Quote from: jabo38 on May 21, 2014, 12:36:41 PM

Is that because of transparent forging? Could you explain how NXT might be more immune?

25% of active stake is not enough, you need majority.

Quote from: hashman on May 21, 2014, 02:40:47 PM

Thanks for your reply. I am interested in proof of stake but still missing something. I don't understand some details of the NXT algo including the universal random number (just reading http://www.docdroid.net/cckd/forging0-4-3.pdf.html)

Yes: total BTC miners revenue in a day is 3600 coin. Before accepting 3600BTC and making a physical delivery from a source with zero trust I would wait about that long. Lets look at NXT for comparison:

Total Forgers Revenue: 5500 NXT

So in a perfect liquid market of stake, I would want to wait about a day before accepting 350 mBTC worth of NXT.

A miner just a tiny bit worse per W than best miner is literally worthless, on a perfect market. Which means there's no risk to factor into because there's no capital to risk. While lending nxt, lender would have to calculate possible risk of lending his coin, which would include the risk of currency collapse, especially as any serious lender would ask for your other liabilities.

In practice, sooner or later there's going to be a ton of miners worse by few percents than top, sold for next to nothing, so achieving non-profitable hashing power will be very easy. However, borrowing more than half of nxt or other PoS currency would be next to impossible.

Quote

Yes, I understand that the big stakeholders now holding the 100% premine might not want to accept my offer of a little extra doublespend revenue to borrow their stake because they are afraid the word could get out and this would affect the value of their personal holdings. But isn't concentration of power in the hands of a few and requiring the network to trust them part of the problem we were trying to avoid? If we want to trust a central entity, this whole blockchain system is a waste.

Why is currency operated by all holders less decentralized than bitcoin's two-three pools (mainly few big farms), which control everything? Proof of stake is the epitome of decentralization.
Mining monopoly is unavoidable. It can be as well already true, just hidden between few pools.

You can become a currency owner even for $0.01, you can't mine for that amount, you can only rent, and you're not going to make any money even with expensive miner due to lack of scale.

Quote

Indeed. Bitcoin hardly seems perfect. But imagine if the 21million BTC (that's 10 billion or so dollars) were all premined in the hands of a small team. They could run a country on that, especially with their total control of the transaction record for all time. Institutionalized double spending, here we come.

That's not argument against PoS, but NXT. PoS doesn't require big IPOs, in fact you can use sell just a few percent and allow people to mine the rest. Or other method of distribution.