Afaics, you are rehashing cosmetic variants of either the nothing-at-stake, power-law (or exponential) distribution of stake/resources, or power vacuum of economies-of-scale problems. You can change the mask and lipstick on the pig, but it is still a pig.
Coming back to the problem of unprofitable mining, I just had the following idea:
Instead of using PoW for making direct profit (as in Bitcoin) or decreasing transaction fees (as in the model I described), we could require each stakeholder to perform PoW in order to preserve his stake. Without producing the required number of blocks in a certain timeframe, the stakeholder would be levied a negative interest rate from his stake and thus lose a percentage of his coins (which would be burned).
And so when the majority PoW orphans the minority's PoW, then the minority ends up with no stake and the majority ends up with all of the stake.
- In order to attack the system (and make a double-spend), you would need to beat the network in terms of hashrate and stake at the same time.
- Only big investors have an incentive to become high-scale miners with a lot of hashpower. Such investors have little interest to attack the system.
Any thoughts?
Other than
rented hashrate double-spend attacks for the PoW coins that don't use ASICs, as I point out in detail in my white paper, the main concern is the 51% attack is not for issuing double-spends (which I agree they won't do) but the majority hashrate can have a monopoly on all the mining rewards in the system by orphaning the other blocks in the system (and in a decentralized minority case, this attack isn't even detectable!). That is an attack and it is insidious (harmless) enough that users of transactions probably won't care, especially given the "benefit" that 1 confirmation becomes a guarantee and can't be orphaned (because the network becomes controlled by a deterministic mining cartel).
By the way, thanks imnotback for uploading the two chapters (which I've read with interest).
I am motivated by knowing that some people find it useful and interesting.