My opinion is that an authority on the blockchain should be present in order to avoid fraudelent and malicious actions. See what's it going on right now on the Ethereum blockchain and ERC20 tokens which is full of scams.
Alt coin and token scams are what makes it all the more important to call out questionable buzzwords such as Proof of Honesty. Dressing up federated trust as a trademarked term called "Proof of Honesty" is borderline deceptive. Selling a centralized solution as "100% Byzantine Fault Tolerant" is like selling asbestos free milk -- it's good to know but the least that I would expect.
And also, if people are not so much in fond of federated trust, how is it possible that Ripple has so much support by users making it 3rd regarding Market Cap?
I'm not saying that people are not fond of federated trust. I'm just saying it's a regressive and naive approach at cryptocurrencies.
It can work to make things better, this is the reason why none works in the shadows. And I believe that there is a great exchanges of ideas in this thread that can lead to a positive outcome.
So we do agree after all that even in the conceptional phase valid criticism is productive
Reading the whitepaper, I can understand the point of Honest and Dishonest game theory and it seems very exciting. Many corners are still shady because we don't have the code and check it.
Many corners are still shady because the whitepaper claims to solve various problems without proposing concrete solutions. The implementation is irrelevant if the very concept is flawed.
Personally, I am fed up with the other projects that try to refine their chains that many times leading to forks and community confusion that lowers the value of the tokens.
If GeeqCorp can give an end to that I will definitely support them from the start till the end of the development.
The problem of hard forks is effectively ignored on the protocol level.
Authority exists in every blockchain. Do you think there is not high volumes of authority in Bitcoin, when Satoshi holds a huge amount of BTC and mining pools the majority of the hashing power? They get the rewards of the transactions so the value is accumulated on them and coins are spread among few users.
Owning large amounts of currency does not equate authority. Large amount of hashing power do not equate authority.
Anyone can participate in the network. No one can block or censor transactions. Block subsidy is not something that gets handed out by a central authority but is what pays for electricity, hardware and infrastructure, keeping the network's security autonomous without external oversight.
Falling back on a centralized authority just because PoW based cryptocurrencies have mining pools is throwing the baby out with the bath water.