Topic: Communist Bitshares Wealth Redistribution IS THEFT! - page 15. (Read 28384 times)

N.B. I see you are a current delegate   Why am I not surprised Who is init? They appear to be running 7 of the delegates.


Is this Stanlarimer? stan.delegate.xeldal

I stepped back, I will come back to the second question later.

A,B,C,D,E...Z. However many you need can be done, majority will always win. If you end up on a minority chain, you are on a fork. To still have some coins of value, you have to rejoin the majority.

In my example, those who were hacked were left with 0 coins, naturally. They were trying to roll back so they could regain their x number of coins and the hacker was left with 0 instead. Network decided it wasn't its job to tidy up after sloppy security (simple password instead of 2FA was the cause IIRC) and continued on the original chain.


I switched to this question first


 

What I described here, even Bitcoin can do - it's called hard fork. BitShares just make it easier.  
In your example with Forge Version A and Version B - as I understand it's can be only 2 options at same time not Version A, B, C, D, E, right? If someone decide to move to Version B, but Version A will win, he need to goes back to Version A manually right?


All fees is destroying (tx fees, account and asset creation fees, margin calls fees, etc) http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/bitshares/2014/12/30/BitShares-Fee-Schedule-Explained

Delegates has pay rate from 0% to 100% (http://www.bitsharesblocks.com/delegates), 100% payrate is 50 BTS per produced blocks, 10% - 5 BTS, etc.

Delegates can change pay rate but only downwards, if delegate want get back 100% pay rate he should create new account at blockchain with 100% pay rate and ask shareholders to elect him again.

What you have described, any POS can do. Nxt has already done it after the BTER hack: Forge Version A if you want to accept the hack and move on, Forge Version B if you want to roll back so the hack never happened. Everyone got 720 blocks to decide.

The majority chose to accept the hack, decentralised decision making. It isn't a unique feature.

How do shareholders force the dev to write the hardforks? Can the dev be a delegate? Can any dev introduce a hard fork?

Finally we come to very interesting point  

As you probably know BitSharesX was merged with Votes and DNS to BitShares http://bitshares.org/bitshares-reloaded
Vote functionality can be used to vote for hard forks as described here https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=10150

As example, extension from 101 delegate slots to N slots or make this dynamic can be done in following steps:
1. Developers preparing hard fork with option 1 (N slots), options 2 (N1 slots), ..., options Y (dynamic slots), option Z (keep as is)
2. Everybody move to this version but hard fork will occurs at specific block and will be based on shareholders votes, if option Z will get most votes of shareholders - nothing will changes, if they vote for option 1, network will move to hard fork with N delegate slots, etc.

Again, only shareholders can make decision which way to go - not delegates. Shareholders votes for hard fork options (using their funds) in same way how they voted for delegates.

Do you know for sure? I would hope that it is the shareholders and not the delegates themselves. Or worse, just Dan Larimer.

But under what circumstances would delegates be in favour raising the cap? I assume additional delegates would dilute the income of the remaining delegates.

The comparison of BitShares to a public company was to demonstrate that unless you call a public company communist you cannot call BitShares communist and hence the propagandising basis of OP and much of this thread has been debunked, so I think it was productive to make that comparison.

This does not make BitShares centralized as 'Decentralized' and 'company' are not two mutually exclusive terms, that would be like arguing Bitcoin is centralized because the currencies preceding it were centralized.

Why 101 - I've briefly read the responses you were given, diminishing returns/profit/efficiency/quality vs. quantity/network analyzability - all valid reasons for why it's advantageous. This answer was particularly comprehensive - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10085453

Regards the mechanism for changing the 101 - I imagine shareholders would have to elect 51+ delegates who were explicitly in favour of raising the 101 number.
 

(P.s. Nxt has 9 devs in the core dev team Jean-Luc Picard, lyaffe, kushti, MrV777, mess, Yustas, HolgerD77, jones and ChuckOne
https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/core-dev-recognition-guide-and-donation-addresses/

Another team of devs joined a couple of days ago, but there are no details on them yet
https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/price-speculation/msg146291/#msg146291 )

@FandangledGizmo, putting communism aside, companies are not decentralized either so comparing bitshares to them is counter productive of your claim that "Bitshares is Decentralised". It is evidence of "Bitshares is a company".

As the cap/"just a number it's set at" on delegates can be changed and can even be dynamic, I asked "Why set a cap at all?"

I think I got three answers but I have another question first.


What is the mechanism for changing the cap from 101 delegates?

Those who held their PTS, or donated them to the project as recommended, wound up amplifying their stake by factors of 3x, 6x or even more.   Later they even got those PTS returned to them to sell or hold as future wild cards.  There has always been a clearly articulated growth path available to all and the only people who missed out are those who bailed prematurely, usually due to their own snap judgements or philosophical differences.  Everyone who followed the obvious recommended growth path has done very, very well.

You say posting a lot of links isn't helping.  I guess we could copy/paste their contents every time someone asks the same question, but that would just flood this forum with walls of content.   Surely you don't expect us to keep retyping the same explanations over and over again just for the fun of it?  You haven't even read the answers we did write out for you in this very thread, because you keep asking the same questions we have already answered.  

Our strategy is to work really hard on getting a good solid answer to recurring questions, publish it once, and help people find it. If following a link is too much trouble, the person wasn't really interested in learning the answer and there is no point in spoon feeding them.

One tl;dr spoonful anyway:  Colluding has no effect on network security until you get to 51% in which case it's called "the will of the stakeholders".  Any node(s) that get out of step get fired and the reputation that got them elected is burned.  They must start over and we know who they are.  Since delegate electability is tied to real-world reputations, sock puppets are not a worry. Reputation + certainty of discovery is what we have added to get the need for brute force nodes down and to make system security analysis practical.  We disagree that adding more nodes of unknown reputation is of any value whatsoever, much less when incremental cost is considered. Focusing on 101 notary employees is missing the source of decentralization.  All owners dynamically select those notaries so decentralization is among them, not the 101 pieces of machinery they choose to use at any point in time. As the owner of one single BTS token, I participate in selecting what globally distributed software the network will run in real time. Finally, we view all these arguments as moot.  We wish NXT great success.  We don't need to argue about its implementation.  We have nothing but good things to say about its developers.  BitShares is what it is.  It works. It can recover if it ever does break.  It is a fielded system and we are aggressively building on top of it.  People should ask if they find its services useful and if they think it will appreciate given its growing feature set, strong community and self-funding mechanism.  

Yes, if you run the NXT wallet consistently that will count as an active node.  The average is 257 nodes online and 307 currently online.  I would imagine the mass majority of these nodes are forging.


I would argue that "true decentralization" isn't based on the percentage of blocks forged by each node, but instead based on participants in the system.  It is the right of all forgers to be allowed to forge independently and forge in equal proportion.  The goal of "decentralization" isn't to evenly redistribute forging power to a select group of individuals.

Alexander Berkman correctly asserted this regarding Communism in 1927:

"The role of industrial decentralisation in the revolution is unfortunately too little appreciated... Most people are still in the thraldom of the Marxian dogma that centralisation is 'more efficient and economical.' They close their eyes to the fact that the alleged 'economy' is achieved at the cost of the workers' limb and life, that the 'efficiency' degrades him to a mere industrial cog, deadens his soul, kills his body. Furthermore, in a system of centralisation the administration of industry becomes constantly merged in fewer hands, producing a powerful bureaucracy of industrial overlords. It would indeed be the sheerest irony if the revolution were to aim at such a result. It would mean the creation of a new master class."

I am going to apply his quote to cryptocurrencies:

"The role of decentralization in cryptocurrencies is unfortunately too little appreciated... Most people are still in the thraldom (slavery) of the idea that centralization is 'more efficient and economical.'  They close their eyes to the fact that the alleged 'economy' is achieved at the cost of the currency holders' rights, that the 'efficiency' degrades him to a mere tributary slave, deadens his ROI, kills his freedoms.  Furthermore, in a system of centralization the delegation of forging becomes constantly merged in fewer hands, producing a powerful bureaucracy of forging overlords.  It would indeed be the sheerest irony if the cryptocurrency movement were to aim at such a result.  It would mean the creation of a new master class."

You make a good point, NXT does have less than half the CAP of BTS.

What is your response to this DE?

If I install and run the NXT wallet will that count as an active node ?  Will it count as an active node for bitshares?

Seriously, that's the worst analogy I've heard in a long time.


Hahaha... nice way to avoid a real debate.  If anyone is wondering the REASON Stan won't let Dan (aka Bytemaster) come on here is because he knows he will get ripped apart.  His blog article was exaggerated to the point of absurdity.  It in NO WAY actually represents reality.  Right now, NXT marketcap is less than half of BTS and it is LESS PROFITABLE to run a NXT node than it is a Bitshares node.  BUT AMAZINGLY... THERE ARE CURRENTLY OVER TRIPLE THE AMOUNT OF NXT NODES ACTIVELY RUNNING!  Explain that Dan.


If you own more stake, you produce more blocks and get more tx fees.  Good luck eliminating "classes" in society.  There will always be those with more of something.  A "fair" economic system should not redistribute wealth, but it should facilitate an even playing field and allow frictionless movement between classes.  NXT is not a rigid economic system.  Nothing is preventing you from going out, purchasing more NXT and forging.  You will never earn a greater percentage than the smallest forger.  That is the way it should be.

