Re: Obyte: Totally new consensus algorithm + private untraceable payments

As ethically perverse as it may be, proof-of-work happens to have this probably in the origins unintended feature of introducing a powerful deterministic skin-in-the-game variable into the mechanism.

Whaddayamean 'unintended'?!? The skin in the game aspect is the fulcrum upon which the entire Bitcoin ecosystem balances.

Well, I didn't express myself clearly on this point, as it also refers to my long post in the Ivory Tower. Most of today's skin in the game with Bitcoin is consisting in the huuuge expenses miners have to continuously fund to keep mining. I doubt that Nakamoto would have foreseen the rise of ASICS and the Bitcoin network swallowing more energy than entire countries like Ireland. That's so much more skin in the game than anyone had predicted in the early days.

The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate. "satoshi" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6306#msg6306

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node. "satoshi" https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014815.html