Since this is a privacy coin, I must address this first:
You have a problem with pseudonymous developers, such as… “Satoshi Nakamoto”?
(Note for Tor users: According to theymos, the administrator of the Bitcoin Forum, IP access logs show that Satoshi always used Tor. Please be sure to mention that, the next time that someone stirs some “Four Horsemen of the Cryptocalypse” style FUD about Tor, anonymity, pseudonymity, etc.)
In the abstract, your argument is indistinguishable from general arguments against anonymity and pseudonymity. How is your argument different than arguing to ban Tor, and issue everyone a fully-doxed “Internet Driver’s License”:
“When Internet users troll, harass, spread misinformation, or even commit crimes, you want to know their names so we can visit them with pitchforks and torches.”
And your argument negates the whole concept of cryptocurrency.
By your argument, Bitcoin should never have been invented, trusted, or used. This whole post could be boiled down to the two words near the start: “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
Cryptocurrency holders have a generally strong need for privacy and anonymity. How much moreso, for some of the most valuable targets of coercion?
Moreover, in practice, we have seen how doxed Bitcoin developers are currently under attack with frivolous lawsuits by the extremely malicious scammer and identity thief Craig Wright.
At least one prominent Bitcoin developer, one of the most active committers for years, recently stopped contributing, citing “too much harassment” as the reason (archive, just in case). I don’t know exactly what he means by that. I do know that he was personally sued by Craig Wright. I also know that he has suffered a ton of other personal harassment. Any which way, someone in that thread suggests pseudonymity as a solution. It is a wise idea, although probably not helpful in that case: I know that no unusual personality can ever really hit NEWNYM on public activities.
Decentralization and cypherpunk pseudonymity are important! For that reason, I have recently had some discussions about how better to fund more strictly pseudonymous developers for Bitcoin Core.
One of my major concerns about Zcash—a subject already on a long list of things I want someday to post about: Zcash lacks pseudonymous core developers, who could lead a community fork in case ECC and/or identifiable ECC devs were somehow coerced, bribed, or corrupted. If they were harassed with frivolous lawsuits, or if Zcash were banned in the United States, who would take it up? How would there be any continuity? Who would have a long-proven track record of well-reviewed commits for the community to trust?
The problem with DASH is not “anonymous developers”. The problem with DASH is that 0. it started with a huge premine scam, and 1. its privacy is fake—a false sense of security—vastly inferior even to Monero, which is strictly inferior to Zcash.
The same argument could be made about untraceable money—or indeed, about so-called “unhosted” wallets.
I don’t want to derail this thread with a long essay laying forth my arguments against POS. I intend to address that in an appropriate manner. Only a few points in summary for you to consider:
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Most people do not understand the subtlety of the POW Nakamoto Consensus. The primary power is held by full nodes. Every non-mining full-node is a “validator”, equal in status to every other. Miners are paid employees, not the bosses. Miners have one job: Byzantine fault-tolerant transaction ordering. Miners != “validators”. A Bitcoin Validator is the thing running on a Raspberry Pi on your home Internet connection, drawing 10W of electricity.
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The security guarantees of POS on paper fall apart in the real world, where the parties controlling large stakes have strong incentive to collude—and where the big players usually all know each other. DPOS has no equivalent to Bitcoin mining pools, let alone efforts like P2Pool.
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What I say in the foregoing is no mere theory: It has been proved in practice. On both the POW side (where malicious miners seeking to protect their covert ASICBOOST tried and failed to usurp Bitcoin—whereas users could have forced their will with UASF), and the POS side (where colluding “validators” with high stakes hardforked chains against massive community opposition). I have watched both types of events up-close, with my own money on the line. POW did what I expected. POS failed catastrophically.
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The economics are screwed up in ways I can’t even begin to summarize without an essay. Not in theory, but in a “why is my money locked up when I need it? why are my profits a mirage?” experiential way here.
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The argument that we should give up because “traditional finance cartels and governments seeking economic hegemony” will prevail is an argument that cryptocurrency has failed. Why bother? I can still open a bank account. And if we want anonymous digital cash without caring about decentralization, it would be much more efficient than POS for @zooko to build an overtly centralized DigiCash for us. He knows where that road leads!
(An explanation for the newbies: Zooko worked with Chaum on DigiCash in the 1990s. It is one of the things that gives Zooko serious cred, because DigiCash was a great concept except for the catastrophic centralization. Zcash as originally designed has the strong privacy of DigiCash with the decentralization of Bitcoin—the best of both worlds! I have also been doing cypherpunk things since the 90s; I cracked a big smile when I saw Zooko’s name first pop up here.)
As aforesaid, I will take this up further in an appropriate thread in the near future.