I agree it doesn’t seem very decentralized at the moment (not many validators and most support coming from the foundation) but that may change if the platform is able to scale.
In theory no; but in practice yes. PoW relies on miners competing for the next block, and block size/time tends to always be a bottleneck for scalability. This is why most secure PoW blockchains have a very low throughput.
Solana’s approach to PoS + PoH + optimistic confirmation allows it to scale to an order of magnitude higher throughput than typical PoW blockchains while - they claim - retaining a degree of security & decentralization superior to a PoW mechanism were it to be scaled to the same network throughput (via block size/time adjustments). This is what makes it novel - if their marketing & whitepaper is to be believed.
Obviously, Solana’s throughput is achieved at the expense of security & decentralization compared to say ETH, but I suspect a PoW blockchain with nodes tuned to support 50K tps would not work at all.
PoW, PoS, PoWhatever in context of blockchains are all consensus reaching protocols. An input to consensus reaching protocol in blockchains is a block hash. Consensus reaching protocol doesn't care if that hash represents 1 transaction or 1 trillion transactions, therefore throughput doesn't depend on which consensus reaching mechanism you pick.
so neither in theory nor practice, PoW has nothing to do with throughput, it's all just scammy marketing to sell you shitcoins. And in this case - extremely centralized, extremely censorable, extremely shady shitcoin.
https://tokens-economy.gitbook.io/consensus/chain-based-proo...
https://medium.com/solana-labs/proof-of-history-explained-by...
I agree it doesn’t seem very decentralized at the moment (not many validators and most support coming from the foundation) but that may change if the platform is able to scale.