Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@shelby3
Last active November 23, 2016 12:50
Show Gist options
  • Star 0 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save shelby3/a64bf9f7758265aebfcb9cdce5a44244 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save shelby3/a64bf9f7758265aebfcb9cdce5a44244 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Section 6. Delegated Proof-of-Stake

6. Delegated Proof-of-Stake

Dictatorship: Exponential or power-law distribution of the control of stake is a power-vacuum trending toward a winner-take-all disequilibrium.

Censorship: Not a permissionless free market to add transaction events and stand up consensus ordering (i.e. delegate witness) nodes. Eventually the winner-take-all cartel of power-law distributed whales are in control.

Monopolistic: Funding for delegate witness is not set in a competitive free market of transaction fees. Instead eventually the winner-take-all cartel of power-law distributed whales decide both the set witnesses and the level of funding generated from minting supply, thus effectively deciding how much to pay themselves by debasing the money supply.

Synchronous: No asynchronous concurrency of transaction ordering for enhanced scaling, throughput, resiliency, and liveness. Only the witness that produces the next block may add transactions during the block period, and all transactions must be propagated to every node.

Decidable: Long range retroactive chain forks (aka “long-con attack”) are implausible due to Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (aka “TaPoS”).

Deterministic: At the winner-has-taken-all whales cartel juncture, latency and variance of transaction confirmations due to partial orders is minimal, because it is presumed the cartel of whales in control vote out uncooperative witnesses. Confirmation is final, not probabilistic. However latency could suffer reliability issues at scale due lack of asynchrony.

Debasing: At the winner-has-taken-all whales cartel juncture, the external work burned in PoW is substituted with rent collected from the system by the cartel monopoly of control. Before this juncture, the waste is all the work in political strife and malevolent witnesses which can increase latency and variance of transaction confirmations and decrease throughput.

Less Secure: At the winner-has-taken-all whales cartel juncture, as explained in the sub-section 5.7.2 Security, double-spends may be more profitable than the degradation of the value of the stake. Before this juncture, only a sufficient majority of malevolent witnesses could double-spend.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment