Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 13. (Read 91159 times)

Huh?

There's no long term solution to the knowledge problem (how do you run out of questions to study?), but that doesn't stop academics from spending their whole life to studying one question--why? We gamble that our life has some purpose--it's irrational, yeah, but people do it every day--anyone who's jumped off a cliff or skydives know it feels good to be alive--and no amount of game theory is going to change that risk assessment.

You don't seem to understand that prediction markets fail when their boards are all sinking in the same quicksand (i.e. the same light bulb behind the star cutouts in your upthread metaphor).

Currency doesn't function fragmented.^{[public-confidence]} There is no relativity of multiple currencies. Currency is a loss of degrees-of-freedom paradigm.

The winner is the one who scales a new currency. There is no long-term panacea. Currencies grow, peak, decay and water-fall collapse. This is the pattern of such natural phenomena.

Asians understand life is a cycle (a circle of repeating paradigms). Westerners wish for an unnatural linear progression. Risto needs to get the fuck out of Europe!

^{[public-confidence]} Shelby Moore III. Value of currency has historically been public confidence in it as a reliable unit-of-exchange. Bitcointalk.org, “Precious metals are not useful in a collapse scenario!” thread, post #62, Nov 2, 2016.

repair industry is the winning bet here

I'll dumb it up metaphorically for you: diversification of steel rolly pollies is an oxymoron.

Talk to the quants who modeled diversification of hedge funds before the collapse of LTCM.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

If you ignore gambling, you'll probably never get "why?"

And if you ignore increasing layers of complexity, you'll never get "how?"

And if you never examine how social structures act in the same rationalization structures as a single brain architecture, then you'll never get "neither."

(someday, someone will get this joke, and that's the bet)

Copying this from @r0ach's thread, because I think it is my best summary yet of the outcome this thread I started about finding a decentralized solution to global consensus...



I agree except please note that Satoshi's proof-of-work will unavoidably end up (probably already is) controlled by a cartel of miners who can censor your ability to transact. Imagine they are bribed to exclude you. Or the coming world finance government (e.g. IMF, World Bank, SDRs replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency) regulates the miners and dictates who can and can't transact. At the moment, this developing cartel is not focused on censoring you, but rather on gaining a monopoly on transaction fees, so that they can raise their income to the maximum that the market will bear. This is the politics around the blocksize debate. I wrote in great detail about this in my coming whitepaper (excepts have been published to these forums already). Any entrenched centralized control ultimately ends up being co-opted by the State and the political power vacuum of collectivism. We have 1000s of years of human history without any exception!

So it is not enough to say we control the private keys. We must also have a global ledger consensus which is impervious to centralization. So far, neither Satoshi's Proof-of-Work (PoW), nor state-of-the-art alternatives such as Bitshare's (Steemit's) Delegated Proof-of-Stake (aka DPoS, combined with Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (TaPoS)), avoid the centralization of control of the global ledger consensus.

As I have alluded to, I believe I have a design alternative which provides a solution to this fundamental problem that has been plaguing society since time eternal.



Life requires flaws. It is precisely flaws that make us unique and alive. If everything was predetermined (flawless), then nothing would exist. The past and future would collapse into indistinguishable (the light cones of special relativity would collapse onto each other). Life requires that real-time omniscience is impossible, which is a conceptual analogy of flaws (i.e. that not all of our actions can be congruent always in real-time).

However what we are talking about here is not attaining "perfection" (not attaining holistic congruence), but rather how to have a system which has some ordered state of equilibrium which is not trending towards Coasian costs maladaptation implosion. In other words, we want a system with maximal degrees-of-freedom. The flaw of PoW and DPoS is they lack degrees-of-freedom because they depend on the economies-of-scale control of some finite resource (mining or stake).

Thus, I believe there can be a design for global consensus which has a form of decentralized equilibrium.

Bye Zcash. What's the next big fail coin?

I don't think it will play out that way.

There is going to be a battle of offerings per my prior post about MU2/BitCache.

It will take a year or years for the dust to settle. I believe there is no way my project even if wildly successful, will kill Bitcoin overnight. Even if Bitcoin ended up only remaining as the entrenched and well established crypto-currency <--> fiat on/off ramp, it would continue to grow adoption for that purpose. If anything my project will drive more demand for Bitcoin.

So I would suggest that if I am able to make good on building a project with many contributors and a significant ecosystem, then speculators should scale in their purchases over time, in order to be diversified and minimize unforeseen risks.

And I have a lot of work in front of me that is not yet certain to be completed (especially challenging given my health problem, for which I won't get an expert diagnosis until mid-January at the earliest).

I appreciate the enthusiasm, but actually what I need most right now is good health. That is my most significant obstacle at the moment. Then after that are several more significant obstacles.


It is very rare for a technological innovation to be that quickly disruptive. That is more reserved for long-tail events such as 10 year cycle weather disasters, 1000 year cycle massive volcano eruptions, or a 100,000 year cycle massive asteroid strike.

