Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: "Failure to Understand Bitcoin Could Cost Investors Billions" (Bitcoin's flaws)
by
Come-from-Beyond
on 13/02/2014, 06:20:54 UTC
I want decentralized security which does not have the power vacuum. Only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work has that.

http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf states that currencies based on PoW can't be decentralized because
Quote
To match this to the notion of “decentralised” (i.e. lacking central authority), the consensus group must be, at least, all participants in the currency. This does not present any real problem when that group is known. For example, it would be possible to define the group as “all people currently in the United States”– where the currency would be something akin to the US Dollar. Assuming the majority decide to behave honestly (as seems likely, after all, that is what happens now), then they should have no difficulty in forming consensus on who has how much money at what time. However, the most general notion of decentralisation does not admit such re-strictions. After all, in some sense, placing any such restriction simply pushes the central authority back a layer: instead of controlling the currency, the authority controls membership of the consensus group. A system like this must allow any entity to participate, and to join and leave the scheme at will. And here lies the problem. If you can never know who is in the scheme (bear in mind that knowing who is in is also a consensus problem!), then you can never get agreement.

So a whitepaper that proves that "only Satoshi's Proof-of-Work has that" is very welcome. Looking forward to read it...