Topic: AI Coin Development Diary - page 9. (Read 49308 times)

Can I ask if you could take some time to define a dictionary of terms used in your posts somewhere. I'm familiar with many but only because I have pre existing knowledge. It is hard to distinguish between what is a technology, and innovation, a third party piece of software, a component of the system, and so forth.

Do keep up the good work, I'll be watching this closely.

I completed upgrading the Bouncy Castle cryptographic libraries. I added two more modules from Texai now that their dependencies are in the project. The first is support for bittorrent messages, which is required by the SSLBitTorrent module to be added after the Network module is added. And the second is support for the Albus Hierarchical Control Network - AlbusHCN module, that is the Texai agent framework.

Over 300 unit tests are running OK on my local continuous integration server, which automatically rebuilds the project whenever I push new updates to the GitHub source code repository. Over 32,000 lines of Java source code have been added to the project, not including the regression tests.

I expect that I will add less than 10 more modules from Texai before I am ready to begin coding the first Bitcoin CPoS test case, which simply runs two slave full nodes that take turns hosting the nomadic mint agent which creates new blocks, without yet performing the required verification of the peer tamper-evident logs.

Great to hear.

I believe somebody has already marked up the blockchain as RDF if that would be of use, indeed a few of us have been working on bitcoin+semantic-web for a few years, nothing vastly productive to show for it, but we've certainly prototyped and mapped the architecture out. They are a powerful match!

I did not know about Web ID. Your ideas are great. I was using UUIDs (random) as subject UIDs in the X.509 certificates I generate. I can revise the server to accept a Web ID from the user, and return the certificate as you suggest. Actually I have intermediate X.509 certificates that issue the end-user certificates. The root certificate is self-signed for texai.org - so no dependency on a trusted third party as a Certificate Authority.

The full node will host multiple agents and each agent can have skillful roles. The roles message other agent-roles in the network and need certificates to sign their messages if leaving the full node and going across the network. I can use UUID subject certificates for this purpose. I use a single IANA port already reserved for Texai, over which I will run TLS/SSL encrypted messages for Bitcoin, plus HTTPS for network operations, and BitTorrent for rapid provisioning of new full nodes.

For the past couple of days, I have been upgrading the Bouncy Castle Java cryptographic libraries to the newest versions. When those unit tests all work again, I will add the TLS/SSL networking code from Texai, and after that the agent framework from Texai.

An RDF API would be straight forward. I use the Sesame quad store to contain RDF statements. I will leave bitcoind and the blockchain alone, but the quad store will contain the OpenCyc knowledge base, and persisted java objects. I wrote an RDF entity manager which persists Java objects analogous to how Hibernate does it with a relational database.

Do not mix authentication with authorization.

Let each node be named with a URI (URI-A)
Nodes issue their own certificates with URI-A in the subjectAltName part of the x509
As authentication dereference URI-A to find RDF-data, check for the public key from the x509.
If public key is found, assert that the node "owns" URI-A and thus can use it as an identifier.

This covers authentication and allows each node to revoke and change certificates as it chooses, it also allows nodes to provide more information at the dereferenceable URI and acts as an extension point.

Layer on authorization using ACL, which can also be implemented using RDF.

See webid (formerly foaf-ssl) for more information, see web access control for more on authn.

Consider defining a simple protocol that allows multiple forms of passing keys and establishing identifiers for agents, x509 may need to be replaced, legacy and different networks may need different auth protocols, your suggested approach binds to HTTP+TLS only, when multiple transport level protocol may be required for this.


I suggest an RDF data API, it will be far more beneficial if the information is machine readable data (possibly with a default HTML view.. RDFa?), then multiple different UIX can be built on top allowing independent innovation and it'll be readily extensible by using new classes and properties in the rdf.

I pushed the OpenCyc RDF repository to a new GitHub repository - https://github.com/StephenLReed/texai-rdf-repositories. Also there are a couple of testing repositories, Test and Benchmark.

The OpenCyc repository is used as the commonsense ontology, i.e. vocabulary and taxonomy, for organizing the conversations between Texai agents.

At the moment, some of the unit tests for the RDFEntityManager module are broken. The RDF repository files are comparatively large and so I moved them to a separate GitHub repository to make commits to the Java source code repositories faster.

The X509 certificate server project is now on GitHub and is working with my local Jenkins CI (Continuous Integration) software such that whenever I push a source code change to the GitHub project, Jenkins automatically downloads the changes, builds the project, and runs the regression test suite.

