[decentralised]

PoW is not often used in consortium networks because there is no need for the excess power usage when the blockchain network is not in the public domain and participation is limited by some form of authority or centralised management structure.

I'm not sure what you mean with sybil resistance in this context though. Do you mean to say that PoA reduces the "51% attack" vector?

[keorn]

The way people try to use PoW for consortium networks does not cause excess power usage: low difficulty, low powered device/s.

Anyone malicious that connects to the network can easily overpower the existing validators. Sybil resistance is only the case if validators compete with computation due to economic incentives. In consortium network the native tokens have likely no/low value.

With PoA there are rules according to which validators are added/removed and limits on block issuance that ensure fault tolerance.

[decentralised]

I'm not sure I agree with you re: overpowering the existing validators.

On a public blockchain, you need a proof that all nodes are acting in the best interest of the network because there is no way of stopping anyone from joining. The economic incentives play a huge part here as you mention.

On a private chain, you'll have some form of registration or centralised auth which prevents "unknown" nodes from joining in the first place. If mining is centralised, that means that trust is established "off-chain" so an external sybil attack would not be a real threat.

Regarding the power usage and difficulty increase over time, I guess you could keep the resource usage low for some time, but you'd need to re-write the client software to prevent and increase in proportion to the number of blocks created, which could have a negative effect on the network synchronisation, or rate of inflation (coin issuance) if there is a token involved.

[keorn]

What is the point of blockchain if there is no fault tolerance, under your private PoW scenario as soon as a single node goes rogue the security guarantees disappear and the chain is messed up.

With this PoA you can keep a well functioning chain and kick misbehaving nodes (up to 50% of validators for this consensus engine) in due time.

[decentralised]

I'm not sure I can agree with you. To my mind with a private blockchain there is always off-chain trust or contract limiting access to the network. (edit: regardless of the consensus algorithm used).

In order to re-write historic transactions, an attacker would need to convince other participants to accept the new chain as valid and drop the old one, which is would be prevented by the off-chain trust model in the first place.

A powerful "rogue" node that starts producing blocks with different validation rules would be automatically ignored by other validator nodes who would not recognise the blocks as valid, so here again the risk of a successful sybil attack is limited.

Fault tolerance seems to be a red herring here because but I would rather ask you to expand on what you mean.

[keorn]

First you need to understand what is a fault in this case. If you make use of PoW the chain is picked on the basis of total difficulty, this means that if any validator (already admitted by a centralised party) is hacked, then they can very quickly produce a chain which gets accepted by all others as canonical (with higher difficulty). This reverses any existing transactions and requires significant extra-protocol action to mitigate.

With PoA there is no such ability, since the canonicality is not abusable. Furthermore addition and removal of nodes can be decentralised and determined according to any rules (since validators can be specified in a contract). This makes it possible to include validators based on something like majority voting.

[decentralised]

I understand that if one node is compromised, it can then be used to generate malicious txs and the attacker can try to add them to a block it generates, but why would you say the other validators accept such block(s) or transactions in the first place?

It seems to me that a successful attack on a private blockchain requires the attacker gaining access to both a "pre-approved" node and having the hashrate majority needed to ensure its blocks are generated faster than the rest of the network combined.

Some background: https://coinjournal.net/vitalik-buterin-on-misconceptions-in... and https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/48m9n6/vitalik_bu...