In Nxt, anyone can forge (possibly through leasing). It's not something reserved to the rich and powerful. The percentage returns are the same.
In Nxt, forging is something done to help secure the network. It's not done to make money. The income from forging is currently around 0.2%/year, which is trivial.
Why would the ability to lease make any difference to my argument. Yes, the percentage returns are indeed the same, thus those with extremely large purses or very large leases profit the most and all others take a loss(when you subtract electricity) when forging Nxt.
See for yourself:
http://www.mynxt.info/forging_calculator.phpso unless you have 5million or more NXT (or can pay to lease that amount) than forging really doesn't cover the cost of electricity:
http://charts.nxtcrypto.org/cDistribution.aspxThis means that only the original investors can realistically profit from forging. With higher transaction velocity early investors can look to profit much more even if fees decrease.
This means the top 0.2% profit from Nxt forging and would explain why there are so few nodes despite it using so little electricity and having a trivial barrier to entry:
http://www.peerexplorer.com/only 245 average nodes online. Bitcoin's 7k average active nodes is dangerous. 245 globally is just laughable.
Validating transactions is so cheap in PoS, it leads to a different mentality to PoW, because there aren't millions of dollars involved every day. (That's part of why "nothing at stake" doesn't apply. The increased income you'd get from forging on multiple forks isn't worth the loss of security. NaS is a criticism only someone from the PoW world would make.)
A complete Non-Sequitur. People can have other motivations besides direct profit with a NaS attack.