If voting only happens when there is a signed fork, doesn't that mean there are no visible confirmations and if so then how does somebody receiving a payment know at which point it is safe to accept it?
Representatives make a single vote on every block they receive so the receiver can count network quorum but unless there's a conflicting block they don't vote again since there's no other candidate block to consider. In the document I added a Confirmation Procedure section to better describe how a single block is confirmed. Let me know if that clears anything up.
Oh I see. Looks interesting.
I like getting rid of the need for wasteful commercial mining without the rich getting richer aspect of PoS, although I do worry about participation both for the number of full nodes and for the number of representatives getting votes. I think i saw something about a kind of weighting to stop a single representative getting a huge amount - can you explain that more please because at the moment all I can see is 99% of users never even looking at it and therefore 99% of the votes going to whatever account the person providing the wallet sets it at.
Sure, the way I hope it will shake out it there are already groups out there who run nodes, exchanges, interest groups, banking institutions. Ideally for any wallet they control they'd have a voting representative they'd name for any accounts they control.
The number of full nodes is a concern as well, indeed as far as I know there isn't a method out there to incentivize a node for performing the essential service of reproducing the full blockchain to new nodes, at least one that can't be gamed. This was one of the reasons why we tried the no-in-chain-rewards system, mining seemed to be heavily rewarding a small group of people who perform a very specific task. If there are incentives for people to run businesses around the technology we think there's an incentive to keep the ecosystem healthy by running representatives or full nodes. At least the cost of running a full node with RaiBlocks is just bandwidth and disk space, rather than heavy CPU/GPU/mining hardware costs.
There isn't a way the protocol can determine if a single entity has disproportionate voting strength because it can't disprove account collusion; I think PoW systems have a similar issue where mining pools become disproportionately strong. I think one benefit RaiBlocks has in this aspect is account holders have zero-friction to make a change if they think a group is getting too powerful, they can simply name a new representative. Compare this with mining where the only way for me to make a mining pool less strong is to invest in mining hardware myself.
Let me know what you think.