Topic: [ANN] [QRK] Quark | Core 0.10 upgrade - page 149. (Read 1031025 times)

I still believe that PoS is not compatible with the ideologies initially promoted by Quark. However, since a lot of Quark's supporters are very outspoken regarding its implementation, please allow me to suggest a compromise between the yay and nay sides of the discussion.

As far as I can tell, there are 2 primary concerns regarding the implementation of PoS into Quark. The first concern is regarding the security it offers as opposed to PoW. A lot of people are against PoS because it supposedly exposes a coin to a 51% attack more than a pure PoW coin would. Personally, I am not convinced with the arguments presented concerning this issue, but that is irrelevant. My suggestion will assume that a PoW/PoS hybrid coin is just as secure as a pure PoW coin, regardless of what various whitepapers and documents say. If you cannot see past that issue, then you may skip the rest of this post. My idea tackles only the second concern which is that PoS would mostly benefit large stakeholders and direct most of the newly generated coins to those same people.

Currently, all PoS implementations reward stakeholders who find a block with a percentage of their stake. What I suggest we do differently would be to reward a stakeholder with only (exactly) 1 Quark. 1 Quark is the current reward for a block found via PoW, so the amount should be no major concern. Additionally, the average time time for finding PoS blocks should be at least three times faster than the average time for finding PoW blocks (i.e., increase mining target time to 90 seconds). That way, mining could still be considered a viable option to get Quarks for people without large stakes. With this proposed PoS system, the inflation rate could be maintained without completely relying on miners to secure the blockchain.

The ShaqFu guys have been busy with coordinating the ~1000 perks for the last little while so haven't wanted to bother them too much. Just sent a quick email to inquire and will update everyone soon as I have a response.

re: QEX - the exchange is real, and I've used it a bunch. Some bugs that they're working out right now but I'm optimistic.

Right now the main problem for Quark is completely hoppible situation in mining. Pool coinmine.pl generate from 60% to 70% of blocks and we have roughly 500 i7-class CPUs hashing ATM. So, we could experience a 51% attack virtually at any moment. And even assuming pool operator completely honest it’s very easy for someone to DDOS the location of major hashrate and attack Quark with no more than half a thousand CPUs. It’s a small botnet or a not very large corporate network -- e.g. Microsoft has 1200 000 server nodes, Google -- 800 000. The reason for such a pathetic situation is generally the initial coin distribution model, which generate very few Quarks, not enough to feed profit-seeking commercial miners. Just an other side of one of the greatest advantage of Quark.

Considering this we can conclude that right now Quark is unsecure at all and it would be highly unreasonable to use it for large transactions.

To fight this we of course could use new pools, donation mining, but these are half-measures. We can’t gather more computing power than a large corporate network on a donation basis.

The problem is fundamental and will stay long-term, so the solution must be fundamental. I think the only viable option is Proof-of-Stake (PoS), the form of mining when a probability of block generation increases dramatically with increase of coins in the wallet of miner. TO day this technology has already proven itself with a several years of operating in probably a hundred of coins. I know no serious issues reported or acknowledged security concerns.

Moreover, PoS is viable economically, as it reward long-term coin supportes and provide income on capital. Also PoS stimulate people to maintain full nodes which favorably affects network integrity and security.

Still, PoS is not ideal because it give a significant share of block and coin generation to coin bags with large wallets. But it could be adjusted to reduce such factor. For example the network could provide even tiny amount of coins generated this way and the process will be still continuing since the costs is almost zero. Or amount of PoS generated coins and/or probability of block finding may be depend nonlinear from wallet. Anyway we could find some intelligent and economically justified solution.

I believe the community must reach a consensus on this matter. We can’t build a succesful coin without an appropriate security basis. And we need to prove the world that we are able to handle such security problems.

As of now Quark gets more secure if more people mine, but there is almost nothing to mine with a 1 quark reward. It has a fundamental flaw. Quarks developer made a mistake to fasten the block halving to 1 per block in 6 months. Thats when the majority of the supporters left. Would those 6 months be 50-100 years then quark would have been top 3 in market cap.

You may not agree, but would be better if you would gave a suggestion also.

It encourages holding the coins as investment, avoiding it's circulation, i.e. true use as a cryptocurrency. Then worst -- PoS looks at the coin age; the longer you're holding a large amount of cryptocurrency, the higher the chance of mining a block, which further reduces chance of circulation. However if the profits proof of stake is giving you is negligible, then we may nullify this disadvantage.

Following this article --
         
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/howto-kill-any-100-pos-coins-owning-less-than-1-of-all-coins-604716
         
A higher degree of PoS means more vulnerabilities. PoS coins will not get any score in 51% protection.
         
Apart from this, you need to run a full node in order for the wallet to mine blocks based on PoS and it should be up always; how many people will do that? (especially when the interest rate is low)? When these coins will be made popular, 90% people will run light weight wallets giving power to the hands of these 10% (PoS difficulty will be low in this case cause the no. of people mining is less). Yes it is true, like with PoW the distribution of mining power will shift towards more professional miners who'll hold large amount of coins, but if the interest rate is low, they rather sell their coins to invest in real world schemes which provides more profits than this crypto, as an advantage they'll have lower risk cause the crypto market is very volatile.
         
In case of PoW, power will may be in the hands of 5% (lower no. of people than PoW) but they'll have a lot of hashing power which if compared to the amount of coins held by these 10% is a much higher value increasing the difficulty in comparison to PoS, which results in higher comparative difficulty for PoW.  As compared to PoW, acquiring enough coins to do a 51% is easier (at these low difficulty and especially when interest rate is low.).

If a crypto has fast difficulty re-targets, it's difficulty to do a 51% attack, cause in the forked chain the difficulty will increase rapidly and will soon reach the target block times, the block time of the main chain will be the same, making a 51% attack impossible.
            
If the main chain's difficulty was high cause of the attacker's majority hashing power, it'll drop to sustain a block interval equal to the attacker's fork chain.

Give me any single reason why PoS is good, and I'll prove it's wrong.