Thanks for your response, it’s really helpful to see your thoughts on this.
I’m not yet convinced. I don’t see these analogies. No capital is burned by locking up your SOV in the current system. Locking up is not analogous to PoW. With rewards going to stakers, the rich get richer, also with the lock up system.
One challenge is to avoid centralization of capital. That requires that newcomers find it easy to start staking, and that newcomers get richer quicker than the rate at which the already rich get richer. That is what the proposed system tries to offer: it makes it easy to start staking, and the multiplier builds up quicker in the first periods of staking and then grows at a slower rate over longer periods.
With the lock up system, it is a handful of core community members with high conviction that get richer quickest and hence, it seems to me, there’s a danger of centralized capital building up around a few.