You'll be able to evaluate over time and increase stake as progress warrants. The only reason to rush early is to buy a small speculative position on something that might yield 100 - 1000X gains. But you never risk your core investment capital on such wild, early stage speculations.

If I make it to testnet and everything is looking good with community peer review, and if you are a $millionaire, then I would think a 10 - 100 BTC speculative investment would be appropriate. If you are not quite a millionaire, then early stage speculation of 10 BTC or less as small percentage of your portfolio. Or just wait for the project to mature and pay perhaps 10 X higher prices.


That mostly concurs with my perspective. Indeed you need to wait for the meat. Remain skeptical.

Monero and Ethereum are reasonably important in different ways. Both also assembled significant contributor ecosystems. And Monero may be undervalued still. I don't think Monero will end up being the mass adoption entry. I don't have any ecosystem, not even a functioning s/w yet. So this is all too premature (slightly embarrassing for me).

The reason I am talking is to make sure I have analyzed and published my analysis on various factors.

But what really needs to happen now is silence and coding. And I really need better health, but I am limping along as best as I can until January medical appointment.


So I think I will try my best now to go silent. Thanks for the feedback and encouragement.

I am copying this post from another thread in Economics -> Speculation, because it is relevant here:



I had already detailed why Yours.network has the wrong model, so they don't concern me:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15753046
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16861040
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17048740

Whereas, MU2/BitCache is a serious threat to my coming altcoin offering in the microtransaction+social networking arena:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/kim-dotcom-megaupload2bitcache-will-take-bitcoin-mainstream
https://bnktothefuture.com/pitches/megaupload-2-0-bitcache
http://insidebitcoins.com/news/thoughts-kim-dotcoms-bitcache/36379

Essentially BitCache will be an effectively centralized, optimization of Lightning Networks, because that is the only way to make LN work. Don't forget that decentralized is not the same meaning as distributed! I do expect BitCache to be distributed:

https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels.html
http://www.coindesk.com/anonymous-blockchain-micropayments-bolt/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701

I don't think users will really care that the microtransaction network is actually highly centralized. Whereas, I have a design which is decentralized, but will anyone care?

One challenge for KimDotCom's plan is how to onboard users and get BTC into their wallets? My plan mints coins to onboard users. His plan can't mint BTC. So I presume he is going to try to have some easy way to buy a $5 of BTC for $10 using a credit card and eat the fraud. Onboarding is a huge issue, for example why most Indians can't just suddenly adopt Bitcoin.

Over time, I think it will become clear that my design scales better and is more trustless, permissionless. Thus I think ecosystem adoption of mine will eventually win against KimDotCom's. But I admit this is going to be serious threat to my plans.

I think what is likely to happen is we will capture different market subsets. Mine will include (not exclusively) the developing world who don't have credit cards and my coverage will be more widespread in terms of ecosystem diversity because of less potential for centralized chokepoints. The risk of those in the ecosystem embracing KimDotCom's system is association with illegality. Whereas, KimDotCom's plan will likely be successful amongst the pirate community.

Thus I see my plan targeting legal, mainstream, and onboarding the billions. And KimDotCom's once again blazing a path that ultimately flames out again.

We'll see... I will need more help asap...

(ICO and open sourcing will come as soon as I have enough code to reach testnet)



Indeed! Why will people flock to MU2 and go out their way to obtain BTC when they can get the same shit for free without any hassles elsewhere. Onboarding and compelling need are huge obstacles.

My plan addresses this both by providing a more compelling mainstream need which isn't associated with illegality, and which requires absolutely no perceived effort on the part of the users (which is radical improvement on Steemit's awespiring, exciting, but failed experiment).

The comments I read in the first two pages of this thread seemed to agree with my appraisal of it being unlikely that people will go out of their way to obtain BTC for spending on activities they can get for free on other sites.



Indeed. That is why I tentatively plan to name the token 'shares' in my planned altcoin system. The word has a dual meaning, "to share" (social networking) and "a share of the growing pie".



I recently wrote about this:

I wonder; can there be an orderly conversion from Bitcoin to your new thing?  I have a rather sizable investment at stake in Bitcoin and would like to convert it into your new thing if/when it becomes real enough.  Or am I missing the point?  If/when your new thing becomes real enough then it will possibly/likely accelerate the demise of Bitcoin (cutting into my investment).  Does your new thing have to be deployed disruptively?  I gather it can live side-by-side with Bitcoin but I'm hoping there would be an orderly way for everyone that wants to shift over to do it without a stampede.  I wouldn't want to get left behind.  If it is truly only disruptive, i.e. no facility for an orderly conversion, then it will be up to each investor to time the transition of their own investments.

I've toyed around with other so-called alt-coins but they hold little interest for me.  Ripple, please.  Litecoin, meh.  Dogecoin, seriously?  Monero, meh.  Etherium, meh.  Zcash, maybe.  Mimble-wimble, maybe.  Your thingie sounds potentially interesting but the meat hasn't been released yet to chew on.

