Topic: Altcoin Concept, Come Poke Holes in My Idea (Read 946 times)

Alright then.

I should also state in this thread somewhere seeing as it would keep popping up if more people would come and give their opinion that I think a de-centralized coin using only its own coin with the main purpose of the coin to provide said storage cant possibly work due to the snake eating its tail thing, The service could generate their own tokens to be paid to miners, but customers should be using an existing coin (Bitcoin, Dash, Monero) that is then given to the miners based on how many tokens they have "mined".

So everyone else (if anyone) reading this thread thinks proof of storage is impossible and proof of work is the only way to run a blockchain?

The Sybil attack is Evan Inc pretending the voting is decentralized. Voting is always centralized whether we lie to ourselves or not about that Iron Law of Political Economics.

If you were to validate the owners of masternodes, the validation would still be centralized and thus corruptible unless it was objective (but even face recognition doesn't prove someone didn't rent their face to another owner).

So is Dash's treasury voting system susceptible to one of these Sybil attacks?


The providing of the storage is just supposed to be a side effect of the securing of the system, ie, instead of wasting heaps of electricity like Bitcoin this one happens to "waste" storage and internet capacity, but, people can use the "wasted" storage and internet capacity.

Because all the storage would be auctioned, the price would just be whatever the people are willing to pay.

Iamnotback insists that its impossible to use proof of storage instead of proof of work to secure the chain though, and I dont know enough to know for sure whether he is right or wrong, so......

I think that the basic client-server model is keeping it as simple as possible when it comes to serving content on a large scale. Such a network would require extensive testing and user support in order to grow and be developed gradually. In the end, regular servers would end up being more reliable too. I can't think of too many use-cases that would need such a network to make sure that there'd be demand for such a thing.

Oh yeah it is just as simple as "validation". Lol. Sorry I am not going to explain Byzantine agreement to you.

Welcome to centralization, scams, and whales.

You'll be learning...

Now, before you want to strangle me, I will say upfront I dont fully understand Sybil attacks, but:

I went to a very good technical advice website (Wikipedia) and they say that Sybil attacks can be prevented by validation techniques. So I just need some of those. Voting must be possible otherwise things like Dash's treasury voting system would be Sybil attacked, right? or is Dash's treasury vulnerable to Sybil attack but noone bothers?

Read more carefully:


That you don't understand the full implications of the relevance of the above, indicates you don't have the domain knowledge you need. And I don't have the time to teach you.

Im sorry but im not 100% ready to give up on it yet lol..

What if we dont think of it as a bitcoin style "blockchain" but more a distributed ledger (as I believe Ripple is?)

You wouldn't send me a log of your ping, X number of randomly selected nodes would send me a log of their attempts to ping you, and if 99% of them say they cant, then your down and thats recorded. just the same as X number of randomly selected nodes will attempt to download the data that is supposed to be stored on your system, if they all come back to the network and say the data isnt there or its corrupted, then you are not hosting the data you say you are.

You probably haven't been researching blockchain tech for 4 years as I have. Also I am a programmer since age 13 and you say you aren't a programmer. I am now ~52 (and my photo is recent).


Please I don't have available time to keep breaking your naive/neophyte ideas again and again. But really I can. (sorry not trying to be condescending, just stating a fact)

Blockchain technology is very complex. You don't have enough domain knowledge to know when you ideas are violating some inviolable principle.


Work is objective in that if I send you a PoW solution, you can independently verify it by doing a computation (even 100 years from now).

If I send you a log of my ping, you can't verify it was not a lie.


I presume you have more productive use of your time than wasting it.

To give you some perspective, I sat on my sofa for months and thoughts of ideas. There is rarely a new idea I see which isn't some variant I didn't already think of. Even for example HumanIQ's entire whitepaper was an idea I've been sitting on for a year.

And I am not the only one who has been doing such deep thinking. I highly doubt a neophyte can come teach us something about a design we didn't think of. It does happen rarely. I know it took me several months or more of deep study to come up to basic level speed on blockchain technology. And more years to become semi-expert.

