I suggest everyone use busy.org to access the Steem blogs, not Steemit.com, because for example just one spiteful dolphin-whale (e.g. @chryspano) downvoting my blog ^{_{(the blog of mine Dan is responding to)}} or comment can censor it entirely from Steemit.com, but not from busy.org. Note that using busy.org won't prevent one or two spiteful whales from removing my rewards received from 100s of voters, as a few whales have done on some of my controversial blogs.

Daniel congratulations on your hard work and accomplishments. Somehow I still believe you're sincere about the ideological pursuit in spite of the premeditated whale money grabs for both EOS and Steem. Psychologically I think you justify your money grabs and potentially securities law violations with your ideological quest. Both EOS and STEEM have been sold by the insiders (aka affiliates) to USA persons thus likely fall under SEC jurisdiction (STEEM being an obfuscated ICO with a premediated sneakyfastmine), regardless of what your attorneys have advised. SEC head Clayton warned earlier this month that all token sales are securities. Unfortunately I do not think that ideological rationalization of breaking the law is going to work out well for you. I am just stating what I believe to be the facts. For example, I commented on BCT about you and I had a similar frustration with divorce and perhaps somewhat similar motivations for entering this technology area.

@dan wrote:

What we know is that Fiat Whales control the majority of the hash power and that they hold the network ransom for fees.

Note I also criticized proof-of-work in my blog:

@anonymint wrote:

^{Well Satoshi’s proof-of-work has an analogous design weakness in that as significant revenue for miners comes from transactions fees as the protocol block reward declines and transaction volume increases, the incentive for the consensus to converge is lost and requires a colluding oligarchy, which of course will also extract maximum rents in either blatant ways such as constrained block size causing higher and higher fees, or obfuscated trickery for extracting rents.}

I also wrote:

^{Byzantine Generals Problem has no perfect solution. Byzantine agreement is an approximate solution with the flaws of a liveness threshold and a safety margin and lacking permissionless and trustless properties. Proof-of-work is another approximate solution which does not have liveness threshold, is permissionless and trustless up to the lower safety margin of 50% attack. However, proof-of-work has another economic flaw which I mentioned in my blog.}

@dan wrote:

The claim is that overlording "whales" can extract higher and higher rents. This claim cannot exist in a vacuum, but must be compared to alternatives of which Proof of Work is presented.

Afaics, the salient difference is that the nothing-at-stake means DPoS can be attacked, gamed, and controlled at no market competitive cost, thus any relatively small-capitalized group of scammers who are lying about material facts can leverage up and create a $2 billion money grab (even obfuscating the ways the insiders are accomplishing an obfuscated winner-take-all grab of the ICO as I documented in my blog) from a speculative bubble. Note I see ongoing posts at BCT about the suspicious activity that might possibly be indicative of the insiders are obfuscating the buying of the EOS ICO from themselves.

Whereas, proof-of-work requires a massive amount of capital to scam with because as you stated, it is competitive and open to all comers possessing hashpower. Do you really think TPTB are going to let you eat from their hand without corrupting you or destroying you in the end game with for example global securities regulation law. The Zionists (note I didn't write Jews) who presumably control the only 14nm ASIC fabs are likely the clients behind the curtain of the largest Chinese miners. They also clearly executed 9/11 (just study the damn facts as an engineer), so that will give you some indication that they have supranational power. So you're correct that PoS does enable a proliferation of deceptive hype and speculative bubbles that will end as toast (or controlled by the same TPTB who control proof-of-work) with the insiders walking away with the loot after they've paid off TPTB. What a wonderful innovation you have there.

