Quote from: DecentralizeEconomics on December 29, 2014, 04:08:03 AM

Quote from: cryptogeeknext on December 28, 2014, 09:23:40 PM

Quote from: jonald_fyookball on December 28, 2014, 08:55:31 PM

Protection against 51% attacks is a concern.

51% mechanism is what allows to challenge the status quo, thus enabling competition for power.
Just sitting on your money in PoW does't give you control over the system, just engaging in the competition for control doesn't bring you money as mining is normally a break-even game. Thus money and control become orthogonal, which results in a dynamic system without asymptotes. In PoS you get both in a nice single package, which saturates fairly quickly.

Hybrid systems are more tricky beasts, thus they need to be studied closely. I'm concerned that saturation in PoS aspect of the hybrid will at some point begin to negatively influence the competition on PoW side.

51% PoW mechanism is what allows malicious agents to challenge the legitimate miners, thus overpowering them via a hashpower coup d'etat.

Do you really think that the legitimate miners in Bitcoin can prevent a government from forcing their rules on the Bitcoin network? Mind you, the NSA had a $10.7 Billion USD budget in 2013. The only way to prevent such actions from external actors is via PoS.

You're inserting judgement into equation.
PoW rules are neutral - run the algorithm faster and you win. Does that make you malicious?
It is like saying, countries can be attacked by other countries, thus countries are bad. Planets can be attacked by aliens - planets are wrong. Universes can collapse in a Big Crunch - universes are evil.

PoW 51% mechanism is what sets things in motion, PoS saturates towards centralization of power and stays there.

Quote from: DecentralizeEconomics on December 29, 2014, 04:08:03 AM

Quote from: jonald_fyookball on December 28, 2014, 08:55:31 PM

For those unaware, there have been some serious
hybrid PoW/PoS proposals for Bitcoin, which you can find here:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

If you are interested in using PoW as a distribution mechanism and PoS as a security mechanism, NXT's monetary system offers such a solution.

PoS security mechanism is that of a private enterprise. It works well when there are other enterprises to run to. Network effects work great with money, thus global money system is better served with PoW as it can stay robust all by itself by allowing competition for both money and control within the system.