Topic: Bitcoin adoption: A technical challenge - page 3. (Read 885 times)

I don't think so.
Firstly, I can't classify most of the altcoins as being better than bitcoin, they are not! People are used to making wrong design choices. Let's take a look at the top of the list:
Ethereum with its universal machine is just a disaster, an exemplary case of a very bad design choice, state bloat will destroy it eventually let alone Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik who feel free to manipulate it because, they say, it is a project!
Ripple is not even a legitimate permissionless cryptocurrency and bitcoin cash is just a simple and naive fork of bitcoin.

I'm not aware of any alt deserving the label "better bitcoin" and it is absolutely understandable: you can't leave a great innovation behind in just a few years. It's time tho.

Secondly, I'm not proposing an altcoin, this project is about a sidechain as I've introduced it above thread. I'm thinking of a better version of bitcoin that co-exists with it as a sidechain, absorbing it gradually (one-way) while helping it by encouraging solo mining.

Whitepapers when done correctly can be the general information needed for a new concept or project but I would agree that when looking at the Bitcoin whitepaper its not very useful for beginners and thats what a whitepaper should be designed for. It should be a basic introduction to the concept and able to be read by everyone and not just technical Bitcoin users. This is why I have mentioned that ease of use is very important to adoption.

Creating a better Bitcoin has already been done to death and none of them have the success that Bitcoin has. Its not because they are not better than Bitcoin but because Bitcoin is known as the first cryptocurrency to gain momentum. Anyone else trying to replicate and add to Bitcoin will forever be known as altcoins and will not be as successful.

I'm not away from anything, WE are away. I'm doing my part and will continue doing it, what's yours?

I'm not a fan of whitepapers, it has been a while, in bitcoin and cryptocurrency whitepapers are neither white nor a paper, rather a colorful advertisement for running ICOs and making dirty money by scamming people and hurting bitcoin ecosystem.

I'll formalize core protocols in step #3 and Github repo is scheduled for step #5 as I've clarified above

To be crystal clear:

1) I'm not under any form of a contract, it is not a scheduled project with budget and time tables.

2) I won't do anything about it without a minimum of community support/contribution, why should I? After all, WE are in step #1 i.e. discussing outlines and finding more contributors.

Now my question: If we could have a better bitcoin in terms of scaling, decentralization and privacy without touching or hurting legacy bitcoin, without spreading FUD, without consuming legacy bitcoin resources while we are helping and strengthening legacy bitcoin, what would be your responsibility?
I mean other than naysaying and accusing peers of being incompetent or the project being vaporware?

OK. Then how many years away are you before publishing a whitepaper, or having a Github repo available for contributors, or a Proof of Concept?

NO!
I need you and everybody to be committed to the cause (bitcoin as an alternative monetary system) and take part in the project. Mining on the side chain is not an altruistic gesture, it is a business decision, we will come to this, not very soon tho. Other than you and other committed people, idealists, activists, and bitcoin enthusiasts I have audiences among other groups as well:

-Bitcoin whales/investors/hodlers who want bitcoin to be truly adopted by masses and prices to skyrocket.

-Hardcore programmers/hackers in this ecosystem who want an exciting really big project to contribute.

-Decent, old hand core devs who want bitcoin, their legacy, to shine even more without suffering from stupid forks and disappointing altcoin projects.

All of these groups SHOULD contribute and WILL do so. For convincing them, I don't follow the familiar but threadbare methods. Instead, I'm thinking of a step by step roadmap.

First step: I denounce hypes and myths regarding magical trade-offs, dilemmas, trilemmas and so on, proposed by junior programmers and people with poor knowledge in software engineering. For this, I'll incrementally give the outline of the project as far as it is necessary. This topic is started to help with this step.

Second step: I'll organize a ring, a sub-community of people who understand that a system with hundreds of times more throughput and thousands of times more resistance to centralization and ways better built-in privacy than bitcoin is achievable and is not theoretically impossible, unlike what is advertised and bought mostly by the community.

