Show me the proof of all this collusion of concentrated wealth if you claim that those critiques are valid. I showed you an article that simply removed both the stake of pumpkin and freedom and absolutely nothing had changed, and I've still to hear of any mining pools colluding to undermine the network, and as for the people who research distributed systems for years, exactly who and where and what are they researching that you seemingly try to inject as if it was even referenced let alone discussed? O yeah, because I called certain unfounded critiques as being formed of horse excrement that means there's no point to discussing fixing an imagined problem stemmed from those critiques based entirely on horse shit.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
http://vukolic.com/iNetSec_2015.pdf For example talks about the issues of mining pools leading to centralization. Which got it mainly from here: https://www.infoq.com/articles/is-bitcoin-a-decentralized-currency/ which describe most mining pools as a threat and hope that more decentralized mining pools surge (Where you can apply the mining pool to big stakeholder issue 1:1 almost).
I can't find the paper atm which was talking about the monopoly problem.
http://www.coinfox.info/news/reviews/6417-proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-merits-and-disadvantages
Does summarize it pretty well though.
If there is a single stakeholder which MAY define all witnesses and then almost do whatever he wants with the chain. Then this is a major risk for the security of the chain. And thus it is not very well decentralized. I don't know what it so difficult to understand with this.
Imagine, someone from another Blockchain doing this to bring down Steem to value his own Blockchain or Steem fork. At the moment this would be even "relatively cheap".
Following that logic, Facebook is not centralized either. There is one shareholder who has mayor stake in the company and which pretty much acts in "the best interest" of the company because of that. So, why do we need cryptocurrencies. Can't we just trust Paypal and Facebook? They are acting in the best interest of their companies too. They're kind decentralized as well. Got a lot of people from all over the world holding their stocks. Let's let Paypal put their money on the blockchain and let them handle the permissioned ledger and it's going to be alright.
The reason I'm in blockchain is exactly to not have this situation. On Steem there was recently a situation where some Witnesses thought about forking the chain, and Steemit Inc said they could elect just the 20 witnesses themselves in that moment.
There is the possibility of that happening, and they said they would do that. Is that decentralization or does it just kinda seem like it.
And of course, as long as they got 30 votes to cast, they could just do that, with 10 votes, especially on the short term, that is much more difficult.
I'm not saying that huge stake holders shouldn't be able to have a big influence. And I'm not denying that this makes sense in the context of game theory. Nonetheless, on Steem this influence is essentially to big, which is a big risk for the chain. So reducing this to 10 votes, would improve the situation while still maintaining the central elements of PoS. (And no, I don't want 1 vote, I want 10).