Stake leasing (centralization) isn't required in NXT's PoS.
Of course it's required. That's like claiming pool mining in Bitcoin isn't required. It's only not required when the coin price is low per unit and it's being used for virtually nothing, with no widespread distribution or demand (i.e. now). Hey guys! I'm not centralized because it's possible to solo mine Bitcoin if I spend $10 million dollars!
With widespread adoption, you would need tons of cash to solo stake. Due to the way transparent forging would work, you would most likely not be able to allow hundreds of thousands of people to stake either. You would probably need to set a minimum stake amount required to be allowed in at all, while culling off all the others. In this manner you've recreated DPoS except with no sybil protection. With transparent forging, the need to pool your stake (delegated voting) increases even more as well.
You either don't know what your talking about or you're lying. Stake leasing isn't required in NXT and the cost of running a node is minuscule. How much does it cost to run a 30W computer 24/7 year round? At $0.1 USD / kWh it costs $26.28 USD not "$10 million dollars!" If you have 10k NXT, you'll generate ~3.15 blocks a year or a block every four months if all the stake is forging. 10k NXT costs $80 USD. Even if TF would require a minimum stake amount of 100k NXT, you would still have a potential of 10,000 forgers and it would only cost each forger $800 USD to acquire such a stake.
DPoS is the mechanism that doesn't have any Sybil protection not NXT. With NXT, you actually have to pay for your stake. With DPoS, you only have to convince others to vote you in. There is no guarantee that the delegates are actually independent and nobody has any idea what type of deals are going on behind the scenes between delegates (aka collusion). DPoS is actually implemented with "approval voting" which is
known to be unworkable in contested elections because it allows strategic voting.
Virtually everything that you complain about for Bitshares claiming it's centralized also applies to NXT and Bitcoin. They are far more similar than not. The main difference is, DPoS starts off with the acknowledgement that PoW and PoS both use delegation and engineers the voting process to do so in the protocol itself. The other two are using a more Rube Goldberg approach to reach the same destination of delegation.
Wrong. NXT doesn't artificially cap the amount of forgers to an arbitrary number that is easily controllable by a very small amount of stakeholders. Why would Bitshares choose approval voting for their delegate selection mechanism when it is susceptible to this manipulation if this was not their intent?
Here's your own hero, "come-from-beyond", telling you NXT isn't going to fit your definition of "decentralized" so you better sell off your NXT now:
He's not my hero because he's not BCNext.
I dislike DPOS because of the necessity for people to vote on delegates. Now this may work perfectly fine in such an enclosed envirement that we're in right now where the userbase is very small but I doubt it'll work very well if any DPOS ever hit's mainstream.
DPoS actually scales to world reserve currency better than any other consensus mechanism. The first transition for DPoS voting would be people like exchange owners and businesses that utilize the platform would run as delegates to make sure the network they depend on is secure. From there, the actors would just keep scaling larger until you had every nation state as a delegate. Some people would think this sounds like a bad thing, but unless every nation was colluding with each other, it would get rid of fractional reserve banking at the very least, which is the real root of all problems.
First off let's clarify that Bitshares is in fact a fractionally reserved system because the
bit"assets" are not fully, 100% reserved and thus there is a lack of convertibility. Regardless of how many "gateways" are brought online, it will always be fractionally reserved because of the way bit"assets" are created. "Gateways" in Bitshares are entirely different than "gateways" in Ripple. All assets in Ripple are brought onto the network through the gateways and therefore the gateways should, in theory, have 100% reserves unless they are corrupt. Assets in Bitshares are merely created and the gateways serve only as a means of allowing a limited amount of bit"assets" to be redeemed for their physical counterparts for a fee. Since bit"assets" are fractionally reserved by the gateways, this allows a situation to develop where a lack of confidence in your prediction market will lead to a total collapse of the asset. This is why it is so irresponsible and in my opinion fraudulent, to describe bitshares as:
BitShares.
Safer than a Swiss Bank.
(Ask me why!)
Furthermore, your insistence that PoS must accept arbitrary centralization to scale is absurd. No platform is even close to reaching 100 tps let alone 1ktps or 100ktps. The necessity of such tps throughputs are so far in the future that it borders on lunacy to state we must relinquish our decentralization
today in preparation for this future event. There's a good chance that 100ktps will never be required by any of these platforms and if it is most likely consumer grade hardware at that point will be able to handle it.
I find it much more likely that your insistence on forcing centralization on your userbase
today is an attempt to establish a stranglehold of control around your network which is impossible to break. You can say all day that the delegate numbers can change from 101 to 1001, but who controls this change is the delegates and when the delegate elections can be controlled by a limited amount of shareholders (because of approval voting), it's those limited shareholders who set the rules now and in the future.
You state you want to "rid the world of fractional reserve banking", but what you really want to do is "rid the world of fractional reserve banking" only to resurrect it via DPoS which is in fact its "second coming". Self admittedly, you refer to this as "corporate fascism" which it is, but it's also communism. There is no greater centralization than that which merges the bureaucracy of state and capital.
I vote that we stomp out this r0ach!