I see FUD errors in this whitepaper:
http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf#page=3but in essence all solutions are the same: consensus is
arrived at when some sufficient number of members of the group agree,
In Satoshi's PoW the miners don't have to reach any centralized census. They ALL agree to use the same protocol (else they are not making Bitcoin block chain). But there is no centralized collection of a vote. They are all free to disagree about which block solution was found first. The longest chain wins, but this concensus is completely decentralized.
http://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdf#page=4It also unknowable: we can never be sure that we actually are burning half of
all the power in existence, because we do not know how much power exists.
We know exactly how much power exists that will mine at the current difficulty and market price, and it is precisely the amount that was mining. To go backwards and rewrite the entire blockchain takes not just 51% of the hash rate, but takes asymptotically 100% of the hashrate as the blockchain goes asymptotically to infinite length.
The author set up this strawman to support the requirement of knowing who all the miners are in his Proof-of-stake (PoS) proposal. Then he commits the entropy error that I said will always occur for non-PoW, in that he requires to randomize the order of the PoS miners ("participants") but of course he can't do it without a centralized vote thus it isn't random at all.
Fail. Sorry.