Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 20. (Read 91087 times)

There is a lot of assuming/guessing here, but here it goes...  

1. (this flaw only applies to dPoS). From what I have gathered (very limited time), your solution is a hybrid, but is still similar to dPoS. It seems you are referring to the PoW part of your design, which is much more permission-less than DPoS?*

2. The mining of all forms of PoW (as they currently exist) can be exploited due to economies of scale, which tends towards winner take all. Agreed. That means you have conceived a new PoW consensus algorithm that is immune to economies of scale? Interesting...

3. Since your model is a PoW/dPoS hybrid, I assume your model pays transaction fees evenly to stakeholders and/or destroys transaction fees so everyone benefits in additional equity (the latter of which is exactly what dPoS does, so that would make sense)? Miners can still be compensated by competing for blocks and earning a subsidy when they do find a block.

4. If the network's nodes can agree that a transaction happened by a majority consensus and the sender paid a sufficient transaction fee, then there is no reason why you could not allow multiple stakeholders/miners to put transactions into blocks (rather than just the person who found the block, if they refused to do so)?

5. TPoS?

6. I got nothing...

7 & 8. Enter the DPoS aspect of the hybrid... On 7 you even said "Burning must exceed double-spend value," which perhaps validates the assumption I made on the latter half of #3. ... The destruction of transaction fees for the betterment of all stakeholders in DPoS is referred to burning.

* I still argue PoW is not permission-less, but can concede it is much more permission-less than all forms of PoS.

No, this is a complete misrepresentation. My proposal is for a decentralised currency that eliminates the need for banks (central or otherwise) but still relies on a free market system based on open competition. It's no more an example of 'communism' than Bitcoin itself. Have you ever heard of the open source movement at all? Doesn't its existence contradict your unqualified assertion that my proposal will result in the "end of all production and megadeath"? Hundreds of millions of people donate their time and energy freely each and every day. Are they 'communists'? Are you saying that people who love to design new buildings will stop designing new buildings? Are you saying that people who love using their hands to build or grow things will stop building or growing things? What on earth is the matter with you? Your hyperbole is so ridiculous that it really doesn't deserve a response at all.


Not at all. Marxism is a bit beyond the scope of this thread, but if you care to PM me then I'd be happy to discuss the subject.

HS

Rebutted:

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Please stop thinking you have an original idea. Karl Marx beat you to the concept by a few generations.

I agree only in the sense that what we call 'value' is an act of collective belief - an illusion. The problem that arises is this: over time, people come to think that merely believing that something has 'value' really does confer 'value' on that thing. When that happens, they tend to become obsessed with the concept of 'value' and the numbers/symbols that represent it. People are so accustomed to thinking in terms of protecting the 'value' they think they possess, and so concerned about 'losing' that illusory 'value', that they can only think in terms of what they stand to lose (nothing whatsoever with my system) rather than what they (and everyone else) stand to gain.


Are you 'the community'? Do you speak for it? Is the community forever closed to new ideas? Is the code Holy Writ to be worshipped and maintained as it is for all time? Has Bitcoin become a cult?


Are you saying that the global ledger is the solution and the only means by which confidence in a system can be established and maintained? Tell me why.


My proposal is publicly available to anyone who wishes to read it. Have you read it? I mean actually read it and thought about it, not just skimmed through it dismissively because it's not consistent with your existing belief system? As for my comments, if you do not like them then do not read them.

HS

You apparently do not understand that money has value because of consensus of CONFIDENCE.

The community will not allow the code to be changed in a way which destroys that CONFIDENCE.

You can't build any CONFIDENCE in a system which does not enforce the global ledger. If you think otherwise, then state your reason explicitly and with less useless verbal diarrhea. Afaics, you are spamming this thread with utter and complete nonsense.

No, nothing is being 'printed' and this is not mere semantics on my part.


Again, no. Bitcoin and all modern digitised monetary systems are merely simulations. There is no 'value', only the perception of 'value', which is itself a misperception based on the belief that things (and unreal digital abstractions of things) can become something more than what they are simply by an act of faith.


What is this 'credit' you're referring to? Is it any different from the credit people use all the time to purchase goods and services? What do you think you are doing when you use a credit or debit card to 'pay' for a product? You are simply moving a digital representation of a number from a digital abstraction called 'your account' to another digital abstraction associated with the business owner. There is nothing of real value or worth being transferred and yet business owners are perfectly happy to let you 'pay' in this manner. Why? Because of the perception/misperception that the number that appears in their bank account has 'value', primarily because it's prefixed with a symbol (£/$) that people associate with the term 'money'. What makes you think they would not be equally happy under my system? If a business owner receives 100 'credits' under the existing system and 100 'credits' under my system then what's the difference? The difference (and it's the only difference) lies in how those credits are generated: as a debt under the existing system, as a gift under my system.

