I think Charles mentioned if IOHK renews its contract in Jan 2021 for another 5 years he wants to work on quantum stuff and Proof of Merit, i found this from a 2017 article about another PoM thing, does anyone have any info on how this applies to Cardano, and if it is better than the existing Proof of Authority coins?
A New Merit Based Consensus Algorithm
A functional marketplace requires fast transaction times, trust in the value exchange system and also the promise of fair competition to buy and sell value. In order to achieve these goals we are combining an authoritative voting system with the idea of work incentives and merit based reputation in a new consensus algorithm called proof-of-merit(PoM).
Proof-of-merit has special nodes charged with voting for consensus. These special nodes are called Validators. Validators are tasked with verifying assets and creating the repeatable proof steps in a transaction. All other nodes are considered Maker nodes. Maker nodes can initiate new asset bids as well as respond to buy requests with a matching asset for exchange. The maker node that responds to a bid with an asset transaction can provide proof steps for the Validator in order to speed up the verification process. The initial proof array can also be left blank for the Validator to fill in, but this will severely slow down the processing time for that transaction.
Once one or more transaction is packaged in a block, the special node submits that block for vote to be written as the next block on the chain. The other Validators then validate the structure of all of the block transactions and submit a yes or no vote. If a majority of validators consensus is reached, the maker that initiated the transaction can sign the block as the maker node and the other nodes in the network will adopt their version of the blockchain as the truth. The new block will create a reward in the cryptocurrency that is native to that block. In the event of a tie, Validators will be told to vote for the block with the largest sum of transaction values within the block.
This process is equivalent to mining in the PoW algorithm, and the Validator node that originally provided the proof and created the block as well as the maker that creates the block will share the mined incentive.
In order to protect marketplace competition for all participants, there will be two more safeguards built into the algorithm. First, Validators proof accuracy and voting history and voting participation over time and will be algorithmically combined into a reputation score. This can be done programmatically within a smart contract or manually off the chain by the Steward. Either way, this reputation of Validators will dictate their merit for remaining in the voting position of power. The steward will control the marketplaces standards and rules for removing Validators, but the reputation score will be the driving factor.
Secondly, the Steward cannot participate as a Validator, or profit on the network from anything other than transaction fees. This will help prevent Stewards from garnering too much short term profit incentive that could negatively affect the competitive balance of the ecosystem.
source of this text is “https://medium.com/@CoenBlockchain/proof-of-merit-a-consensus-algorithm-designed-for-blockchain-marketplaces-d2c9d7677622”