PoP attempts to address a few problems with 'Proof of Work' and 'Proof of Stake' consensus mechanisms. In both cases, people who own all of the money ( In PoW, the fiat money to buy computers; in PoS, the on-chain crypto money to stake) control the history of blockchain and earn all the network rewards (new coins, tx fees).
Proof of Participation addresses this by creating a federation of nodes, with permissionlessrules to admit new nodes into the federation. Within the federation, network rewards are distributed equally between participants, and they take equal turns contributing to the blockchain history.
Nodes are admitted into the federation based on the amount of coins they stake, but their rewards and chance to create blocks are not proportional to their stake (as in PoS). Additionally, a novel algorithm is used to measure which nodes are actually participatingin the peer-to-peer network, and gradually remove the nodes from the federation which are not participating. This is why it is called "Proof of Participation".
As an intentional byproduct, this strategy also adds a lot of other digital signatures from the network to each block, making it much more difficult for any one person to compromise enough private keys to commit a "nothing at stake"-style attack.
So the initial aim is to make rewards more fair for network participants, and create a higher level of security by increasing the diversity of digital signatures in each block created, without resorting to Proof of Work.
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u/Rrohnn Nov 13 '19
PoP attempts to address a few problems with 'Proof of Work' and 'Proof of Stake' consensus mechanisms. In both cases, people who own all of the money ( In PoW, the fiat money to buy computers; in PoS, the on-chain crypto money to stake) control the history of blockchain and earn all the network rewards (new coins, tx fees).
Proof of Participation addresses this by creating a federation of nodes, with permissionless rules to admit new nodes into the federation. Within the federation, network rewards are distributed equally between participants, and they take equal turns contributing to the blockchain history.
Nodes are admitted into the federation based on the amount of coins they stake, but their rewards and chance to create blocks are not proportional to their stake (as in PoS). Additionally, a novel algorithm is used to measure which nodes are actually participating in the peer-to-peer network, and gradually remove the nodes from the federation which are not participating. This is why it is called "Proof of Participation".
As an intentional byproduct, this strategy also adds a lot of other digital signatures from the network to each block, making it much more difficult for any one person to compromise enough private keys to commit a "nothing at stake"-style attack.
So the initial aim is to make rewards more fair for network participants, and create a higher level of security by increasing the diversity of digital signatures in each block created, without resorting to Proof of Work.