The OpenShare design doesn't attempt to prevent a power-law distribution of the tokens (i.e. whales) because that would not be possible to prevent. Power-law (or exponential) distribution of resources is the norm in nature.
IMO power-law distribution of tokens in existing cryptocurrencies is due to the fact that more resources result in more rewards
as per protocol. You still have to prove that it is
per se not possible to design a currency that effectively incentivizes rational users to own less tokens than their resource share. Even though you had some valid points regarding my proposed scheme, I'm not convinced yet that breaking the proportionality-link between the power-law distribution of resoures and its impact on consensus is strictly impossible. In fact, I'm currently looking into new incentive mechanisms which seem promising in that regard.
The tokens will be distributed to the app devs, users, and content producers, so we aren't necessarily distributing them to whales initially. The distribution will be meritocracy where those who receive tokens do so because of some objectively verifiable "work" they provided to the ecosystem. Speculators will have to buy them from those groups.
That somehow reminds me of an idea I had about a coin where users who contribute to the success of the currency (by promoting it or doing any work that can be at least subjectively verified by humans) would be rewarded (and have most impact on consensus). To determine the rewards, other users could vote/bet on contributions and receive curation rewards similar to Steem. Early birds would get higher curation rewards than late comers. So, it would leverage the intelligence of the crowd. Unfortunately, I only posted my idea in the German section of this forum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1598127.msg16049813#msg16049813Instead the design (in theory) makes it impossible for the whales to force onto to the rest of the users what the protocol will be, and it makes it impossible for any node in the system to misbehave because the system objectively detects malevolence and routes around it without employing PoW.
Think of my design as a hive of bees, that routes around obstacles or attacks and attacker. That hive acts as one brain, but no one can control it, because it isn't voting (and thus doesn't have
the problem of voting).
That's an interesting approach. I think the crucial thing here is to
objectively detect malevolence. As it seems quite possible to build a
cryptocurrency that guarantees safety and liveness (for existing) users even in presence of attackers controlling +50% by sacrificing partition-tolerance. However, if such a system relies on subjective scoring rules (like the time order of received blocks), a misbehaving attacker might fork away from the honest nodes, while newly joining nodes would have no clue which fork to join. In other words, such a design must be based on the assumption of weak subjectivity. Are you implying that your design can handle +50% attackers, while offering objectivity and partition tolerance to every users, new and old?
I don't want to try to characterize the difference in security comparing OpenShare vs. PoW, because I think my design is comparable in security, but this needs to be heavily peer reviewed because the game theory for new consensus designs is very complex. Really you should trust nothing until it has been heavily peer reviewed.
At which point in time are you planning to seek peer reviews?