Neophytes can often make very insightful suggestions though on individual features, marketing insight, etc.. But in terms of blockchain economics and consensus algorithms, I highly doubt it.

Proof of Storage coin

Points (not coins) are issued by the network based on the following formula:

-1 point = 1gb hosted for 1 month.
-Any downtime (detected by pinging) reduces profit 10x (ie, if your mining machine is down for 1 day, you lose 10 days worth of profit for that uptime month). Ping checks are performed every 15 minutes, you need to fail 2 to be considered "down". Thus you can install an update and restart without "down time".
-100% of your "storage" has to be downloadable by the network within 1 hour, tested by the network randomly 4 times per month (uptime month of 30 days, not calendar). If you fail this test your profits over this period are reduced by double the amount of failed download, eg, you are hosting (mining with) 4gb of space, a random download attempt occurs and only 90% of the 4gb is downloaded, then your profits are reduced by 20% untill the next random download test.
-When you start mining you do not receive profit for the first uptime week of 7 days (this is to stop people that had some downtime simply creating a new miner on a new wallet straight away)
- Miners are also rewarded the transaction fees of the network, spread evenly to the miners based on points earned in the last 24 hours.
- Proof of Monitoring: You will receive unique codes every 2 hours or so. Entering this code into the mining software will increase your points by .1% for 30 days. This effect stacks so if you enter every code correctly for 30 days and then keep doing it you will then be earning +72% coins.
-1 point per customer gb downloaded from miner (so data downloaded but not including the rubbish data to fill empty space or the network speed testing data). This does mean that 2 miners with the same amount of share could end up earning different amounts of the coin just because they happen to have more or less frequently accessed files on their storage, but, oh well, life isn't fair is it .

Coins are issued at a fixed rate per given time period, and distributed based on a simple ratio, ie, if you earned 1.5% of the points on the network you get 1.5% of the coins.

Use of the storage:
The idea of the coin is just the same as an other cryptocurrency, just using proof of storage instead of proof of work or proof of stake, to get some real world use out of the "security". Unlike "Burst" the storage could be used for useful things.

People would "buy" storage using the coin, this would be done via an auction system held every 10 minutes or so. The auction would be priced as 1gb per 30 days storage. Upon winning the auction the purchaser would then have the next 10 minutes or so to indicate how much storage they wish to buy at that price, up to a cap of a certain percentage of the remaining free space (1% or so probably) If a buyer wins an auction the space is available to them from that point in time for 30 days. If the same buyer then wins the next auction and selects the same amount of storage, the contract changes to the same amount of space but for a length of 60 days. This can continue until they have a 6 month contract or another buyer wins.

Storage on the system would be encrypted, and have multiple redundancy. The level of redundancy would be chosen buy the data purchaser.

Any "free" space on the network would be filled by junk, so if someone is hosting 2tb of data, then 2tb will be consumed on their hard drive regardless of space utilization in the network.

Now this is the important (and I think clever) bit:

Fees paid by purchasers of storage are NOT given to the miners, but are BURNED.

This should, theoretically, stabilize the price of the coin. If the value of the coin is low, more coins are spent to buy storage, thus more coins are burned, thus total supply shrinks.
If the value of the coin is high few coins will be spent on purchasing the storage, thus the coins given to the miners will far outweigh the amount burned and the supply will increase.

Increased adoption of the coin should not increase the value of each coin substantially, but will increase the total supply of them.

Blockchain Cleaning (I have no idea if anything below is remotely viable or technically possible)

Unlike Bitcoin where every transaction ever created is stored this would have the following cleanups:

When creating a new wallet, it would cost 1 coin (the first coin put into it would be burned). Any wallets remaining empty for more than 90 days would be forgotten.

If a wallet does not make any transaction in 100 consecutive 30 day periods it is forgotten

Every so often (few months?) the regular chain stops, assesses which coins are in what wallet, reaches a consensus, creates a new genesis block and automatically assigns all those coins back to those wallets, and starts the block chain again with all old data (transactions) removed from the system

Yep, I realized you are right here, noone will ever have incentive to mine as the coins mined will always be worth less and less due to reducing hardware prices etc. So theres a fatal flaw right there.

