Quote from: Peter R on April 27, 2014, 03:00:36 PM

Quote from: BldSwtTrs on April 27, 2014, 02:12:42 PM

I don't get why people are so prompt to make the analogy PoS=Fiat. In fiat people who vote (Central bankers) have divergent interest with fiat holders, they have no skin in the game. Whereas with PoS the interest of the decision makers are the same than the interest of holders.

Correct. It is like a popular democracy where shares (money) can be created and destroyed based on popular opinion. For example, SlipperySlope has a tricky decision to make: should he credit Satoshi with his estimated 1,000,000 shares and risk a dump of 8% of the outstanding bitshares? Or should he redistribute them more "fairly"?

This question concerns the initial distribution of coins; it's not the same as bankers making deciding how much money to print on a day-to-day basis. It's a one-off choice.

As an aside, I don't think it's right to pick on Satoshi but I do think there's an argument for basing the initial distribution on the unspent transaction outputs in the Bitcoin block-chain that are, say, less than 2 years old. The main reason being, you want the new coins to be held by people who are reasonably active in the Bitcoin community, in the hope that they will also be active in the new altcoin community. Satoshi would be excluded, not because he is too rich, but because he's too inactive. Arguably there is no need to reward the earliest adopters of Bitcoin because they are not early adopters of the altcoin. You would advertise the snapshot date in advance, so that whales that were still active and monitoring the scene would be able to transfer their bitcoins to themselves to freshen their transaction dates before the snapshot.

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And then perhaps it will become popular opinion that some whales have too many shares and it's unfair that the staking rewards flow in proportion to stake rather than work.

Rewarding stake is actually rewarding risk. Anyone holding large amounts of bitcoin when they could sell them, is risking the bitcoin price crashing and them losing a fortune. It shows they have faith in Bitcoin. That risk-taking and faith does deserve some reward, in my view.

Also, do you see what a leap it is from "whales are dangerous to our new currency because they could crash it by dumping their coins, so perhaps we should exclude them to reduce that danger", and "we should exclude whales because they don't deserve to be rich, because they didn't work for their money"? The first is pragmatic. The second is philosophical/moral; the politics of envy.

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And then perhaps they will vote for some sort of progressive transfers of shares from these whales to projects for the betterment of humanity (the "greater good").

You keep making things up and ascribing them to your opponents.