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This is not bullshit. The final white paper will be technically convincing and not hand waving.
Abstract: Centralization in Satoshi's proof-of-work is due to economies-of-scale, which impart some power which the decentralized participants are unable to diminish.
My design for a consensus ordering system eliminates these economies-of-scale and enables the decentralized partipants to effectively as a collective force diminish any power which is objectively deleterious to the collective collaborative good will of the system. This forms a Nash equilibrium on adherence to the one collaborative game theory strategy envisioned by the protocol.
Consensus of OrderingAny system of consensus on the ordering of some observed events (e.g. ordering of transactions) will either require empowering an entity to make that decision (perhaps periodically in blocks of time, round-robin scheduling a list of delegates such as in Delegated Proof-of-Stake), or accepting as the total order, the partial order with the greatest consumption of some resource. Satoshi's design consumes electricity (and hardware amortization) in a randomized proof-of-work puzzle because:
- it eliminates any requirement for trusting a reputation, and;
- it's a decentralized means to objectively distribute the minted tokens remuneration without exchanging (i.e. selling) them, and;
- it provides security regardless of the transaction rate.
Satoshi's Proof-of-WorkCentralization in Satoshi's proof-of-work is due to economies-of-scale, which impart some power which the decentralized participants are unable to diminish. Examples include the selfish mining attack
1 and propagation delays which accrue more than proportional rewards (thus accumulating ever more hashrate) to those with more hashrate due to wasted mining of the others.
Yet in Satoshi's design there is no objective metric to differentiate malfeasance from good will, i.e. there can't exist an objective perspective in the Byzantine Generals Problem
2 (without a total perspective which would otherwise not be a Byzantine Generals Problem), and political reaction to malfeasance requires a (manipulatable and otherwise unlikely) monolithic political hardfork action (with entire loss of security to change the proof-of-work algorithm to prevent the existing miners from controlling the decision) instead of as enabled by my design, an avalanche of decentralized, free market individual snowballing remedial proactions.
Delegated Proof-of-StakeDelegated Proof-of-Stake (DPOS) is effectively a permissioned, centralized system, because the (votes of the) whales are in control. If we just wanted a centralized, persmissioned system, then we don't need blockchains. We could do that more efficiently without a blockchain. We have it already, it is named Paypal, Visa, or Mastercard. The only way you scale this globally, is if nobody owns it. This is why Paypal can't disrupt the existing financial structure of the world. Too many vested interests fighting turf battles.
DPOS has the most essential flaw that delegates are either disallowed from refusing to include a block containing a double-spend, or a total order is not assured because delegates can diverge into partial orders forks. Only full nodes which validate all transactions can objectively determine which delegates and partial orders are erroneous, but lite clients are only supposed to trust delegates. Even if the lite client is provided a fraud proof based on ordered Merkel hash trees a la Segregated Witness, then lite clients then must become distrusting of any transaction in any block until all delegates have been visited (under the presumption that not all delegates can be colluding), because it is not knowable how many colluding blocks will be in succession. This could impact negatively the high transaction throughput and low transaction confirmation latency claims. Delegates can ignore some or many transactions, causing poor performance, and which is not objectively provable thus might be difficult to mount a political vote to remediate.
Also it is probable a majority (or significant enough minority combined with voter apathy and/or collusion with some whales) of the voting power is held by the exchanges, which could collude to elect delegates that are complicit in some malfeasance for profit, such as shorting the token and/or achieving a double-spend. The nothing-at-stake issue remains in that no resource is consumed by voting. Voting is a power vacuum
3 and objectivity of [redacted] is impossible when obscured manipulative deals are possible behind-the-scenes
4 while profit due to such malfeasance is not effectively limited.
Although DPOS scales transaction throughput significantly more than Satoshi's design, it doesn't enable resiliency through parallelization of event ordering across multiple simultaneous delegates, thus reducing the performance and resiliency of the system to the weakest delegates; which will make free market decentralization and/or instantaneous transactions more restricted as the transaction load rises by orders-of-magnitude. Since every delegate has to validate every transaction in the blocks of all the other delegates, colluding delegates can overload other delegates with transaction spam attacks in any DPOS system which has no transaction fees or which pays the fees to the processing delegate. The supply and demand for delegates in DPOS isn't determined by the free market. It is not possible to spontaneously migrate away from an existing delegate nor for a new delegate spontaneously to meet demand— not just load demand, but also demand for other attributes such as geographical location, perceived need for additional check on malfeasance, etc.. And the objective metrics of collusion and malfeasance are insufficient being at best mostly retrospective after the damage is done, and not proactive.
Proposed Improvement OverviewMy design accepts as the total order, the partial order [redacted]. The Nash equilibrium incentive to converge on this total order is achieved through the objective [redacted] combined with objective limitation of potential profit due to malfeasance otherwise derived from [redacted].
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1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.02432 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.138236073 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=9844 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.12376416