Money is Proof of Work
On first sight, money appears to be a technology for exchanging value between market participants, and proof of work appears to be a cyber security technology for securing bits of information. Bitcoin in this view is a novel form of money that happens to be secured by proof of work, but that could also be secured by alternatives like proof of stake.
But if we take a closer look at what money really is in its fundamental form, we can see that the two concepts are closely related and could even be the same thing. Money is a technology for keeping track of favors provided between market participants. When two market participants engage in trade, one participant provides goods or services to the other. Making these goods or services available to the second participant requires work to be performed by the first. In exchange, the second participant acknowledges the work performed by the first, and offers a receipt indicating “proof of work” in return. At a later point in time, the first participant can then come to the second and redeem their proof of work receipt for the goods or services provided by the second participant, which respectively required work to be performed to be made available. In this way, money is a proof that work was provided at some point in the past. Possessing a unit of “proof of work” means “I provided work to you in the past, now it is time for you to provide work to me”.
Proof of stake is sometimes considered as a viable, and potentially desirable, alternative to proof of work for securing monetary technology. The benevolent view on proof of stake is that decisionmakers need to have a stake in the outcomes generated by the system in order to be and remain aligned with the flourishing of the system, a.k.a. having “skin in the game”. When someone stakes their crypto, they are incentivized to keep the respective system alive and well, because if the system fails they would loose their stake. But when applying the perspective developed for understanding proof of work, we can see that what proof of stake really means is that “I have more to loose, now it is time for you to provide work to me”. Does this not sound like a description of slavery? In the relationship between slave and master, the master can be defined as the one with most to loose, or “the highest stake”. The slave respectively can be defined as the one with the least to loose, or the lowest stake. Proof of stake receipts, the money in this relationship, are still used to track favors between market participants, but the favors go exclusively in one direction, from the slave to the master.
Proof of work is money for reciprocity, and proof of stake is money for slavery.
