Surprised more people aren't weighing in on this.
Perhaps they are digesting it.
Seems like it would be big news either way:
Either Vitalik has a breakthrough concept
that can solve the nothing at stake problem,
or no, it is another failed attempt and PoS
truly can't work.
i think its a case where all the people who usual weigh in on this subject are usually the ones who are advocating the idea that nothing at stake is a serious threat to "badmouth" pos. now faced with a technical explanation of why it isnt a threat (in certain implementations) from a very public person who is accepted to be an academic/pioneer in the area they cannot dispute the fact that they are (for the most part) wrong. and more specifically, wrong about nxt which uses 720 block reorg limit as is explained in the paper vitalik has published (understandably he doesnt use nxt as an example seeing as nxt is competition) thus giving credit to nxt for actually doing things correctly as he has actually said on the nxt forum after discussion with the devs.
now no one is willing to admit they are wrong. silence... as someone in on the nxt forum said.. "its like someone farted and everyone knows but no one will talk about it".
interestingly enough, nem is working on a new algorithm based on the concept of pos but instead of just the amount of coins an account has, the transactions an account does, and with who it does the transactions, as well as coin age is used in the calculation for deciding what weight an account has. it takes 30 days for nem to be fully vested before the weight assigned to the received coins can be added to the "active" weight. eigeintrust++ algorithm decides whether a node is "trustworthy" or not based on length of time a node is online and a number of other factors which im not sure of.
it sounds like vitalik is explaining how pos
should work, and how nem/proof of importance
does work.
jabo from nemforum put it well so il quote him.
These things kind of go over my head, but the way I read Vitalik's article he is advocating our system.
He states that just counting each coin as a little miner (word for word BCNext's explanation) was flawed because there was no timeout (NXT fixed this because it has a 720 block lock out). But NXT stops there. And then he also goes on to explain that is not all that is needed. He says also that coins needed to be aged in, and also nodes needed a way to trust each other, i.e. the longer a node has been online the more trustworthy it is. He proposes doing this by giving gravity to an account; that basically the longer it has been known to be online and the more the coins have been aged, then the heavier and more trustworthy the node is. It seems to me that he makes the argument that PoS needs all three of these. Or did I miss something?
What he calls "gravity" we call PoI if I am correct. At NEM we check to see if Nodes are trustworthy through the Egientrust algo used to determine which nodes can be trusted, and we also give weight to coins by how much they have been aged in.
I kept on reading this thinking, "Wow, he is basically advocating NEM."
if nem ticks all the boxes that vitalik has put forward which it sounds like it does using only algorithms. i think we could be on to a serious winner.
[disclaimer]apologies for advocating the coin im involved with but it is relevant.[/disclaimer]
