Essex, I have three questions for you.
(i) What will prevent two or more people from double spending by using the same wallet.dat in two or more different geographic locations?In your whitepaper, you claimed that the Cluster protocol will automatically split blocks within the network according to geographic regions (undefined) and create multiple valid blockchains.
You further stated that sync blocks will be generated only once certain thresholds are reached. To me, this 'synch gap' creates a perfect environment for network-wide double spending.
(ii) What will prevent entities from creating blockchain forks within their own geographic region?Since the hashrate from individual geographic regions will be relatively small, a person or organization with a significant enough hashrate could easily create forks to facilitate double spending.
In addition, said entity could fool the protocol to allocate a geographic region for itself by spamming dusts to create the illusion of trade volume. In your whitepaper, you stated:
[...] we believe that the most important part of the clustering algorithm is to cluster large economic hubs that have a lot of financial activity in order to maintain fast transaction confirmation time.
As you can see, the threat is very valid.
(iii) Did you buy this Bitcointalk account?If yes, may I know your original Bitcointalk account?
If no, can you explain why your earlier posts consists almost entirely of asking for giveaways (wallet address + 'Thanks!' or 'Awesome'!)?
Your four months absence between post #147 and #148 also raises some questions.
First of all, I want to thank you for contributing to the coin development by asking valid questions.
i) wallet.dat file can be used in different regions/clusters but the balance in each region will be different (i.e. in each region there will be region-specific balance), so double spending will not be possible. It is possible to transfer funds across different regions but no using them at the same time twice
ii) creating a fork in a given region will not be simpler nor harder than creating a fork for any other crypto as in each region clustercoin behaves pretty much the same apart from synchronization blocks. We have seen many different coins, with big and small network hashrates, and forks are not created by attacks but typically by bad coin implementation. Although, the usual fork risk exists as with any other crypto, it is not bigger so it doesn’t seem to be a major point of concern.
iii) geographic regions will be created based on latency, not on transaction volume (potentially high transaction volume regions will be used as starting regions for clusters). Even if one of the clusters has been created by a group of nodes by collusion it is not clear how these nodes can benefit from having additional cluster. Whatever coins have been mined in their cluster would have to be transferred to another cluster (via sync blocks) and because per cluster block reward will be proportional to cluster’s hashrate (this is still one of possible solutions around this) it shouldn’t be profitable to engage in such activity.
lastly I didn't buy this account. I was experimenting with crypto back then, looking what others were doing. Away time was due to some rough time at my former job.
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