Here is the GitHub project page . . .



And here is my local Jenkins CI server page for the X509CertificateServer project . . .

I configured Jenkins continuous integration software on my local server, and now it rebuilds the project whenever any source code changes on the GitHub Texai project. About 170 unit tests pass OK. There are two downstream projects that are not yet on GitHub. The JavaCV is a computer vision library that I will not be using with Bitcoin CPoS, and the second is the Texai X509 certificate server which I will later add to GitHub as a project.

I added the Texai Java module X509Security to GitHub at https://github.com/StephenLReed/texai. 41 unit tests passed OK.

X509 certificates are commonly used by websites to authenticate servers in the HTTPS protocol. In Texai, both endpoints of the communication channel authenticate themselves during the TLS/SSL encryption negotiation with X509 certificates issued by the Texai certificate authority server  - which has a certain self-signed certificate as the root certificate. Only full node operators need to be concerned about these certificates when they initially install the software.

I pushed, i.e. uploaded, two Java modules to my GitHub project repository at https://github.com/StephenLReed/texai. The first was the main project Texai which has been pruned down to one maven module - Utilities. I upgraded the Java platform to 1.8 and am using NetBeans version 8.0 as the programming environment.

The Utilities module has 133 unit tests that passed OK. I use three different static bug-finding and style checking tools. Next to adapt and push to GitHub are the RDF Entity Manager and X509Security modules.

Although the Bitcoin core developers have the advantage of portability and performance with their C++ language choice, I for one, am much better off using Java. It will be much, much faster for me to adapt the existing Texai Java source code than to learn C++ well enough to adapt the existing Bitcoin Core source code.

When Bitcoin CPoS is deployed for testing starting this year and for ultimate launch in early 2016, it will only be designed to run on paid-for full nodes, that will get paid only if the full node executes the specified configuration. At the moment I am thinking that the full node operators will be instructed how to run Ubuntu Linux LTS, i.e. the long term stable version, Java 1.8, the CPoS Java components, and the then available Bitcoin Code bitcoind executable. Unlike the Bitcoin core developers who have to design and test code to run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and other platforms, Bitcoin CPoS will be designed and tested to run on one platform, chosen for optimum security.

A Blockchain-Based Exchange Between Proof-of-Work (PoW) Bitcoin and Cooperative Proof-of-Stake (CPoS) Bitcoin

Imagine that in early 2016 there are two versions of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. There is the legacy Satoshi Bitcoin network with proof of work mining. And there is the new fork CPoS Bitcoin blockchain and network. There will be a need to exchange value between the two blockchains as hopefully, the new fork becomes more valuable when users appreciate its benefits.

An nomadic exchange agent in the CPoS system would be connected to the PoW (old fork) network using a suitably configured bitcoind instance. The exchange agent could thus transact on both Bitcoin blockchain forks, i.e. PoW-fork and CPoS-fork simultaneously. Each user of the exchange would have both a PoW Bitcoin wallet and a CPoS wallet, which are two instances of the same program pointed at different networks. The wallets would be used to execute market orders. Multiple signature transactions should permit limit orders, in which the exchange agent provides the second signature when required as the limit condition is met.

There would be a one-hour settlement time on the PoW-fork side of the exchange transaction. The CPoS-fork side of the exchange transaction would occur at the end of the transaction settlement period.

The exchange agent would not have a hot wallet, as all transactions are performed on the respective blockchains. The earned trading commissions would be distributed immediately as microtransactions to the exchange owner. The exchange agent would have an API for charting sites. Trading bots could use that API to determine the market situation, and use their own bitcoind instances, in lieu of wallets, to perform the trades.

Being on-blockchain should allow fees to be lower as the design is simpler and there is no exchange hot wallet to secure. Without any connection to fiat currencies, it should be easy to find jurisdictions to operate the nomadic exchange in which the wallet interface alone is sufficient - without an enrollment that requires certain identification.

CPoS To Be Implemented Using the Texai Cognitive Architecture

The Texai cognitive architecture will be used to implement the multi-agent network that connects bitcoind, i.e. Bitcoin Core, instances together and enables a single nomadic mint agent that is the core idea of CPoS.

Here are references and videos about my work with Texai . . .

