[Cryptography] Krugman blockchain currency skepticism

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 10/08/2018 03:33, Ray Dillinger wrote:
> Honestly, the boot on the door, in some manifestation or other,  is
> inevitable.  Any payment system requires mutual consent between payer
> and payee.  And therefore any entity capable of creating a strong
> motivation to refuse consent, for either side, can kill the system.  If
> accepting payments via Bitcoin becomes illegal, and enforcement actually
> starts charging the owners of any server seen running a node with a
> crime and levying fines, then overnight the value of Bitcoin crashes and
> it ceases to be useful for making payments.  There is no way to
> simultaneously protect all nodes and keep the system publicly available.

We don't have to protect *all* nodes.  That is the point of a 
decentralized system - that the government can take some nodes, and it 
does not make much difference.

Trouble with bitcoin is that taking a small number of expensive and 
vulnerable mining nodes would work.

Hence I argue for proof of stake with stake held by clients of 
blockchain peers, and power exercised by peers in proportion to the 
stake of a peer's clients, rather than proof of work with power 
exercised by gigantic and expensive number crunching systems.  If 
Government takes a big peer, its clients move elsewhere, it ceases to be 
a big peer,and some other peers in some other jurisdictions take over 
its role.