Monero...POW ensures permissionless behaviour
PoW doesn't insure permissionless nor decentralized if mining is inherently centralizing.
In Satoshi's formulation of it and every other one I have seen, it is. Please for example refer to my prior reply to monsterer. Also the upthread post I made about how adding instant transactions via LN (or any transaction rate scaling) forces further centralization.
There are many reasons that Satoshi's design is centralizing. One is for example that mining is profitable, thus there is a competition to drive difficulty higher and higher such that EACH transaction costs ~$10 in electricity (which is currently paid by mining the investors as professional miners who have loans from the oligarchy+banksters mine with huge farms near hydropower at $50 per BTC cost and sell all that they mine). Even if no debasement was paid to miners, they have a monopoly on transactions added to blocks, so they can charge what ever transaction fees they want if they control 51% of the hashrate. It begs for a oligarchy on mining to develop (which is the direction it appears to be headed and normally government steps in with regulation to aid the oligarchy).
And increasing the transactions per block also forces centralization, thus furthering a trend towards oligarchy control, so saying cost per transaction will fall as transaction rate increases is only true if the resultant oligarchy decides to go for market share first (perhaps as a longer-term strategy of 666 enslavement and world government trend).
Also since mining is only done for profit, then pools are required to deal with huge variance of winning a block for typical (non oligarchy) miners. Pools centralize mining, even if we argue that miners can switch pools, the government can more easily target the pools even if miners switch since by definition there will never be as many pools as miners (not even close).
There are many flaws in Satoshi's design which make it entirely broken from my view. I can't support Bitcoin (nor Monero). I support things that I feel enthusiastically could work out well for mankind and be successful. Bitcoin will succeed only because it is fitting in well with the existing oligarchy's (e.g. Peter Thiel) plans for world domination (and that includes that an illusion of decentralization will persist long enough for the centralization to finally take hold).
It seems like you have hit an impasse, but without knowing the details of the problem
I had thought so, but I think I explained in this thread how to break the impasse I thought I had hit. But I reiterate I will go over all the details when I am offline to see if I haven't missed something in my thought process while I am writing here online.
First I do agree that Satoshi's design is flawed for the following two reasons:
1) Mining cannot be paid for entirely by fees, so a tail emission is a must.
Mining can be paid for by users who must add PoW to submit their transactions. The other reason for tail emission is because otherwise the coin supply is shrinking towards 0 as users lose coins, which will be much more likely once doing microtransactions and more frivolous widescale adoption.
The reason is that a fee market cannot properly develop in the absence of a block subsidy. One has either a fixed blocksize with a mining oligarchy and infinite fees or an infinite blocksize where competition between miners drive fees to zero.
For layman technophobes, your astute point (which many of us technophiles already aware of and I wrote
Spiraling Transactions Fees thread in 2013) is that when the block size is unlimited then anyone can include all the transactions that were excluded by a miner that was trying to force higher transaction fees. But if block size is unlimited then transaction spam can be unlimited, so a mining oligarchy must form to constrain block size. The problem is not due to relative block size (so compression wouldn't fix it), but due to the fact that someone centralized needs to decide which transactions are spam or not (otherwise in decentralization at least in Satoshi's design then all spam transactions are allowed).
But you are incorrect to assert that tail emission fixes this. This is a fundamental flaw in Satoshi's design which is not fixed with tail emission. It is fundamental problem of a design that includes blocks. This is one of the flaws that Iota is attempting to correct by eliminating blocks, but then I have conjectured in this thread that Iota has other flaws because it eliminates flaws.
This is why crypto gets so frustrating because it seems every design always ends up with centralization, because the CAP theorem can not be avoided!
My idea for fixing all of this, has to do with the way the temporal intrablock partitioning is done. I will probably find some flaw in my design too, but I will spend more time thinking about it. This thread is helping me enumerate all the issues I need to write down when I rehash the analysis of my design again (sans the part I had mentioned is already flawed but now I think that part may have been unnecessary any way).
In short, IMO Monero isn't close to solving the real problems of crypto. Even the anonymity is highly flawed as I explained in the recent discussions in the Monero vs. Dash thread (only Zerocash could be reliable anonymity). I don't want to waste my time on baby steps that aren't really moving us to any true solution. Sorry because I know you and the Monero folks are very smart. I just can't feel we will get the breakthrough we need working to improve Monero because there is some ingrained inertia there I don't want to fight to overcome.
2) In order to have a permission less system on needs an opaque blockchain where censorship is impossible or at least very expensive.
There are two vectors to accomplish this:
1. Mining is controlled by users, not centralized.
2. Transactions are entirely opaque, which is only accomplished in Zerocash. Cryptonote's anonymity breaks down in theory with chain and meta data analysis by a global snoop such as top-down society (NSA, etc).
Either one of those would probably suffice, but together that afaics would be fabulously permissionless.
There is a cost to censorship which has already been demonstrated in Bitcoin. It is manifested in the opposition to an increase in the blocksize by those miners that are based in China. The reason for this is the latency introduced by the Great Firewall of China puts a centralized data centre in China at a significant disadvantage with respect to say a residential connection in Canada. The irony here is that if Bitcoin had allowed for larger blocks earlier on this situation would not have developed since the Chinese ASIC manufacturers would have been forced to sell their devices for export leading to a much more decentralized Bitcoin mining situation. The lesson from Bitcoin is that a small blocksize can actually lead to mining centralization by accommodating censorship rather than the other way around.
Astute, well stated, and agreed.
The block size is a double-edge sword no matter which direction it is increased or decreased. Real solutions will change entirely the design.
The second factor of PoW that must be taken into account is PoC (Proof of Cold). The key is that in a situation where electricity is used for space heating the marginal cost of mining is zero; however the heat is only valuable if it is decentralized. The key here is that one can easily distribute electricity but not heat forcing decentralization. This in effect gives the small player a very significant cost advantage over the large centralized operation.
Heat from electricity is the most inefficient way to heat (better to use wood, gas, or any carbon). Besides Larry Summers' 21 Inc is dreaming up ways to hook users into being slave oligarchy miners by giving them free heaters and cell phones in exchange for using their device to mine on behalf of 21 Inc (last time I looked 21 Inc was already a significant % of the global Bitcoin hashrate and climbing fast).
Sometimes I wonder if you Monero folks are actually a Trojan Horse planted to fool everyone to keep them away from furthering real solutions.
The reality is that it is very premature to dismiss a true second generation PoW coin such as Monero over what are very valid failures in the original Satoshi design. As with many technological innovations the first generation is not the one that eventually gains prominence.
And IMO/AFAICS Monero is too much of a baby step to be the one that kills Bitcoin. It doesn't really solve any problems truly.