Comment by saurik

How does that prevent me from pretending to be any number of nodes I want; including, but by no means limited to, over 1/3 of the nodes? (Maybe you should first do a quick search to learn what a Sybil attack actually is?) They can shore this up by having some kind of Sybil attack prevention elsewhere, but given their statements about proof-of-work here it seems unlikely they would, for example, add proof-of-work elsewhere. It might be, based on skimming some blog post I found if theirs, that the goal of this is to help them shore up a proof-of-stake algorithm to deal with byzantine failures? That would be interesting, but is a more involved scheme then than just this part, and I actually don't think that is what they are doing either (as the connection in that blog post is mostly me reaching for something that works, not a direct connection made by the authors).