You have some flawed reasoning with regards to security.

1) Just because no case of a 51% attack has been successful with Bitcoin doesn't mean that Bitcoin is secure from such an attack in the future. The same reasoning can be applied to any PoS with NaS. When it comes to security, analyzing all possible attack vectors is of utmost importance.

2) To only focus on NaS attacks PoS/DPoS critics are not accurately reflecting all the possible attack vectors in which these currencies are vulnerable to.

I.E...  Some would consider Bitshares to be recently attacked with a "51% democratic attack by delegates" which decided to change BTSX from a deflationary currency to an inflationary currency and upsetting a minority group of investors who were sold on the idea of a deflationary currency.

These proposals do not address the fundamental concerns in the document that gmaxwell posted. They do add a fair bit of complexity, making them hard to analyze (and making a concrete attack too intricate to describe). IIRC Vitalik has backed away from these proposals because they do not provide the security benefits he originally thought they did.

It's worth noting that by writing a well-defined security model and working toward it, it is possible to create a "working" PoS which is only broken when the assumptions of the security model are violated. If one were to do this, it would then be easy to point out how the security model is not applicable to the real world. But Vitalik's posts --- and no PoS writeups that I'm aware of --- actually do this.

This. If mining costs more than bitcoins, miners actually take bitcoins out of the system to pay for their electric bills.

So if bitcoin has a market cap of $1 billion and electricity costs are $500 million, miners will actually pull $500 million worth of money out of bitcoin.

Amazing huh?

And if the electricity costs are over $1 billion...the cost of bitcoins will go negative and anyone using bitcoin will actually be paying to use it.
 


Or, more realistically, if miners are selling all of their coins there is a built in maximum inflation built into bitcoin which can easily be eaten up by the influx of new users.

I legitimately want a fork of Bitcoin. I want to see direct competition between proof of work and proof of whatever (everything else remaining the same). Then, should my assumptions hold true, I will be able to refer to the failed proof of whatever fork whenever someone makes a new we-need-to-change-Bitcoin-now-or-it-will-die thread. If I'm wrong, I will happily eat crow.

Plus, I would get to be part of the experiment. As a current holder, I will be able to do my part and vote for the chain of my choice by selling my new proof of whatever coins in the hopes of buying more actual bitcoins with the proceeds.

I've been waiting for this to happen for a few years now. All we get are new threads.

Make a mining heater, and I'll start mining. I spend some kW on heating anyway.

Linode

https://www.linode.com/pricing

Digitalocean

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

That's the 2 most popular VPS provider. Few minutes to launch, very flexible.

If Bitcoin is going to take off, you've got to use it.  I just talked to a customer service guy at Newegg.  He said 'hardly anyone' pays with bitcoin.  He said he's only dealt with two orders done in Bitcoin.  

If you've got bitcoin, go spend some buying cool shit at Newegg or Overstock.  The whole thing will fall apart if Merchants start seeing it as a waste of time.  

Don't wait, buy some shit today!  What are you - an idiot?

Now that you have conceded to a longterm and constant payout to support Bitshares dev and marketing how do you compare the costs of mining to your costs of constant dilution to support dev and marketing?

For some odd reason you cannot grasp the concept that VOTE is not only the mechanism to insure the devs get paid but also the leverage used to insure that the merger goes through. As daniel said himself:


If Vote was not implemented to insure dilution to pay for future development costs it would compete against BTSX as a separate DAC.

The merger itself is more about marketing and development funding through the existing stakeholder userbase and far less about confusion.

Getting back to the actual topic, why do you think PoW would prevent bitcoin from reaching $5000?

From what I understand, you seem to think that a currency is like a big pile of money, and the overhead drains away all the money until the currency isn't worth anything anymore. Is that about right?

That is not how it works, and not how I explained it. 3% VOTE is the share distribution everyone gets upon the merger. The reason why VOTE is critical is because it is a important mechanism to incentive and coerce existing stakeholders into making such changes. Funds for the dev team are will be supported by votes with this new mechanism which will allow for more crowdfunding means and ways to further dilute supply in order to maintain payroll for dev and marketing.

How many different ways do I have to explain this very simple concept?

Well this is ridiculous. It's not like we can just push a hardfork tomorrow and force everyone to adopt it. Removing PoW mining right now is virtually impossible. Attempting to remove it in a year or two will be impossible!
This is what coin halving is all about. Why are you so impatient? Do we need Year 1 5000$, year 2 10 000$, year 3 100 000$??

Why do you fear posting a question of clarification on your own forum? Do you fear the answer will back up what I'm saying?