Cant believe I didnt think of that 2 days ago.

I think I can fix this aspect though. When you "mine" instead of earning "coins" you earn "points". Coins are issued at a fixed amount per month (or per day or per minute whatever) (regardless of network size) and are given to miners based on how many points they earned in that month.

We still burn the coins used to pay for storage, thus the price of the coin can go up due to limited supply, but as the price of the coin goes down more will get burned helping to support the price.

I dont quite understand why we cant prove storage, upload speed, uptime etc, dont we just ask random nodes in the network to try it, and if if nodes cant ping or download from the other node then its down, or lying about its capacity? If we can prove work, me must be able to prove storage.... I feel confident in that somehow lol.

Anyway my idea for the coin is all broken and spread out now so i'm going to write a new post that re-summarizes it

In addition to my prior critique of "proof-of-storage", I see some additional flaws in the idea expressed as quoted below:


None of these quoted are objectively provable to the public-at-large, i.e. on a blockchain. For example, proof-of-storage can work from the perspective of the owner of the data to be stored, but not from a public perspective.

Network performance can't be proven. This is one of the fundamental reasons we have to deal with Byzantine fault tolerance on networks. How do you prove to a blockchain that the ping time you measured was accurate. You can't. How do you prove downtime. You can't. If you say voting, then you have Sybil attacks on voting. Byzantine agreement can't remain unstuck without a hardfork or whales. Etc..

Sorry this is entirely impossible. It violates the basic research and fundamentals. Much more detail is in my unpublished white paper wherein I start from first principles and try to explain these fundamentals (but ends up being far too much to summarize to laymen, so I don't know if that version of the whitepaper will be the one I end up publishing).

So this is what I mean with my criticism that proof-of-storage can't even really work well even for file storage in the Storj model where each user encrypts the data to be stored (in multiple variants), because it is impossible to insure fungible performance for the data retrievability.


Burst is a flawed shitcoin and I had long ago explained precisely why. But nobody listens to me, so I often don't bother to explain any more. Everyone ends up hating me, because almost every project in our ecosystem is a flawed shitcoin. So much better I will STFU.


It is an interesting idea conceptually, but afaics the economic and mathematical relationship is not sound.

For example, in order to bring the token supply down considerably via burning fees, we may need more supply of storage to accommodate enough spending. Yet supply would leave if the price is too cheap. So the system diverges instead of converging as you assumed.

From the Storj website: https://storj.io/faq.html#faq-3-4


Its a similar problem Bitcoin has with electricity being cheaper in certain countries. It would be interested to know what is more globally consistent, electricity prices or internet bandwidth (i currently have no idea)

I don't know any easy ways to fix the problem, I don't know if its feasible to limit miners based on geographic location, ie any one country can only have a maximum of 20% of the total coin generating capacity of the network or any physical address can only have 1 server that is capped in size at a percentage of the total network or something.

VPN's could bypass this but then they would have to pay for double internet fees so, if any system can viably geographically limit mining then its probably this one.

Maybe the problem cant be fixed and like bitcoin it would mostly end up in the hands of large miners.

Maybe that babysit thing combined with a limit on node size based on total nodes or average node size could prevent it all becoming centralized because if anyone tried they would have to run around constantly entering in codes.


I think there definitely needs to be some penalty for downtime. Maybe 10 to 1 penalty is too harsh, but if its distributed enough it may not be. Maybe a 2 to 1 penalty would be sufficient its hard to say on an imaginary coin

I see.

I don't think Storj is slow, I didn't check but I'd imagine files encrypted into tiny bits pushed to many nodes (plenty of redundancy) it should be super fast to download them.

Problem is, prioritizing bandwidth simply means it's pointless to bother for people on home computers, only on rented/owned servers with proper bandwidth which means it will be quite centralized. More centralization (fewer miners with bigger bandwidths instead of more home miners with small bandwidth/storage) will also possibly limit redundancy.

