools. Mining pools have historically grown and faded over time and miners can switch pools and often do instantly.

The beauty with bitcoin is I don't need to directly trust the intentions of people or delegates. Trust is built upon the fact that there are great incentives to play honest and it costs real money to make an attack. With DPOS or POS their is only the first and not the second, thus Bitcoins weakness is also its strength as an added layer of security.

Whether or not one person can be trusted as a respectful member of the community or not should should not be the concern. We should focus on decentralizing bitcoin to a point where trusting a small group of humans isn't needed as all.

Delegates can have the best of intentions and be corrupted over time, by special interests(lobbyists), misguided decisions, changes in character, or simply being a target by a hacker who holds them hostage or gains access to there vote through compromising their systems.  

From a "normal person's" point of view I'd agree - but from a "government's point of view" things change (as they can just print their own money as long as they wish).

So if a government wants to "destroy" a PoS chain then they can just buy up (paying more and more as they print more and more) and they will succeed (the cost is always *zero* for them at least in terms of the "fiat").

In PoW even if a government wants to spend billions to kill of Bitcoin they just don't have the ASIC equipment to do so.

Too quick on the reply - the "resource needed to gain >50% is ASIC" and they are in short supply - so a government would have to set up manufacturing at least as good as the world's best (and keep it secret) to do so.

Of course they could just try and "purchase" existing ASIC so that would depend upon the pools as to how easily they can be *bought out* (and whether people notice this going on).

Bitcoin is still experimental with a market cap of 6-10 billion. Nxt has a market cap of only ~36 million for less of a history than Bitcoin which makes your claim laughable. Whether or not an successful attack has been made against a PoS coin doesn't address the valid security criticisms of the framework and is false as well:

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/mintpal-gets-hacked-pos-vericoin-fork-result/
http://coinjoint.info/navajo-suffers-double-spend-attack/

Additionally, any bugs or flaws within a POS or DPOS exploited by a single hacker can be used to attack the network regardless of the intentions of delegates or the distribution of the POS pool. with PoW there are real resources being used so even if a vulnerability is exploited to hijack a miner they will quickly correct the issue because they are losing money and hijacking miners all around the world that use different equipment , different pools, and different uplinks is a whole lot more difficult than finding a flaw within a wallet of hijacking a few large stakeholders computers.

Because it's cheap, not because the US or Europe don't know how to manufacture ASIC.

Australia could do it if they could do it economically and with a competitive price. They can't make money from it is the only reason they are not doing it. But if like you said, when the government don't care about printing more money, then they could easily do it. China is not some technologically advanced country, in fact all their chip maker machines are imported from ASML, which is an European company. China have cheap labor, that's about it.

Okay - am coming around to your point of view now - but one point still bothers me which is the *hacking point*.

With PoW you can't *hack the proof* you have to "do the work" (unless a fundamental flaw is found with SHA256 which would probably screw up all cryptos that exist at the moment).

It may be much easier to *attack the wallets* of stake holders (via keyloggers, etc.) in order to gain the stake without having to spend "astronomic amounts" of money (might only require a few million to recruit a team of black hats and exchanges would be a major *weak point* with this vector).

Forging a POS coin allows for easier wealth accumulation than with PoW as existing ASIC manufactures have to take risks with investments and reinvest their gains in new equipment and miners are forced to spend a majority of their profits on new equipment and electricity. POS and DPOS is essentially a framework where large stakeholders collect usury off the network and even if you have a very fair initial distribution model you will have unequal wealth accumulation over time because most of the profits are compounded instead of reinvested at a loss.

With PoW you can easily know in realtime if there is a mounting risk from a mining pool, ASIC manufacturer, or miner. With POS or DPOS one individual can slowly buy up a 51% stake under many Pseudonames with no one noticing. Governments cannot build a large mining factory without leaks as evidenced by the high  amount of top secret intelligence constantly leaking. Some people mistakenly assume that Snowden was the first leaker of the NSA programs when people in the IT field where knowledgeable of many of these programs shortly after 9/11 and all Snowden revealed was further details.  The bitcoin community would find out about any special program and react just like we constantly do when a mining pool gets near 50%.

 

That sounds great, but you'll need to first implement your concept in an altcoin, so that it becomes a "proven" concept, otherwise I doubt it can be considered as a choice.