What are the cons to hybrid PoW PoS in Monero?

@quadriocellata
My every instinct says that would be a terrible idea!

Firstly there's the problem of the privacy of staking. How can the privacy of stackers be guaranteed? Staking would require utmost privacy or else stackers could be held liable for the compliance of transactions and so high standards of privacy and security might become unviable.

But assume, on the contrary that you could implement very robust privacy for stackers.

Then there's the monetary problem. What backs the currency? Monero / bitcoin is not just an arbitrary unit but is a receipt for energy expanded. Even with an addition pos layer, this would still be true, but it would no longer be fair because not just anyone can mine. So the miners would become an elite 'crew' who together control the entire supply of coins (new and old). So the risk is they throttle the supply and the dump on the market later on. Then monero is suddenly not sound money in the Austrian sense. On the one hand, who cares if its sound money or not, you don't have to hodl to benefit from its encryption tech. On the other hand, I think it has to be sound money in order to secure high value enterprise, like dnm and the rest.

So I agree with you that its a problem with monero that a powerful player could just pay for a 51% attack, but I don't think this problem is so crucial because that wouldn't be sustainable, and would only prevent the network from being usable for a short time. I think market cap will always be limited by hash power and there's no way to change that, but that this is not such a bad thing.

In comparison, eth is completely different because its 'backed' by the (fee paying) market for smart contract execution. So eth doesn't have to be 'sound money' because it piggybacks off a market, whereas monero does have to be.

Maybe I'm way off the mark though, this is just my instinct.

@Nebuchadnezzar_II

Some good points. I think in this example we should assume there is some zk/private way to do the staking. Just to keep thing simple for now.

As for the Monetary side. As you say, in this example we still have PoW, so that is satisfied that effort/energy is expected. As for the "fairness of mining", if you have a very low staking requirement, it could be permissible for anyone already involved in Monero to mine.

I do understand the want to allow anyone to be able to mine, that is a fair critique.

As for one of the benefits of hybrid PoS PoW, network security, we could say if Monero hashrate was significantly higher, the risk of the network being attacked would hopefully be a lot lower. Perhaps the best thing to focus on rather than a PoS component... It's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Will also be interesting to see post fcmp++ the ideas on a finality layer...

@quadriocellata ummmm some argument here....

1. Instead PoS, we maybe better had finality layer....or other approach that make it done with 1 block lock (because..... yea, why not we should had 10 block lock when we only need 1? on business POV that's also not too good)
2. somehow PoS good.... but i afraid people with better "economic" scale will taking the monero ecosystem, i mean look.... PoW need more "investment and effords" to make it works, instead just PoS where all you need is just capital