"Proof-of-Stake Politics (non-decentralized governance)" - I guess you haven't been following Bitcoin lately? There are just as much politics involved with PoW as soon as a cryptocurrency is large enough. Google "Bitcoin block size limit controversy".
Perhaps you haven't noticed that changing Bitcoin's protocol is incredibly difficult because it requires convincing 50% of the mining hashrate to do so. In my design, it will require ~100%. That is zero effective politics. People can foam at the mouth but they can't actually change the protocol.
That sounds like a horrible idea... you are banking on the fact you will release the cryptocurrency without any flaws. Furthermore, it will be hard to make changes if something desperately needs to be changed. One saboteur can ruin it for everybody. If Satoshi would have made Bitcoin that way, I'm sure Bitcoin would already be dead. Cryptocurrencies need to be able to evolve easily due to unknown issues that will certainly come up in the future.
Btw, thanks for raising the point that my innovation to eliminate control-of-the-majority means hard forks become that much more difficult to accomplish. I do need to make sure I pay attention to that!
A PoW coin becomes progressively more difficult to hard fork as the mining becomes more diversified. Obviously Satoshi couldand Monero can stillhard fork, because they have loyalty of the miners because it is not yet a widely adopted block chain.
But yeah, a PoW coin needs to get their protocol correct before it becomes too widely deployed.
Also note that even widely deployed, miners are much more willing to accept a hard fork which fixes a bug for as long as it isn't injuring their vested interests.
Users invest in a protocol and if politics can change the protocol at any time in the future, then users can't trust the future. This is another reason Bitcoin can't just graft on all the innovations of altcoins.
It is one of the prominent reasons I am trying to design a PoW block chain which can be hot-plugged with unlimited public block chain transaction format variants that are orthogonal to the PoW chain which remains a constant (so they don't all have to reinvent security).Whereas, PoS proponents want absolute control forever. And thus they are private club designs. Their designs will never be ubiquitous platforms because they
are not strictly protocol:
The only way you could accomplish what you stated is for the system to not enforce a consensus protocol.
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Either proof-of-stake is not a decentralized protocol for consensus so your point is correct, or vice versa so your point is incorrect. This ties into the point that
politics has absolute control in proof-of-stake. Does everyone always agree with the decision of the government. Who is that again who predicted DPOS would end up in a shooting war?
[...]Bitshares is going to have elements of the Roman senate, maybe people will even stab or murder each other eventually[...]
The PoW proponents are trying to design the protocol that will be the block chain for the entire internet, not some private club where we get to play King forever. Inventing a protocol that is orthogonal to politics is I think part of the definition of an end-to-end principled protocol (end-to-end is an underlying principle of all popular internet protocols).
Whereas in Proof-of-Stake coins, the collectivized, centralized control is absolute.
As stated above, there is a reason why a "majority rules" system is best.
Refuted.
Your claim that attacking a PoS coin is a "fixed cost" and attacking a PoW coin is an "unbounded cost" is similarly ridiculous considering the costs of attacking both types are dynamic (PoS depending on the price of the coin and PoW depending on the hash power of the coin.)
It is absolutely correct. Once you control a PoS coin, you control it forever at no additional (significant) cost. How can anyone else ever take control away from you since you control staking and the only way anyone else can get stake is by buying it from you? No one can and you don't need to continue expending resources (mining) to retain control as you do with PoW.
Wrong. If someone buys up 50%+ of the currency supply to attack it, the PoS coin's community thanks them for the donation, forks the coin, rolls back the blockchain, and continues business as usual.
In that case, the system doesn't work at all, because it doesn't enforce consensus. You might as well have "the community" record everyone's holdings on a spreadsheet.
Also, attacking via 50% doesn't necessarily require "buying up" anything. It could be (at least in part) having hacked an exchange or other large holder, or having accumulated stake through borrowing. The same with PoW (compromising a large pool for example), except that it isn't permanent.
Obviously that is not an ideal solution, but a worst-case scenario solution. Feel free to try and attack a PoS chain and let me know how successful you are.
You are missing the point. The stake is an attack.
If you and few others who were Kings before but gave up majority stake, you fork but the users may not follow you. The masses tend to be very apathetic about changing what they are accustomed to.
The majority can change the protocol at-will. Ditto with Satoshi's PoW (
but I claim not in my innovation), except it is an unbounded ongoing cost;whereas, with PoS it is a one-time cost. And you can even recoup that cost by shorting the coin if the manipulations will cause a drop in price, or by recouping profits gained from changing the protocol.
As long as the protocol changes don't too much inconvenience the masses, they won't bother to change. For example, adding a small transaction fee that is paid to the new Kings.
You claim we can't attack PoS, but this may be because there is no profit for us to do so, because your PoS coins have no usership nor sufficient non-mirage liquidity to profit from shorting. Go grow the usership and/or the true liquidity of the float, then observe the game theory.
You are also presuming that the majority of stake exists. Instead you may have 10 coalitions of minority stakes all fighting each other. Thus 10 forks and chaos due to being able to spend the coins 10 times.
Forking will almost always be avoided because politically it is devastating. Again the attackers can just short the coin.
A dictator attacker who unifies control (a la Napoleon) by acquiring majority stake would perhaps be cheered (ending the chaos). This is the strategy being deployed right now before our eyes to bring the world to its knees to beg for a NWO one world government to stop the nation-state chaos. The banksters created that chaos on purpose.
Refuted.