Topic: [ANN] NeuCoin's 40-page white paper rebuts all nothing at stake objections (Read 1677 times)

Neucoin Deposits open on Cryptsy! Welcome Neucoin miners and traders. https://www.cryptsy.com/

Do you have a trustless escrow?

We also just released important news about our presale which will start on April 28:

• 100 million NEU to be offered in exchange for BTC
• Price starts at $0.01 per NEU and increases by 1% per day
• Presale ends after 60 days or when the 100 million tokens have been sold

All proceeds from the presale will be held in escrow until the NeuCoin cryptocurrency is launched, expected to happen in July. (If the launch does not occur by September 30, all presale purchases will be refunded). Following launch, all proceeds will be distributed among NeuCoin?s three Isle of Man-based, non-profit foundations - the Code, Growth and Utility Foundations - and will be used, along with cash remaining from NeuCoin?s strategic angel round, to fund core development, consumer marketing and projects that increase the utility of the cryptocurrency.

The initial price of $.01 per NeuCoin is two times the price paid over the past year by NeuCoin?s strategic angel investors (in cash) and NeuCoin?s founding team. However, all the NeuCoin sold to angels and retained by the founding team can only be sold or used at the rate of 2%/month during the year after launch, 3%/month during year two, 4%/month during year three, 5%/month during year four, and 6%/month during year five. These re-sale restrictions were put in place to ensure that the founding team and strategic angels are committed to the successful development of NeuCoin over the long term.

The main purpose of the presale is to enable the broader crypto community to join NeuCoin?s own community:

• A founding team who have launched several consumer-facing internet companies that have reached tens of millions of users in the music, gaming and shopping spaces. See bios here: http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#team
• Strategic advisors that include Patricke Stymne, co-founder and Chief Architect of King (Candy Crush Saga), Alex Norstrom, Head of Growth of Spotify, Jackson Palmer, creator of Dogecoin, Michael Witrant, core developer of Peercoin, and Brock Pierce, crypto financier and member of the Bitcoin Foundation
• NeuCoin's strategic angels, invited to invest based on their ability to forge partnerships and help drive consumer adoption, include the SVP of Business at Uber, the President of Hotwire, the Head of Growth at Facebook, Producers of television shows American Idol and X-factor, and dozens of other top tech, media and VC executives and entrepreneurs. List of angels here: http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#angels

The initial presale price of $.01 equates to a market value of $30 million for the total supply of 3 billion NeuCoins that will exist at launch. However, at a price of $.01, it is worth noting that coinmarketcap.com (the popular digital currency pricing information provider) will initially indicate NeuCoin?s market cap at just $1 million - because the only NeuCoin available for sale at launch will be the 100 million NeuCoins sold in the presale. Moreover, as shown in the chart below, the vast majority of all NeuCoin at launch will be held by NeuCoin?s foundations, which will use their NeuCoin assets to increase the utility and value of the cryptocurrency over time.

Proceeds from the NeuCoin token presale, along with cash remaining from the angel investors, will cover the foundations? expenses during the year after launch. The foundations? main objectives for year one are the following:

• One million or more consumers using NeuCoin for online micropayments
• Hundreds of quality content providers accepting NeuCoin micropayments
• Integration with leading exchanges in all major geographic markets to enable easy access to NeuCoin for consumers worldwide

As an incentive to learn more and get involved, the NeuCoin foundations are offering up to 2,500 NeuCoins to those who read NeuCoin?s Strategic Plan (http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/) and share their opinions through a questionnaire available from the Strategic Plan page. These would be additional to any NeuCoins you earned if you completed the earlier survey.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Hi memai!
You can earn NeuCoin either by:

1. Taking part in our White Paper Bounty program, all the details are available here: http://forum.neucoin.org/t/white-paper-bounty-program/314
2. Answering a questionnaire about our Strategic Plan, you can earn up to 2,500 NeuCoins by taking it. You can access it from our home page: http://www.neucoin.org/en/

Let me know if you have any questions!

