r0ach (OP)
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January 02, 2014, 02:48:22 PM |
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To preface the article, I'm not a socialist, communist, etc. The purpose of this post is to discuss coin generation, and how the currently, highly flawed PoS system relates to both capitalist and socialist models, and the pros and cons of each implementation.
First off, everyone has heard of the term Occam's Razor, except possibly Sunny King. I feel like the current PoS method is an overly complex system, and a solution without a problem. What exact problem does PoS attempt to solve? 51% attacks? Power usage? Miner incentives?
The term 51% attack is far more than a "technical problem" or "bug". It's actually more of an ideological or philosophical problem and has to be treated as such. You can broadly define the 51% attack as the allocation, or centralization, of exponential amounts of power for the benefit of whoever wields it. Reread that statement a couple of times and you'll realize this is not a software problem, but an ideological problem that affects everything from government, to economics, academics, and anything else.
PoS identifies this as a system collapsing problem, and then attempts to code *around* the issue by implementing an overly complex system with what I'd call soft locks, instead of hard locking anyone out of doing it completely. Sunny King, in effect, is giving you a virtual rule book that says centralization of power is bad, and you should not do it. This is also, undeniably, in effect, a form of soft socialism. Such wow. I had no idea PPC was a commie coin.
This is the part where people should probably realize that everything isn't completely black and white, and Karl Marx wasn't actually wrong about everything he said. The problem isn't that the PoS creators are using the lessons of Marx to design a coin. The problem, as remarkable as it sounds, is that he probably didn't go far enough with the idea in order to create hard locks against the undesired results. I will discuss more on that later in the page.
The next problem PoS tries to solve is the electrical power usage issue, which happens to be a direct product of the centralization of resource power above. If people are allowed to collect and throw exponential amounts of power at a system for increasing personal reward, they will probably do so. This is what drives people to buy faster and faster ASICs and GPUs, making power requirements and inefficiency very high, while also increasing centralization of power at the same time, as seen with entities such as cex.io. As you can see, each problem is so directly interconnected, that you can't just code around them one at a time, you have to address them all at once.
The answers to these problems are probably not what most people want to hear, but a system of hard locks combined with Occam's Razor and the lessons Marx actually was right about, might be the only way to tackle the issue. As mentioned earlier, Sunny King is already covertly using socialist principles to tell you centralization of power is bad, so this isn't exactly new territory.
The first step would probably be to not give out free, infinite numbers of wallet addresses. If wallet addresses are scarce, and each person can only acquire one, you can then set global variables where no matter how much hashing power someone throws at a system, they aren't going to receive ever increasing rewards for their hording of power. They can be capped to 0.000x% of total coin count per day (insert logical number of arbitrary zeros here). You have just solved the bitcoin energy crisis, the 51% attack, and the cex.io centralization of power at the same time.
Since you're no longer in a contest to see who can build the largest computer, the proof of work system is now functional on low power hardware and energy use plummets. This, in turn, also makes it so the system becomes more decentralized, since there will be an enormous web of low power hardware keeping it up, and things like cex.io will become non-existent.
Early adopters can still be rewarded over latecomers using the current halving block reward system, or block rewards can be linear. The use of finite, or restricted wallet addresses to solve issues with Bitcoin is just an idea that I've never seen brought up before. It brings up many variables and issues of it's own, such as privacy obviously, but there are solutions to that as well.
One of the worst case scenarios would be requiring submitting your ID to some kind of verification authority to receive a wallet address. Even in worst case scenarios like this, you could still build some kind of mixing service into the client to facilitate more anonymous transactions. You could possibly trade your less anonymous coins into a more anonymous system like Bitcoin, and then even use a mixing service there whenever you need to purchase an AR-15 off Silk Doge Road.
There are many possibilities for implementation in limiting wallet addresses. They could be as simple as signing up for an email site and an automated phone call to your number from the site. Or it could be as restricted as linking your wallet to a Coinbase account. There are many dangers in having authority figures determine who can and can't spend or earn money, so I'm not advocating a replacement to Bitcoin, only possible, new ideas for coin implementations better suited to solve problems PoS can't.
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