If there's money to be made, then of course you attract strategies to make it, you inspire scammy strategies, and you end up with an oligarchy of greedy bastards that are then responsible for the system.
I agree for most existing cryptocurrencies which fail to stay decentralized. But I think the problem lies in the fact that the power is proportional to stake/resources and gets reenforced by the rewards. As you already know, I'm trying to design a system that decouples power from stake to encourage real decentralization.
Well, I also started on designing a system. But it is far from even conceptually ready, so I have no clear answers yet to many questions, but I think that the main issue is indeed that one shouldn't gain from keeping the system running in any "proportional" way, as you say.
In fact, my idea is that the only reason to keep the system running, is that if you don't keep the system running, you lose everything you have in it. Honestly, if nobody in the system cares about its holdings, then I don't mind the system failing.
Well, if you particpate to keep the value of your investment, you do this out of a financial motivation, which is not true altruism. There's actually a big design space between altruism-prime and direct monetary rewards.
I'm not looking for altruism (a notion I think doesn't really exist). It is more like: "if you don't care about your holdings, don't be surprised they are gone."
One of my latest ideas is to set a fixed-percentage transaction fee on default and give the miner the priviledge to make transactions without any fees up to the total amount of the transactions that he included in his block. Such an incentive mechanism would benefit to miners with high transaction volumes. As an alternative, one could even imagine setting a lower limit for transaction amounts and exlude the miner from this rule. You would then mine to make microtransactions!
Very rough sketch:
My idea is that there are no transaction fees, nor "block rewards". There is an initial amount of coins, and that's it (derived, for instance, from a fork of different existing coins, like bitcoin, ethereum, and a few others). For each address you have on these chains, you are entitled to one coin. Not even proportional. Just a RANDOM initial coin distribution.
Next, there are no rewards for anything. But each user is responsible for his own wallet, and co-signs off other people's wallet updates, and must make sure he gets a recent validation before he can make a valid transaction. You get validations from those nodes that have kept a sufficiently long history of transactions that they can "update" your validation. The longer you wait to get a validation, the larger is the risk that your wallet will never be validated again, and you've lost everything. So you better validate regularly. At that moment, you can also validate other wallets.
There is a kind of block-chainish distributed file, but it only contains validation information.
In fact, the idea is inspired from the masternode concept of DASH, where masternodes "validate" transactions on the mem pool. But if, as a wallet owner, you keep those validated transactions, that's in fact good enough. No need for writing them ultimately on a block chain. And everyone with a minimum of stake can be a "masternode".
That's an interesting approach to the NaS issue, but unfortunately your suggestion is not incentive-compatible and could result in another type of Tragedy of the Commons. Your participation in block mining as an individual stakeholder doesn't add much to security. It's the whole group of miners that matter. And as mining is costly even in PoS currencies (you have to keep running your PC the whole time), why would you mine if everybody else does? But, then, others might think the same and stop mining, so that the system eventually collapses down to a minority of real altruist miners.
Well, the first idea is that you have to update the validation of your own wallet regularly. And yes, if you don't "invest" in a running PC, you diminish the security of the system. But there's not much security to be had. Block chains do much too much, because they allow you to have an "immutable record". But that's not what is needed for monetary assets. What's needed for monetary assets is *unforgettable* transactions. The real order in which non-double spent transactions are given is not really important if they don't succeed one another (and they can't). Adding stuff doesn't matter. Once a balance is updated with the most recent transactions concerning him, and having sufficient "validation signatures", we don't really care about the past. There's no winding back, there's no inventing transactions that didn't exist (impossible imitation of signatures). The ONLY thing that matters in monetary affairs, is that one doesn't FORGET a decreasing transaction. But once it is included in your balance (in order to obtain a recent validation), there's nothing else that's needed.
If my only recent stamp I have indicates that I have 20 dollars in my account, that's all that's needed to prove that I have a right to spend 20 dollars. If I spend 5 dollars, then the receiver will want to have a validation of his INCREASE in his account by 5 dollars. The only way for him to get that validation, is by having a simultaneous recent validation of MY account by 5 dollars. So I have now an "older" validation that says I have a 20 dollar account, and a more recent one that says that I have a 15 dollar account, which, at the same time, sets my counter party's account to 5 extra dollars.
Nodes know about this transaction which is broadcasted. So if I want to have an 'update' of my validation, I ask nodes to sign off my account status, and they will only sign if this corresponds to the last transaction since my previous validation.
When nodes "forget" about this transaction, they cannot validate my account any more. If I wait for too long a period, I will not find sufficient nodes that are able to have the list of transactions since my former validation stamp ; so I might lose all I have in my wallet (an old validation is worth nothing). I better continuously ask for validation updates. If my wallet didn't transact anything in the mean time, nodes will give me a validation update.
In order to send a transaction, I have to have a recent validation, no conflicting double spends since this validation and my counter party has to have a recent validation too. We then get a common "updated validation".
As there's no mining incentive whatsoever, censoring such transactions and discarding blocks that contain them wouldn't make you lose money. The bribe amount to make you participate would thus be very low.
This is why this system needs to be entirely obfuscated so that nobody knows anything about it. You only update potential wallets with potential transactions.