I'll start communicating with contributors to this topic, who show enough interest and alignment with the framework  and put as much time as needed for encouraging them to act, NOW!.

Third step: I'll publish my works in bitcointalk and in separate threads gradually. They include:

• An essay on the governance crisis in bitcoin it includes a formal description of Absorption my proposed solution for this crisis.
• A re-newed analysis of mining variance and pooling pressure in bitcoin and a thorough analysis of possible approaches to this problem.
• My scaling solution for bitcoin. it includes:
  
  • An innovative hierarchical state sharding model.
  • An Improved/organized yet open/permissionless relay network design.
  • An ultimate UTXO commitment model to support smart full-nodes able to migrate between shards in a fast and seamless fashion.
• A built-in coin mixer feature to enhance privacy in bitcoin substantially.

Fourth step: A mailing list will be started for finalizing a technical road map and choosing core technical staff.

Fifth step: Sharing code for core algorithms on Github, I'll actively participate in the implementation phase, taking care of the big picture and architectural issues.

Sixth and final step: System will be launched as a side chain.

In the final phase, we need campaigning to encourage solo mining in bitcoin that is now incentivized by rewards distributed in the sidechain. It is a very important point to keep in mind: This system will help bitcoin by offering a stable block reward in the sidechain to bitcoin solo miners helping them to be more resilient against the very high variance in the legacy chain. I can imagine a situation that rewards in the sidechain are covering the costs and small miners take it as the main source of income while patiently waiting for a hit in the legacy bitcoin chain. It would be just like buying a lottery ticket by a fraction of their income.

I see, so when you're asking for people to offer resources to support your project, you're talking about them mining a sidechain.  Not sure why you couldn't have just opened with that.

You are right about stability as a pre-condition for adoption but not regarding the need for a delay, nor for ease of use, I explain:

One of the most important factors behind my hesitation since the day I become convinced that there is a way to help with pooling pressure and then scaling in bitcoin was the governance problem: How should it be decided to change anything in bitcoin?
Some people (mostly scammers?) commit hard forks, others go after a brand new so-called altcoin while decent old hand devs are trying hacks and hooks to extend bitcoin, i.e soft forks.

In accordance with your arguments, I don't support forks (either soft or hard) or altcoins. I'm investigating a more decent approach: "absorption". It is about a one-way pegged side-chain that competes fairly with the legacy chain (while surprisingly is helping it to function better) and proving its superiority over time, gently "absorbs" users without hurting the legacy chain. It deserves a separate article, I see, but there are more articles to be written regarding this project, let's have this topic: "How and when we should make a move?" postponed for a while.

This topic we should rather focus on the core ideas about decentralization, scaling and privacy, IMO. As of "ease of use" I've discussed it above thread:
If there was enough adoption it would have been solved now, boosting more adoption.

@Domad, @WIND_FURY,

Just relax, I'm not hired by anybody to do anything about bitcoin, I'm just trying to share my ideas in a top-down approach. It is because I did it bottom-up for PoCW and I got nothing, people came and asked for high-level discussions, now I have progressed even more in my work and I'm trying to present it this way, just relax and wait for more to come, you are not losing anything, it is my time, my budget and my nerves, ok? 

That proposal is abandoned by me because, in the process of implementation, I realized that there are opportunities for taking care of the scaling problem as well and surprisingly this is how we can implement the core idea of PoCW. It is exemplary as the first alternative to Nakamoto's winner-takes-all PoW design, as far as I'm aware.

In PoCW miners compete for transaction fees in the first phase and the block that has won the race is chosen by subsequent shares that are generated by miners committing to it more and more.

