Author

Topic: Bitcoin Capitalism vs Bitcoin Socialism and the inevitable death of Sunny King (Read 2043 times)

full member
Activity: 171
Merit: 100

My proposal maintains normal proof of work, but allows you to run it 24/7, on a single core with little power use.  People would leave it running all the time because they wouldn't want to miss out on any block reward while they're out of the house doing something.  There would be little reason to turn it off when you're only using a single CPU core, so the network distribution would be bullet proof, light years ahead of BTC.  Once you build an encrypted messaging client on top of that, it would really be something.  

Also, if you can use PoW without power consumption issues, there's no reason to use PoS.  It just brings unneeded complexity and annoyance.

it is your PoW  bringing unneeded complexity. PPC might be complicated I give you that (an hybrid mess) but 100% PoS is actually the easiest solution as it doesn't bring the PoW hardware issues in the equation.
lets say everyone in the world is given just one unique wallet and everyone for fairness gets awarded 100 starting coins on genesis block .
with PoS all people would need to do to "mine" the transactions and keep the system secure is be connected. that's all. from a mobile phone or whatever. like seeding on bittorrent.
 it's all done through stake comparisons.
obviously you cannot expect big returns...as most people will be connected most of the time to the network (expecially as the network will not just be "money" but packed with features or even a new decentralized internet) .....so you can only expect "profits" comparable to a saving account (3-4% yearly) at best.
to actually earn a living and increase your stash you will have to work (yes real work lol), commerce etc. you need to forget about mining as a job.
the sooner the cryptocurrency gets rid of the hardware based miner problem the sooner we will get to the ideal decentralized sustainable and fair crypto.


hero member
Activity: 770
Merit: 500
Twiki: BeedeeBeedeeBeedeeBeedee. I smell a rat.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
at least we have now several experiments going on, so it is interesting to see how this evolves.

Yea, the NEM coin (NXT fork) popped up 1 month after I made this post.  I believe a PoW system that issues unique wallet addresses, then caps mining rewards a day per address, is a much better solution than their whole deal with proof of stake + IPO.  You could also, instead of capping mining rewards per day by wallet address, go with a Kimoto difficulty system, then cap each client/wallet to the same amount of hashing power that connects to the network, so reward would be variable depending how many people get on.  There are just several more efficient ways to do things than how Bitcoin does now.

My proposal maintains normal proof of work, but allows you to run it 24/7, on a single core with little power use.  People would leave it running all the time because they wouldn't want to miss out on any block reward while they're out of the house doing something.  There would be little reason to turn it off when you're only using a single CPU core, so the network distribution would be bullet proof, light years ahead of BTC.  Once you build an encrypted messaging client on top of that, it would really be something.  

Also, if you can use PoW without power consumption issues, there's no reason to use PoS.  It just brings unneeded complexity and annoyance.
full member
Activity: 168
Merit: 100
nice post. you should read Marx some time if you haven't. it has actually surprisingly little to do with wealth-distribution or constructing a ideology. rather it is a very broad analysis of human production, capital and work. he has probably as much to do with soviet communism as Adam Smith has with capitalism. both never proposed a political system, but where used for justifications of them.

I see what your getting at. you're referring to a kind of party rule, where there  are intransparent of processes of group decisions. at least we have now several experiments going on, so it is interesting to see how this evolves.

http://youtu.be/yA2lCBJu2Gg
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
nice post. you should read Marx some time if you haven't. it has actually surprisingly little to do with wealth-distribution or constructing a ideology. rather it is a very broad analysis of human production, capital and work. he has probably as much to do with soviet communism as Adam Smith has with capitalism. both never proposed a political system, but where used for justifications of them.

I see what your getting at. you're referring to a kind of party rule, where there  are intransparent of processes of group decisions. at least we have now several experiments going on, so it is interesting to see how this evolves.
sr. member
Activity: 364
Merit: 250
Yet PPCoin is even more centralised than Solidcoin.

In Solidcoin there were 12 or so "trusted nodes", in PPC there are how many? Just one?

Same with all the garbage clones that ripped it off without correcting the centralisation and that mostly seem to go around pretending they are not centralised power-based but rather some kind of P2P network.

-MarkM-



You mean the clones that actually implemented the server checkpointing?

Because there are 'clones' that have specifically chosen to stay away from the central checkpoint server, accelerating the PoS block dominance over the PoW so that cpu miners can contribute to block chain security just as much as gpu miners...
legendary
Activity: 2940
Merit: 1090
Yet PPCoin is even more centralised than Solidcoin.