• Natural Language Approach of the Texai Project Stephen Reed's Texai project presentation recorded at the 2008 Artificial General Intelligence Conference
• OpenCyc Commonsense AI Tutorial - part 1 Stephen Reed presentation recorded at the 2009 AGI Conference
• OpenCyc Commonsense AI Tutorial - part 2
• Bootstrap Dialog: A Conversational English Text Parsing and Generation System Stephen L. Reed, Texai.org, presented at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference, 2009.
• Texai presentation at AGI-2009 recorded video Stephen Reed
• Texai presentation slides at AGI-2009 Stephen Reed

Texai is a cognitive architecture to achieve artificial intelligence via a dialog system whereby mentors teach the system skills. For Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake, I will remove the demonstration dialog modules, leaving modules that perform . . .

• X509 certificate server - provides Texai X509 certificates when installing full nodes
• X509 authentication - each agent and each hardware node is assigned an X509 certificate for pseudonymous authentication
• SSL/TLS network - communications between authenticated full nodes are encrypted with X509 certificates on both endpoints
• SSL Bittorrent - the torrent protocol is encrypted and used to catch up the blockchain on relaying full nodes as required
• Webserver - full node statistics and network operations are presented to the operator via HTML pages
• Albus Hierarchical Control Network - a robotics-inspired multi-agent network consisting of agencies, agents, roles and skills
• RDF Entity Manager - a Java object persistence framework that uses an RDF quad store as the storage. RDF is a semantic web language for knowledge representation
• Open Cyc - the open source RDF version of the Cyc commonsense knowledge base, which provides the extensible ontology that structures what Texai agents know and can do

My work plan for the remainder of June is to upload the selected modules to GitHub and begin implementing the first system test case which is a single relay agent full node communicating with a single mint agent full node. The initial version will not perform any peer validation, nor DDoS traffic scrubbing. Note that I need to test whether my approach requires any changes to the Bitcoin Core bitcoind code. I think not.

Here is how I will slave bitcoind to the Texai network . . .

How do you become qualified to solve something without solving it? Have you solved it? I assume when you talk about qualified you're talking about Peter Todd and Gavin Anddressen?

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/2014/06/13/centralized-mining/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_sold_50_of_my_bitcoins_ghashio/

I've made my position on the GHashio and Bitcoin design problems known. If you think I'm unqualified to speak then please ignore everything I've said and continue acting on the information you believe to be correct.

For the record it's true I was involved with Mastercoin from the beginning, am involved with Bitshares too. I'm not panicking, I'm promoting whatever I think the best technological solutions are and to me there is DPoS, CPoS, and Transparent Forging.  If you understand the technology enough then you'll understand why I think that at a later date.

If no one agrees with my opinions I don't really care. I'm putting it out there because the flaws I see in Bitcoin aren't being fixed and I suspect that it needs to be hard forked just to implement CPoS. I wanted to voice my opinion in favor of a hard fork because at this point Bitcoin is promoting a level of centralization which I'm uncomfortable with because it goes against the long term strategic technological principles that I follow.


Don't take it from me, do your own research and form your own opinion. Google is your friend here.

I voiced my concerns because they are genuine concerns. I'm seeing increasing levels of centralization around mining. I'm seeing mining which was once a serious game which anyone had the opportunity to play become something that over time the chip makers will be the only players qualified to profitably participate in.

This is a problem as it removes whatever democratic nature the network could have had. It also has many people claiming that the game is rigged/unfair because the only way to get a Bitcoin now is to buy it with cash. If you have to buy Bitcoins with cash then it has no advantage over Proof of Stake anymore that I can see.

These problems are just the philosophical surface issues I have with how things are playing out, there are some technical problems which are already well addressed by CPoS so I will not go into that.

No. Ignore him, he's just panicking and trying to solve something he's not qualified to solve. And while he's at it he's polluting an otherwise very interesting thread.

Not any 51% attack has happened recently: actually there was a concern about ghash.io total share of btc mining power which was fluctuating at the 40%-50% range recently.. As a result Bitfury dropped 1PH/s of its mining power from the ghash.io pool to cool off the threat and satisfy the concern.

Nxt might not be the most optimum PoS scheme which could be implemented theoretically (but which coin has the optimums so far?), anyway it is the first pure PoS working and that it is doing not partially but as we've seen in the past six months, enough satisfactorily.

Some people just like to speak, and to speak too much.. for proof reference you can have a look at mastercoin thread.
I am passionately following the OP's work and contribution in this thread, hope we could have less noise and nonsense here.

Why partially?

Holy crap. Is this true?