This is pure gold! It was Daniel that created VOTE to compete with BTSX when investors paid him to maintain BTSX! He is literally talking about competing with himself!



Mechanism to keep diluting supply continuously!


So here he is reassuring investors that he won't pull this stunt again by creating a competing DAC.

Who do you think is going to get paid for these marketing and development projects in the future as well?

If it was just a merger, why do the ratios get adjusted and the quantity of tokens change? Why couldn't  consolidation happen keeping 2 billion and take a snapshot of everyone's ratio?

All you have to do is read the Initial post that I already linked to in the thread.You have great fears about reading documentation from the bitshares forum for some odd reason. Here I will copy it over for you:

There are many problems we need to resolve as a community:

1) We don't want to compete with ourselves and divide our network effect.
2) We don't want to confuse users with a million brands.
3) We want to have 1 BitUSD for everything rather than many different BitUSDs
4) We need to recognize those who have helped fund development after Feb 28th so they don't compete with us.
5) I don't want to have divided loyalties... I cannot serve two masters.
6) We need to provide for long term funding and growth.
7) We need to resolve the consensus problem once and for all.

As a community effort we are stronger if we can agree on changes using proof of stake and we should agree once and for all that the majority will rule here.   Those that want a stable money will use BitGold or BitSilver because those are not subject to change, only supply and demand.    If you cannot trust the community of stakeholders to act wisely then create a rigid system with no rule changes and attempt to compete.

My Proposal:

1) Drop all other BitShares brands.... rename BitShares X to just BitShares
2) End PTS...  BitShares will evolve to incorporate every possible feature that stakeholders vote on.
3) If there is a clone then it should start out with stakeholders it thinks are best... because BitShares holders are uniting.
4) Add stake holder approved dilution without limit to BitShares X.
5) Bring in all AGS holders and given them a stake in BitShares X that cannot be moved for 6 months... the ratio that this stake should be given should be equal to PTS market cap... so $5 million or 10% dilution of BTSX allocated to these individuals.    This is effectively BTSX buying out our competition.
6) Bring in one last PTS snapshot also valued at $5 million for another 10% dilution of BTSX... 6 months until funds could be spent... buy out this competition and end PTS.
7) Our team will focus on no other DACs other than BitShares in general and work to make it the most robust and *FLEXIBLE* DAC out there.

There will still be other DACs based upon our toolkit  (Music, Gaming, DNS, etc) but those clones will not be dividing my loyalty because they have their own teams and are already known and operating independently of us.  Those who have joined those DACs can attempt to grow them how they see fit and BitShares will be competing with them where we can.

Our goal will be to scale BitShares to handle the transaction volume and users... to solve the scaling problem while still remaining decentralized and allowing 0 barriers to entry for competition except our network effect.

At the risk of calling BitShares one DAC to rule them all... I think we can worry about that after we have achieved critical mass, until then someone else may come along and build one DAC to rule them all and we don't want them to get there if we can get there first.

Simple answer to author of this topic. Coins mined ale halved every 5 (?) years. So price must go up simply because of that. Secondly, in 2021 which is not far from now, mining new coins will stop. With your theory price will skyrocket then.
Simple as that.

I'm providing the proof with all the links. If you don't trust me and think that other delegates, Daniel, and moderators are lying in the links I provided just post a question and ask them directly or are you too scared to get clarification on what is clearly written.

It appears all you know about Bitcoin is from staying too much in the altcoin section too long. You definitely do not know the economics, finance, legal issues and mining facts involved with Bitcoin. Posts like yours reminds us all how far we have made it in this Revolution. You should really learn some basic facts about what's really going on here and you may finally get it.

Since this is probably really all about altcoins, here's the speech:(2nd times a charm)

Bitcoin itself had in the past been vulnerable to very similar things that you said happened and now see happen with altcoins these days, but fortunately THAT WINDOW IS NOW CLOSED.

Part of the definition of the bitcoin protocol includes the checking of the proof of work put into various block chains, and then choosing the one with the most work. Bitcoin has more proof-of-work in its blockchain than any other competing cryptocurrency, and so by definition it must be the one chosen, and all others ignored.

Altcoins are all very similar to Bitcoin: there is a block chain to store transactions, a consensus mechanism to build the block chain, and a cryptographic protocol to register transactions. Some prominent examples are PPCoin, Primecoin, Litecoin, and Freicoin.

Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not. This is known as the network effect. An initial imbalance between two nearly equal media of exchange will benefit whichever is more widely accepted until a single one overwhelms the rest. There is no limit to this effect: ultimately one would always expect a single currency to overcome all its competitors.