How on earth do you think the existing debt based system came into existence? Do you think we all collectively woke up one morning and said "I think it would be a great idea to surrender control of the money supply to organisations called 'banks' and allow them to issue something called 'money' as a debt that we have to pay back?" If such a system did not exist today and you were asked to sanction its approval then what would you say? I submit that your response would be something along the lines of "f**k off, that's a scam", and yet here you are today using just such a system and accepting its illusion of 'value'. Why? Don't tell me it's because you don't have a choice, because you do have a choice. I'm giving you one right now.


How can a digital simulation of money become more illusory than it already is? Simulated money will always be an illusion, but because it is a simulation we do not have to accept the 'rules' coded into it as if they are the Ten Commandments. Instead, we can select the relevant sections of source code, hit the delete button, and start over.

HS

No, you have not read my proposal properly. If you read the PDF version then you'll see that I've questioned the need for 'bitcoin' to exist at all. Even so, in a system whereby everyone can perform the function currently performed by banks (i.e. creation of bank credit money with a push of a button) and bitcoin miners, the very concept of a 'double spend' becomes completely irrelevant. See my other comment: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16896845

It is not, as you call it, a 'lie'. Rather, it is recognising that existing monetary systems (Bitcoin included) are illusions that serve the interest of a minority. The solution is to replace the existing illusion with an illusion that serves the interests of everybody.

This is what Bitcoin is:

"Those familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan will no doubt already recognise that bankers are living in a rear-view mirror reality. They function as if they inhabit an 18th century world in which gold sovereigns must be pushed from one side of the ledger to the other in order to balance the financial Scales of Justice. In point of fact, the 'value' of these metallic tokens was as illusory as our digital tokens are today. The creation of money and the need to 'balance the books' is just a numbers game and there is no need to treat it as anything but."

"The concept of "rear-view mirrorism" refers to the way we think about (and thus perceive) modern technology in a way that relates to the technology that preceded it. In other words, we are looking at the digital world through the eyes of the old analogue world. Bitcoin itself is a prime example, i.e. by recreating the coin in virtual form Bitcoin has duplicated the 'rear-view mirror' perceptual error of the bankers described above. Bitcoin has reinvented the wheel in digital form, and a digital wheel is merely a symbol which, unlike the wheel itself, has no real-world application. Transferring bitcoin from one person to another has all the utility of handing a picture of oxygen to someone deprived of air. Bitcoin itself is like a simulation of goldfish in a bowl, a simulation which stipulates that a) the non-existent water needs to be oxygenated to prevent the fish asphyxiating, and b) that the fish themselves need to earn this non-existent oxygen. It does not need to be earned (or issued as a debt to be 'paid back') though. Why? Because it is merely a simulation."

Bitcoin (and all other modern monetary systems) is a digital simulation of money and nothing more. Pretending that it is real, and that the digital tokens we exchange have 'value' and that this 'value' needs to be protected against 'devaluation', is like sitting in front of Microsoft Flight Simulator pretending that you are flying a 'real' plane and pretending that it actually matters whether you fly your non-existent plane into a mountain.

HS

There is nothing worth grasping. Just nonsense. He doesn't prevent double-spends in his system.

If we have a system where everybody can lie about the value of money, then money loses its key properties of fungible unit-of-exchange.

Thanks. Seems interesting. Will try and sit down tomorrow and really read through it. Right now I'm not really grasping it at first glance.

R

@HugoStone is ignored for not understanding what double-spend means.

I believe we do have a solution that's worth working on. A PDF copy of my proposal can be downloaded here: https://cloud.gmx.com/ngcloud/external?guestToken=zIgHg-57Qz2JRn4BEgNA6Q&loginName=hugostone@gmx.com

See also: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-proposal-for-the-evolution-of-bitcoin-1678904 and https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16885474

Regards,

HS

I have revised significantly the first sections of the whitepaper, here is a sample portion:

They are not exactly the same between PoW and DPoS even though I used the same numbering for both. I will not write the ones for DPoS at this time. For PoW, they are:



There is a clever twist in my design on Byzantine agreement. PoW is unbounded participation but never final, only probabilistic. Byzantine agreement is bounded participation and final. Both can be stalled indefinitely by 51% attack, and both have failure modes (loss of Nash equilibrium) with a 33% attack. My design combines both concepts but doesn't need PoW (formerly I had unprofitable PoW but hence replaced it with something better)! That is a very strong hint for you.

What are the 8 major flaws you perceive (keep it concise, please)? Then, we can try to guess what the key design innovations are.  

Hey iamnotback, do you still feel that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was invented by deep state operators hoping to de-physicalize money and slowly but assuredly gain control by mining centralization in China? (Or some similar idea)

I thought it was absurd when I first read this idea from you, but now I realize that the Chinese elite are merging with the American elite (who are currently scrambling in desperation and trying to regroup and restrategize to face the unexpected Trump Train), so centralizing control in China doesn't now seem to be outside of the idea of the deep state / shadow government / dark budget / military-industrial complex.

