Quote from: monsterer on September 17, 2015, 09:34:41 PM

I suspect you are attempting to justify other consensus mechanisms

No, I'm proving that Bitcoin doesn't function at all like the PDF states. Words used like "trustless" are obviously not correct because a second layer of abstraction was added (pools) that invalidates much of what he says about voting. You're not participating in democracy, you're participating in a republic. If it was trustless, it would be a democracy. This is why PoW is a less efficient, worse scaling, resource wasting form of DPoS. They're both republics. One is designed to be that way, the other reaches the same conclusion by creating a Rube Goldberg machine that eats megatons of coal and spits out a less decentralized, lower performing system afterwards. Both systems are republics, both systems are delegation, denying it is intellectually dishonest.

Quote from: monsterer on September 17, 2015, 09:34:41 PM

by trying to find loopholes in definitions to prove a point.

If by "loopholes in definitions" from your quote, you mean me stating that it's easier to collude with myself (sybil in the form of the same entity owning the 3 high hash rate pools) than it is to collude with other people who own pools? Most consensus models seem to make a large differentiation in the two. They aren't the same. Like I said, it's not collusion, it's a sybil attack. There is no prevention mechanism against it in Bitcoin either. The actor can do so in complete secrecy, eternally, until whenever he wants to pull a long con or other strategy. Some coins like Darkcoin and Vanillacoin try to use collateral requirement (coins) to create a node. All this does is put an upper limit on the number of sybil nodes you can produce.