Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 28. (Read 91144 times)

Exactly - this is like saying the best option is to agree not to make forward progress; a disaster for convergence.

Yep - I can't see a clean solution to this issue of double spends in the current DAG chain approach.

Other than ONLY building on chains that have no double spends in them. So that there is a valid version of history.

A user would not build on top of a txn-chain that has inconsistencies and can always go back through history and build on top of the last 'fully' valid txn-chain he finds.

Would this simply cause the chain to explode 'width-wise' ?

In the DAG systems, users are most definitely miners, yes. I assumed you were talking about bitcoin, because you said 'full node'.

Your assumption about security isn't considering what is actually most secure for them - double spends cause all kinds of nasty problems, which I discuss above.

But in this DAG system there are no miners ? Just users building on top of each other. (Unless we class all the users as 'momentary' miners)

And yet there is still a consensus building process.

I am saying that there is an incentive for the users to act in the best interest of the whole network, even without paying them.

They receive security for their funds.

And that this is shown in the btc sphere, where people still run full nodes, for no financial reward.

But non-miners do not contribute to consensus?

What about the 'Security' incentive ?

People run full nodes because it is more secure and they don't need to trust anyone. They don't get paid.

I suppose it could be classed as financial, as their funds are more secure.

Indeed. I wasn't referring to your design above, just running through potential designs using bitcoin as an analogue.

monsterer there are no mempools in my design.

Selfish behavior is great until it wrecks the environment.

Bringing this topic back on track, I'd like to discuss what I believe is the primary challenge in creating a decentralised, trustless, p2p cryptocurrency. Nash equilibrium for non professional miners.

Because power always centralises, if you reward miners, you create a point of centralisation so the apparent solution is not to reward them at all - instead you make it such that every user has to mine their own transaction in order to participate. And on the surface this seems fine but dig a little deeper and the nash-equilibrium is broken because the cheapest, least risky way (PoW cost and orphaning risk) for users to participate in this process is for them to ignore as much of the network as possible within the bounds of the protocol.

For example, (in a blockchain design with the LCR rule) if you require them to include as many mempool transactions as they can see in their blocks, they are incentivised to pretend they see only their own transaction because the probability of their new block being orphaned by double spend increases with every other transaction they include. This will cause the chain to become divergent because the structure of a chain doesn't permit high frequency blocks resulting from this rational behaviour; the LCR will be wildly selecting between candidate chains in an unintentional orphaning war caused by a combination of this rational behaviour, network latency and the chain structure itself.

In a probabilistic DAG design, even if you have only one transaction per block, orphaning risk still persists; submitting your transaction at the tip of the DAG is more risky than submitting it further down the hierarchy (because probability of being in an orphaned branch decreases with the number of children), so users have an incentive to widen the DAG which is the same as saying they agree not to make forward progress. In addition, users are incentivised to reference as few parents as possible, because the more parents they reference, the higher the chance of their transaction referencing a branch which will become orphaned due to a double spend which isn't apparent when they submit their transaction.

Even if you do away with orphans completely and have a deterministically ordered DAG with one transaction per block, the incentive is for users to reference as few parents as possible because every parent they reference will be given ordering priority over them, which is opposed to the timely confirmation incentive. The narrowest possible DAG is always desirable because the strength of the network decreases linearly in the number of partitions, and partitions are merged by referencing parents.

I maintain that unless there is a monetary incentive to behave in favour of the network as a whole, instead of being purely rational, the nash equilibrium is destroyed.

Thoughts?

How are people going to vote when the network is halted? Votes are transactions.

Why does temporarily halting the network = drive the price down to 0?  Once it is halted, people could simply take action and vote out the evil witnesses.  While similar to >51% control in PoW the outcome for halting a DPoS network appears much less appealing...

1. Short the coin
2. Vote in evil witnesses to halt the network, driving the price to 0
3. Profit.

Nominally, this would have to be a very evil exchange, but this kind of thing can happen for example, if the exchange gets hacked.