Byteball is interesting in features it enables but we should not forget its sins:
- the Byteball system is essentially a shared database between 12 witnesses and the rest of nodes
- it is a trusted system - you need to trust that witnesses behave honestly and are not colluding to form a cartel
- it is easily susceptible to hostile takeover. A rogue third party only needs to take control over 11 witnesses which is rather easy at government/court/police gunpoint
- for that reason the entire system can be shut down at any time
You don't need to trust witnesses since you can check by yourself that they behave honestly.
And what I and all users can do with misbehaving witness that formed a cartel?
You forgot that a witness that feels threatened can transfer its duty to another entity in a matters of minutes using an address definition change.
How about witness that doesn't have time to "feel threatened". Do you think government or any hostile party will reveal its intensions by notifying the witness so he can "feel threatened" and "transfer its duty"? That's just laughable.
Remember this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ReserveBitcoin only exists because it
can't be shut down. That's the whole point behind PoW system. Nobody has come up with anything equally resilient to takeover and not consuming so much energy. But it is well spent energy. Any PoS system devised so far is susceptible to being shut down with any charges that powers that (should not) be can concoct. Doesn't "money laundering and operating an unlicensed financial transaction system" sound good as a pretext to preserve the power and control over money system? Liberty Reserve operated unabated as long as it became to big and popular to allow it to function further. Once that happens any centralised system will be shut down right away.
You forgot that users can decide which witnesses to use and revoke any witness that would be compromized.
That's plain wrong. Users can decide to change ONLY ONE witness. If witnesses form a cartel you can't change more than one which means that you can't force misbehaving witnesses out at all. In this scenario users can only fork the entire system or make "a schism" like it's described in the white paper.
Please keep the discussion on the fact based opinions.
