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HW are an unnecesary third party risk in my opinion and a waste of money. Just grab an old phone and use this guide to turn it into a cold storage. Tldr: install a software wallet and never connect the phone to the internet again and use QR codes to sign transactions using the camera. Super practical, cheap, truly air gapped and doesn't call attention like a hardware wallet.

In your hypothetical, you're paying the cost of bringing the painted house into production with your labor, not getting paid just for owning something.

A closer comparison would be landlords who claim "being a landlord is a job" because they pay themselves to paint the house (or other property management).

At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers.

The workers are the ones securing the network. Anybody can participate, providing they have as little as 0.01 ETH to put up as collateral.

The workers - people with jobs - are not securing the Ethereum network. The rich can more easily afford the opportunity cost and transaction costs of staking, and thus get a higher percentage return than the poor with mostly cash reserves. It recreates the feedback cycle we're seeing with the dollar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent

At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.

Ethereum base fees are in fact sent to a burn address and removed from circulation. Validators get priority tips only.

I'm talking about net profits, not base fees. You would need something like difficulty adjustment.

PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO.

PoS is unrelated to the DAO hack.

No, it was related. I was an ETH user myself until then. The reason they did the bailout was because they were afraid the hacker would risk PoS.

And there wasn't a strong consensus. They explicitly said "the code is the contract" and pointed towards the code itself when asked about design intent before the hack. Those of us who disagreed with the bailout just left.

You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin Wiki

This was a bug in Bitcoin, not a bug in a user-created smart contact. Ethereum was working perfectly at the time of the hack.

There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.

Not doing it every time proves that these co-founders were not as influential as Vitalik Buterin (who had invested in the DAO). The DAO hacker's money was rolled back with a hard fork.

The entire value prop of Bitcoin is that it's ossified and simple.

That would make altcoins worthwhile, wouldn't it! The value proposition of Bitcoin has not changed since it was the most complicated cryptocurrency.

Each Bitcoin halving reduces the block reward for miners ... so unless the price just goes up forever as Bitcoin literally burns the planet, the result is a decrease in the overall hashrate of the network, allowing for an easier attack.

This is addressed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. A block's transaction fees alone are already worth more than the total block reward used to be.

At best, it’s economic rent with holders getting free money from workers.

The workers are the ones securing the network. Anybody can participate, providing they have as little as 0.01 ETH to put up as collateral.

At worst, it’s a game of musical chairs that only people who don’t use the money can win. Profits from securing the network ought to automatically adjust towards zero.

Ethereum base fees are in fact sent to a burn address and removed from circulation. Validators get priority tips only.

PoS is why Ethereum bailed out everyone with money in the DAO.

PoS is unrelated to the DAO hack. PoS is a consensus mechanism change from PoW. Instead of solving increasingly more difficult and energy-intensive puzzles to determine who gets to process the next block, in Ethereum it's randomly chosen amongst the validators.

• Firstly, the DAO fork was not a rollback or bailout. It was a unique situation where the hackers had to wait 28 days for withdrawals, so a smart contract change was executed.
• There was strong consensus across developers, users, miners and community alike - it was hardly a centralized decision.
• Those who disagreed simply moved to Ethereum Classic. It's a win-win situation for all.
• Ethereum was still a very, very new project then. You know which other project did a rollback when it was less than 2 years old? Value overflow incident - Bitcoin Wiki
• EIP-999 being rejected is the final deathblow to this hypothesis. There was a chance to rollback 500,000 ETH to an entity managed by one of its co-founders, and the community overwhelmingly rejected it. Rollbacks do not happen on Ethereum.

Upgrading Bitcoin is a great idea

An idea that virtually NOBODY in the bitcoin community agrees with. The entire value prop of Bitcoin is that it's ossified and simple.

But I would not consider Ethereum’s security model to be an upgrade

Ethereum's model is sustainable 10, 20, 50 years from now. In order for Bitcoin's security to be sustainable, the price of BTC must rise. Each Bitcoin halving reduces the block reward for miners ... so unless the price just goes up forever as Bitcoin literally burns the planet, the result is a decrease in the overall hashrate of the network, allowing for an easier attack.

This is demonstrably true: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4727999

Lemmy is just not a great platform if you value personal property

Personal property vs private property.

and individual freedom

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.