I have made a quick review, happy to discuss with anyone who cares:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11021463

Well I've got blackcoin staking on my laptop as it uses minimal resources and I could probably run many staking wallets without noticing. There's no special hardware or software needed unlike with PoW so even if people only have a few coins there isn't much of a barrier to them staking. The biggest reason people wouldn't stake there coins is probably that they keep them on exchanges.
Anyway the current money supply according to my wallet is 74841336 and the number of coins being staked on the network is 9444499.
Also this means I'm running a full node verifying blocks as this is the only way to stake. PoW coins provide no incentive to run a full node as far as I can see.

Any giveaway or bounty for NeuCoin at the moment ?

Thanks !

Hey,

We're trying to spark a debate on proof-of-stake versus proof of work on bitcoin's subreddit. (NOT focused on neucoin)

Feel free to join and help get proof-of-stake back on the map!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/30t3k4/proofofstake_is_more_decentralized_efficient_and/

I think a problem with the paper is that it offends PoW people as well as PoS people.
PoS guys are mainly offended because NeuCoin cherry picks other PoS system when comparing to their solution, although nothing is really new besides their coin distribution scheme. Moreover credits are missing where properties and ideas are copied and the reference list is just ridiculous.

As much as I like the effort I believe that they should do the homework first and then write two papers: a scientific paper rebutting PoS attack vectors and a second "paper" wanting to sell the advantages/properties of NeuCoin.

ATM expectations not met - mark: scammy...

Do you plan on properly crediting NuBits creator/architect Jordan Lee (and NuBits core developer sigmike) with this solution?

From Jordan Lee:


Source: https://discuss.nubits.com/t/neucoin-is-a-bitcoin-alternative-designed-for-microtransactions-2-25musd-in-funding/1351/3

Here Here..!

1) Much is made of the 'wasted' and 'costly' electricity used to run the POW mining rigs.. People seem to think this number can increase 'INDEFINITELY' and somehow consume ALL the power in the whole world. This simply is not the case. The miners will spend what they can make from mining, they can't spend more.. or go out of business. The Market will determine what this will be. Personally, I really don't see it as an issue, at all.  

POS queries..

2) What if all the coins in a POS system are distributed evenly, yippee!, so that there are very few, if any, whales. Everyone thinks they have an insignificant amount, for mining purposes, but in truth they are ALL minnows. Who would mine ?  

3) If 10% of the stakeholders mine in POS, since I think 100% or even 50% seems unlikely, does that mean you need 5.1% to perform a 51% attack ?

4) In POS, can energy be expended searching more chain branches to find a valid chain on which you make more money ? If this is the case, won't future miners just spend money and expend energy until they spend slightly less than 1 block makes (same as POW) ?

..

Good Luck NeuCoin!

yeah, I agree reddit is also a good place for this type of discussion

I'm still hoping we can have an honest discussion on nothing at stake! 

I think a lot of guys on Reddit still bleat about Nothing at Stake, might be worth posting there too.

Don't expect any reasoned arguments though, just PDFs of opinion of others (you know who, two attempts and still nothing concrete in his work )

The NeuCoin Project just released its technical white paper: “NeuCoin: the First Secure, Cost-efficient and Decentralized Cryptocurrency”. It is available as a PDF version on this link: neucoin.org/en/whitepaper

We hope that this white paper will spark the first honest and fact-based debate on the pros and cons of the two main consensus mechanisms used in peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies: proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. Bounties will be awarded for constructive feedback, see below for details.

Our white paper gives an in-depth analysis of the following elements:

Bitcoin faces mounting problems: mining consolidation, higher transaction fees in the long run if transaction volume doesn’t scale dramatically, and a misalignment of interests between corporate miners and Bitcoin holders.

The Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism solves these problems thanks to two major changes:

• It rewards miners based on number of coins owned rather than amount of electricity and computing resources spent - effectively replacing the operating costs of proof-of-work mining with the capital costs of holding coins;
• Mining rewards are proportionate to number of coins owned and time held, making them akin to “interest payments” on the miner’s coin holdings.

