By distributing new coins via mining, miners are motivated because they can compete to gain a more competitive ranking in the coin ownership. If the PoW is cpu-only as Bitcoin was when half of its coins were mined, can potentially get the entire population excited about mining.
How can PoS attain similar marketing and adoption?
ASIC resistant coins like Protoshares for example just end up with people running server farms of hyperthreaded multicore CPUs. In the end you end up with the same problem though perhaps not as stark.
that Protoshares is ASIC resistant. It is compute bound and thus it can be implemented to run more efficiently on an ASIC. The cpu-only PoW can not be compute bound (and that is yet another hint of my secrets).
But your point isn't that Protoshares will remain cpu-only, rather you are claiming that while a coin can be mined with a cpu (ASICs not yet developed for it), then server farms will dominate the mining.
I have a solid logic as to why I don't agree.
For the moment the masses are not interested in mining Protoshares because a) it isn't popular enough yet, b) the mining client isn't something Grandma could download and operate, c) Protoshares development was funded by the Chinese so they were ready from way before release to mine it with server farms.
Once the masses are mining they will mine at a loss, because their electricity costs will exceed the value of the coin. They won't care, because the coin value is rising, they won't notice the change to their electric bill, and the virgin anonymous coin is intrinsically worth more (even if sells for same price) than a coin obtained via an exchange. I think it has been established that
the cost of mining determines the price of the coin, so this will push the price of the coin higher and higher much faster than Bitcoin (because the hardware is already owned, i.e. the value of all the PCs in the world gets moved into the marketcap of the cpu-only altcoin).
Thus server farms won't be profitable. Perhaps only micro-hydropower stream driven mining will be profitable. This was really a major epiphany when it hit me, I said "A ha!, this is it!".
With cpu-only mining, I envision that economies-of-scale with huge rigs located in cooled data centers will earn less ROI than carting some PCs to a stream and running microhydropower, because I estimate the by-far lowest cost energy (micro-hydropower) will outweigh the very minimal cost-scaling advantages of a tower of PCs. Thus I see the (small, reasonable, annual rate of new coins or Freicoin's demurrage) redistribution of wealth going to the smaller guys with the most initiative, who are driving new technologies for harvesting renewable energy, i.e. the antithesis of waste.