RE: In Defense of Consortium Blockchains
Wow! Glad to meet you. I'm one of those people who think PoW+PoS as the best model and I have a history of not shutting up about Dash. Taking a hint of Delayed PoW of Komodo, I've thought of having PoW as a Service. If you need to attack Komodo which use the Equihash mining algorithm, you need to break Bitcoin's SHA-256 hashpower too which makes KMD much more secure than BTC.
I know that PoW is inefficient.But are we and should we really be done with PoW? Digital didn't make analog go away. It gave a new meaning to analog tech. Robots never destroyed any jobs. We just had to rethink and re-allocate human labor. It's time we look at PoW with a different eye.
The defining feature of PoW is that it is a brute force system. Software or computer networks can be meddled with. In 2010 92 billion Bitcoins were brought to existence because of a software bug. It was fixed of course. I'm not a programmer. So correct me if I'm wrong. DPoS is still vulnerable to a Ethereum like software hacks. There is no brute force layer an attacker has to go through. This concerns me a bit. Again; not a programmer. Correct me if I'm wrong.
To hack komodo, one needs to brute force Bitcoin first. What if other blockchain projects adopted a similar system? The networks will obviously be extra secure. This is especially important to newer kids on the blog.
This leads me to propose PoW as Service model. It won't really be a given service; but more of an adopted one. When more and more projects start depending on a specific PoW coin for an extra layer of security, then that PoW blockchain itself will have more value just as Ethereum increase in value when more and more ICOs stat using ETH. This can turn into a positive feedback loop. We could end up with one popular PoW coin per mining algorithm.
IMHO the single best candidate for the job is Dash. I'm not a professional cryptographer. I know that SHA-256 is part of the SHA-2 cryptographic hash function initially designed by the NSA which is a branch of world's greatest agressor and privacy invader that is called "the land of the free". It does worry me at times. I know X11 is relatively very efficient and it use 11 hashes. SHA-1 has already been broken. SHA-256 won't be that easy. But breaking 11 should be much harder even if they aren't as good as SHA-256 on their own. It is also worth mentioning the next iterations of this algorithm which are X13, X14, X15, and X17.
Now what if various blockchain projects start implementing dPOW (delayed proof of work) for added security. Personally I see a far better future for Dash compared to Bitcoin. The Hashrate has been growing crazy fast for dash.. The overall community has great harmony and it's a project with excellent fundamentals even though X11 isn't much time tested. Maybe that'd work in favor and give the algorithm some extra years before it's broken. I don't have a crystal ball (a major drawback of my life). I can only take informed actions.
And I think using existing PoW mining as an extra layer of security leading to better valuation for PoW coins would be an excellent thing for the blockchain community. Don't just dump the old; Recycle them!
Hopefully I added something valuable to the discussion :-)
Happy steeming!
@vimukthi
I think POW guarantees security based on economic assumptions. I think those economic assumptions as you say, only protect against the obvious brute force attack. I think true security requires looking at things statistically and no I do not think POW is more secure than hybrid POW+POS, not is it more efficient for stakeholders. What I mean is POS provides for more evovability in governance than POW.
I could go in on this topic but I would rather let Dan communicate on the technical side of things because he is one of the main innovators in POS. My opinion is that while I like DPOS, I have my own model of how things can or should be, based on what some people might think of as "sci fi" if I tried to describe it today. All I can say is what looks like sci fi if described right now will not look like sci fi in 5 years, and all the topics I discuss are in development, even if we do not see the fruits for up to 5 years.
The botnets, the agent based ai, the post I wrote on autonomous negotiators, these will be in the crypto-space probably in the next year or two. AI is coming and will merge with blockchain and this in my opinion is unavoidable because they have so much synergy and will make trillions in profit.
I'm very interested to know about your "sci fi" model.
AI is certainly begging to be connected with the blockchain. But the development must be kept open source. There could be private implementations but closed source AI could be worse than a FEDcoin.