Because it was started earlier and has had a greater opportunity to grow and attract users, Bitcoin has a market larger by a wide margin than all the markets of all the altcoins put together, and this makes it vastly more useful as a currency. To defeat Bitcoin, an altcoin would require not just superior technology, but such vastly superior technology as to be an advance over Bitcoin comparable to the advance Bitcoin represents over fiat currency. Furthermore, a truly great innovation would much better serve people by being incorporated into future versions of Bitcoin rather than by requiring them to switch to something else. Indeed, the people who have proposed new ideas that are actually good, such as Zerocoin and mini-blockchain, did not develop their own currencies around them, but have simply described their usefulness as features.

The Bitcoin community is not just overwhelmingly larger but of overwhelmingly better quality as well. Bitcoin is surrounded by real entrepreneurs working hard to create new and useful services for Bitcoin. Altcoins are surrounded by loud-mouthed pretenders with irrational hopes of duplicating Nakamoto's success. This does not mean that there is anything intrinsically wrong with altcoins: the problem is simply that once Bitcoin exists, then there is no additional value, from a monetary standpoint, of creating knock-offs. Can anyone really expect to create something of value by rereleasing Bitcoin under a new name and with a few tiny changes to its source code? What makes Bitcoin great cannot easily be duplicated. Thus, while the Bitcoin community matures and grows as more and more entrepreneurs are attracted to its potential, the altcoin communities can only whine for attention.

For a new currency to take bitcoins place it would have to represent a significant improvement over bitcoin, or bitcoin would have to first FAIL before this could happen. So the question is not will bitcoin become obsolete, but will (your proposed new coin) overtake bitcoin? I don’t see any reason to believe that Altcoins represents a fundamental new innovation with meaningful improved functionality.

In physics, we learn about the concept of entropy. Entropy is often described as “chaos”, “randomness”, or “disorder”. To simplify quantum mechanics as much as possible, imagine a basket with a line drawn down the middle, and throw some balls into the basket. If all the balls are on one side of the line, that is an ordered state and has low entropy. If the balls are spread across both sides then it has higher entropy.

Now, let us take the concept of entropy and apply it to cryptocurrencies. We can imagine each cryptocurrency created has a possibility that some value can be placed within it. If all possible value is placed in bitcoin, and none in litecoin or altcoin, then this is a low entropy state. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that entropy in a system should always increase. So we should expect the total cryptocurrency value to be spread among all the possible altcoins.

Going back to our example of balls in a basket, one can easily get all the balls onto one side of the line simply by tilting the basket. This represents the concept of enthalpy, or energy within the system. Just as gravity pulls the balls onto one side of the basket, enthalpy can pull things into a higher entropic state. The most proof-of-work has been put into bitcoin, and so it takes higher energy to put any value into an altcoin.

From an entropy standpoint, there will always be alternate currencies, and the value assigned to them will always be greater than zero. But from an enthalpy standpoint, bitcoin is favored over altcoins, so the total value of each altcoin will remain very low compared to bitcoins.

The reason why they don't do it is because secretly or subconsciously they believe in Bitcoin long term and merely want to simultaneously pump their alt they invested into and/or get Bitcoin to mutate into behaving like their alt so they win either way. They also may fear that they can make a quick buck on their early IPO investment with some initial mommentum but ultimately it is a very risky bet because of Bitcoins network effect and thus are keeping most or a portion of holdings in bitcoin.

Their fears are correct, and ultimately it is likely they will be crushed by Bitcoin.

You understand that the VOTE DAC doesn't exist pre merger and that development by Daniel is being paid for by 3% of 2.5 Billion shares of the total market cap of BTSX,PTS,AGS, DNS. So yes, the DNS holders can get a speck paid back out of the large capital infusion.

Its not as if VOTE has its own IPO where people can buy into it with BTC, it is automatically getting a share distribution.

What is so complicated about this?

You don't have to go by my word, why don't you ask the question to other delegates and moderators within this thread if you assume that I and they are wrong:

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10214.0

The proposed solution:

To resolve this conflict, Bytemaster proposed merging BTSX, PTS, and AGS back together into a new entity called Bitshares (BTS).  The new entity would be able to create new shares to be sold to new investors for a capital infusion, by shareholder vote, for purposes of funding the marketing campaign. Proposal was made in this thread:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10148.msg132495#msg132495
This is the thread you will want to read closely and think about the implications of such as written by Daniel himself.

You have so much faith in Bitshares that you don't even trust the hard facts explained by developers, moderators , and the creator in their very own forum.