Thus far, Proof-of-Stake has been dismissed by much of the crypto community based on the umbrella objection that there is “nothing at stake.” What is meant is that since proof-of-stake mining does not consume any outside resources (electricity, computing power), miners have no costs, so nothing prevents them from endlessly trying to commit double-spends, or mining on multiple branches, no matter how low the odds of success. Since there is “no cost” to behaving maliciously, proof-of-stake systems are unsecured and can’t even reach consensus. They ask, “how can you have security without paying anything for it?”

What proof-of-work proponents are neglecting to see is that proof-of-stake security does have a cost: the capital cost of acquiring and holding coins. The brilliance of proof-of-stake is that it turns all coin owners into security providers, and requires any would-be attacker to purchase a large amount of the currency to attempt an attack, which would be an attack on his own wealth.

Besides ignoring the reality of capital costs, proof-of-stake critics are also prone to depicting scary-sounding attack vectors against proof-of-stake - grinding through the blockspace, rewriting history with old private keys, long-range, pre-programmed double spends - without explaining the details of how these attacks would be conducted or demonstrating mathematically that they have more than an infinitesimal chance of success. The truth is, these attack vectors do represent valid areas of concern, so it is interesting to ask why the critiques are always theoretical and never concrete.

Perhaps by leaving the critiques abstract, without even mentioning Peercoin, NXT, Bitshares, or Blackcoin, etc., with all their different parameters, the point is made that proof-of-stake’s “nothing at stake” flaw is fundamental and nothing can be done to fix it. Or it could simply be that analyzing the odds of success of a given attack vector against a specific proof-of-stake implementation isn’t worth the effort. Besides, none of the existing proof-of-stake coins have published substantial rebuttals to the various critiques.

NeuCoin’s design answers the “nothing at stake” argument

To choose the parameters and features of its own design, NeuCoin began by researching and mathematically modeling all the potential attack vectors against a proof-of-stake cryptocurrency: double spends, history revisions, grinding attacks, and preprogrammed attacks. In the end, NeuCoin believes that it was able to architect a proof-of-stake design that defeats all these attacks and addresses all “nothing at stake” issues.

There are three critical elements to its design:

• High mining incentives: NeuCoin provides much higher mining rewards than existing proof-of-stake currencies in order to maximize the percentage of coins being mined at all times. The odds of success for all attack vectors in proof-of-stake are based on the percentage of staked coins that the attacker controls, so it is paramount to maintain a high percentage of all coins staking across time, which existing proof-of-stake coins fail to do. To further bolster mining participation, NeuCoin reduced minimum stake age to one day (from 30 days in Peercoin) and abandons the use of coin age as a factor influencing the probability of generating a block.
• Redesigned stake modifier: NeuCoin chose to adapt a version of BlackCoin’s stake modifiers, which floats over time, rather than use Peercoin’s design, which permanently fixes the stake modifier after the initial modifier interval. NeuCoin chose this design because Peercoin’s design is susceptible to preprogrammed long-range attacks. Moreover, the modifier interval and selection interval parameters were substantially adjusted to minimize the threat of grinding.
• Duplicate stake punishment: NeuCoin uses a client version developed by Michael Witrant aka “sigmike” (core developer of Peercoin and Technical Advisor to NeuCoin) that not only detects duplicate stakes so that honest nodes can reject them, but also punishes nodes that broadcast duplicate stakes by rejecting all blocks broadcast by the dishonest miner.

We hope to gather comments and questions from the crypto community as we consider this to be the first draft of our white paper. This work is meant to be useful for the crypto community as a whole and to highlight that there is a strong alternative to Proof-of-Work.

White paper bounty program:

NeuCoin bounties will be awarded by the NeuCoin Code foundation for all constructive input, both positive and critical, you will find details here: http://forum.neucoin.org/t/white-paper-bounty-program/
Valid contributions will be expected to be submitted at forum.neucoin.org