Imagine a blockchain operated by a consortium of five companies. There are also second-grade members in the pool.
For the sake of example, imagine this is a market that is being used to trade fishing rights for a region off Iceland.
Each of the five has a holding of Consortium Coin on this chain. This give them voting power in any decisions that have to be made of the chain. None of the second-grade members have any Consortium Coin.
The second-grade members trade in Fish Coin and Boat Coin.
Each of the five operates an oracle feeding to the consortium. It provides fisheries stocking data, and records of dock inspections of member boats. Each piece of incoming oracle data is signed to indicate that it is backed by the Consortium Coin holdings of the operator (proof-of-stake).
A simple election/raft algorithm decides that Oracle advice is true once it passes a threshold of so-much Consortium Coin.
There are contracts signed in western countries where the five firms are listed. These contracts say - essentially - that they will operate in good faith on the chain. (If they did not, they could be sued in the usual way).
There is a direct line out of this chain into the regulator, who runs analysis algorithms against the reported behaviour, and compares that to their independent mechanisms.
Bribery could still exist off-chain. But that is not new, and we do alright at protecting against that through current systems of governance. In this scenario, the thing your proof of stake is protecting against is a non-consortium blockchain member setting up a rogue oracle.
Why is this valuable? If ppl get the model right, you can run sophisticated markets like this without any civil servants being involved. It may turn out to be policy-wonk heaven. You can cut the size of the civil service, and yet have much more nuanced regulation, and better game-theory for operating markets.
Next: a social network going where people indicate trust of one another, and act as semi-guarantors for people they have vouched for.
Next: operate sections of the legal and judicial system over the chain.
Human actions captured on a cheap, secure, distributed ledger.
(I'm explaining the dream here. If I knew what I was talking about, I would have done it.)
If the blockchain community gets the contract/language issues sorted out, a small dev team could knock out a first-stage system like the fisheries system in three months and in two layers of technology (contracts, oracles). It would be trivial to operate and resilient to server failure (less-so the oracles). Ten years later, it would still be just the same two layers of code.
In this world, contracts make custom APIs obsolete. There is a new career path for a developer who lives and breathes async contract code.
The way of implementing such a system now is db-centric. Business problems tend to be event-driven, but databases are not. So we need many more layers of technology: ERD, stored procedures, 'backend', partner API, hosting complexity, business continuity complexity, further layers to assist support and deployment and API onboarding.
The database company takes on a life of its own, it is expensive to fund and delivers a bad customer experience.
So the thing that blockchain adds: you will able to reliably build significant systems with two-person teams in domains where we currently struggle to do adequate work with firms of twenty or forty people. We will be able to engage with more complex domains than we can at the moment, and there will be network effects from this.
So it sounds like what you really want is a better centralized database that has those properties, rather than a slow, energy-inefficient ledger providing features you don't need like reward tokens, mining, and decentralization.
You don't have mining in proof-of-stake. (Mining is for proof-of-work.)
My focus is multiple-host, centralised async systems. I think this is the future, and that databases will be marginalised. Comment here elsewhere gives more details.
I may turn out to be wrong. In that case, we will end up in the kind of blockchain world described in my earlier comments. I suspect it will hinge on whether it is possible to create a good-enough high-level language.
For the sake of example, imagine this is a market that is being used to trade fishing rights for a region off Iceland.
Each of the five has a holding of Consortium Coin on this chain. This give them voting power in any decisions that have to be made of the chain. None of the second-grade members have any Consortium Coin.
The second-grade members trade in Fish Coin and Boat Coin.
Each of the five operates an oracle feeding to the consortium. It provides fisheries stocking data, and records of dock inspections of member boats. Each piece of incoming oracle data is signed to indicate that it is backed by the Consortium Coin holdings of the operator (proof-of-stake).
A simple election/raft algorithm decides that Oracle advice is true once it passes a threshold of so-much Consortium Coin.
There are contracts signed in western countries where the five firms are listed. These contracts say - essentially - that they will operate in good faith on the chain. (If they did not, they could be sued in the usual way).
There is a direct line out of this chain into the regulator, who runs analysis algorithms against the reported behaviour, and compares that to their independent mechanisms.
Bribery could still exist off-chain. But that is not new, and we do alright at protecting against that through current systems of governance. In this scenario, the thing your proof of stake is protecting against is a non-consortium blockchain member setting up a rogue oracle.
Why is this valuable? If ppl get the model right, you can run sophisticated markets like this without any civil servants being involved. It may turn out to be policy-wonk heaven. You can cut the size of the civil service, and yet have much more nuanced regulation, and better game-theory for operating markets.
Next: a social network going where people indicate trust of one another, and act as semi-guarantors for people they have vouched for.
Next: operate sections of the legal and judicial system over the chain.
Human actions captured on a cheap, secure, distributed ledger.