I agree with the gyst of your concern also Nagalim.
The concern echoed in these forums lately, is for rapid transactions, traditional Proof of Stake won’t work for Ethereum. They have no choice but to come up with an alternate method.
The same problem exists with Bitshares too.
Network latency and attack vectors become increasingly more difficult to handle when you don’t have enough people on the network. This is why Sunny King mirrored Bitcoin’s 10-minute block times. It’s a good idea.
Rapid transactions are meant to happen off-chain, via side-chains or centralized chains.
What we have now, is Bitshares, Steem, ETH all trying to have the benefits of PoS, but adding in all these fancy ways of getting around the “centralization” issue. But it is centralized.
Bitshares claims that 100 witnesses is not centralized. If I can count a finite number, it’s still somewhat centralized.
Casper is talking about something similar. They want certain nodes to bet a security deposit, which means only a limited number of nodes in actual probability will be producing blocks and reaching consensus on the chain. Everyone else just listens to that consensus. This is somewhat centralized too.
We have cake. If you want icing, it should come separate from the cake, but still be useful with cake.
These guys want cake that when you bake it, the icing is already on the top of the cake. Conventional ovens can’t do that, so now they’re going to build new ovens to accomplish it.
There is no need to do all of that… Both of these technologies could have used Peercoin as a backbone currency with 10-minute blockspacing, and everything that occurred inbetween each 10 minute period could have been handled by their own systems.
I could go on and on… but eventually I’d have to produce an essay on the subject or my own deconstructive review which would be 30 pages long.
So what is it we’re talking about?
Seemingly this is what people are TRYING to talk about:
Casper and DPOS are superior to Peercoin in every aspect.
The answer is no, they aren’t. With the changes, they bring their own interesting problems yet to be seen.
We’re not competing in the same space.
To answer you specifically:
Let’s ponder this, and look at things a lot deeper if this is your genuine concern. I find it amazing that this hasn’t been a central concern that has plagued our network much over the last 4 years.
There’s probably multiple ways of addressing this issue. One of them has been checkpointing. People keep posting on these forums they want checkpointing removed. I’ve always wonder if these are sock puppets from other cryptocurrencies begging us to do it, so they can use their knowledge to try and exploit our network if checkpointing was removed prematurely.
Sunny King has suggested it might be time to remove Checkpointing as the default. It’s these types of questions we’ll need to have him make full answer towards.
Block time spacing, nodes on the network, coinage, which forks exchanges are on, are all variables, plus I’m sure there is even more. You can’t just fork the network willingly without Proof of stake with the right hash.
Forking the network against consensus “by accident”, as you put it, invalidating transactions and creating double spends, because half the world is not connected at the same time… there is a reorg procedure that can cause extra-delays during forks in Bitcoin as well. So it depends on what your moving.
If you send me a million dollars, I’m going to wait for more than 6 confirms.
If you send me 20 dollars, one confirm is good enough for me.
To reiterate this point. I spoke at length to someone who owns a Robocoin ATM. When Robocoin wanted licensing and to control everything, they wrote their own custom software on the machine. It’s actually quite trivial and possible to do…
When they first opened, 1 block confirm was enough. When they started moving serious cash, they upped it to 3 confirms. Now their machine responds “dynamically” to block generation. Where it comes from, what amounts are moving, by whom, what known miners are mining it, this, that, all kinds of stuff. Their bitcoin atm adjusts itself based on probabilities and will want more or less confirms dependent on what the health indicators of Bitcoin are. There’s a risk running that ATM for multiple reasons, and they’ve factored all of that into their code. One way or another the ATM continues to generate them profit, and they’ve built both a business model, as well as a technical flowchart to have it make sense.
One of the problems here, is that society in general, is a “headline news” based society. Some one throws up a scare in a headline, and everyone starts ducking for cover. Asking genuine questions is fine. But the emotion and energy behind such a disection of the Peercoin protocol is without warrant, because none of us have been studying the health of our network more than Sunny King himself.
He constantly comes out to answer questions, attend interviews, talk to the community, and we seem more interested in asking him things like “Do you own Peercoin?” or “Are you Satoshi” or “What other coins are you interested in?” – Really? While this is all fun. Everytime he leaves these interviews we slap ourselves in the forehead going “oh! wait! I should have asked him about this or that regarding attack possiblities, etc etc.”.
If we continue to waste his time during these types of interviews, then we only have ourselves to blame.
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