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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

There are quite a few projects vying for owning the next generation of block chain. Generally known as ffm tech (fast,free,and minerless). They depend on some variation of PoS, hierarcal blockchains, and Byzantine consensus algos. Basically there's lots of serious work going into making blockchain ledgers scalable to permit money-like usage.

Some examples are Raiblocks and Ethereum's Plasma protocol.

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Did anyone solve the "no stake" problem in "proof of stake"?

The solution in Casper: if you approve more than one block at the same height, someone can submit both your approvals to the winning chain, which destroys your stake on that chain. The submitter gets a reward. There's a long delay to withdraw your stake so plenty of time for someone to submit.

What if the alternate chain is kept secret until it is sure to be victorious?

In a situation where this type of conspiracy takes place it makes economic sense to join them.

It's fine for your favored chain to win. And maybe you can get a group of validators to cooperate and make that happen. But they better have bet on only that chain, or they will lose their stake.

If the validators are conspiring on a secret chain, and they're betting only on the secret blocks, the public blocks won't be finalized.

You generally get around the "nothing at stake" problem by requiring validators (consensus-forming nodes) to submit a deposit that is subject to deletion upon proof of bad behavior. For example, if I get two conflicting messages signed by you in Ethereum's Casper network, I can present that data as proof to the Casper smart contract where you lose your deposit.

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