You've left out a whole bunch of key ideas in proof of stake, for example the idea that the amount of voting power you have is proportional to the percentage of the money supply that you own. Which in turn means that your consensus system is ultimately controlled by the wealthy.
How do you know that someone has been dishonest? A consensus system can only enforce rules within that consensus system, if the consensus system has been compromised the dictator can censor any evidence of dishonesty, even if most people are aware that dishonesty has occurred.
You can draw the line anywhere you want for "conceptually simple". We could easily say that proof of work is equivalent to building a tower, and that the tallest tower is used to determine what consensus is. That's also very simple, but also leaves out a bunch of ideas.
> Which in turn means that your consensus system is ultimately controlled by the wealthy.
Yes, well how is this different than Bitcoin's massive multibillion dollar mining farm operations? Hard to avoid the rich getting richer. At least with Ethereum, it has launched hundreds of derivative tokens that have been able to experience exponential growth and have made a lot of retail investors very wealthy.
> How do you know that someone has been dishonest? A consensus system can only enforce rules within that consensus system, if the consensus system has been compromised the dictator
You're getting into implementation details. Almost nothing is ever easy to implement even if it is easy to conceive. Ok, a dam or a bridge is easy to understand, but building one is a highly technical challenge that involves a myriad of engineering tradeoffs, so if you want to read more into the particular tradeoffs the Ethereum Developers have settled on, go read the documentation. Everything is a rabbit hole, go as deep as you want.
How do you know that someone has been dishonest? A consensus system can only enforce rules within that consensus system, if the consensus system has been compromised the dictator can censor any evidence of dishonesty, even if most people are aware that dishonesty has occurred.
You can draw the line anywhere you want for "conceptually simple". We could easily say that proof of work is equivalent to building a tower, and that the tallest tower is used to determine what consensus is. That's also very simple, but also leaves out a bunch of ideas.