Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 3 from 2 users
Re: Proof-of-Approval: A Better Blockchain Consensus Protocol
by
monsterer2
on 15/03/2018, 09:33:37 UTC
⭐ Merited by ETFbitcoin (2) ,suchmoon (1)
Hi Shunsai,

Firstly, congratulations on producing a genuine white paper; there is a lot of rubbish that gets posted here, this is a cut above most.

I've only skimmed the paper, but a few things caught my attention:

* In your description of the ideal blockchain (from the article) you've omitted a very important attribute, 'permissionlessness' (excuse the non-word), which describes the ability of a party interested in participating in the block creation process to do so. Because your protocol is PoS, any interested party requires stake in order to participate in block production, making it permissioned.

* The consensus mechanism is based around timestamps, but there is no objective way to verify a historical timestamp. Doesn't this present a number of problems, e.g bootstrap poisoning?

* You are rewarding newly minted blocks with stake, yet to produce blocks, you require stake. How is this resolved?

* Doesn't the Pareto distribution of stake over time present centralisation concerns?

* How does your protocol deal with the keys-from-the-very-recent-past attack, whereby an attacker purchases newly emptied private keys of very large stake value, then creates a fork where he steals all the stake back for himself?

Cheers, Paul.