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A comment on Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back. Parent comment

Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by theamk on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:20AM (#18586504)
But staking is naturally limited by the amount of money one has -- so it would be a great advantage for big corps with PR budgets and a disadvantage for individuals. Do we really want that?

Hypothetical example:

- The Citizen (on blockchain): EvilCorp is dumping toxic waste on my property! They are making millions of dollars from my ruin! I stake all of my available money -- $20,000 -- on this statement.

- EvilCorp (on blockchain): No we are not. We stake 1% of our discretionary PR budget -- $200,000 -- on this statement.

- PR firm (on blockchain): We stake $200,000 to support EvilCorp. They are our biggest customer, and we can handle the (unlikely) money loss if this means good relationship.

- Other citizens of the town: yeah, that sludge looks really nasty.. but EvilCorp has a ton of money. That guy has almost nothing, I do not think he is going to win. If we support him, we will likely lose our stake. So it makes financial sense to side with EvilCorp.

- Blockchain decides EvilCorp is correct. The Citizen now has backyard full of toxic sludge and broke.

- EvilCorp and PR firm both get even more money.

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Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by pas on Wednesday December 05, 2018 @06:00AM (#18607237)
Good example, and that's why the last few years in block-graph land comprised of going from "just stake it man" to token-curated-registries-of-oracles and other kinds of governance problems modeled and explored. Game theory, handling adversarial edge cases, the good old sharding and securing problem (irrevocable staking to secure "side chains" and whatever Ethereum/Vitalik is working on, but maybe called Casper: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1029900695925706753.html )
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Re:Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don'... by theamk on Thursday December 06, 2018 @09:00AM (#18618062)
I have not read this very carefully, but these conversations seem to be worried about classical cryptocurrency attacks -- we have rational agents who try to maximize their money. A threat of someone loosing all of their money will prevent one from doing something.

However, in my example, this is not the case at all. A PR firm or EvilCorp does not care about success of cryptocurrency, they just want to make sure that "The Citizen" will fail. For example, your link talks about "penalizing both sides hard" like it is unavoidable -- but this is exactly what EvilCorp would want.

I don't think I have seen analysis of the prediction markets which assumes actors who are willing to lose money to get the desired results.

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