In the original design, there was a finalization phase in which rewards should have been distributed, later I found a way to eliminate this phase by leaving this duty to the next block. I didn't edit the original article for historical reasons neither published a new version. The whole idea is now merged into a new work.

you can check this link for details:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/getting-rid-of-pools-proof-of-collaborative-work-4438334


No, they don't! It is true for super matured technologies or basic nature rules but not for bitcoin. Winner-takes-all was a wrong choice from the first day, Satoshi didn't care because he was not ready for developing a system that is supposed to live forever, imo, he was just releasing a proof of concept and you don't wrap a concept in a sophisticated multi-layer architecture like what we have to do for a collaborator-takes-share model.

There is no reason behind such a claim, changes imply trade-offs, just analogies, and presumptions about how GREAT bitcoin is.
To be clear: bitcoin is great but it is in its infancy, the fact that this system is so exciting shouldn't be an excuse for manipulating minds about trilemmas and trade-offs. You can't tell a child to do a trade-off and choose between growth in his knowledge and his brain or body.

They "say" that sharding has security implications because of the distribution of hash power but what if there is a workaround for this threat or other issues? Hierarchically sharding the bitcoin machine state is one such workaround. Now they may suggest centralization threat, yet there may be a workaround for this, actually, there is:

Suppose we have segmented the UTXO (IOW, bitcoin machine state) in just two layers a top layer (full state) and two odd and even segments. High-end full nodes may choose to maintain the state in the top layer and machines with less power should stay on either odd or even segments but does it lead to centralization of mining (we will be back to the centralization of full nodes later)? No, absolutely not. We could simply ask miners in any layer to do the same amount of work to prove their blocks, couldn't we?

Now, let's take a closer look at our simple 2 layers hierarchical sharding model and become even more surprised by figuring out that mining is not centralized and on the contrary, we have a more decentralized system! How? Just focus:

In our naive model, the difficulty is distributed between 3 segments and in each round, we are introducing 3 blocks with less merit to the network, these blocks cumulatively have the target difficulty, tho. Yes? But lower difficulty means better distribution of luck and it is what we desperately looking for to keep the network decentralized: low variance, less pooling pressure, less need for pools.

Interestingly, we found ourselves in PoCW territory again. Defining a block generation round as being broken to small parts and accumulating the work done is the key to Collaborative Proof of Work. Only in the new model, the transaction space is partitioned and work is done more efficiently and in a smart way.

I'm aware that it is not a formal description or a proposal but it is more than enough for the purpose of this topic to convince the reader about one simple argument: Decentralization and scaling problems are neither paradoxical nor even substantially different problems and have one basic solution: Distribute the work!

As of fears about full-nodes (not mining) becoming centralized, one should be absolutely pragmatic:

1- We have UTXO commitment and pruning potentials for bitcoin, currently not unleashed, that can reduce cots of maintaining a full-node drastically but we have absolutely no idea to fix centralization of mining and getting rid of pools other than PoCW and this new version we are discussing here. So, the whole full-node issue is not on our priority list, actually, it is not a problem at all.

2- Costs does not grow linearly with UTXO size, anyway.

3- Bitcoin is and remains permissionless and it is up to the user to choose the level she wants her node to take part.

You'll have to pardon my skepticism, but this just sounds like more of the same vapourware from you.  You always have plenty of grand ideas, but nothing ever actually happens.  I suspect because your ideas are a little bit too grand for you to handle.  Start smaller.  No one else comes storming in claiming they can magically change a significant pillar of Bitcoin's reward mechanism without consequence and without a fork, so why do you think anyone is going to believe you when you say you can do it?

Mass adoption which is a good thing for Bitcoin should not happen to early thats why its not always a good thing when companies start accepting Bitcoin and that hits the news which can cause instability in the market. The ideal solution to the adoption which is needed in my opinion for Bitcoin to become what it was created for needs to happen after all major forks. Forks cause doubt and could hurt those that have adopted Bitcoin and having the mass adopt Bitcoin after most major forks will be the better long term solution. Forks can be complicated and cause instability which causes doubt from a average person that is using Bitcoin. We don't want Bitcoin to be only for the technically advanced members of society we want it to be easy to use for everyone and that is the biggest challenge of Bitcoin when it comes to talking abut adoption.

