Suppose there is a disagreement amongst the users of a pow chain. Any combination of the pow users, development team, or miners disagreeing with each other.
A fork occurs though without large miners or a strong mining pool backing it. A malicious miner or pool is then able to at will take over or disrupt the forked chain.
Is this a good thing? Is there a way around it?
Now suppose in pos a disagreement occurs creating a fork. A disgruntled stakeholder tries to disrupt the fork. Should the pos fork create another fork and ban the disruptive stakeholder assets in the new fork?
What do you mean by disrupting the fork?
Stakeholders will fork away from any chain that does not obey the rules they vote for. (just like PoW)
I would not say the stakeholders would fork away from the disruptive stakeholder. I’d rather say the disruptive stakehodler forks himself to a different chain (assuming he didn’t find a vulnerability).
A malicious stakeholder that owns enough coin (e.g., more than 51%) that they are able to successfully execute double spend attacks. Now, this might not be peercoin, though could apply to other pos coins with poor distributions.
I was thinking only in the case of a stakeholder having large enough stake.
A fork due to a vulnerability would fork away from the vulnerability and the disruptive attacker.
The idea of PoS is that such a large stakeholder has more to lose by compromising trust in the chain due to attacking peers than he has to gain by doing so.
Yes, right. Though what if in the case of a disagreement results in a fork. There are now at least two parallel forks running. The large stakeholder prefers fork like and there is another camp that prefers fork don’t like.
Maybe there is a case that the large stakeholder doesn’t have much to lose by attacking the fork don’t like, because fork like value is still accepted by the ecosystem.
The large stakeholder is in a position to threaten everyone mandating that no forks can occur. If a fork were to occur the large stakeholder has promised to perform a double spend attack on the forks. Now, somehow the stakes of the large stakeholder must be suppressed or restricted in the don’t like fork.
I’m not sure the same can be done with a pow threat model in the case of a fork. A disagreeing powerful enough miner or mining pool can always attack any pow fork it disagrees with.
One problem is that it might be hard to identify the coins of a large stakeholder, especially if they are split into many smaller stakes.
Big shareholders do not destroy their hard company, and since they have paid a high price for the position of big shareholders, they must want to continue in the right direction. It is absolutely impossible to destroy themselves
Even if he did so, prices will fall, his wealth will shrink, this time he has two way to go, the first time in a very low price to buy, but this money reputation has been damaged, to take up the cost will be very high, it is very difficult to trust people him, so he wouldn’t do that, second, he did not want to have this coin, has been the currency prices drop down, his status of major shareholders will be replaced by others, so he will not do so.