Why PoC+ is great

Discover why Proof Of Commitment (PoC+) is the most innovative solution for a sustainable blockchain.

You have extreme centralization and unfair competition if you do not add the commitment factor and rely only on hardware.

This has been shown many times; you cannot compete with hardware only with giant farms. They pay way less for hardware and spend way less than you for electricity. With the committed coins factor, you have something that you can compete at the same level (the price is the same for everyone). The entry barrier is very low. Small miners can boost their mining power with relatively little money. PoC+ is a greener option since effective capacity can be increased without purchasing more equipment.

Being ASIC Proof means that people can mine for the network every day and be just as efficient as those who buy fancy, expensive equipment trying to gain an edge over each other.

Proof of Stake gives participants with the most significant stake the most validation power. This means that people with a lot of stake, i.e. a lot of money injected, become more important block validators. The richest get richer. Therefore, the entry barrier for such a consensus mechanism is usually very high and gets higher and higher over time. This leads to an accumulation of validation power, meaning that over time the network gets controlled by fewer and fewer, but each time more powerful validators.

Once you are a rich validator, you will be a rich validator forever. Initial whales of any PoS project will get richer and richer, giving them even more power over the network.

Proof of Stake Relies on Miner's Keys Remaining Secret Two issues with miner's keys potentially being compromised:

1) To mine, a miner must store his private key on a computer mining for the network connected to the internet. This directly contradicts the idea of general best practice security for cryptocurrency, where holders should hold on to their keys offline and in a secure location. 2)History key attacks are possible, where miners sell their private keys long after they have emptied their accounts, and the key is otherwise useless. Proof of Stake supporters have argued that this is not a problem because decentralized checkpoints do not allow the blockchain to be rolled back far enough for this to occur. The attack vector that this miss is that such an attack could happen using forks off of blocks over a year, which ends up with millions of fake forks building off of various blocks, and how can a new miner just join the network for the first time possibly know in a trustless manner which fork is correct?

In contrast, Proof of Commitment favours smaller validators, aka miners. PoC+ requires at least some basic hardware like a hard drive - only staking is insufficient. In most parts of the world, it's pretty cheap to acquire a few terabytes of conventional disk space.

The initial monetary and technical requirements for PoC+ are very low, i.e. the entry barrier is very low. Due to the hybrid model of hardware and staking, aka commitment, tiny miners can boost their mining power with relatively small money. The less capacity a miner has, the cheaper it is to gain more considerable boost factors, while big miners would need to stake/commit significantly more to keep up the boost factors. This mechanism is a countermeasure to keep the network decentralized.

Most PoS projects usually come with a large pre-mine. So there is no fair launch. Otherwise, how can you stake if no coins are circulating yet?

Signum (Previously Burstcoin) has been running since August 2014 with a fair launch:

Signa can be mined with PCs or tiny computers like a Raspberry Pi. The only thing needed is disk space to create what are known as plot files. With its PoC+ algorithm, Signum opens up the possibility for everyone to participate in the mining process without any significant obstacles.

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