In Solidcoin there were 12 or so "trusted nodes", in PPC there are how many? Just one?

Same with all the garbage clones that ripped it off without correcting the centralisation and that mostly seem to go around pretending they are not centralised power-base but rather some kind of P2P network.

-MarkM-
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
To preface the article, I'm not a socialist, communist, etc.  The purpose of this post is to discuss coin generation, and how the currently, highly flawed PoS system relates to both capitalist and socialist models, and the pros and cons of each implementation.

First off, everyone has heard of the term Occam's Razor, except possibly Sunny King.  I feel like the current PoS method is an overly complex system, and a solution without a problem.  What exact problem does PoS attempt to solve?  51% attacks?  Power usage?  Miner incentives?

The term 51% attack is far more than a "technical problem" or "bug".  It's actually more of an ideological or philosophical problem and has to be treated as such.  You can broadly define the 51% attack as the allocation, or centralization, of exponential amounts of power for the benefit of whoever wields it.  Reread that statement a couple of times and you'll realize this is not a software problem, but an ideological problem that affects everything from government, to economics, academics, and anything else.

PoS identifies this as a system collapsing problem, and then attempts to code *around* the issue by implementing an overly complex system with what I'd call soft locks, instead of hard locking anyone out of doing it completely.  Sunny King, in effect, is giving you a virtual rule book that says centralization of power is bad, and you should not do it.  This is also, undeniably, in effect, a form of soft socialism.  Such wow.  I had no idea PPC was a commie coin.

This is the part where people should probably realize that everything isn't completely black and white, and Karl Marx wasn't actually wrong about everything he said.  The problem isn't that the PoS creators are using the lessons of Marx to design a coin.  The problem, as remarkable as it sounds, is that he probably didn't go far enough with the idea in order to create hard locks against the undesired results.  I will discuss more on that later in the page.

The next problem PoS tries to solve is the electrical power usage issue, which happens to be a direct product of the centralization of resource power above.  If people are allowed to collect and throw exponential amounts of power at a system for increasing personal reward, they will probably do so.  This is what drives people to buy faster and faster ASICs and GPUs, making power requirements and inefficiency very high, while also increasing centralization of power at the same time, as seen with entities such as cex.io.  As you can see, each problem is so directly interconnected, that you can't just code around them one at a time, you have to address them all at once.

The answers to these problems are probably not what most people want to hear, but a system of hard locks combined with Occam's Razor and the lessons Marx actually was right about, might be the only way to tackle the issue.  As mentioned earlier, Sunny King is already covertly using socialist principles to tell you centralization of power is bad, so this isn't exactly new territory.

The first step would probably be to not give out free, infinite numbers of wallet addresses.  If wallet addresses are scarce, and each person can only acquire one, you can then set global variables where no matter how much hashing power someone throws at a system, they aren't going to receive ever increasing rewards for their hording of power.  They can be capped to 0.000x% of total coin count per day (insert logical number of arbitrary zeros here).  You have just solved the bitcoin energy crisis, the 51% attack, and the cex.io centralization of power at the same time.

Since you're no longer in a contest to see who can build the largest computer, the proof of work system is now functional on low power hardware and energy use plummets.  This, in turn, also makes it so the system becomes more decentralized, since there will be an enormous web of low power hardware keeping it up, and things like cex.io will become non-existent.

Early adopters can still be rewarded over latecomers using the current halving block reward system, or block rewards can be linear.  The use of finite, or restricted wallet addresses to solve issues with Bitcoin is just an idea that I've never seen brought up before.  It brings up many variables and issues of it's own, such as privacy obviously, but there are solutions to that as well.

One of the worst case scenarios would be requiring submitting your ID to some kind of verification authority to receive a wallet address.  Even in worst case scenarios like this, you could still build some kind of mixing service into the client to facilitate more anonymous transactions.  You could possibly trade your less anonymous coins into a more anonymous system like Bitcoin, and then even use a mixing service there whenever you need to purchase an AR-15 off Silk Doge Road.

There are many possibilities for implementation in limiting wallet addresses.  They could be as simple as signing up for an email site and an automated phone call to your number from the site.  Or it could be as restricted as linking your wallet to a Coinbase account.  There are many dangers in having authority figures determine who can and can't spend or earn money, so  I'm not advocating a replacement to Bitcoin, only possible, new ideas for coin implementations better suited to solve problems PoS can't.
Jump to: