[buckie]

> The validators are known, so any risk of a 51% attack arising from some miner collusion in China does not apply.

That's just wrong. Dangerously so. Maybe I'm just missing something in his protocol spec and he didn't really mean mining...

I've discussed this attack vector in more depth here[1]. Even if you made the mining function signing the block with your sk it'd still be wrong. Even if you forced the sk holder to have that same sk protect something really valuable, it would still be wrong... just have a larger disincentivize.

The whole point of mining is that it's non-auditable (w.r.t. who is physically mining) -- the only real metric you get is the speed of success which you can always mask by not releasing a block immediately. That's why PoW is a cockroach of a consensus protocol.

In the "we roll a dice to see who gets to append to the ledger next" metaphor for consensus, deterministic and PoS both require you to know the number of sides the dice have before you roll them. In PoW, you don't figure out the number of sides until after.

[1]: http://kadena.io/blog/MiningInPrivate.html