I was not aware of anyone else using the term provider. Bitshares has delegates, NuBits has custodians, Lightning has hubs, etc. The problem is that as soon as one reaches any scale, one will come in contact with traditional law, the rest of the financial system, Internet services, etc. No ethical business can allow itself to operate outside the law.
Agreed. I wasn't using that term, but equated what I am doing to be something akin to a provider, but maybe not in the way you defined it below.
In any case, the solution I have employed to deal with the dilemma you stated, is that the control of the PoW is in the hands of the users, not professional miners nor these "providers". So the users can shift their PoW at-will to those "providers" that are not abusing the protocol in any way.
If we assume the users will not do this, then of course why even bother creating anything at all for the users if they won't fight for their own rights. The problem with Satoshi's design is the users can't fight because they don't control the mining.
So at the minimum my design has the decentralized, permissionless attribute sustained for as long as 51% of the user's PoW is willing to move away from any "providers" who are doing malfeasance (assuming users can detect and agree on who is doing malfeasance which is another topic of discussion).
However, I do admit that the masses are apathetic and they can be convinced to use Coinbase and accept the default settings. So that is why it was important to me that my design achieved the ability of the minority to fork away from the majority (when the majority is abusive) and to not be vulnerable to a 51% attack by the majority in terms of censoring transactions.
As I explained to monsterer upthread, it is not possible to objectively prove (with cryptography and math) which chain is the honest one and which one is the dishonest one when there are censored transactions. But it is possible to determine which "providers" (in my design) are denying certain transactions and/or denying to interact properly with other "providers" which are not denying certain transactions. This is determined from the perspective of the user who is trying to send the transaction to the "provider". Thus user can simply send his transaction (+ PoW share) to the "provider" which doesn't censor him. And so my design naturally anneals to fork away from malfeasance. I was quite pleased with that. It isn't perfect in every respect, but it sure gives us a fighting chance to resist deleterious centralization effects.
Thus even if the apathetic masses are induced to use their PoW shares to attack the minority chain, it won't work. Because there is objectivity that I described in the prior paragraph. That was one of my key epiphanies. They paradigm shift is the objectivity is individually based and thus doesn't require a global objectivity. That will of course create a new partition (a new fork), but each forkh as its own longest chain which users can identify by the providers that are not censored from it (users thus taking the unions of all chains). In other words, users will use the chain that doesn't censor their transactions. So the objectivity is that the attacker's fake transactions aren't used by any one, or that union with the apathetic majority's transactions is not exclusive to the minorities's transactions. For as long as the minority chain is building off the majority chain (i.e. always building off the end of the majority chain and including its transactions), then the attacker can't double-spend in both. The minority chain just adds transactions to the majority chain, thus it doesn't require Partition tolerance thus doesn't violate CAP.
Note however that this minority chain is unprovable to a full node that wasn't online as it was occurring (which was my point to monsterer), but I don't think the minority community will behave totally chaotically like that. Instead they will communicate in forums and agree on some checkpoints for the minority chain (which can be downloaded to user's clients), because socially if there is a sizeable minority that is being harmed they have every incentive to organize and protect their funds from censorship. And they will hold the PoW power to do so.
![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
Notwithstanding that, there might a way to write checkpoints from the minority chain into the majority chain without the majority chain knowing it until after the fact, assuming the majority chain allows any encrypted data (or encryption can possibly be hidden with steganography). However, that is probably pointless because a 51% control can always rewrite the chain (but that becomes very obvious to the community and is not realistic).
In summary, 51% attacks can't be hidden. As long as the community holds the power in their individual user hands, it is very difficult to foist crap onto the users that they don't want. Humans can fight when they can organize and they hold the power.
I am quite clear on this by now. I have thus have a design for what I want to achieve; which is as stated above.
But the centralization and failures come insidiously over time as we are observing (and which I publicly predicted years ago and was labeled as crazy).
If I am understanding correctly what you are alluding to, that won't work. I already analyzed that sort of design. It fails for similar reasons as I have explained that other designs fail, in that it can't arrive at one total ordering of the consensus. No one can trust money that has multifarious orderings, because there is no truth about the money's value. Money has to have global fungibility otherwise it isn't money.
I assert you are working against the direction of entropy as discussed by CoinCube and I upthread (and currently a debate that I need to finish with the professor Jorge when I have time to come back to it).
The world is moving to globalization of commerce and money, not the other direction.
The system serves it participants which want some kind of utility out of it, be it a profit or a service. Bitcoin works to the extent it does, because it carefully balances all elements. Game-theory is perhaps the most important tool for analysing these systems. Mining is a competitive race. But its unclear what the economics of Bitcoin should look like without the bootstrap subsidy.
PoS coins are launched without any profitable mining. And some such as Nxt gained significant investment.
But you are moving the goalposts. Now you are not talking about whether unprofitable mining can secure the coin but whether there will be enough adoption and interest to secure the coin. So now you've moved the goal posts to a marketing economics discussion.
If all crypto is going to be is a speculator fuck fest, then it will end up just like pink sheet (shit) stocks do.
We have to enable a widely needed use case for the launch of the coin, or we might as well just admit we are fucking with ourselves same as for Monero and all the shit coins. They are just zero sum game circle-jerk echo chambers. The greater fools will fund those who are extracting the value from the community and it will all die in a heap of broken delusions and bagholders.