phillipsjk

I think part of the goal of bitcoin was to be deliberately confusing in that way. If the govenrment wants to impose strong Money-Service-Business regulation on Bitcoin use, claim it is a commodity. If the government wants to claim VAT, claim it is a currency. Of course, now in the US different branches of the government have started choosing those same contradictory interpretations when it suites their purposes. (IRS: commodity; Fincen: Currency)

I found this a little creepy. The block-chain is public. Best practice is to not re-use addresses at all, much less strongly tie such addresses to kown indivituals. This appears to be a side-effect of politicizing the coin distribution process. You can't jsut give "grants" to "worthy causes" without some kind of accountability. Of course, this extends to voting on worthy causes as well. One address does not necessarily correspond with one person.

I am a strong skeptic of PoS. The fundamental problem is that it is not secure. Unless delegated proof-of-stake is used, the stakers have to leave their private keys on network-connected machines that are unlikely to be secure in the long-term.* The paper linked in the OP claims that risk-free delegation will lead to the centralization of staking; much like the separation of hash-power from hosting a full node led to PoW centralization. That paper claims that: However, later in the paper (section 5), they admit: I feel that the 50% paticipation rate (that is, 50% of coins are activ