[hnthrow1010]

Well first of all, cryptocurrency isn't "censorship-resistant" any more than any other encrypted distributed system, so you can take that phrase out. Take a look at Tor or Freenet to see how this is done without the ponzi tokens.

Second of all, you can easily build a timestamped and tamper-proof ledger without making people pay to access it using speculative tokens. The aspect of trying to assign money value to these tokens is the problem, not the tamper-proof part. Conflating all these concepts together under the roof of "blockchain" is one of the many sins of web3 companies, but it's not true. Another sin is this constant attempt by people to "refute" critics. You don't need to do that, the fact that it happens so often should tip you off that the technology is not the focus of the discussion here. If you ever find yourself getting hostile about this, you're falling for the trap that the marketers are setting.

[tatertots1234]

re: censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring an Ethereum transaction please?

re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a BFT consensus mechanism?

The technology is absolutely the focus of this discussion here.

[hnthrow1010]

>censorship, prove to us how you would go about censoring an Ethereum transaction please?

Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail. I don't know why you're asking this question, you should be able to answer the same question about Tor or Freenet and extrapolate from there.

>re: timestamp, prove to us how easy it is to build a distributed and tamper-proof append-only ledger without a BFT consensus mechanism?

I also don't know why you're asking this question or what it has to do with cryptocurrency or what I said at all. There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens. BFT algorithms are by and large, good and useful; the problem comes in when people try to solve this by handing out tokens and convincing people to use them as money. In that way web3 is actually very intellectually lazy to me, the only proposed solutions it appears that most of them have for this is to simply mint more and more tokens.

[tatertots1234]

> Very simple, throw the wallet holder in jail.

This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application, which remains widely distributed across all nodes in the network. Tor is great but has different design goals, such as consensus of the entire network secured by about 10 nodes.

> There are BFT consensus mechanisms that don't require the use of speculative tokens.

What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes? Common choices are PoW or PoS, or PoA with a small number of trusted authorities as it is used in Tor.

[hnthrow1010]

>This has no effect on the on-chain transaction, message, or application

Sure, but you can't make those when you're locked in jail with no access to the internet. I believe this was made obvious all the way back in 2013 with the Silk Road bust.

>What BFT mechanism do you propose to secure consensus of this "easy to build" tamper-proof ledger for a widely distributed network of untrusted nodes?

Out of what you said, PoA is the only one that has any chance at being fair over a long period of time because it's a lot easier to eject bad actors from the network. If you use PoA there's not much point to using a blockchain, but this is good actually; it gives you the freedom to choose between any number of more efficient datastructures. PoS is mostly just a loose approximation of another form of PoA (whomever stakes the most is the authority) and it's wholly unnecessary if you get rid of the speculative tokens; PoW (and some PoS algorithms too) are quite literally based around consensus-by-lottery, in my view that's another reason why it will never be useful for anything beyond gambling on speculative tokens. I've seen a lot of variations on the algorithms but none of them can get away from that basic problem without morphing back into another form of PoA.

[tatertots1234]

You can jail a person but the contract or message they deployed, which may include private encrypted information or even be a fully fledged blockchain application, is still accessible and functioning as it was before. That is the point of the ledger being censorship-resistant, and it’s a different model than trusting a small handful of node operators.

PoW and PoS may rely on speculative valuation of the token but they aren’t really like PoA at all. The whole concept is that they are permissionless, as opposed to permissioned.

But anyways we have three options: PoW, PoS, PoA. And there are crypto currencies and blockchains for each of those. PoA tends to secure the least amount of value as it’s generally seen as less secure, less censorship-resistant, and less distributed.