Bitshares on the other hand is a rigid economic system.  You must be in a certain "delegate class" to forge.  Everyone including the delegates (in theory) are subjected to inflation.  Now the delegates can effectively rid themselves of this inflation if they control a greater percentage of delegate positions than stake.  If an individual controls one delegate position, they will escape the taxation (inflation) imposed if they own less than 0.99% of the stake.  If an individual controls five delegate positions, they can own 4.95% of the stake and still not be subject to taxation.  Considering the fact that delegates will use their stake to vote themselves into power, this creates a system where they will never be subject to taxation (aka a forging monopoly).  Politics are going to play a major role in delegates voting for each other to maintain this monopoly.


There is no inflation in NXT, only Bitshares.  Everyone (large and small) should be allowed to earn the same ROI from forging.  That is fair.  In Bitshares, only a small group of individuals are allowed to ROI from forging.  That is unfair.


I too was a large PTS holder.  I mined PTS from the very beginning on a substantial amount of computer hardware both owned and rented.  I always find it amazing how the biggest critics are usually those individuals who were involved from the beginning and witnessed how everything transpired.

Join us at https://bitsharestalk.org and you will get all technical information from community and developers which you are looking.

Delegates responsibility to create blocks, they can create or not create a blocks and can filter transactions which will included to the their created blocks.
If they stop producing blocks or not include transactions at their blocks, the time for some transactions can grow from 10 sec to 40-50 sec depends how many blocks will be missed.
The problems becomes if more than 50% (50 delegates) stop producing blocks or makes hidden fork (invisible to main network), the network will lost consensus but every single client on fork or not will notice what network has problems and can act accordingly, for example exchanges can disable deposit/withdraw operations, merchants can stop accepting the payments, etc until network consensus comes back.

Because network pay delegates for their job it's mostly unlikely that they will miss lots of the blocks because they want to do this, usually they get some sort of technical problems, hosting down, internet connection loses, etc.
The delegates which stop producing blocks for 12-24 hours or miss many blocks usually de-voted by shareholders.

All details about current network health you can see here http://bitsharesblocks.com or in regular BitShares client (Delegate Participation Rate, Forks in last 24hrs, etc)

Edit: Described situation already happened at the end of last year due to software bug in upgrade code, everybody (include exchanges) know how this looks and how to act in such situations.

I was also disappointed by some of the changes, I personally was a big fan of BTSX. I've come back in support of BitShares though as it's the best model out there in my opinion and really well positioned right now. I'm also seeing a trend in POW that tells me it's days are numbered. One reason is their high inflation, in a bear market that 1% a month can really eat into the buy wall,  but the main reason is their volatility, I believe the fact that businesses are immediately selling crypto is what is putting even more consistent selling pressure on the Bitcoin price. So I think you're going to see stable BitAssets like BitUSD really get big this year.

Regards how damaging collusion would be, I think you need 51 delegates to collude to have a material impact on the system, but hopefully more technical guys can answer the question in more detail.

I think the thing with the links is that forum is pretty big with 8000+ members, I think it's more busy than the alt-coin section of bitcointalk on a day to day basis, so when people come here, they usually link back to relevant articles or the forum etc.

Once again, my interest is not based of a love for NXT, i actually have none. But as i pointed out i used to be one of the biggest supporters of  Invictus, from being in the top 10 PTS holders i was diluted down and sold half my holdings in disgust.

My interest is in the technical parts of this conversation not your "evangelism", some of us are very resistant to propaganda so save us the trouble and let there be technical point by point conversation. Support BTS by proving the arguments against it's system wrong and you'll even win people like me back.

Words about how it's great with no technical basis, really have no effect on the crowd here.

And as someone pointed out, throwing in a lot of links really isnt helping. The current discussion point is the limiting of nodes to 101 whethere this provides a secure model and whether it counts as true decentralization. How damaging could it be if three or more people in control of more than 3 nodes each started colluding?

Efficiency, profitability and perhaps counter-intuitively for you it actually increases effective decentralization imo.

http://bitsharesblocks.com/delegates

I want to have a good idea who is controlling those 101 positions. As the system matures we are able to make sure those are unique individuals and only doubles if we choose. When you raise that number much higher, the average shareholder can't verify 251 of 501 without centralized assistance. (BitShares holders can though if they want vote to raise the 101 number in future, it's up to a decentralized community of shareholders how many delegates there are.)

I expect over the year, more generally well known crypto people who have high reputations, trust & are more well known in crypto in general, will become delegates, then the average alt-coiner will recognize many of the delegates too.


I also know the incentives are there for free market competition to be an individual BitShares delegate, with other POS systems the economic incentives just aren't there unfortunately https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10085323

The BitShares model is also efficient, I will be able to pay for goods in a store quicker than a credit card without the system centralizing around BitPay type services.

BitShares also has a large team of highly talented developers and the blockchain can hire more whenever required. Other coins are centralized around their developers - if something happened to two or three main guys, their progress would be seriously affected and they would lack the ability to hire new talent. I find that to be incredible centralization.