I still think it's unlikely, but not absurd/impossible.

So you think bitcoin.pdf was stage 1 of a much larger plan? How might such plan look?



I think the most important question in regards to the idea of a TOE is this: Are you making the distinction between "small TOE" and "big TOE"? If not, check out physicist Tom Campbell's work. Campbell's creation of the distinction between small TOEs and big TOEs (objective vs. subjective reality TOEs, or consciousness as primordial vs. epiphenomenological TOEs) by itself creates a (meta)paradigm gap that renders all small TOE models as historical curiosities akin to pre-Copernican epicycling, as physicist Peter Russell puts it. IMO, the Small TOEs that have been produced within the artificial parameters of the "authority"-bound mainstream scientific community are essentially a joke when compared to Campbell's Big TOE -- and I think his is also excessively assumptive, although much less than the more mainstream attempts.

A sampling of my other posts and writings which provided insight into the physics of our Universe on the requirement for impossibility of a total order for unbounded systems (and towards a Theory of Everything that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics), and its correspondence with the computer science concepts of Byzantine fault tolerance and the unbounded nondeterminism of Hewitt's Actor model.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15383835
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.15514646 (bottom portion of the post only)
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16278695
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16427829
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.16844323
https://steemit.com/science/@anonymint/the-golden-knowledge-age-is-rising (and a backup copy in case Steem goes defunct)
http://unheresy.com/The%20Universe.html

I am refining the cited references section of my whitepaper, so I prefer to compose the following here and refer to it, than to dump the following all into whitepaper.

Because the genesis of my current technical+human engineering decentralization solution (which is in my whitepaper) was written by myself on Bitcointalk on Christmas 2014.


A page that is linked to but doesn't exist yet (i.e. will be displayed as empty) is one example of a flaw.

In that video, Ward Cunningham explains the “Linus law”¹ of publicly releasing the flaws as soon as possible to the most eyeballs is the optimum way to solve the most flaws. Even more saliently is this principle of release often, release flawed, open source doesn't require all the participants to be equally expert on every issue. Each person may be expert on some issues, but no one is expert at everything. The key point is that this enables us to push democracy out to the ends of the network where the voters are so we can make the network dumb and impotent so it can't impinge on us (the End-to-end principle), because we only have to make their votes adhere to the open sourced perspective of truth rather than attempt the impossible of making everyone equally astute and motivated to be diligent on all issues. Whereas, the normal mode of democracy is a power vacuum because voting is an altruistic-prime incentive on an undersupplied public good, because each individual will vote for their individual interest rather than an objectivity of the collective best interest.

Also the point that the topics and pages of a Wiki are unbounded, so that there is unbounded degrees-of-freedom on how issues are segregated, combined, and organized. Whereas, in elections for representatives, there is no possible collaborative Nash equilibrium because the politician will promise everyone everything that isn't conflicting of individual interests of the majority and use conflicts of individual interests to divide-and-conquer the votes of the opposition. Whereas, with unbounded degrees-of-freedom, everyone finds the Nash equilibrium strategy of contributing to be more productive than the strategy of conflicting. And that is the essence of how I found a way to reorient the Byzantine agreement technical challenge with a paradigm-shit. To be more concrete, even if you have the most power in the world, sabotaging (with untruths) individual pages of a decentralized Wiki won't help you if you can't limit the pages that others can add to Doxx your pages.

Unbounded doesn't mean without any cost, because costs are necessary to squelch spam. When we attempt to give away for free, that which is not free, we end up either with spam or with a power vacuum (which is the case for DPoS with its zero transaction fees and the power vacuum control over funding for witness, which is one of the flaws of DPoS I fix).

P.S. my technical solution for decentralized Byzantine agreement is not a Wiki, lol. I am referring to a Wiki as an example of an applicable analogous concept.


¹ First summarized or at least widely promulgated by Eric S. Raymond as “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” or alternatively stated “Half amateur programmers randomly banging on the code is sufficient to find all the bugs”.

Whether it be the key insight I found to retain decentralization in consensus ordering systems or some key design decision that will enable a platform similar to Steem(it) cross the adoption chasm, the BIG IDEAS are always simple and obvious in hindsight.

For example, the BIG IDEA of a Wiki is that it can link to pages that don't even exist yet:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/3/31/Ward_Cunningham%2C_Inventor_of_the_Wiki.webm/Ward_Cunningham%2C_Inventor_of_the_Wiki.webm.480p.webm

Yes that is BIG innovation idea of a Wiki. Bet most of you all never thought about that or realized that. And you may not still understand after watching the above video.

In my opinion, the ability to distill to the generative essence is the generative essence of genius:

http://unheresy.com/Essence%20of%20Genius.html