Btw, in section 7.1 of my whitepaper I have disproved the thesis of this blog:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

PoW is not the cheapest (least wasteful) for the equivalent security. The illiquidity cost in my design orders-of-magnitude less than the illiquidity cost of PoW for comparable security level, because PoW requires a huge globally superior sunk cost to eliminate the risk of rented hashrate attacks. (Smooth this is the essence of Satoshi's flaw which you felt was the weakest point in his whitepaper).

My replies to @r0ach are in his new thread, so let's keep that side-discussion over there...

I started off replying to your post in this thread but decided to make the post a thread on it's own, so I present to you:

The dark secret of money the sheeple aren't supposed to know

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-dark-secret-of-money-the-sheeple-arent-supposed-to-know-1700073

That doesn't help if the longest chain is not yet published, which is a plausible issue for short and medium range attacks and especially if your blockchain is not "the one chain that rules them all". And in theory this can also be the case for a long-range attack if a quantum computer becomes reality and is able to rewrite the entire chain in a fraction of a second.¹⁸

¹⁸ Serguei Popov. The tangle. §4.3 Resistance to quantum computations, p. 24, Apr 3, 2016.


Since we are mostly convinced that long-range attacks on PoW are not likely unless a quantum computer arrives, I argue that TaPoS with significant burned transaction fees is equivalently objective and does not depend on the honesty of any node. A long range chain with millions of transactions referencing the hashes of blocks is objective per my prior comment on this topic. The current stake holders are not going to accept a long-range attack which double-spends their stake back to a former stake holder's private key. The decentralized objectivity is in the community's unwillingness to build on that attacker's chain.

The weak subjectivity seems more applicable to nothing-at-stake (i.e. without TaPoS) and where propagation makes a difference in terms of which transactions are confirmed and there is nothing other than centralized checkpoints to resolve ambiguity. TaPoS is decentralized checkpointing.


The objectivity of PoW is that the longest chain of hashrate difficulty wins. The objectivity of TaPoS with burned transaction fees is that the most burned transaction fees wins.

In both cases, the attacker can burn less PoW or fees than he double-spends, and thus attack. But for PoW, I argued that for the "the one chain that rules them all", the mining farms are not going to rent out 51% of the systemic hashrate for short-term attacks. I would however not make the same argument for minority PoW blockchains (especially those without an ASIC) such as Monero. And I would not make that argument for burned fees for the short-term because it can be plausibly more liquid to attack and short, then to sell xx% of the stake. However for the long-term and assuming minting of new money supply tapers asymptotically towards 0, the burned fees will asymptotically approach 100% of the stake (and the current stake holders can not build on an attacker's chain which reverts their stake) so it becomes more and more implausible the longer-range the attempted attack (note this does require that stake being infinitely divisible or practically so). Thus nodes that recently come online (for both Monero and my design) would need to wait a while for the network to stabilize in absence of either node reputation and/or a more objective finality to the consensus. I resolve this in my design with a two-factor, fail-safe combination of the two (optional node reputation and optional deterministic finality) with a fallback to the need to wait a while otherwise.

I discuss this in my whitepaper:


Vitalik's blog is useful as starting point for discussion.

I am not insinuating that Vitalik doesn't make valuable and interesting insights. He is overachieving for his age, and he has contributed to the prior art which we build on. And in hindsight we can state things which we didn't know at the time he wrote that. He has I assume learned a lot since then as well. And he was arguing that he learned to love subjectivity. Yeah because there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in our universe.

Afaics having afair not read a precise specification of your design, there is some overlap of broad concepts in my design with what you've described in various forum threads. In general, those (few?) of us who've studied this in depth know we must partition in some form in order to scale asynchronously.

I'd love to offer to do it and finally see something tangible from you after all this time and hard work.

Unfortunately I'm at least (if not more) as maxed out as you at the moment  So I'll just have to wait until its public.

The sections you've posted though seem to be concise and make sense for the most part (though I did only skim), and share a lot of overlap with my own findings and thoughts.

The major 8 sections of the white paper are completed. 16,621 words. 250+ paragraphs, 104 references. I am awaiting feedback from two people who will be reviewing it. These two guys aren't thoroughly qualified though to do peer review. I don't know who I can trust to do peer quality review before public release. Any way, one guy reviewing it is a programmer with a college education. The other guy has a degree in Applied math.

alkan, I will reply to you later. I am busy for next few hours on athletics with my son.

That's a fair point if you look at objectivity in a strict sense. However, practically, it does make a difference if you only need one honest and omniscient (or at least up-to-date w.r.t. the longest block chain) node to get the latest state of the network. If you can connect to an unbounded number of nodes, you can asymptotically achieve objectivity since the probability that one of them will send you the longest chain will approximate 1 provided that at least one out of all nodes is honest and up-to-date.

Whereas with subjectivity, different nodes might come to different conclusions if some of the nodes are malicious.


Vitaliks definition is too narrow and thus irrelevant.

Even if we are talking about "asymptotic" objectivity, its impact on security (and partition tolerance) of a decentralized network seems questionable to me. You cannot download and use the network client without trusting anyone (expect if you are the creator of the network) because you can never be sure if it's the right client or just a malicious copycat that is perhaps using a different protocol.