Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Long-term mining incentives

From: Tier Nolan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2015 11:14:06 +0100

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 10:49 AM, Thomas Voegtlin <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>
> The reason I am asking that is, there seems to be no consensus among
> core developers on how Bitcoin can work without miner subsidy. How it
> *will* work is another question.
>

The position seems to be that it will continue to work for the time being,
so there is still time for more research.

Proof of stake has problems with handling long term reversals.  The main
proposal is to slightly weaken the security requirements.

With POW, a new node only needs to know the genesis block (and network
rules) to fully determine which of two chains is the strongest.

Penalties for abusing POS inherently create a time horizon.  A suggested
POS security model would assume that a full node is a node that resyncs
with the network regularly (every N blocks).    N would be depend on the
network rules of the coin.

The alternative is that 51% of the holders of coins at the genesis block
can rewrite the entire chain.  The genesis block might not be the first
block, a POS coin might still use POW for minting.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/25/proof-stake-learned-love-weak-subjectivity/