This paper studies the concentration of block production in selected Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains and finds evidence consistent with participants entering leaving consensus process, thereby changing level, but not disproportionate compounding wealth for large stakes.

P Zatko, better known in the security community as Mudge, was one of the leaders of the L0pht hacker collective, which contributed significantly to the disclosure of serious Internet vulnerabilities and eventually became the security consultancy @stake. He has worked as a division scientist at BBN Technologies, a project manager for DARPA, and a researcher at Google. He’s currently working on a...

Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain mechanism have been attracting much attention. One of their core innovations, Proof-of-Work (PoW), is notoriously inefficient which potentially motivates a centralization of computing power, defeating the original goal of decentralization. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is later proposed to replace PoW. However, both PoW and PoS have different inherent advantages and...

We offer a case-study in irrationality, showing that even in a high stakes context, intelligent andwell trained professionalsmay adopt dominated practices. In multiple-choice tests one cannot distinguish lucky guesses from answers based on knowledge. Test-makers have dealt with this problem by lowering the incentive to guess, through penalizing errors (called formula scoring), and by eliminatin...

Motivated by a problem in the theory of randomized search heuristics, we give a very precise analysis for the coupon collector problem where the collector starts with a random set of coupons (chosen uniformly from all sets). We show that the expected number of rounds until we have a coupon of each type is nHn/2 − 1/2± o(1), where Hn/2 denotes the (n/2)th harmonic number when n is even, and Hn/2...

Proof of stake is a consensus mechanism for digital currencies that is an alternative to proof of work used in Bitcoin. The main declared advantages of proof of stake approaches are the absence of expensive computations and hence a lower entry barrier for block generation rewards. In this report, we examine the pros and cons of both consensus systems and show that existing implementations of pr...

Good language learners slot in a repertoire of strategies and when language tests are at stake, test-taking strategies and test-wiseness pave pay to a prolific outcome. Among such tests, TOEFL iBT seems to be a prerequisite to academic success and a nightmare many Iranian students struggle with. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to raise awareness about the type of questions in iBT, b...

Recovering American Literature by Peter Shaw; Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education by Gerald Graff; Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation by John Guillory Review by: Barbara Foley The New England Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 458-479 Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/s...