Topic: Critical problems with Trestor - Read before use - page 2. (Read 13957 times)

They have shown in another thread a complete chat history with indian forum moderator Benson , I thought its a good company when I saw their website but soon i realised that they hadnt hit any exchange site yet .

I doubt, we'd be able to defend "rational/irrational" arguments for long.
Why don't you stop having discussions here. These people are not your target audience and customer demographic. They're experienced with digital currency that doesn't mean high receptibility from business point of view.

Enjoy BTCIndia's rational trolling \m/

Palmcoins, however, seems intelligent enough not to be affected by your interpersonal influence through appreciative psychology.

Dear BTCIndia and Palmcoin,

Thank you for bringing some rationality and logic into this debate.

Technical whitepaper along with associated source code is scheduled for release tomorrow. It should help clear the fog.

Trestor Team
www.trestor.org
@trestorconnect

Problem is state of mind.

Way to troll! There is no debate about initial pricing. The Indian law requires fixed pricing. And since they are centralised, the Indian law requires them to be registered as pre-paid instruments. And the Indian law also requires to be nation specific to avoid money laundering.

You are free to file a PIL and get it rectified, but until then they are illegal.

All of what I wrote is not my problem. My problem is that they are scamming people, which is besides them being illegal.

Palmcoins, A pyramid scheme is exactly what you describe. What you follow up with, is what trestor is doing practically in real life, but on paper they are posing otherwise.
The trestor network is posing as a cryptocurrency.

- If we consider them to be a cryptocurrency, the 'validators' in T-Net have no economic incentive to validate transactions. But 'validators' have to buy validating rights from trestor. Why would someone buy something with no benefit? They won't. So either they earn benefit through fees or through become retail merchants. Both of these are then pyramid schemes.

- If we consider them for what they are doing in real life, they are just a digital currency like paypal or paytm. But they are hiding behind cryptocurrency to eliminate national boundary boundations (which does not apply to a centralised currency) & fixed price boundations by Indian law and are thus a scam. Also, there is no way to 'buy'. Everything is a donation, so that the consumer is legally unprotected.

I hope you read there technical draft, then my comments in detail & I am sure you would understand that they are a scam.

There are literally more than 10 cryptocurrencies in this sub-sub-forum alone but do you see me calling them out?

I love all coins but I hate frauds. I don't know why Palmcoins and BTCIndia would support a scam.

I am not affiliated to any company nor do any coin & have no benefit in doing this but only wanted people to realize this scam. But rather I feel the community doesn't care.
People who understand the protocol should raise their voice about the scams otherwise it is gonna come back and bite the cryptocurrency scene in India.

To each his own.
Since I have pointed out all I wanted, I am gonna lock this thread in a day or two.

Great, so am gonna remove the tag and move this to the Alt Section.
You can lock it as well if you wish.

Am done with my questions as well

So much fuss about fixed price. Does anyone here believe that Pizza event established first price parity for Bitcoin which had no "intrinsic value" and that helped to create some "intrinsic value" for commons?

Well, Trestor you should have planned some market stunts. Like, 1 Kg of Caschew mozambique sold for 10,000 trestor and perhaps it would have second costliest Caschew deal someday in future.

And death of debates about initial pricing. I hope, you know answer to chicken and egg dilemma.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11423036 - May 19, 2015, 07:24:45 PM


http://www.ummid.com/news/2015/June/20.06.2015/trestor-partners-with-cameron.html


How did you'll move from 'very early stage of development' to $4mil in a month?


BTW @skang, these things have been informally tagged as e-fiat scams. I liked the sound of that .

Yes, Trestor is a scam in it's current form. It is not a cryptocurrency, but a centralised digital currency pyramid scheme that is trying to ride the cryptocurrency wave.

Trestor is illegal as per 'Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007', 'Notification No. FEMA 15/2000/RB dated May 3, 2001' and 'The Sale of Goods Act, 1930' and Customs (http://www.dov.gov.in/newsite3/section7.asp).

If you fix the value of a trest and make it country specific, you will become legal like paytm, paypal etc.

Dear Skang,

David's paper about Stellar protocol (SCP), which already forked due to faults. There is a reason why Stellar is now centralised and working with Ripple.


We are citing David's work in general, his SCP research was commissioned because of the fork, paper was released much later. 

Do you still think Trestor project deserves such a thread title?

Trestor - A confirmed cryptocurrency scam !


Trestor Team
www.trestor.org
@trestorconnect

Skang,

We are confident that you have genuine intentions and your motivation is to save the community from yet another altcoin fraud.

Trestor team is not a scam, just a bunch of Individuals who have come together to create something truly new and innovative. All of us are financially well placed, money is our secondary motivation, primary is to 'create something awesome which not only us, but our parents and our country can be proud of '
   
We will be happy to answer any more questions here.


Trestor Team
www.trestor.org
@trestorconnect

I am done saying what I had to.
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it' but I hope people read everything and decide for themselves.

Trestor is now citing David's paper about Stellar protocol (SCP), which already forked due to faults. There is a reason why Stellar is now centralised and working with Ripple.
Anyways, Trestor doesn't use SCP or even byzantine consensus.

I have few questions as well. Just waiting for skang to finish.

Dear Skang,

Welcome back. Hope you had a fun trekking trip.

Trestor protocol makes no assumptions about the rational behavior of attacker. Compared to generic proof of-work/proof-of-stake schemes, our protocol has minimal computing requirements. UTXOs is not the only solution for distributed security. Prof David Mazieres, Head of Stanford's secure computing group has written extensively on this topic. http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/

Do you really mean the following statements: 

1.  A consensus is not enough; proof-of-work is also required.

2.  Worst still, if a majority decides that a transaction is valid, that transaction is validated, irrespective of any algorithm preventing trests to be created out of thin air; not even Trestor!


