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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

POS has a big problem when a coin starts as proof-of-stake. I agree with this. Because there's no fair way to do distribution. Many proof-of-stake coins happen to start out with the majority of supply owned by the core devs or VCs. It ends up becoming a cartel, which is not decentralized.

I think Ethereum's approach is interesting, because after 6 years of Proof-of-Work and several up and down markets, the distribution is widespread at this point. For example, even the co-founder Vitalik, only has about 300K of 115M circulating supply. So now I feel like they can migrate to proof-of-stake and it will not lead to excessive centralization.

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Which is why I find it inevitable that any future cryptocurrency project will either have to start with Proof-of-Work during an initial minting phase then switch to Proof-of-Stake, OR use an existing blockchain to bootstrap itself, either as a fork or through airdropping. To these effects, any alternative consensus mechanism that is based on tying up a resource that's not the coin itself could be considered akin to Proof-of-Work (Such as Chia and its proof-of-capacity).

Anything resembling an ICO is a non-starter if it were to survive, especially with a shifting regulatory landscape. I was among the opponents to Ethereum's initial distribution (premine) but to wit, ETH has no supply cap so Vitalik's slice has shrunk over the years.

I agree.. I had an idea for a Bitcoin “unfork”.

You essentially airdrop a proof of stake coin to every existing BTC, BCH, bsv, etc address, in a ratio of the current market prices.

Call it Bitcoin one, or BONE. Different from onecoin.

I would argue that auctions (ICOs) are fairer than mining. Devs can give themselves coins directly or they can have a dev tax (e.g. Zcash) or they can fail; I don't think it makes sense to hold crypto devs to a higher standard than, say, startups.

No, an ICO + POS is not fair at all. It might make sense for a crypto startup but not for a layer 1 blockchain currency. The base layer has to be plausibly neutral, or it defeats the purpose and you might as well open a Robinhood account.

Censorship resistance, plausible neutrality, decentralization, antifragility, uptime, and security are features of layer 1 blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

If a dev team starts off with 80% of supply they aren't going to ever achieve any of the above.

> If a dev team starts off with 80% of supply they aren't going to ever achieve any of the above.

I'm not sure how you got from A to B. What stops an ICO from auctioning off almost all of the supply?

> Censorship resistance, plausible neutrality, decentralization, antifragility, uptime, and security are features of layer 1 blockchain systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I completely agree, all the the above must come before throughput in an L1 blockchain. So many of the so called ETH killers sacrifice on some or all of the items you listed. Do you think anything else ticks all the boxes and can stand alongside BTC and ETH as a legitimate L1?

They're both unique because they're both the first of their kind. And they were doubted for years before they were shown to have value and staying power. The copycats have a problem especially when they hype themselves to $40B market caps before they have even grown a sustainable ecosystem or fair distribution.

The file storage chains like Filecoin, Sia, Chia, etc. may tick this box, but they aren't competing with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Any other unique proof of work algos that can't be easily hashed by ASICs or GPUs might qualify but I don't know. I don't see any others with a real grassroots ecosystem of activity.

I wonder about an ICO that gets burned...

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