Quote from: Este Nuno on August 20, 2014, 05:05:10 PM

AnonyMint seems absolutely convinced that PoS cannot work. You both seem confident in your respective opinions. Does your CPoS system address any of his concerns?

It can't. Let them go ahead and waste their time (and probably other people's money). I have no desire to try to stop them from failing or doing another investment pump.

They will invent more and more verbose obfuscations of the fundamental issue of why PoS can't.

Btw, traditional financial systems are not fully decentralized.

Even if you did solve the insoluble issue of centralization as it applies to security of the block chain (in the most general sense where control to fork or influence the design of the system is considered an insecurity), you can never solve the problem that it doesn't redistribute coin from the accumulators in the power-law distribution of wealth back to the spenders, thus just like gold, it can never be a currency. The way society has solved that is socialism. PoW could in theory solve it by routing the debasement decentrally to the spenders, especially if the spenders are the ones mining (and no one seems to know how to make this happen but I think I do).

Nothing at Stake wasn't the problem. The argument that stakeholders won't destroy their investment is a red-herring strawman or off-topic! Our overlords who own our financial system now don't destroy their investment when they destroy us with their control of the financial system. Stakeholders can drive the system in directions that benefit the oligarchy, without destroying the double-spend security.

A Benevolent Dictator is preferable over an rent seeking oligarchy, because the latter can never do good due to a Tragedy of the Commons, at least former does sometimes (e.g. Julius Caesar).

PoS will always trend towards control by the accumulators in the power-law distribution of wealth. Even PoW does too unless you make mining uneconomic yet necessary. So that is why people have argued that it makes no difference and might as well use the one that consumes less energy and is more efficient.

Quote from: Este Nuno on August 20, 2014, 06:08:00 PM

But there are experts on both sides. Vitalik just recently being a convert. ~~And SlipperySlope here as well.~~

I know gmaxwell has posted about 'Nothing at Stake' attacks, but that appears now to be a solveable issue. Infact, Vitalik wrote a whole article about them and it appears as a result of his article sparking debate, a solution was found.

Two very smart guys (cryptographers I believe), but my intuition is they lack holistic economics and political science understanding. They are math nerds.

SlipperySlope I believe is outside his field of expertise in crypto-currency. I don't think he is a cryptographer nor a programmer nor an economist nor a political scientist. He has an applied math background if I remember correctly, which is pretty general if considered in this context. If were in an applied math forum, I better shut up and listen more to him.