It was the following linked post where I linked to the post I had made on Vitalik's blog about the
Consensus-by-betting plan for Ethereum's future version named Casper:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czcpoezI explained at the linked post above that Consensus-by-betting is essentially a proof-of-stake/share algorithm in the sense that the financial penalty mechanism is based on deposits (stakes). And
PoS has failure modes which don't have a Nash equilibrium (some of which Vlad is not aware of!) and here follows I described how longest chain rule does have a Nash equilibrium:
Thus I have explained there is no Nash equilibrium in Monero's penalty feature (unlike for Satoshi's longest chain rule where there is indeed a Nash equilibrium because if miners don't converge on the longest chain then all their chains are invalid/orphans and worthless without consensus). ArticMine is probably thinking that since miners have different costs, the equilibrium point for transaction fees will be the weighted average but I have explained the holistic economics by which this weighted average is driven by the costs of the largest hashrate miners until they control all the hashrate[1].
Greg Meredith
talks technobabble for 15 minutes about the design of Casper.
Greg is talking about the math that says if the bets are rationally motivated by the penalties, then it should be possible to get them to converge on a consensus as to which block from all the validators (i.e. verifiers) is correct and chosen, i.e. that convergence of consensus can be mathematically guaranteed.
Vlad Zamfir
had a video presentation and an
audio presentation about Casper. I had also send a
video presentation by Vitalik which explained more about sharding and an overview.
But what both Vitalik, Greg, and Vlad are failing to grasp is a MORE FUNDAMENTAL INSOLUBLE FLAW which is what I wrote in the prior post that consensus requires the the underlying state transformations for contracts are/is bounded on recursion, otherwise the partial orderings diverge and it is impossible to unifying them into one block chain ordering.
Bob McElrath explained on Vitalik's block the consensus requires fungibility of contracts. By fungibility what he is really wanting to say is commutativity of ordering, which is achieved (other than a double-spend) in Bitcoin by the UXTO history having the directed acyclic graph property.
Edit: Vlad's conceptualization of the
CAP Theorem at the 15:17 slide of his video presentation is incorrect! Once you allow Partitioning of the block chain state, it is then impossible to regain both Consistency and Availability. Vlad seems to think you can regain Consensus consistency after waiting for a vote, but that is incorrect because the partitioned state is not irrevocably in conflict and can be reconciled any more! Also Vlad makes many other errors as well.
These three guys are clueless. They are making so many mistakes.
I hear you, honestly I do, but my laptop isn't perfect (it sometimes grinds to a halt at 100% disk usage), my super duper new flat screen sometimes pixelates, my old CDs used to jump and skip, and 'always on' is sometimes 'off'.
There are well known discussions about bitcoin and it's suitability as a financial tool. It is just too slow and bloated!
The point I'm making here is that tech is NEVER perfect. It's all about the best tool for the job at the time that particular piece of tech comes into public usage. ETH is not perfect and it never will be. Once the issues in ETH are addressed in the next big thing in crypto, the next big thing in crypto will have its own flaws exposed, and so on.
With all the flaws of bitcoin, people still believe in it. It is the same for ETH.
Personally, I see complementary blockchains on the horizon. App execution, storage, network interactions, accountability/trust/auditing etc, all contributing to the global network concept (conspiracy theorists please insert 666 aka 'The Beast' here) rather than the one size fits all model.
Imperfect blockchains working symbiotically to simulate the perfect blockchain (with downtime due to hackers on public holidays - fixed by Monday morning after an outcry in the national press!).
Nothing in this world is perfect.