Komodo’s dPoW
I have a conflict-of-internet on dPoW because I helped @jl777 brainstorm the idea for it but I wasn’t involved in working out the details nor the implementation. I regretfully made some public comments around the time of the ICO launch which might have limited the size of the participation in the ICO and that may have temporarily strained my relationship with @jl777. So I don’t want to repeat that by writing anything about that could cause any damage to it. I have no investment in Komodo though. Actually I personally am only invested in Steem and Bitcoin at the moment so my lack of investment in Komodo shouldn’t be construed to have any meaning. I will just say that dPoW fixes the long-range nothing-at-stake problem of proof-of-stake because it (last time I checked) relies on the Bitcoin blockchain for objectivity (which could become very expensive in the future and I have not analysed what other game theory issues might be introduced by checkpointing in an external chain). That resistance to nothing-at-stake is important. It enables the proof-of-stake to run at low-energy and very fast between checkpoints in the proof-of-work chain. It’s not the way that the project I am contributing to will attempt to fix nothing-at-stake though.
Skycoin’s Obelisk
I will take another look at Skycoin. I had very crudely analyzed their whitepaper some years ago and it basically appeared to use a web-of-trust similar to Stellar SCP which I analyzed in Part 3 of this blog series, so probably the same flaws of Stellar SCP apply. If I have time, I will add some more meticulous analysis to this blog for Obelisk.
EDIT (7 hours later): I have studied Skycoin carefully and I have some positive impressions. I will be adding my analysis to this blog shortly. Skycoin has the most unique innovation I have seen yet. Not the original whitepaper (which was junk) but the recent one by Houwu Chen which is pure gold. The Asians are ready to make their mark on the world!
RE: Scaling, Decentralization, Security of Distributed Ledgers (part 4)