I’ll preface by saying I think Proof of Waste schemes should be illegal. Proof of Stake schemes eventually over time become de-decentralized because as with PoW there is incentive to having a large stake (as demonstrated by the large private mining pools.) Eventually what you have is a clique of large powerful players in control of the financial system. You’ve basically reinvented banks but you made them extremely inefficient along the way. I don’t see any way how decentralization schemes eliminate the potential for organization, as centralizing inside a decentralized system is beneficial and highly efficient vs. remaining disorganized/decentralized.
Decentralization seems fundamentally at odds with natural order and thus maintaining its decentralization costs energy. Compare that to USD which backpacks on the energy spent maintaining a nation, the cost of USD is essentially amortized by the simple existence of the US.
Following this line, wouldn't corporations form around the large stakes? So essentially banks, but with transparent holdings?
I'm not well versed enough in financial systems to game out the implications of this, but as someone who believes in the efficiency of free markets, it seems like a good thing to have more transparent banks.
I'm a strong supporter of free markets* -- meaning, free markets are efficient and good, but efficiency isn't the only consideration for society so reasonable regulation is just and necessary. I'm not convinced you get any additional transparency from a blockchain that the government doesn't already get into any organization it wants to. Public ledgers also have remarkably poor privacy, which is necessary for some transactions and/or individuals.
That is an interesting point. The purpose of government access to that information in this case is to protect the public from shady practices, right?
Potentially the benefit is the distribution of the information. As in it becomes standard for these new banks to make public which addresses/transactions they are associated with. The market will probably do a much better job at detecting especially harmful practices. Especially given that the asymmetry of information in fraud is often the only thing that makes it work.
The privacy question is an interesting one. It seems like it pretty quickly reduces to some fundamental problems in crypto-system design. How can we design a system that is totally open on one end and totally anonymous on the other? And furthermore how do we guarantee that the banks won't set up addresses on the anonymous side to do shady things with?
Not really sure how to align the incentives here. Potentially a combo of escrow and batching transactions. It would be interesting to hear ideas from people who work in this space.
Decentralization seems fundamentally at odds with natural order and thus maintaining its decentralization costs energy. Compare that to USD which backpacks on the energy spent maintaining a nation, the cost of USD is essentially amortized by the simple existence of the US.