Thing is, storage is cheap and bandwidth is expensive. Anybody can add another cheap HDD to their computer and contribute to the network but many people can't get faster internet. Many many home users with small individual bandwidth I think is preferable over a few rented/owned servers and the way you imagine the system to work heavily prefers servers. But of course it's your vision.

The DDoS problem can be easily avoided with less harsh penalties. Miners could just get paid in a linear fashion based on how many days or even hours they were online with frequent, random short speed checks to avoid miners with intentional or otherwise limited bandwith. With enough redundancy miners with low uptime shouldn't be a problem and if files are broken into small, let's say 1MB encrypted bits scattered over the network (instead of 1GB which wouldn't make sense), low bandwidth home users shouldn't be an issue either.

And once again I forgot to add:

1 coin per customer gb downloaded from miner (so data downloaded but not including the rubbish data to fill empty space or the network speed testing data)

This does mean that 2 miners with the same amount of share could end up earning different amounts of the coin just because they happen to have more or less frequently accessed files on their storage, but, oh well, life isn't fair is it .

Agreed, but most "miners" in this intended system would be small scale, probably not worth it. If anything threat of DDOS would encourage de-centralization I think...

Alternatively some automatic IP changing software could be put in for people under DDOS attack maybe.

Anything can be DDOSed, I guess you just have to make it not worth it somehow, and i'm sure that somehow could be figured out.


Correct, A Bitcoin miners main expense is electricity, in Burst its HDD space, in this it would almost definitely be internet connectivity.

Storage is no good if it cannot be accessed. Mining will be an inconvenience to miners, no doubt, but thats kind of the point.

The 1 hour thing was just something I made up without thinking too hard about it, it could be tweaked to 2 hours, or 12 hours, but I think the focus would be more on speed than total size, so I still think 1 hour seems about right.

Remember the point of this coin is to be a currency backed or secured by storage, storage is not the "main goal", but instead of just wasting electricity (Bitcoin) or space (Burst) its being put to productive use.


Dont forget I said:
- Ping checks are performed every 15 minutes, you need to fail 2 to be considered "down". Thus you can install an update and restart without "down time".

This gives you 15-30 mins downtime with no penalty.

I think most miners mining most coins at the moment use dedicated machines with very low downtime, so, I dont think downtime will be the biggest issue for miners (that will be internet connection speed)

I dont know how/if cleanup would work either, its totally possible it wont.

Miners wouldn't HAVE to babysit, in fact with the best reward only being a 70% increase I really dont think most would bother. The idea behind the "Babysit" is that their storage is being actively monitored thus if it goes down its more likely to go back up more quickly, thus its more valuable. I think the biggest issue with the babysit thing is that it encourages centralization instead of decentralization. I'm still very open to being told that the babysit idea is a bad idea.

Storj is very different to this. Storj is purely a coin for storage, its not intended as a general cryptocurrency I dont think. Also, we dont know yet how exactly the miners are going to be paid, but we do know that there is a hard cap, thus its more likely I think for big price fluctuations than this is with its automatic coin circulation regulator.

I dont believe Storj currently has decentralized way of purchasing storage either at the moment, though its probably their intention. Will it be an auction based system like this? I dont think we know yet.

Compared to this coin I think Storj would be a LOT cheaper per GB of storage, but access to it would end up being a lot slower.

Such harsh penalties practically beg for people to DDoS the competition once a month.


That means you need 291.27 KB/s (or 0.284 MB/s) per every GB data you store. Bandwidth therefore would be waaaaaaaaay more important than storage size. I mean 1TB is not much today but that would require 290.81 MB/s (2.32 gigabit/s) which is ridiculous. Also, topping upload speed for one hour without limitation can be super annoying (it would lag everything else). Imo transfer speeds should never reach 100% or even 90% for long periods of time. And with a lot of redundancy, it wouldn't be required for someone to upload gigabytes of data fast.


Similarily to point 1, people will have downtime. Unless they use a server environment - which this idea of a coin seem to highly favor.


