Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 35. (Read 91144 times)

Unfortunately I've had to put monsterer on ignore. I really thought he was going to be of great assistance and I am shocked at this result. My original judgement was that he was very smart and mathematical, and I had great respect for him.

You've missed the 'on average' part. Obviously it costs the network 25 BTC on average to produce a block. And, I left k out of the intuition because its easier to get the overall picture without it.

No need. I already pointed out that you continue spamming the thread with obvious errors.

Get some sleep, and come back to this later

I get frustrated because this post of yours ignores what I wrote in the prior post.

There is no such equilibrium because not all miners have the same costs for the same difficulty.

Also you can't assume they didn't double-spend more than one transaction.

Those are just really obvious errors. I shouldn't even need to make this post. You should have thought of that before making the post and thus realized not to make the post.

(I been awake too long and my forehead wants to fall on the keyboard, and even in this dilapidated mental state I can easily see those errors)

I've no idea what 'boastful surety' is, but here is the intuition which motivated me, which the reader may find useful:

PoW has a value. The electricity burned by the entire bitcoin network attempting to produce one block costs 25 BTC on average, because overall, PoW mining is equilibrium centered around break even. Therefore, as the recipient of a transaction for 25 BTC, it stands to reason that I can wait for 25 BTC worth of PoW to get appended to the chain after my transaction appears in a block, because any double spend of this transaction after that point would not be profitable for the miner, since they must expend that amount of PoW to achieve the double spend.

In a system with no block reward, I can't see how you can possibly make any judgement about when it is safe to accept a transaction, because there is no direct valuation of the PoW.

I asked you to create your own thread or use my PM box if you wanted to discuss. If you at least honored my reasonable request, maybe I would have been more willing to reveal more to you. As it stands with your obstinance, I don't feel you are trustworthy.

I suggested to you that what ever we discussed off thread, could be brought onto the thread with a summary conclusion.

I have a problem in this forum with people who don't respect that the time of others is finite and not free. And that it is not fair to coerce me with attacks. I am only one person. I have a lot on my plate to do. I can't respond to every boastful thing at every instant. I need time to think through what I want to respond to and when (for strategic reasons and otherwise).

For the past 36 hours I have been wanting to discuss decentralized exchanges (I have a job offer for that so it is a higher priority for me at the moment), but every time I go to start that, I have to deal with you instead. Take it off thread so it is not a coercion of me in this thread which I popularized. I may not have the same priorities as you.

Then again, you are free to do what ever you want. I don't own the thread. And so am I free to do what I want too. Teamwork requires some recognition of the non-linearity of relative priorities and some attempt to organize to minimize stress and strife.

I wouldn't be so coerced if your posts weren't asserting with boastful surety that unprofitable PoW can't have the correct incentives. Meaning I wouldn't feel compelled to have to stress myself to reply to them immediately (could come back to your post later at my leisure). If you want to make the point that you think PoW requires profit to have correct incentives and state your reasons why you think that, that is not as coercive as stating absolutely that you know that no design with unprofitable PoW can have correct incentives. When you aren't even including all the factors in your analysis, such as the fact that unreimbursed capital costs are not the same in profitable and unprofitable proof-of-work. That point is deducible from the first statements I made to you:


You are not considering factors such as whether the community will honor a longest chain that has an enormous number of double-spends relative to the chain that has to reorganized after obviously been withheld from the network for an enormous number of blocks (assuming all payees are told not to accept a payment for that number of blocks and especially in combination with an instant transactions option when they need faster confirmation).

A 51% attack (or with lower probability some < 51%) for double-spends is nonsense. No one amasses that level of capital costs just to mess around with a small level of profit. The 51% attack is only useful for censoring transactions or other malfeasance that is directed towards society-wide benefits to the State.

One can argue that the attack can benefit greatly more consummately to the capital costs by shorting the coin, but this is the case in Bitcoin too then regardless of the block reward. If the profit from shorting is large enough to pay for capital costs risk, then the block reward is too small to be relevant.

Even if you argue that mining equipment can be rented, then again the reward from double-spends is far less than the reward from shorting, so the block reward is again irrelevant.

Bottom line is it better be damn difficult for anyone to centralize a great % of the hashrate, else your coin is vulnerable to double-spend attack to short the coin, but since everyone knows the attacker's intent is to profit from shorting and he can't sustain the attack due to ongoing capital costs (unlike in PoS where the capital costs are not ongoing), then it is unlikely for the short to pay off. And I already pointed out to you that aggregating a large % of the hashrate is much more difficult in my design due to unreimbursed capital costs, because the mining is unprofitable and you are battling against the CPUs of all the payers in the system (unlike in Bitcoin where the only incentive to add hashrate is to make a profit and then you need to include in your equation the fact that marginal miners have costs of $350 and mining farms costs of $50 per BTC thus marginal miners are not going to proliferate as much as unpaid PoW share payers in my design).

If you argue that attacker can rent the mining equipment and won't do the attack because the profit from double-spends is less than from the block rewards but would do the attack if the block rewards are 0, one flaw in that reasoning is that there is no level of block reward for which k is bounded. You can argue that a higher block reward forces a higher k, but that is no guarantee. How high do you increase the block reward to make yourself convinced the incentives are sufficient? Rather if you increase the number of blocks required for confirmation, then the hashrate needed (the variable r) is adjusted so the capital costs increase. The nonsense equation you quoted is completely missing that math. So the point is that increasing the number of blocks for confirmation is another way to decrease the profitability of a double-spend and also the level of hashrate one would need to rent. That nonsense equation also doesn't factor in the cost of variance as the probability r becomes very small (as well as not counting the ongoing costs that have to be offset by the profit from the double-spends). At some level of block confirmations, and counting the ongoing cost then unprofitable block reward is equivalent in relative profit to any block reward that Bitcoin has at 6 confirmations.

