Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 18. (Read 91144 times)

One thing you failed to notice could be that anyone in crypto can be the centralized figure, it doesn't limit you to do so like governments with fiat.
It all goes back to the code and nothing more.

That's certainly the case for the model I suggested. But what about the leader election procedure described in https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/889.pdf (chapter 4.2). Doesn't it ensure true randomness?

Coming back to the problem of unprofitable mining, I just had the following idea:

Instead of using PoW for making direct profit (as in Bitcoin) or decreasing transaction fees (as in the model I described), we could require each stakeholder to perform PoW in order to preserve his stake. Without producing the required number of blocks in a certain timeframe, the stakeholder would be levied a negative interest rate from his stake and thus lose a percentage of his coins (which would be burned). The amount of work would depend on the stake as well, so that small stakeholders with only a few coins could easily do the computation on their computers or even phones while large investors would need access to mining rigs or server farms. (Splitting the stake between several accounts wouldn't help to reduce the resources needed to prevent the sum from decreasing over time.). On the other hand, the amount of stake would serve as an upper limit on block creation for every stakeholder: Once a stakeholder has produced the required number of blocks, his blocks would be rejected by the other nodes and prevented from becoming part of the block chain.

Letting aside the problem of granularity (i.e. block size/block creation rate which also impairs decentralization as it throttles the number of nodes who can participate in block creation), such a scheme would offer some interesting properties.

- In order to attack the system (and make a double-spend), you would need to beat the network in terms of hashrate and stake at the same time.
- Only big investors have an incentive to become high-scale miners with a lot of hashpower. Such investors have little interest to attack the system.

Any thoughts?

By the way, thanks imnotback for uploading the two chapters (which I've read with interest).

Here is the rough draft from my white paper for the section concerning transactions fees, block size, and the unavoidable monopolization of Proof-of-Work by a few:

https://gist.github.com/shelby3/c0d6e0ed132be7e4577df3663c81ee09


Applies to every proof-of-work coin which attempts to scale up, not just Bitcoin.

---

I edited it after proof-reading upon awakening.

Probably didnt pass correct fee... totally fine

Read it; more please.

FYI:
BTC Transactions Queue is overloaded.
16 hours and the guy can't get a confirmation, how can people not see BTC is failing, is beyond me.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/transaction-queue-size-1689151

 

The (very rough draft, likely to change) section of my white paper about SegWit and Lightning Networks:

https://gist.github.com/shelby3/c786018a8bb2d8d837abce3a4cf4e799

I am very sleepy so didn't proof read that well yet.

The similarity is as I wrote in my prior post, that you essentially must use PoW to obtain the randomness of whom to select as the delegate to order the transactions in next block.

When you get to a high level of understanding, the taxonomy of generative essence possibilities becomes narrowed and designs that seem differentiated share the same category.

I'm cannot see a big similarity between Bitcoin-NG and the concept of using a meta blockchain system.
Perhaps you meant my last post https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15995725 which describes another design that in fact is somewhat similar to Bitcoin-NG as it makes use of hash puzzles for finer granularity (as opposed to microblocks), making it less difficult for low-scale miners to participate in mining.

You are right back where you started like a dog chasing his tail and not knowing it.

Because you can't achieve that without proof-of-work, as I wrote 3 years ago:


Your contemplated design is essentially just Bitcoin-NG in disguise.

---

I discarded proof-of-work and formulated a consensus ordering design concept different than just proof-of-stake, DPoS, or a DAG.

Thank you for your quick answer and the references. That's a valid objection from a practical point of view. I'm not sure to what extent using the cumulative hashing power contained in the (meta) blockchain could help in that respect: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15972492.

In such a setting you would probably need to run your botnet for months or years in order to build a longer chain (of the transactional blockchain).

This is certainly more risky and costly than renting the computing power for some hours to build an alternative chain in traditional PoW currencies.

How did you solve this issue in your version of unprofitable PoW?

The only participants possibly motivated to do unprofitable PoW are those who are issuing transactions.

If we argue for an “altruism-prime” motivation (and make the perhaps incorrect assumption that it doesn't matter that it is an undersupplied public good!), they will willingly burn the larger of:

• A reasonable transaction fee burned as PoW.
• Their CPU PoW hashrate at fractions of their current electric bill.

Neither of those even with millions of users (and especially if you expect them to be on mobile) will be sufficient to secure the chain against powerful attackers such as botnets with gaming rigs and hijacked Amazon EC2 or other VPS cloud accounts.

I also suggest these two References from my (yet unpublished) white paper:

⁴⁵	Paul Sztorc. One Chain to Rule Them All.  Truthcoin.info blog, §Only Bitcoin’s Hashrate Stands a Chance, Mar 7, 2016.
⁴⁶	Mircea Popescu. The woes of Altcoin, or why there is no such thing as “cryptocurrencies”. Trilema.com blog, Aug 16, 2014.

Also (even unprofitable) mining on CPUs enables 51% rented hashrate attacks! Kiss Monero's (and Zcash's) ass goodbye if they don't get an ASIC implementation. Komodo might possibly be a better bet because @jl777 adopted my suggestion to use Bitcoin's blockchain for security.

Would you mind telling us more about your discarded idea of unprofitable PoW?

Some time ago, I came up with such a concept myself:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15981017

My basic idea was to use PoW as means of "honing" your address/account, so that mining would become more beneficial for low-scale miners than for big players.

Yeah and he is myself.

But you probably won't understand it when it is explained to you.

Why do yall keep arguing?

Is there any sources for reading material on this subject? I feel like someone much smarter than us may have figured this out

Central banks will adress the legitimate needs of people using cryptocurrency and leave the coins to fight over breadcrumbs. Which in the grand scheme of things is quite a lot anyway..

Lol and they banned me back in 2013 and look how prescient I was in early 2013 (and this was only about 2 weeks of studying Bitcoin):

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3111/will-bitcoin-suffer-from-a-mining-tragedy-of-the-commons-when-mining-fees-drop-t/8686#answer-86868686

They since lifted the ban but I never go back there any more.

Bitcoin "killer" approaching...


Of course the detailed explanations are not shared with you until the paper is published, for reasons of competition from copycoins.

Just found this video about a modified PoS (Prof Kiayias) , partitioned into time slots and with a random selection of new stakeholders

Shows nice graphs on theoretical central -> decentral and speed graph but missing full CAP theorem view. Watch at 15min:

https://youtu.be/pjYDWWEkgN0


At 35 min the new PoS model comes up.

Guess, it won t work....