The only reason it did not blow up is because the stake in Nxt is centralized.
PoS does not converge if 51% of the stake is not controlled by an oligarchy to enforce that the nothing-at-stake converges on a single chain.
I know about Nothing at stake, and the attack scenarios are very difficult to implement. I've read the whole series the Ethereum team has written about that topic ("The History of Casper"). From what I know it is even more problematic if PoS coins have an uneven distribution, while a PoS currency with relatively equal distribution would normally work as expected
What is true is that the holders of 51% of the stake must behave in a honest way (not trying to cheat minting on several chains at once), but that is not different from mining.
PoS has some disadvantages, because no external resources are "burnt" and so its consensus depends on the blockchain history, but it can be organized in a way the disadvantages aren't relevant for a working cryptocurrency system.
I asked for a response to your statement in chat and I received a rebuttal as follows:
For more detail, I quote from the publicly available rough draft of the upcoming
shocking document:
Oligarchy if PoS is FunctioningThe Dysfunctional if Significant Transaction Revenue section scenario applies always to PoS because there is no protocol dictated block reward;* thus the only incentive for appending a block is to collect transaction fees. For that reason alone, PoS will not function unless it is an oligarchy.
Yet the nothing-at-stake problem is another reason PoS can only function if its an oligarchy.
Block forgers in PoS compete analogously to PoW miners to append their blocks to a chain yet in a nothing-at-stake tragedy-of-the-commons (c.f. also), which without an oligarchy in control of the checkpoints entropy mechanism enforcing the leader election process, would in theory devolve to a precomputing attack aka stake grinding (which is effectively proof-of-work computation and rewarded only with transaction fees thus Dysfunctional if Significant Transaction Revenue.
There is no mathematical way to decide amongst all the potential forks that can be forged within any interval, which is the legitimate one. In PoS unlike in PoW, due to the nothing-at-stake problem because the interval is relative to the autonomous choice of timestamp and nothing is burned, then forgers (i.e. stake-based miners) have the incentive to build their forged blocks on top of every forged block. The choice of of which forged blocks to mine upon is either based on enforcement power (e.g. the grouping of stake with the most stake) else PoS devolves as stated. Even if the stake grouping with the most stake is not a majority of the stake, it must necessarily be coordinated (not randomly autonomous) in order to maintain the longest chainthus fulfills the definition of an oligarchy in control. Algorithmic changes that attempt to penalize those who forge on more than chain are necessarily always going to be flawed and not resolve the issue, because there is nothing-at-stake.
In theory devolve, but I know of no documented cases where the theory was falsified in reality (with a deterministic checkpointing mechanism thus enabling oligarchy control to be expressed), because every extant PoS cryptocurrency I know of was distributed to an oligarchy thus avoiding the falsification test! 😲 How convenient. 😏
For example:* Its pointless to distribute newly minted tokens in PoS because the probability of winning a block is proportional to stake (except worse in Nxt), thus all stake in the system would be debased proportionally by newly minted tokens such that no one would gain nor lose any relative wealth. The requirement for the oligarchy to deterministically control said checkpoints can be alleviated in so called provably secure PoS by employing secure multiparty generation of entropy, but at the cost of the liveness assumption that a majority (or 67%?) of that stake is always online, and for a honest majority of the stake that the network is always synchronous (i.e. 100% reliable network transmission within a upper bounded latency threshold)either of which seems to be onerous and unrealistic unless the majority of the stake is a tightly controlled oligarchy. The proposed solution to the liveness and synchrony requirements is a delegated PoS (DPoS) option, but which thus reverts it back to a power vacuum which requires an oligarchy. Note PoW in altcoins also needs checkpoints because c.f. the PoW is Not Secure in Altcoins section. Ethereums bonded penalties are also flawed, but that is a longer explanation than I can put here. Such PoS checkpoints become relativistic, proliferate discordantly, and thus dont have a single-point-of-truth (SPOT) in the absence of an oligarchy with a majority of the stake grouping to agree on them, because the nothing-at-stake tragedy-of-the-commons provides no incentives for emergent (bottom-up) convergence of a majority of honest participants. Alternatives to checkpoints which also enable oligarchy control to be expressed, include for example delegated PoS (DPoS)which is an elected oligarchy.
Pegging is never stable long-term because there is always leakage against any such paradigm via externalities such as shorting. This was explained in a Pastebin.
Well, until now, it has worked. Can you link me to the Pastebin?
CoinoUSD and NuBits
both failed.
I cant find that PasteBin at the moment. Pegs are only stable with a centralized entity to enforce, due to aforementioned externalities. Centralized entities only remain stable for as long as the maximum profits they can extract from the ecosystem is due to maintaining the system. Once the profits for destroying the system are greater, then some entity grabs the opportunity to do so. This is the economic reality of power vacuums. Which is precisely what all cryptocurrencies are at this time.
Decred (interesting PoS/PoW combination)
These result in the worst attributes of each, combining to make something less secure than either alone.
As I recall, Theymos prior forays into analogous ideas for merging PoS and PoW were handily rebuked with detailed technical explanation. Perhaps he could revisit those threads to read posts.
OK, in this case I didn't know the details, so if you want you can point me to a text explaining that.
Here is
one of them I found with Google. There were
other such threads.
Public ICOs are a scam, because the insiders buy the ICO from themselves pretending there is more interest and buyers than there really are.
That is simply speculation. It may be true for some ICOs but not for all of them. ICOs on blockchain platforms are not trustless, that's true - that's also why someone should check carefully
who is selling.
Nothing can be proven because identities are Sybil attackable.
Its not speculation because the economics of power vacuums dictates that in all such launches where it is not provable otherwise, then 80+% of the money supply went to insiders and the rest to monetarily incentivize accomplices (i.e. all of us) who shill it to the greater fools (the newbies coming into crypto).
Even if BTC didnt move from Nxt address during the ICO period (and it may have, I have not checked), an insider with sufficient BTC can buy it from themselves.
This and
this suggest the first transaction was on October 29 but to another address controlled by BCNext and from that it was not moved until November 17.
But in the announcement thread it said the ICO would be ongoing for 3 months, so he thus apparently moved some funds and was enabled to buy from himself recycling funds already used.
Even if he didnt move and recycle BTC, he only needs a wealthy accomplice to buy most of the Nxt from themselves, making it appear there is a wide distribution when in fact there is not.
Why are we so gullible? Because we are profiting on the greater fools. Thus complicit as the SEC has warned. This is not a sermon. It is about future blowback by the authorities. It is all being tracked and recorded by the national security agencies which are sharing it all with the G20. They are biding their time and will ponce when they are ready to collapse it all. Right when we need cryptocurrency because the world economy is collapsing, most of us and these scamcoins will be destroyed by our own choices.
The announcement thread of Nxt which you provided a link to, has no technical or specifications in the first several pages.
No one in their right mind would have bought that obviously premeditated sneaky ICO:
At the beginning, they had suggested to not invest more than a few satoshis.
I read in the first pages, they pretended someone was sending 800 BTC. Do I need to quote it?
But the "Nxt is controlled by 73 insiders" is a myth that has been divulged very often here and is simply not true, that's why I commented it.
What is your proof it is a myth?
Okay on not hijacking this thread, but (and intended in a friendly tone) you are making a claim without any proof. Im relying on economic truths to support my position.