Also I never said the block reward would be 0 and I even emphasized that my design can distribute new coins so the coin supply doesn't shrink towards 0 asymptotically as in the case of Iota/DAG due to lost coins/private keys. I said it would be unprofitable due to the difficulty imposed by the payers who send PoW without expecting profit.

Whats good for the goose is good for the gander also (yes I'm lurking)

I look forward to the time we can discuss this fully, and I genuinely wish you all the best.

I asked you to do preliminary discussion of your myopia in another thread or in my PM box and you obstinately refuse. And here you are going on and on and on in this thread with the same myopia. Thanks for filling up the thread with endless noise in the nonsense piecemeal analysis with Fuserleer (when he was unwilling to release the complete specification), the nonsense misunderstanding of how a DAG can't be total ordered (even after it was explained to you numerous times), and now after those two examples of how you create a lot of noise, your obstinate refusal to respect my reasonable request.

Remember I don't have to tell you a damn thing. I can wait and explain in a white paper if I so desire. And that may be to my maximum benefit. Your method of discourse is to boastfully proclaim nonsense attacking the designs of others who have stated they are not ready to release all the details for competitive reasons, and thus attempting to force us to reveal our secrets before we are ready to.

I can easily refute your myopia when I am ready to. I am outside right now and not at my regular desk, so I am thinking about whether I should let you take over the thread and enjoy your 15 minutes of fame until the white paper is released (after which you eat humble pie).

Since you are unable to respect the boundaries of others, I am contemplating it is best to stop discussions with you.

Your math and holistic economics conceptualization is still incorrect.


You chomp on that until you realize your mistake.

k is the number of double spends an attacker attempts to pull of at the same time. In theory it can mean there is no upper bound for when it is safe to accept a transaction in bitcoin because, under a theoretical elastic block size, the attacker can attack an infinite number of merchants at the same time. However in practice the author of the paper assumes a k of around 4/5 (can't recall exactly), because there is a limited window in which the attacker can pull of his attack. There is a way around this problem with k, but its for another discussion.

In your system, however this is completely unbounded and there is no way to place bounds on transaction acceptability because PoW is not being valued, therefore the recipient can never tell when it becomes unprofitable for an attacker to try and double spend your transaction.

The capital costs argument applies equally to all PoW coins, I don't see the relevance?

edit: am I the only one who sees the irony in you calling a critical equation 'nonsense' from a paper which you yourself cited as being 'bitcoin 101'?

You have ignored the implications of the variable k and note the equation fails to consider capital costs. Chomp on that for a while, as I need to step outside for 3 hours. You will soon come to realize that the above equation is nonsense.

Start with a nonsense, non-holistic equation and you get only a nonsense result. And boastful, disrespect n00bs who memorized something from a white paper and think they are qualified to disrespect me.


Eat more humble pie.

Try to rephrase the answer in another form, he might get it then lol

You entirely fail to comprehend what has been explained to you and that is also why you fail to understand why the math you have shown is irrelevant.

You only able to see things in a small box perspective and unable to contemplate how the holistic economics renders your thinking invalid.


You are not being civil because you are being boastful about your myopia and instead of trying to understand, you are trying to fill the thread up with noise. I told you my PM box is available and we can hash out your myopia there, so we don't have to play 21 cat & mouse questions here. We can come back here and point out the final conclusions. Or I asked you to create another thread to discuss your myopia but you refused and continued posting your noise in this thread. You are extremely disrespectful.

I told you I want to keep this thread terse and easy to follow.

This is plain nonsense. Of course an individual payer can have a majority of PoW, that's how double spends exist in the first place.


I've given you a reference to a math proof about the inability to asses confirmation in your design. Lets see your rebuttal.

Further, I've yet to hear why any given attacker can't trivially circumvent your censorship prevention by creating a majority of 'provider' nodes.

Please try and be civil here, I am trying to help you.

I explained what is different but you've decided to ignore the education:



What the fuck can't you comprehend from above?

You have an inability to think about anything in paradigm-shift terms. You tried to analyze a DAG as if all the branches obey a deterministic relative ordering, totally failing to comprehend that such an ordering is impossible without a global clock (since the LCR is impossible given multiple branches). Now you are demonstrating your intellectual handicap again.

I will reply to your myopic math delusion after I complete some tasks this morning. Don't forget how I taught the Monero developers some math recently (and make you sure scroll 2 pages up that thread and see how they were so sure of themselves and boastful just the same as you are now). Hint: unbounded entropy of the universe.


You are wasting my time and I won't be surprised. I will be forced to point out more of your myopia.

It was already explained to you upthread that due to the fact that the speed-of-life can't be infinite, then it is impossible to have decentralized, trustless Consistency in the face of multiple perspectives (i.e. branches a.k.a. Partitions) without consuming some resource in a LCR. Any idea you are contemplating will be flawed because it violates the fundamental nature of our universe.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on rewards not tied to a block?