Apparently PoW should still be in there. Something was "missing in translation" here...
https://medium.com/@chrispacia/avalanche-pre-consensus-making-zeroconf-secure-ddedec254339
I think they're 2 different things though, Emin is building a new coin from the ground up just using Avalanche, Chris is using avalanche for preconsensus on bch
I believe Pacia and some other devs were talking about basing Avalanche participant selection on PoW over the past ~100 blocks so it's still critical for gaining control of the network
Yes and no. Basically the old benefit of 51% is "few confirmations" accommodating a split for a double-spend. With Avalanche, network control can cause a sway. But remains _not_ split.
Just that centralization or any kind of attack would still rely upon gaining a large majority of hashrate on the network. Lots of people were irked by the idea of PoS Bitcoin