Regarding the regular cleanup of unused addresses, I'm not sure how that would work but that probably introduces a whole array of problems. I leave that to someone smarter.

I'm not sure why miners would have to closely monitor stuff so that 2 hours or so required babysit sounds like useless annoyance. I mean the system should be automated.

Basically, I think StorjShare already does everything better than this imaginary coin.

Oh I forgot to add:

Proof of Monitoring:

You will receive unique codes every 2 hours or so. Entering this code into the mining software will increase your profit by .1% for 30 days. This effect stacks so if you enter every code correctly for 30 days and then keep doing it you will then be earning +72% coins.

*update*

Idea above fails due to noone ever having incentive to mine. Idea updated in post 10
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17990290







Firstly, I cannot code so this is not something I will ever develop.
Secondly, I am new to cryptocurrency so there will probably be massive issues with this idea, thats why i'm posting, to find out what they are.

Anyway, basic concept:

Proof of Storage coin

Coins are issued by the network based on the following formula:

-1 coin = 1gb hosted for 1 month.
-Any downtime (detected by pinging) reduces profit 10x (ie, if your mining machine is down for 1 day, you lose 10 days worth of profit for that uptime month)
-100% of your "storage" has to be downloadable by the network within 1 hour, tested by the network randomly 4 times per month (uptime month of 30 days, not calendar). If you fail this test your profits over this period are reduced by double the amount of failed download, eg, you are hosting (mining with) 4gb of space, a random download attempt occurs and only 90% of the 4gb is downloaded, then your profits are reduced by 20% untill the next random download test.
-When you start mining you do not receive profit for the first uptime week of 7 days (this is to stop people that had some downtime simply creating a new miner on a new wallet straight away)
- Ping checks are performed every 15 minutes, you need to fail 2 to be considered "down". Thus you can install an update and restart without "down time".
- Miners are also rewarded the transaction fees of the network, spread evenly to the miners based on earning.

Use of the storage:
The idea of the coin is just the same as an other cryptocurrency, just using proof of storage instead of proof of work or proof of stake, to get some real world use out of the "security". Unlike "Burst" the storage could be used for usefull things.

People would "buy" storage using the coin, this would be done via an auction system held every 10 minutes or so. The auction would be priced as 1gb per 30 days storage. Upon winning the auction the purchaser would then have the next 10 minutes or so to indicate how much storage they wish to buy at that price, up to a cap of a certain percentage of the remaining free space (1% or so probably) If a buyer wins an auction the space is available to them from that point in time for 30 days. If the same buyer then wins the next auction and selects the same amount of storage, the contract changes to the same amount of space but for a length of 60 days. This can continue until they have a 6 month contract or another buyer wins.

Storage on the system would be encrypted, and have multiple redundancy. The level of redundancy would be chosen buy the data purchaser.

Any "free" space on the network would be filled by junk, so if someone is hosting 2tb of data, then 2tb will be consumed on their hard drive regardless of space utilization in the network.

Now this is the important (and I think clever) bit:

Fees paid by purchasers of storage are NOT given to the miners, but are BURNED.

This should, theoretically, stabilize the price of the coin. If the value of the coin is low, more coins are spent to buy storage, thus more coins are burned, thus total supply shrinks.
If the value of the coin is high few coins will be spent on purchasing the storage, thus the coins given to the miners will far outweigh the amount burned and the supply will increase.

Increased adoption of the coin should not increase the value of each coin substantially, but will increase the total supply of them.

Blockchain Cleaning (I have no idea if anything below is remotely viable or technically possible)

Unlike Bitcoin where every transaction ever created is stored this would have the following cleanups:

When creating a new wallet, it would cost 1 coin (the first coin put into it would be burned). Any wallets remaining empty for more than 90 days would be forgotten.

If a wallet does not make any transaction in 100 consecutive 30 day periods it is forgotten

Every so often (few months?) the regular chain stops, assesses which coins are in what wallet, reaches a consensus, creates a new genesis block and automatically assigns all those coins back to those wallets, and starts the block chain again with all old data (transactions) removed from the system


So thats it,

Where have I gone wrong?