Also, we didn't quite understand the legal protection and two-level pyramid scheme accusation.

Trestor Team
www.trestor.org
@trestorconnect

Trestor further admits:
3. Trests are 100% pre-mined (but since 100%mined means no mining they call it 'pre-assigned' & explanation is too complex so they will release separate document on it)
4. When you buy trests, its not a purchase but a donation, so there is no legal protection for you (because "Trest" is short for Trestor Donation Receipt & it could not have been Trestor Sale Receipt)

Here are the problems in the algorithm:
1. Account not UTXOs. In Trestor Network, ‘the state’ stores a list of accounts where each account has a balance, and a transaction is valid if the sending account has enough balance to pay for it.
- The definition of a coin as per Satoshi's paper is "electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures." In bitcoin, we could only store the addresses with their latest balance; why the hell do we need to store all the past transactions? Blockchain's space requirement problem solved isn't it? Brilliant? Absolutely not. Maintaining a chain of transactions is required to maintain the consensus of validated blocks. It means that even if a block is disputed, you could trace its origin right back to the coinbase.
Since Trestor is 100% premined, they are the ones issuing accounts and 'the state' maintains account balance, just like a bank.
If there is a dispute, there is no history and resolving it is purely a matter of Trestor's discretion.
Worst still, if a majority decides that a transaction is valid, that transaction is validated, irrespective of any algorithm preventing trests to be created out of thin air; not even Trestor!

2. Since there is no mining to validate transactions, the way to validate is, you pay (or rather donate?) Trestor to award you the designation of a 'Validator'.
Now when a transaction comes through, the validator can at best check if the sender's account has balance of trests. If so & if that validator has not approved a contradicting transaction before, they validate it.
Since the validators have no economic incentive to validate trests, why would they do so? To earn from fees or to earn by selling trests.
Both ways it is a two-level pyramid scheme where investors who will continue to recruit other investors for an incentive that is presented as an investment opportunity - the right to sell a particular product or to earn fees from them.

Even if all of the above was legal on some planet or that I am totally crazy to miss out on something, the algorithm is still flawed:
- In case of a double spend the transaction gets stuck, since validators can't vote against themselves. To resolve this they have implemented time-bound validity of nodes. This doesn't solve it. Consider a scenario where first 50% validated A->B and second half validated A->C at the same time. The transaction gets stuck. Votes expire after time t and now the first half votes for A->C & the transaction gets stuck again & so on..
- The value of t is not based on anything but pulled out of air.
- If more than 80 percent of a node’s peers have voted for a set of transactions, it goes through. The value 80% and node's peers (100) is based on nothing but pulled out of air.
- To make T-net scalable, a validator doesn't needs votes from 80% of the network but from random 100 validators. This randomization implementation would be out when Trestor open sources it's code on 1st July, but unless it is based on a physical system, it would most likely be predictable. Even if not, this list is stored by Trestor so is prone to corruption.
- When a new validator node gets set up, it will select a fixed number of peers (e.g. 100) from the known set and use their votes as a basis. At the same time, there will be about 100 nodes selecting this new validator as their basis. Graphs don't work that way. Suppose 4 kids are standing in a circle holding hands, as an example of 4 validators with 2 peers. When a fifth child comes and offers its two hands to be held by 2 random kids, the kids already in the network need to produce a third hand! Thus the number of edges in the graph changes unless the graph reorganizes itself for every newcomer which is a separate problem.
 

A funny thing is, all of the above would be legal and ok (though hackable) if you register as a pre-paid instrument like PAYTM or Paypal or a bank.

So to summarize people, Trestor has admitted to two things:
1. Proof-of-work is not required, a consensus is enough. (Comfortably ignoring the failure of consensus based systems like hashcash that existed much before bitcoin. Also, Trestor has no proof-of-whatever in their system, so there)
2. Value of a cryptocurrency is whatever people exchange it for. Treats however have fixed rate (, determined out of thin air.)


Yes, we admit it. Network consensus is enough.

As more and more Trests come out in the open market, exchange value of each Trest would begin to be subjectively determined by market participants.

Dear Trestor,
1. What is your justification of a 100% premined currency?
2. The only way to obtain trests is to buy them from the Trestor foundation. Why does the foundation lists every sale as a donation?

Strictly speaking, Trests are Pre-Assigned not pre-mined, because pre-mined is used where the creators of a protocol, mine some coins before opening their network to other mining participants. As, there is no mining in Trestor Network, Pre-Assigning is a more appropriate term. Justification for Pre-Assigning is strong but complex, therefore it will be detailed in our whitepaper. 

"Trest" is short for Trestor Donation Receipt (TDR). 

We look forward to understanding the flaws that you discovered. Enjoy the trek.

Trestor Team
www.trestor.org
@trestorconnect

So to summarize people, Trestor has admitted to two things:
1. Proof-of-work is not required, a consensus is enough. (Comfortably ignoring the failure of consensus based systems like hashcash that existed much before bitcoin. Also, Trestor has no proof-of-whatever in their system, so there)
2. Value of a cryptocurrency is whatever people exchange it for. Treats however have fixed rate (, determined out of thin air.)

Let's move further.

Dear Trestor,
1. What is your justification of a 100% premined currency?
2. The only way to obtain trests is to buy them from the Trestor foundation. Why does the foundation lists every sale as a donation?

After this, we shall dig further the flaws in the algorithm..

(Since I am trekking won't have good internet for next 3 days, so might reply after that)