Quote from: r0ach on July 29, 2014, 11:27:03 AM

Quote from: raid_n on July 29, 2014, 07:23:49 AM

Again you post arguments based on your premises but not on hard facts.

Your premises seem to rely on the assumption that Bitcoin will live forever, and that any disruption to the block chain is only temporary and greedy miners will sort things out from there. My premise is that the centralization of mining pools will be an ongoing issue that provides so large of an attack vector, that it's inevitable central governments will impose their will over how the protocol functions, either getting rid of it outright, or turning it into governmentcoin.

For example, let's say all western governments suddenly said, "sorry, you can't mine anymore because you could be processing financial transactions for terrorists". Various third world Asian governments would probably follow suit as well. Mining would suddenly be a crime in most places. You might end up with only small amounts of hash rate in obscure places like Bulgaria. There would be no real security for the network since overpowering it's hash rate would be trivial. Price would go down to nothing, market cap would be nothing, nobody would use it.

You seem to ignore the obvious fact that if governments have any opportunity whatsoever to regulate, manipulate, or screw something up, they will. The giant mining pools have to go or Bitcoin has no future. As for your claim of me "shilling" for a specific altcoin, my point has nothing to do with altcoins. My point is that you either have to remove the giant pool mining from PoW, or use PoS and utilize reputation as a finite resource to fix most of proof of stake's current issues.

The problem is that you want a solution to a formally impossible problem.
In the type of system we have you need at least a majority to reach consensus and you can't circumvent this.

What you are proposing when you say there will be government intervention etc. is that there is an external entity that enforces rules.
For absolutely any protocol the government can come in and pull out the "its illegal" card.

Actually here is something for you to think about:
All it takes to break any of these models (PoS,PoW whatever you want) is to control the exchange of information.
If I can assert control over the underlying network used to exchange information (i.e the internet) I can isolate groups and participants so they cannot post new blocks to participate.
Because these systems are decentralized they have to be able to deal with failures of participants.
Satoshi was clever to assume that messages are disseminated quickly enough because it simplifies the problem.
It is in part a dangerous assumption but given the long block intervals he chose reasonable enough to withstand most issues.

Say you use a PoS model with reputation or whatever. For the network to function it has to be able to generate blocks with fluctuating amounts of participants.
How do you want to enforce distribution of the active resources used in creating blocks is fair (no one has a majority)? You can't unless you block during times where this is not the case.

The issue of some entity being able to control >50% of the active resources required to generate new blocks will always be there.
It is impossible to remove because it is impossible to reach consensus in the proposed model without a majority.
Probabilistic consensus allows smaller disruptions to be rectified later on because eventually the majority overrules any decisions taken contrary to the majority.
If you do not allow this the system has to block as soon as a majority cannot be reached.

[edit]

Reading through my own text it is a bit unclear what I want to say.

In a blockchain type of consensus sytem:

1) you cannot guarantee that a single entity won't somehow obtain more than 50% of the active resources used to create blocks, whatever they are.
You can try to encourage stronger distribution but there is no way to enforce it at all times.
2) Indecision will always exist in a probabilistic consensus model. You cannot fully prevent double spending because no block is 100% agreed on.