Is IOTA's Shimmer a completely new DLT Consensus Mechanism on par with (if not by far superior to) Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake?

What is Shimmer?Shimmer is one of IOTA's Coordicide modules, in my opinion the most interesting one.Simplified explanation: http://bit.ly/2X9pNIh explanation in section 6.2.2 (p.23) of the Coordicide Whitepaper​I urge you to read the formal explanation to fully get the idea. Anyways, since I cannot expect everyone to read it, I will try to describe it in my own words:​Shimmer allows to resolve conflicts (e.g. double spends) through a dynamic self-adjusting voting mechanism. Nodes signal their opinion on which of the conflicting transactions they prefer and readjust their opinion based on their neighbors. They do not only consider their immediate but also more distant / indirect neighbors. This way the entire network quickly tips over into a stable, practically irreversible state that favors exactly one of the conflicting transactions, thus solving conflicts by reaching global consensus without the need of a central synchronized block chain which would limit the throughput.What does this mean for Crypto?​I feel like IOTA just invented a new consensus mechanism for DLT. This is neither PoW nor PoS but something completely different in nature yet simultaneously so simple. It appears to me with their approach, IOTA has just revolutionized DLT. This to me seems to be changing the entire landscape of cryptocurrency and looks at least as revolutionary as both PoW and PoS. I would even go one step further and argue that it is technically superior to both since it does neither waste useless energy (PoW) nor requires any kind of global syncing (PoW: global blockchain, PoS: global consensus on block issuer). Once implemented, this would make IOTA:truly decentralized (no miners, stakes or central block issuer)partition-tolerant (DAG, no central entity)feeless (no miners, no blocks)scalable (no syncing required and no bottleneck like blocks)​I would really really love to hear other people's opinion on this, especially technical arguments. If true, the introduction of this new mechanism would be the biggest technical advancement for crypto as a whole this year. Keep it mind, it is not implemented yet but I think we now have enough technical details to reason about the theory behind it.

Submitted May 29, 2019 at 02:05AM