If the attacker has 51% then their hidden chain will be longer than the public chain.
The attacker have to reveal this hidden chain before the legit chain goes 10* blocks ahead of the fork. Otherwise online nodes won't accept his chain. So after 10 confirmations transactions will be set in stone.
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* - actual number depends on statistics, it's set to 720 now.
So right now it takes 720 confirmations to be 'set in stone'. It sounds to me like we are both using the same model here.
I think I can sum up DPOS as automated POS mining pools with an eye toward rapid confirmation and filtering of good/bad pool operators.
I would love to know which ideas you have found worth borrowing.
I think that at the end of the day the primary difference between transparent forging and DPOS is only how the block producers are selected. In one case you do it based upon balance, we do it by vote.