OK, then how many years away are you before you publish this "great idea" that will solve Bitcoin's problems? I believe you once posted that it's near, and that we should expect it?

can you provide a link to your paper on "collaborative proof of work"?


we think that way because changes imply trade-offs.

let's take your "hierarchical sharding" idea as an example. can you elaborate on that? because the consensus is that sharding is highly centralizing since it drastically reduces network redundancy.

OP made this thread Getting rid of pools: Proof of Collaborative Work.

@aliashraf you might want to mention relevant thread/posts that you've made


I don't see how technology could solve this problem, each solutions have different weakness which can exploited.

Besides, not all people see equitably/fairness as best way to solve problem.


I think Pmalek's point is current wallet is still complicated for older people, even though younger people finds it very easy to use.
I can't think any real solution besides having someone to teach them how to use it few times before getting used and feel the convenience.

ASICs are not part of the project, it is not too late for bitcoin to tackle ASICs though, but I'm not including an ASIC-resistant algorithm as part of the solution.

Collaborative Proof of Work (PoCW) which I published its idea a while ago was a preliminary example of how it is possible to have POW that is not based on winner-takes-all. I have merged the core idea with a scaling solution (based on hierarchical sharding) and it is working (conceptually speaking) fine. It is not about ASICs, has nothing to do with ASICs, it is about pools and mining variance.


I've discussed much of the parts of this project separately with some exceptions. And I don't think I've been talking too much about it, just once (maybe twice) I've shortly denounced the integrity of claims about bitcoin being trapped in Buterin trilemma, mentioning the existence of a project.

Usually, I don't talk about ideas, rather I think about them and when they show strength I work on them and once the work is matured enough I publish it. By matured, I mean having a state that people can read and contribute. Unfortunately, in this forum and bitcoin community, we are losing stem for contributing to projects, because they think it is about forks and alts.
On the other hand, recently, I have not enough time and resources to argue with shills, I want contributors and people committed to the cause.

Distribution of wealth is not bitcoin's main concern, decentralization of authority on money is. Socialist, Anarchists, ... should take care of the whole picture but decentralization of monetary system is a critical step for any form of justice, I suppose.


Ok, keep praying for that to happen, but I'm in a rush and I will take my shot, let's say good luck for both parties

BTW, It is not vague, it is just about the big picture: tackling centralization and scaling problems at the same time. We are used to thinking about each problem separately or worse, as a challenge for solving the other one. What if they both are phenomenons of the same flaw in bitcoin? Above thread I have introduced this flaw for the first time: winner-takes-all.

i rather think bitcoin core and their supporters are already doing that---or as close as possible to that, anyway.

you're speaking in (purposefully?) vague terms. i don't think you'll get much support without at least describing the sort of technical changes you're proposing.

I think that ease to use depends mostly in wallets.
There are some wallets like coinomi which can be very convenient and easy to use.
You can just scan the QR code to send funds. What could be easier than that?

The biggest problem imo lies in seed security, which most users are not used it yet.

If something is truly decentralized, everyone must be able to access it equitably. If everyone can access it, then rich people can access it. If rich people can access it, then they can also access most of it.

If you truly have a solution for this (which might exist but I certainly can't think of one), I'd love to hear more about it.

OP, you have been talking about your "great idea" that will "save" Bitcoin, but never have you showed us a Github repo, or a Proof of Concept. Or a whitepaper?

Can you elaborate on "collaborative proof of Work method"? How is it going to tackle ASIC monopoly in mining? As long as the mining algorithm stays the same, casual PCs will not be able to compete. Even if we all connect to some kind of pool, our accomplished work would be so tiny compared to all the ASICs, so reward would be too small to share among everyone who participated.
Changing the mining algorithm of Bitcoin to be GPU-friendly and ASIC-resistant is not realistic I think.

We need to accept that Bitcoin mining is rather centralised  and its not necessarily a bad thing. Network is very secured exactly because of enormous hashing power of all the ASICs.