Bitcoin Mining Is an Oligopoly, and Proof-of-Stake Isn’t Any Better

Today PoW and PoS blockchains have conflicting interests between miners/validators and network users. Users would benefit from faster and cheaper transactions, but in general, this will increase costs to miners and validators, reducing their profits. A version of this conflict came up during Bitcoin’s Blocksize War, where some argued to increase the amount of data in a mined Bitcoin block, theoretically making transactions faster and cheaper. The corresponding cost for miners would be higher with bigger blocks, but fees would be lower. Who won out?