One known way to prevent an incentive for a malicious 51% attack is to introduce a PoS innovation to the mining algorithm.  In other words, the more BTC you own, the less hashing you need to do.  Thus, miners would need to be stakeholders in BTC and thus creating network disruptions would be clearly against their interests.  They have 'skin in the game'.  Another effect would be that the demand for BTC would increase significantly(which would cause an increase in price).

The most well known problem with PoS is something called Nothing At Stake.  If we had hybrid algo, there is something at stake(computation resource) which does not eliminate the problem of N@S altogether but would probably effectively mitigate it.  N@S suggests that you can create many alternative timelines at once and exploit that, however with a hybrid model, these alternative timelines cost computing power(and thus introduce a net disadvantage).

I think some of these ideas about preventing mining pools are somewhat awkward.

This solution would be generally non-disruptive and most certainly would have a very positive effect on the price of BTC.

-bm

not true.

you can combine PoS with PoW, the most obvious method is setting the hash difficulty according to how much BTC the miner owns.  This will also have a significant appreciative effect on BTC because it will require miners to own BTC to mine effectively(will reduce the supply).  Of course this might also be viewed as being elitist(excludes poor miners) - but IMHO the cost of mining gear already poses a significant barrier to entry.  The positives would outweigh the negatives.  Also there are significant theoretical issues regarding PoS that need to be addressed.

Also this proposal practically eliminates the incentive for a malicious 51% attack.

-bm

this person is remarkably reminiscent of BCNext.

-bm

interesting but no where does Peter Todd establish how this will save on resources.  The goal here presumably is how to have subsets of TXO (eg. ∑a, ∑a + ∑b) but in the examples he shows they are all interdependent.  Mostly he is showing a few of the characteristics of side chains and how linking between them would work(or not).

The problem I believe lies in the formula for splitting the TXO.  If we can 1) agree on this formula 2) properly creates useful subsets that have minimal cross-transactions we can probably find a way to turn a global TXO into a local TXO, and thus have useful localized ledgers- which is the tacit goal here.

going by the original post btw: http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04388.html

-bm

it's a tactic to build credibility.  Convince everyone you are a Utopian critic, then pronounce the issue solved.



-bm

is CfA another Utopian puppet?

-bm

how can you possibly be touting both NEM and NXT?

NEM seeks to replace NXT.

you need to get your story straight.

-bm

you guys are a joke.

-bm

this should create at least a dozen new BTC bullish pontificators on this forum.  Money well spent. 

-bm

also Apple announces Bitcoin support?  these are not indicators that Bitcoin is going away- it would appear that it has gained acceptance among major tech players.

all things seem to suggest this price dip was created to shake out small hands.

-bm

something bizarre is going on that is certain.

-bm

here's whats bizarre. 

1) Chinese exchanges dont seem to be reflecting this price drop.

2) perhaps a new major stakeholder due to US Federal Auction.

3) Yahoo and Google both added support for BTC price.


 ?

-bm

that sounds like standard proof of stake.

-bm

voted on by whom?

-bm

did anyone even bother to read the Darkcoin whitepaper?

I did.  It was complete garbage.

-bm

can you give us a link describing the Peercoin asset exchange?

-bm

actually Cointropolis is trying to remove DGS because it conflicts with some deal he's involved with.

-bm

u not utopia english not same.

msg from Bluemeanie1

NXT is even faster.

that message greatly calmed my fears about LTC.  It seems as though LTC is as good as Bitcoin.  Actually it's seems like it's exactly the same thing as Bitcoin except it's no where near as popular.

</sarcasm>

-bm