Okay I've digested the white paper. I appreciate john-conner providing more details. That was the honorable and helpful action.
Unfortunately afaics, there are elementary attack vectors that he has not addressed in this white paper:
- No cost to being a peer, thus a Sybil attack on nodes in general. The adversary could insert a unlimited nodes if he wants to in order to dominate voting.
- How to squelch DoS attacks on the vote? A node which always votes against consensus can't be distinguished from one voting honestly since lock conflicts result in an indeterminate vote.
- He employs a Bellagio Algorithm to avoid gaming the selection of which nodes to poll for votes, so this removes the reputation weights of Skycoin's consensus, but it doesn't address the spamming of total node count nor the spamming of the lock conflict.
- Nodes are not paid for voting. If they receive bribes from the double-spender, the algorithm has no defense other than it hopes that 50% of the nodes in the network are not on-the-dole.
- Lock request spamming or DoS attacks. Are transaction fees hardcoded for the entire network?? Preset constants are anti-decentralization.
Also this algorithm requires the entire network to see all the transactions which of course won't scale without centralization, so if he is trying to enable real-time microtransactions (1 second confirmations) which could explode transaction volumes up to the 100,000s or more per second then he has a problem. Refer to the GavinCoin fork debate.