...POW ensures permissionless behaviour
PoW doesn't insure permissionless nor decentralized if mining is inherently centralizing.
There are many reasons that Satoshi's design is centralizing. One is for example that mining is profitable, thus there is a competition to drive difficulty higher and higher such that EACH transaction costs ~$10 in electricity (which is currently paid by mining the investors as professional miners who have loans from the oligarchy+banksters mine with huge farms near hydropower at $50 per BTC cost and sell all that they mine). Even if no debasement was paid to miners, they have a monopoly on transactions added to blocks, so they can charge what ever transaction fees they want if they control 51% of the hashrate. It begs for a oligarchy on mining to develop (which is the direction it appears to be headed and normally government steps in with regulation to aid the oligarchy).
And increasing the transactions per block also forces centralization, thus furthering a trend towards oligarchy control, so saying cost per transaction will fall as transaction rate increases is only true if the resultant oligarchy decides to go for market share first (perhaps as a longer-term strategy of 666 enslavement and world government trend).
Also since mining is only done for profit, then pools are required to deal with huge variance of winning a block for typical (non oligarchy) miners. Pools centralize mining, even if we argue that miners can switch pools, the government can more easily target the pools even if miners switch since by definition there will never be as many pools as miners (not even close).
There are many flaws in Satoshi's design which make it entirely broken from my view. I can't support Bitcoin (nor Monero). I support things that I feel enthusiastically could work out well for mankind and be successful. Bitcoin will succeed only because it is fitting in well with the existing oligarchy's (e.g. Peter Thiel) plans for world domination (and that includes that an illusion of decentralization will persist long enough for the centralization to finally take hold).
It seems like you have hit an impasse, but without knowing the details of the problem
I had thought so, but I think I explained in this thread how to break the impasse I thought I had hit. But I reiterate I will go over all the details when I am offline to see if I haven't missed something in my thought process while I am writing here online.
First I do agree that Satoshi's design is flawed for the following two reasons:
1) Mining cannot be paid for entirely by fees, so a tail emission is a must. The reason is that a fee market cannot properly develop in the absence of a block subsidy. One has either a fixed blocksize with a mining oligarchy and infinite fees or an infinite blocksize where competition between miners drive fees to zero.
2) In order to have a permission less system on needs an opaque blockchain where censorship is impossible or at least very expensive.
There is a cost to censorship which has already been demonstrated in Bitcoin. It is manifested in the opposition to an increase in the blocksize by those miners that are based in China. The reason for this is the latency introduced by the Great Firewall of China puts a centralized data centre in China at a significant disadvantage with respect to say a residential connection in Canada. The irony here is that if Bitcoin had allowed for larger blocks earlier on this situation would not have developed since the Chinese ASIC manufacturers would have been forced to sell their devices for export leading to a much more decentralized Bitcoin mining situation.
The lesson from Bitcoin is that a small blocksize can actually lead to mining centralization by accommodating censorship rather than the other way around. The second factor of PoW that must be taken into account is PoC (Proof of Cold). The key is that in a situation where electricity is used for space heating the marginal cost of mining is zero; however the
heat is only valuable if it is decentralized. The key here is that one can easily distribute electricity but not heat forcing decentralization. This in effect gives the small player a very significant cost advantage over the large centralized operation.
The reality is that it is very premature to dismiss a true second generation PoW coin such as Monero over what are very valid failures in the original Satoshi design. As with many technological innovations the first generation is not the one that eventually gains prominence.