I wrote:

^{My issue is that you and Dan are misrepresenting the facts.}

^{Attackers can’t come back over and over again like they can on PoW and other chains.}

^{Au contraire, the antithesis is more true. Because of the nothing-at-stake problem, proof-of-stake can be attacked over and over again at no cost. Y’all presume not, because y’all implicitly assume an oligarchy in control of voting (whether you realize it or not if you’re not knowledgeable about the political-economics science of voting). I described in my blog one of the possible attacks against DPoS employing shorting by whales. And TaPoS does not eliminate such attacks. Whereas, it requires an expenditure of electricity to attack proof-of-work}

And you're not addressing the fact that if TPTB rubber hose or otherwise influence or take out the small number of whales which possess 50+% of the stake (which is true due to the power-law distribution of wealth regardless if there was no scamming by insiders), then there is no way to get an objective consensus ever again. I will get into this more below, because you still do not understand Byzantine math.

@dan wrote:

Mining profitably means economies of scale and ultimately alternative revenue streams derived from the political power the miners possess. Many governments in the world can trivially make mining unprofitable for all free market actors.

But no single government nor grouping of governments can shut down mining completely. You continue to fail to understand/acknowledge that the liveness threshold issue does not apply to proof-of-work.

What we can conclude from this is that mining is a dead-end, winner takes all, system.

I also explained in my my blog (and links in it) that DPoS is also a dead-end, winner takes all, system. True that numerous DPoS chains can be created, all of them each a winner-take-all dead-end. I fail to see any claimed improvement that DPoS provides w.r.t. to overlords (DPoS does provide a performance benefit).

Actually it is very depressing that current blockchain technologies are headed for oligarchies. Why do you think I continue to work on researching/developing fundamental technological innovation and not rushing to grab $2 billion with a technology which is clearly a dead-end.

I would not feel comfortable misrepresenting material facts and taking $2 billion in investment (intentionally obfuscated as "useless token" sales and intentionally apparently not doing any KYC!!) in such a convoluted global securities law and anti-money laundering law regulation environment.

@dan wrote:

This means that stake holders can vote out malicious actors even if 51% are malicious, so long as their exists at least 1 honest producers willing to accurately tally an election on a temporarily minority fork.

Daniel, that is mathematically incorrect. You have enough money now. Go hire a PhD to explain my blog to you properly. I'm not going to repeat myself.

Apparently you're not understanding the conceptualization of the marbles in jars example and why nothing can be objectively concluded when the liveness threshold is exceeded. You're not conceptualizing it holistically. Given I have already tried to explain it in my blog to a layman, I think rather than trying to explain it again and again, it is better for your team to hire someone to explain it to you. Or have that PhD come here and refute me.

Once an election occurs on the 1/3 network it will gain speed to 3/3 and eventually overtake the "bad guys".

This is still the underlying "rule of DPOS" on STEEM and BitShares and everything else is simply establishing a high probability of irreversibility.

It doesn't matter how many times you repeat this incorrect understanding, it will never be correct.

@dan wrote:

Bitcoin never reaches finality and without timely finality inter-blockchain communication is not practical.

Your argument distills to that proof-of-work has slow confirmations. Because as you presumably know, DPoS is also never final (i.e. has probabilistic finality), because of the nothing-at-stake problem. DPoS employs TaPoS (which you invented) to create probabilistic finality w.r.t. to the nothing-at-stake issue.

So please be honest and conclude that both PoW and PoS reach probabilistic and social consensus (i.e. Vitalik's "weak subjectivity" concept) on finality. I agree DPoS has much faster confirmations if the oligarchy in control doesn't leverage the nothing-at-stake vulnerability. Since your 0.5 second claim relies on 0-confirmations then it is faster than Bitcoin's (perhaps 15 seconds) 0-confirmations but it is not accurate to compare it to 1 hour. You're misrepresenting the facts again. As for transaction volume scalability on chain, I concur that DPoS has a significant advantage compared to Bitcoin.

If we are going to rely on 5 mining pools, then we might as well let them sign off on things in seconds rather than waiting an hour or more. The resulting security will be the same, but the latency will be dramatically reduced.

Incorrect. The security model is not equivalent. I explained it in my blog and retouched on reasons in this comment.

Also I debunked this 5 mining pools hype/misrepresentation of the technological facts in my debate at BCT with @chryspano.