It was avarice which allowed Mt Gox to grow like that. I'm not usually someone who speaks out against greed because greed can be channeled into good or bad purposes. When greed leads only to centralization without promoting technological progress then can we accept that it's being channeled to a bad cause?

Mt Gox was not producing technological innovation, it wasn't even trying to be the most regulated exchange, it was just a nest of greed heads who were clinging to an obsolete centralized exchange technology. Exchanges were falling left and right yet people still put their money into Mt Gox and many of them were some of the richest early adopters of the Bitcoin community.

When Mt Gox first started delaying withdraws nothing changed immediately. When Mt Gox first got hacked we heard the same sorta "stay calm" rhetoric. Why should I listen to you now? The security of Proof of Work was based on the premise that a 51% attack is not feasible. It's now proven that a 51% attack is feasible and while you can tell us that it can be patched or prevented it doesn't change the fact that the vulnerability is in the design of the Proof of Work incentive structure itself.

You're going to keep having these sorts of problems until a hard fork switches things over. A hard fork will be necessary because the elites of the PoW Blockchain hierarchy are not going to want to give up their power. Those who would willingly give up their power for the sake of technological progress are truly on the side of technological progress. A transition has to occur and at this point it is clear that Proof of Stake is a better design for long term sustainability both environmental and socially.
CPoS hasn't been tested yet, I'll give you that. NXT, Peercoin, Blackcoin, all are partially working. Bitshares is in the testing phase right now and DPoS, CPoS, are both similar in a lot of ways. When Bitcoin was being worked on no one was sure it could work but the people who took a chance were rewarded. It resulted in a great technological breakthrough and progress. We have to continue pushing for technological progress in my opinion.

I'm not telling anyone to sell all their Bitcoins for any specific technology. I'm saying we should promote technological progress at every opportunity. Bitcoin is proven to have vulnerabilities in the design of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake is an alternative which might be able to solve it. CPoS could work as intended and if it does then there will be no rational reason to stick with PoW except avarice.


The whole premise of this thread is that Bitcoin needs to be upgraded. A hard fork is a way to do that if the core developers and entrenched interests wont support the idea. Of course I would rather see the core developers and companies like BitFury get behind the idea. I would like to see these companies begin funding development, where is BitPay? Where is Coinbase?

But I'm skeptical that anything will happen until something dramatic causes people to act. So I'm not posting to promote any FUD, only to share my own stance which you asked me to clarify.

I'm aware of PoW problems, but you were saying non-sensical things like we allowed "MtGox to become centralized". MtGox was just an exchange, and it was never decentralized. It's just a website! What do you expected Bitcoin developers to do about it?

Also, nothing changed when a pool reached 51%. If you didn't panic at 30% or 40%, why are you panicking now?

CPoS hasn't been proven secure yet, and other alternatives have been proven insecure.

If you are so sure PoS is secure, go ahead and sell your bitcoins for Nxt. But have you considered that a technology might not be "the most advanced" just because someone says so?

This thread is for research, not panicking, fudding, and complaining about the state of Bitcoin or its politics. Please keep it clean.

Bitcoin is not sustainable as a decentralized currency. Proof of Work does not and by design cannot scale until a day when each of us can make chips in our basement 3d printers. Since we aren't chip makers, the electric company, or the producers of hashing power, we must continuously buy or borrow hashing power from others. The producers of hashing power control the SHA-256 Proof of Work technology and with it they have obtained the ability to 51% attack. Due to the economics the pyramid can be expected to continue to become more steep over time as control winds up in fewer hands.

The 51% attack which happened this week is a warning sign to anyone paying attention. It's a red flag exactly like what we saw when Mt Gox was not processing withdraws. The time to push for a hard fork is right now because Proof of Work as Bitcoin is implementing it is obsolete. It's an incomplete solution compared to a more complete solution such as the Cooperative Proof-of-Stake CPoS or Delegative Proof of Stake DPoS. NXT has a solution as well and the specific challenge we have is to promote the best technologies even when it might not be in the best economic interests of entrenched elites of Proof of Work Blockchain hierarchies.

They got in their positions because they chose the most advanced technology and I don't see why they should entitled to keep their leadership position if they do not consistently choose the best technology. Progress should be more important than whether or not some miners can get rich. If I were them I would pull some of my money out of Bitcoin and put it into Proof of Stake or I would fund the development of CPoS to support the hard fork of Bitcoin.