Quote from: ttookk on October 26, 2018, 09:14:32 PM

Oh, good, we finally arrived on the verge of ad hominems. Questioning my intelligence and all that. Great.

Alright, but now I guess this turns too much into incoherent rambling from my side, plus, I don't like to be insulted, so that's it from my side. You have fun playing with your Byteballs.

I did not question your intelligence nor called you with any names. I was just wondering if there is some languages issues that you yet again cherry pick a word out without the context and jump a gun on it. "not directly comparable" is not same as "not comparable", also "purely based on monetary gain" is not same as "based on monetary gain". And also, you accuse others talking only about Bitcoin, when post was comparison. Like how hard is that to miss? Must be a language issue or you didn't read it at all.

Quote from: ttookk on October 26, 2018, 09:14:32 PM

Yeah, maybe I was skimming over that part a bit quickly

Ahh, right, it seems you didn't read it, try to read the parts about Byteball too, not just Bitcoin, you might get different understanding of the post.

Quote from: ttookk on October 26, 2018, 09:14:32 PM

I brought up the witness voting mechanism to DPoS comparison multiple times, because I think it is far more comparable than Byteball/BTC. If you want to see how a future system that is based on voting can look like, there are a lot of DPoS systems out there in which on-chain voting as part of the consensus mechanism is a thing and their behavior can be studied. Lisk, EOS, Ark, Tron, Shift, just to name a few.

If you are suggesting by that, it should have more witnesses and anybody could be randomly a witness and they should be anonymous and so on then that is explained in whitepaper. 12 is optimal amount because less would be not enough and more would be too difficult to keep track of. This is only because they should be public persons or companies with reputation on the line. If it would be anonymous then obviously current system would not work.
It is too early to tell, which is the ultimate consensus mechanism, so if you feel this is not the right combination then you can support any of the mentioned projects above that you think has better mix of rules.

Quote from: ttookk on October 26, 2018, 09:14:32 PM

Oh, and by the way, here is something no one in the altcoin space wants to hear: technology is absolutely overrated. Things don't have to work optimally with tons of headroom, they have to work good enough. Almost all Bitcoin clones were trying the "better than BTC" narrative, be it faster blocktimes, bigger blocks, more GPU-friendly mining algos etc. Where are they now? Currently, we are seeing the same phenomenon with ETH and its competitors. If tech would actually matter as much as so many people think it does, at least Ethereum would have been dethroned by now.
In the end, it doesn't matter if something is theoretically better than the competition, if no one uses it. History is full of better versions of the things that became mainstream, where simply the circumstances, like the network effect, helped decide the race.
Bitcoin is more decentralized than all the other projects out there (maybe except for Ethereum in some fields), including Byteball. Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain/distributed ledger. Maybe there are implementations out there which are theoretically more secure, if they had the userbase, the development base, the miner base and all the other metrics of Bitcoin, but they don't. In the end, users will not (and should not) give two shits about whether the system they use to pay their coffee or whatever uses a blockchain or a DAG, PoW, PoS or a different consensus mechanism.

This is all true what you are saying, can't argue with that, but you are drifting away from the original point where this discussion began:

Quote from: tonych on October 26, 2018, 12:07:25 AM

You are right about incentives. But there is something else. PoW mining is an economic activity. You have capex, you have opex, almost all your profits are burned in your huge costs, and you have to care about efficiency in order to stay in the game. And in any economic activity, you have economy of scale. As your mining farm gets bigger, it becomes more efficient and stands better against the competition. You get volume discounts for miners, you will be the first in line for the new generation of miners, you can get cheaper electricity when you buy wholesale, it becomes worthwhile to relocate to a more favorable location, and you can hire the best talent in the industry. It doesn't matter if the PoW algorithm is ASICable or not, the economy of scale is universal. It might be not very important in the growing market when everyone, even a smaller and weaker miner, gets a portion of the growing pie, but nothing lasts forever and as the market matures and gets more competitive, the weaker players are darwinized, and the hash power gets concentrated in the hands of a few bigger miners. Miners, not mining pools. This looks like an end-game of any PoW based blockchain, because it has a heavy "hook" into the economy, and the economy favors scale. You can call it emergent centralization. Incidentally, Byteball moves in the opposite direction.