Its good idea - Pos!!!
how about double spending attacks on Pos?
if a coin is pure pos then its network has rate will go down substantially and then it becomes really easy to attack the network and double spend
a high hashrate and the longest chain rule is what protects Pow coins
There's plenty of discussion of these issues in the threads of PoS coins like Blackcoin, Cinni and Peercoin. You should go check it out if you're curious. If a coin goes 100% PoS then hashrate doesn't matter and the main issue is forking due to PoS exploit that rat4 claims to have solved. I believe his github fix is opensource which could be used. He has a method for determining the longest chain if it gets forked and he simply goes off of that. Also I believe Peercoin is still going which is still a hybrid PoW/PoS. Either way there are plenty of successful PoS coins and if they could be forked and manipulated for double spending then I'm sure many would have already done it.
the problem with a successful attack is that it becomes part of the longest chain and no one is the wiser
check out this paper:
http://cryptome.org/2014/05/bitcoin-suicide.pdfand the related discussion that mostly discredits it:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/on-the-longest-chain-rule-and-programmed-self-destruction-of-crypto-currencies-600436Wow that's a lot of reading but I'm definitely gonna check it out.
Ok so I skimmed the post and the paper a little bit and from what I understand the paper is more of a discussion of a possible 51% attack defense that the people in the thread think will not work. Am I understanding correctly? I'm not sure that is relevant to deciding whether or not to make Muniti PoS.
I found this link which I find more relevant to the PoS discussion.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/23j9iw/problems_with_pure_proofofstake/.
It looks like from that link, the biggest vulnerability with PoS is if someone bought more than 70% of all the coins they could create a false side chain where they double spent. Obviously buying 70% of all the coins would skyrocket the price and just about any coin this would be impossible because there isn't even 70% of the coins on the market. It's difficult to even predict how high the price would go before they would even get close to getting that many. I guess radi324 with the premine could do this attack but they'd be destroying their own coin basically because everyone's transactions that weren't on the false chain would become null and everyone would know what was going on after the attack.
After this reading I think I feel pretty safe in assuming that PoS vulnerabilities haven't been fully tested yet because they've never happened and probably aren't likely to ever happen. I haven't heard of any of these attack scenarios actually occurring, and they aren't that much more plausible than a 51% attack, which by the way for a lot of the time this coin has had like 80% of the hashrate on one pool.
As for the method of transitioning to PoS, it is difficult to say, because of the premine distribution. The reason the market is receiving coins like Cinni and Blackcoin favorably is because the supply is known and fixed and there is very little inflation. With each D2D release the supply would inflate, and the market would be expecting this, so the price might remain suppressed. On the other hand, the hype of a PoS country coin might be able to overcome this.
Instead of:
"2) Stop PoW in a week's time at the current block reward rate, and move on to PoS - this would go against the very objective of the project, as there would be more coins in the hands of the Maltese people than in the hands of foreigners, unless we adopt BlackCoin's system of mining."
Why not just Stop PoW in a week's time at current block reward rate and move to PoS BUT give the Maltese people a smaller nominal number of coins (ultimately with a higher real value)? Just reduce the number given in the drop proportionally to have same ratio as before
I kind of like this idea because it would mean massive sudden deflation of total supply which would send the price souring. With the current price at 1,000 satoshi, this would give a lot more nominal separation from 1 satoshi. Since there would then only be about
750,000 (This is what we'd have if production stopped immediately, not with one more week of distribution) coins then including the adjusted premine amount, then the price should be roughly 100 times higher even at current base level, not including buying support due to the fact that the total planned supply would be slashed, the excitement over a new country PoS coin (the first?), and the unique distribution method and genuine dev team. There would certainly be huge excitement and publicity in the community from one week of mining the final Muniti coins. If there was any selling after each D2D wave, then the price would be in the hundreds of thousands of satoshi, which would give more room for the price to recover from falls, rather than fall to depressing lows in the thousands or hundreds of satoshi if there was a potential crash.
I had another thought, what if there was increased PoS % following each D2D release? This would encourage people to hold their coins during the uncertain time that people would be suspecting that Maltese might dump their coins. The Maltese would also in turn have incentive to hold their coins during these periods. The amount of coins this would generate could be calculated and publicized so that there is no uncertainty about how it will affect the total amount of coins. I think it would only require a nominal increase, of say, 3 weeks following each D2D release will be 5% PoS instead of 1% normally.
Finally, this method would reward all of the supporters who have mined and stuck with Muniti from the beginning, and the top holders would be the most loyal people to the coin and less likely to dump.