How is this any different from what anyone can do without attacking the network? Create a copy of the software with some divergent property to create two chains. If the diverging property is seen as valid by some percentage of users, the divergent chain has some value. Do you have some solution to this as well?
@anonymint thinks the distinction is that in the case of ambiguous nothing-at-stake forks from the perspective of those who were offline,
they're more or less ambivalent to the outcome which doesn't affect them.
And without a strong compass, they can then be swayed by the powers-that-be to believe in the mainstream opinion.
Mainstream opinion is owned by those who own the corporate behemoths.
So the point is that relying on community opinion is centralization.
If instead there was objectivity, then the users who were offline at the time of the forking wouldn't need to trust CNBC, CNN, FOXNEWS, BLOCKINFO.COM, COINBASE, ZEROHEDGE, ALEXJONES, and all those other gatekeepers.
We want to destroy their power if we can come up with a design that can do it.
Tangentially (and somewhat offtopic), see how Thatcher was the moma to those men, who reverted to children without a compass after she was gone:
https://steemit.com/politics/@anonymint/re-anonymint-unfairness-of-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-explained-in-beer-20180602t081228178z@anonymint's idea for ending the "new feature" forks is to solve most of the problems that drive a hype market for forks such as scaling and latency of confirmations.
The speculation in the market is significantly driven by idea that the market for cryptocurrency is still nascent and largely untapped.
There will always be such speculative snake oil in the future, but who cares when their market caps top out at $1 billion on the pump and dump, when the main cryptocurrencies will have market caps in the $100s of trillions.
His idea for solving the nothing-at-stake problem revolves around formation of objectivity with statistical evidence.
We must remember that finality is always probabilistic any way.
There is little to no risk to creating a fork out of thin air such as in the case of Bitcoin Cash and whatnot, but there is a huge risk to creating an on-network fork - namely nobody cares about your fork and the value of your money from the main chain is destroyed.
Offline users do not know which one is the main chain.
Ostensibly you presume that COINBASE et al are going to agree with what the users who were live thought they observed.
It cant be proven that one live groups network synchrony was superior to another group's.
The point is you are presuming objectivity where objectivity doesn't exist.
From there you must devolve your argument into what amounts to mind control. Do you really believe some nameless, faceless identity has a chance to sway users over the people they interact with daily on which chain is honest? And all this over trying to get their side of a double spend to complete?
He thinks you have this transposed from the actual reality that is likely to be the case.
Not only do you presume that the powers-that-be who want to do this attack are nameless,
but you presume that the live users who speak out against the powers-that-be will not be nameless.
Why wouldn't the powers-that-be own COINBASE et al? They own everything.
These gatekeepers are always for sale to the highest bidder who can steal the most from society.
That is what corporations do. They maximize profit by any means possible.
They have a fiduciary duty to maximize profit. They do not have morals.
I know you do not believe in fairytales so why would you believe the world is some fantasy fairytale where corporations and gatekeepers do the moral thing so they can lower their profits?
And their motive may not be double-spending but rather censoring transactions (although they can do this with a majority of the stake in most designs any way) and even long-range attacks where they steal coinbase funds and downstream lineage UTXO and burn UTXO they can't steal in order to accomplish attacks on competitors and what not (including shorting the token and then going long again after their attacks or what not especially if they're trying to destroy that token):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4266048.msg39124755#msg39124755https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/btw-i-noticed-in-your-responses-to-others-at-the-end-of-your-blog-youre-emphasizing-393f4ca0deffAlso for a competing token to their Bitcoin, maybe they just want to destroy your token and short it into the ground.
The powers-that-be get their power largely through manipulation.
P.S.
Ty for the debate on the merits.
You still have a slight tone of presumptious arrogance as if you assume the other person doesn't have a valid rebuttal for you,
but it's possible to interpret your tone here as just skepticism.
Apologies that @anonymint didn't understand in 2013 when you used to post from username @Etlase2, that groupwise cryptographically secure entropy is possible in a proof-of-stake system.
Ourobos and Algorand exemplified it is plausible within some security thresholds.