@Nigel Did you read this comment in the PoS thread? I concluded that I’m against it.
The cost/penalty that I spoke of would have to be denial of a farming reward, after having already invested (time and resources) by running the punished node.
I’m not against bio mimicry in theory, but remember that the attacker can see everything we’re doing. They can just adapt their nodes to take into account whichever strategy we come up with. One can easily make cloud based computing nodes “behave” like home users by disconnecting periodically, or even lowering their network performance.
What you should focus on is on things which are not easy for an attacker to change. For example you can deny attack vectors from large cloud computing platforms by blacklisting the well-known cloud platform IP address ranges, or at least taking source IP into account when calculating consensus privileges. The strategy can also limit the amount of privileged nodes coming from the same IP block, forcing attackers to take more distributed approaches.
Ultimately, an attacker can always resort to mobilizing a consumer botnet against the network. This reinforces the argument against PoS. We may not be able to stop an attacker from mobilizing a large number of nodes, so perhaps we should focus on mobilizing an ever greater number of honest nodes.
We need Guilfoyle and his army of smart fridges! 