16. Censorship...... Only the majority of witnesses can effectively impose forbidden content rules – if users choose such witnesses
government is able to put pressure on public witnesses. And they will simply refuse to be witnesses. In this case it will be almost impossible to find a suitable replacement for them
It's a good critique. I think the answer is not in denying this vulnerability, as it is true, but being aware of the vulnerabilities of the alternative validation mechanisms POW and POS.
With POW as well as POS, anyone can get a hold of the majority of the validation/hashing power, as long as you spend the money.
And so people with outside interests may be financially motivated to spend the required amount to destroy it, and can do so fully anonymously.
This will be much harder in a system where your identity is required, and a strong outside reputation as well, as they then lose their outside reputation too.
That being said, I would prefer to see POS instead of witnesses as it is harder to take down with regulations/gov pressure.
In the end though I think adoption depends much more on other factors than the security of the network.
User friendliness, business model, fees, functionality etc.
Think Byteball comes out overall very positively.
And ofcourse over time the gov thread will go down for private currencies as it becomes more a legalized industry less and less at risk against gov attack, comparable to marihuana production in USA today.
