Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: A World of Trust – eMunie Consensus Primer
by
TPTB_need_war
on 25/08/2015, 21:38:38 UTC
Indeed it appears his system needs to be modeled as a complex state machine.

You can't just make a claim out-of-context that an "honest" majority of the trust reputation will decide the winner of a double-spend. You have to model the state machine holistically before you can make any claim.

Proof-of-work eliminates that requirement because each new iteration of a block solution is independent (trials, often simplistically modeled as a Poisson distribution) from the prior one (except to some small extent in selfish mining which is also easily modeled with a few equations). See the selfish-mining paper for the state machine and then imagine how complex the model for his design will be.

This is independence is what I mean when I say the entropy of PoW is open (unbounded), while it is closed for PoS.[1]

[1]https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1159691.msg12242278#msg12242278
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1159691.msg12227357#msg12227357

Imagine this highly technical discussion comparing PoW and PoS can't happen in the Bitcoin Technical & Discussion forum, because the overlord Gregory Maxwell moves it to the Altcoin Discussion thread.