Only a different consensus mechanism then one purely based on monetary gain can solve this, otherwise the process towards total centralization is automatic.
I strongly disagree with this. If you have no built-in reward, the ones running the system will eventually make damn sure that they get rewarded in some other way.
I stongly disagree with that statement too!
I said purely monetary.
It is not a first time by ttookk for not understanding the whole sentence, he jumped to my "not comparable" too, ignoring that i said "not DIRECTLY comparable". Attention span nowadays
But could be language issue too, don't know.
Could be. Also, I'd like to hear if he/she or someone else disagrees with the more interesting part of that statement, namely that basing a consensus mechanism purely on monetary reward will automatically lead to total centralization.
Just like totally free (unregulated) capitalism in a market will automatically lead to a monopoly.
Yeah, maybe I was skimming over that part a bit quickly, but "purely monetary" in the strict sense doesn't exist; there is always other factors associated with it. Do you have to run hardware 24/7, do you have to stake coins/tokens etc.
To answer your question, I can see the danger of centralization in Bitcoin, yes, but I think it is largely mitigated by a strong division of the different interest groups (miners, devs, users, etc.) and the gametheoretical underpinnings that give cooperation on a protocol layer little to no advantage.
Let me try to rephrase the whole question I have:
As tarmo888 has so condescendingly stated, Byteball operates on a very different basis than Bitcoin, so why aren't you guys looking for more comparable real-world projects?
I brought up the witness voting mechanism to DPoS comparison multiple times, because I think it is far more comparable than Byteball/BTC. If you want to see how a future system that is based on voting can look like, there are a lot of DPoS systems out there in which on-chain voting as part of the consensus mechanism is a thing and their behavior can be studied. Lisk, EOS, Ark, Tron, Shift, just to name a few.
…Oh, and by the way, here is something no one in the altcoin space wants to hear: technology is absolutely overrated. Things don't have to work optimally with tons of headroom, they have to work good enough. Almost all Bitcoin clones were trying the "better than BTC" narrative, be it faster blocktimes, bigger blocks, more GPU-friendly mining algos etc. Where are they now? Currently, we are seeing the same phenomenon with ETH and its competitors. If tech would actually matter as much as so many people think it does, at least Ethereum would have been dethroned by now.
In the end, it doesn't matter if something is theoretically better than the competition, if no one uses it. History is full of better versions of the things that became mainstream, where simply the circumstances, like the network effect, helped decide the race.
Bitcoin is more decentralized than all the other projects out there (maybe except for Ethereum in some fields), including Byteball. Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain/distributed ledger. Maybe there are implementations out there which are theoretically more secure, if they had the userbase, the development base, the miner base and all the other metrics of Bitcoin, but they don't. In the end, users will not (and should not) give two shits about whether the system they use to pay their coffee or whatever uses a blockchain or a DAG, PoW, PoS or a different consensus mechanism.
Alright, but now I guess this turns too much into incoherent rambling from my side, plus, I don't like to be insulted, so that's it from my side. You have fun playing with your Byteballs.
Good points about practical circumstances and not just technical specifications deciding the race. VHS vs Betamax etc (look it up kids). if history teaches us anything, we just need to use new tech to publish porn in order to make a project succeed.
As for the monetary reward and costs, there is hardly any of that in Byeball, the role of a witness is very different and it is much more about trustworthyness, reputation. In fact the point is, they are only witnesses because they are reputable and to continue to be recognized as such, they should not have any other interest in the ecosystem other then that. Very different from the interests of miners in a PoW-scenario.
Sincere apologies if I was to impolite.