AI Coin Development Diary - page 17.

clout

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SlipperySlope

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Stephen Reed

Quote from: jonald_fyookball on April 25, 2014, 02:49:18 PM

A good problem solving technique is to first solve a simpler problem.

May I suggest setting aside the issue of new coin rewards,
and simply focus on how to achieve consensus
between nodes without PoW.

It quickly becomes clear that if solvable, it is non-trivial.

The core developers stated that no one has achieved
this so far.

This is what Meni said too -- you still need PoW as
issuance mechanism.

We are talking about a node creating a new block
and the rest of the network accepting it.

I think it may be possible with some kind of cryptographic
handshake between nodes, but my ideas on this are
vague at best.

EDIT: If you want to simplify the problem even further, assume all nodes trust each other and are honest.

SlipperySlope

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Stephen Reed

The problems to address as viewed by a member of the developers email list . . .

Quote

The problem with proof of stake is essentially that there is no cost to
creating a proof-of-stake. So there are two problems here:

One is that stake voters are free to vote for multiple chains, and since
only one will be the "real" chain, i.e. the one with the longest proof of
stake, the extra votes will simply go away. So there is no cost to voting
for multiple blocks. (A way to discourage this might be to use a signature
scheme where signing multiple signatures with the same key causes the key
to be revealed. But it is not clear what should be done after the fact,
since there is no consensus on which blocks exist or are 'valid' for the
proof of stake to fall back on.)

Another problem is that the stake voters are chosen 'randomly' but
deterministic ally by the content of earlier blocks. This gives a
voter to grind through blocks until he finds one which will give him
more votes in the future than he otherwise should get. Then the proof
of stake becomes a proof-of-work, but one that discourages consensus
since all voters will want to do this.

The problem is what wrecked Peercoin, which I understand is now
centralized (all blocks are signed by the developers to be valid). It is
also a problem with NXT, as of the last time any of us at
#bitcoin-wizards looked at their code.

I talk about this a bit in Section 5 of my document on ASICs and proof
of work:

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf

A goal of proof-of-stake is that it should be easy and cheap to create
a history, at least relative to proof-of-work. Perhaps people want this
for environmental reasons or some sort of "the people should own the
means of production" mentality. But this makes it easy to overwrite
history. As I described above, an attempt to force all participants to
participate in such fraud (thereby making it unfeasible) by, say, having
each block voted on by several random participants, doesn't work because
the random selection can always be gamed.

There have been fun conversations on #bitcoin-wizards about getting
random numbers from the sun, or cosmic radiation, or pulsars, since
these numbers would be both random and verifiable by many parties.
Certainly this would require expensive equipment for all verifying
parties, which intuitively is bad for Bitcoin because people verify
transactions for free and we want this to be as cheap and easy as
possible. (To the best of my knowledge nobody has suggested choosing
stake voters from such random numbers, though there have been many
ideas and I might've missed it. Pulsars are nice because they give us
a clock which everyone within several light years can agree on, which
is good for e.g. sharing the Bitcoin blockchain with Martians. This
is almost always a more popular discussion topic than PoS.)

It's also unclear that PoS can be equitable anyway, since selecting
voters based on "stake" seems to favor the very rich disproportionately.

SlipperySlope

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Activity: 686

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Stephen Reed

[April 13, 2015]

On the advice of our diverse set of financial and regulatory attorneys, we are postponing the launch of AI Coin until such time as we have obtained the necessary money services business licenses in 48 States, and BitLicense or equivalent licenses in jurisdictions requiring them. To go forward without those in place would make our business plan a legal risk.

[October 22, 2014 - I changed the project name to AI Coin. Drew Hingorani is the co-founder and President, I am CTO]

The A.I. Coin project is a multi-year effort to achieve a no-proof-of-work mining implementation in an cryptocurrency that ...

Meets or beats the existing proof-of-work implementation with regard to securing the blockchain against attack.

Provides sub second response time when acknowledging transactions for certain incorporation into the blockchain, in contrast to Satoshi's Bitcoin which only promises best effort which takes more than a second to reach all nodes and takes minutes on average for the first confirmation.

Does not permit double-spending fraud attacks, whereas Satoshi's Bitcoin sometimes does, e.g. the BitUndo service.

Meets or beats the existing implementation with regard to no trusted third parties, as Satoshi's Bitcoin is evolving towards hashers' trust of a single, dominant industrial mining pool.

Preserves to the greatest possible extent, Satoshi's social contract between developers and users.

Specifies how a nomadic mint agent creates new blocks without effort, and allocates block creation rewards to secure the distributed network using conventional data security techniques.

Permits the issuance, relay and blockchain storage of microtransactions having 100x lower fees than Satoshi's Bitcoin.

Explicitly pays for for the creation, ongoing enhancement, and operation, of the enterprise-class, scalable, secure, and robust networking infrastructure that can accommodate all the world's financial transactions. In contrast, the Satoshi Bitcoin full node network consists of mostly unpaid volunteers.

Provides a multi-agent framework upon which human agents and intelligent software agents can be vetted, integrated and paid for skills delivered.

Note that the May 2013 whitepaper below describes a hard fork of bitcoin. That cannot possibly happen unless A.I. Coin is successful and subsequently convinces the Bitcoin community that a good alternative exists for the current industrial mining method. Furthermore, the current approach is not conventional proof-of-stake, rather the block rewards are used to pay for network infrastructure, developers and community support, e. g. through institutions such as the Bitcoin Foundation. It appears that there is no need to pay staking dividends to secure the network.

Whitepaper: Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake Stephen Reed

A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to establish and staff a secure financial data network capable of handling the world’s transactions with sub-second response time. The new system pays dividends to stake-offering bitcoin holders. In contrast to Satoshi Nakamoto’s mesh network consisting of competing peers, this system uses an enterprise class network that is efficient, robust, and scalable, consisting of cooperating peers. The network backbone nodes host trustless nomadic agents. Thousands of distributed full nodes are paid to replicate a singleton blockchain built upon every 10 minutes by a nomadic mint agent whose actions are verified by its peers. This arrangement enables immediate acknowledgment to an issuing node that its transaction has been accepted. Less effort means that subsidized transaction costs will be lower. Network reconfiguration enables the processing of numerous microtransactions. Stake-weighted distributed consensus is achieved when necessary with less than one-half arbitrarily faulty nodes. Important invariants of the Satoshi Social Contract between core developers and users are maintained: The reward schedule, the blockchain format, the fixed number of bitcoins, and the decentralized, trustless protocol are untouched. The system remains a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of transparent rules they follow.

GitHub: TexaiCognitiveArchitecture

[email protected]
LinkedIn: stephenreed
mobile: 1-512-791-7860

Descriptive posts . . .

Project Development Approach . . .

Migrate the Texai cognitive architecture project to a public GitHub repository.
Write software agents to sandbox the Bitcoin Core program - bitcoind, demonstrating the smallest possible network.
Write additional software agents to complete the verification of peers, migration of responsibilities, and network operations.

Reading List, the current situation . . .