It may be that Nxt is in fact 100% secure because >50% of the stake has always been held by a few people such as Marc De Mesel who will defend it against attacks. That doesn't make it decentralized nor does it make the method secure just because Nxt in particular might be.
I guess you have to ask yourself, "How much does decentralization matter if the currency holders are the ones that secure the network?"
It certainly does. The point of cryptocurrency is not Moon. The point is to have a system of enforced rules where all participants are protected not only from outside attackers but from each other.
I never said the point of crypto was only to make money. I think for a lot of the original believers in crypto that was more of a secondary consequence. I understand your point of participants not being protected from each other, but there are very few people who would act to their own detriment.
The point you are missing is that it isn't necessarily to their determent. You're only considering "crash the world" type attacks. If Bitcoin miners 51% attack to prevent increasing the blocksize and drive up fees while maintaining their competitive advantage, they help themselves at the expense of people who want to transact with lower fees. That's just one example that comes to mind, and maybe not the best example regarding PoS but the underlying issues are the same.
Crypto without decentralization is just inefficient fiat.
Right, but isn't it the currency holder's right to set monetary policy (aka chain rules). Your argument that miners shouldn't dictate policy is understandable because the miners influence isn't proportional to their currency holdings, but in a system where currency holdings equal chain influence what does it matter? The the majority of currency holders want to dictate policy, imo that is their right. The reason in my mind that DPoS is flawed is because it breaks the linkage of coin ownership and chain ownership via a fraudulent voting mechanism.
I don't know who gets to define what is "right", and I think I don't care.
If someone has disproportionate and effectively absolute power, it will likely be used. Since you can't limit concentration of coins you have to limit power. PoS is even worse than PoW in this regard. PoW is a physical quantity and you can't cram all the miners into a single point. Even "Chinese Miners" are not single entity and compete in some ways even as they may cooperate with others. You could put 99% of the stake on a small part of a single chip (way smaller than a USB stick).
It just doesn't work. That's why minority shareholders in public corporations have certain legal rights and not just the right to be screwed by larger shareholders. Otherwise public corporations go away and you end up with no real decentralization of ownership and private equity (arguably happening anyway).
It has nothing to do with "right or wrong". It has to do with the prerogative of the majority coin holders. It's very true that stake can be centralized much further than hashpower. All someone has to do to get more influence is purchase more stake. I'm not sure about the argument of "Chinese Miners" competing... Is there any business in China that isn't controlled by the govt? Is there anyone in China who has money that the govt doesn't want to have money?
Regarding the fact of minority stakeholders being taken advantage of by larger shareholders, I can only imagine a situation where the larger holders would destroy smaller holders currency. This of course would destroy the currency and its value and would not be in their interest to do so.