This is interesting. How would people acquire coins in the proof-of-stake model?

The more coins you lock into an investing wallet, the more likely the network is to choose you to mint a block.

In practice it's quite a bit more complex but that's the basic idea.

Same way as in a proof-of-work blockchain. Miners (validators) receive the transaction fees plus some number of coins per block that is included in the chain, but instead of anyone being able to mine a block (and thus requiring a very high difficulty), only nodes that have a large number of coins frozen (the stake) are allowed to publish new blocks.

Ok, so coin holders are allowed to validate transactions between other coin holders, and for that they get more coins.

But if I have no coins, I have to buy them from a coin holder with another form of money.

So this system would require the original issuer to be someone that you trust and have a reason to do business with in the first place right? So it's kind of like banks and central banks today?

I realize ICOs by startups are a thing but I kind of want to just ignore that whole phenomenon... I don't own any kind of coin and don't understand it well enough, but this seems to me to be a technology that will eventually be very useful.

You do need to trust the validators in a PoS scheme, but with PoW you also need to trust the majority of miners.

So, the rich get richer?

It's not that different our current economic model. You can choose between spending the cash you have now, or "locking it up" (i.e., buying bonds/equities) and receiving a dividend.

With PoW, it's still the case that the "rich get richer," because you have to be pretty wealthy in order to afford the equipment to mine any reasonable amount of coins.

Yeah, but this stuff is supposed to make things much better. If it's the same as our current system, I don't see much reason to change.

> How would people acquire coins in the proof-of-stake model

They usually sell them in an initial offering. Of the top 8 coins on coinmarketcap only 4 have mining. Ripple, NEO, Stellar and Cardano don't.