Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 40. (Read 91113 times)

It is only a solution to the malleability issue that rendered TierNolan's original implementation practically unusable (so I just wanted to clarify that malleability is no longer a part of the problem).

I see ACCT with CLTV as being more akin to a street currency exchange than to an exchange like Cryptsy (i.e. useful in the same way as a street currency exchange is for fiat when you are traveling abroad but not very suitable for the purposes of day-trading and cannot be used for high frequency trading of course).

If the purpose of say obtaining LTC for BTC was not to day trade but just to have some LTC as some sort of hedge or to use for some other purpose then you won't need to trust an exchange like Cryptsy being the point.

What about the other issues with decentralized exchange I enumerated?

In regards to decentralised exchanging using ACCT the introduction of CLTV means that malleability is no longer an issue (you don't need to refer to transaction ids that aren't already confirmed).

I have built code that will create a Bitcoin script that works by combining the ACCT and CLTV with a P2SH address and redeem script.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13435766

Correct (kudos!) and I stated that upthread. But I also stated that since you can't allow PoW to be signed by the payer, then PoW can be outsourced to ASICs and thus centralization results.

Also there was the greater concern about a DAG's Consistency (and I prefer not to repeat that upthread discussion).

Master Yoda?!

Already eliminated in Iota.

1,312,500 BTC mined per year @ $300+ profit = $400 million annually (assuming the very low < $50 costs for mining for 2 cents hydropower and latest ASICs). Chinese are mining an estimate of 67% of that apparently.

They can afford to build that custom software solution.

The Chinese miners are lying.

Expect corruption at the highest levels. Probably are getting subsidized electricity for free. Etc.

Bitcoin has already been 51% attacked. End of story.

We MUST eliminate profitable mining (my design)!

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Edit:


That was also one of my thoughts about the possibilities.

But also consider that the core devs of Bitcoin can't be this dumb. Surely they also know about this and have covered it up.

I actually argued that fungibility is not anonymity, that they partially overlap, but that fungibility also requires decentralized, permissionless attribute. And that the latter attribute is a higher priority for maintaining fungibility.

The power law distribution of wealth can't be ameliorated with Coasian barriers.

The wealthy gain inflatacoin from owning more revenue generating businesses, and they can transfer this wealth to the deflatacoin, which they can then use to buy more of the next inflatacoin.

Pertaining to the discussion CoinCube and I were having upthread about the entropic direction of crypto currencies and the trend towards world government control:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4089aj/im_working_on_a_project_called_bitcoin_classic_to/cz0mda4
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4089aj/im_working_on_a_project_called_bitcoin_classic_to/cz0vncc

On the likelihood of fixing Bitcoin:

I hope these aphorisms are not totally off the tangent:

The longest chain is just the longest chain, the rule and the block size limit
are logically separate and independent.

Just as a price ceiling distorts that market where it is imposed, a hard-coded
limit becomes a source of inefficiency. No sacrosanct dev group or other entity
should be able to dictate what that limit is.

There is a market for security - getting included in a block provided by
miners. If we can get that market to clear without friction, then no more block size problems.

I feel like the fungibility thing is somewhat off-topic, and again I'm refraining from quoting due to clutter. But I hope I haven't fallen into the Monero pumpers category as described above. Its true - yes, I do not really understand cryptography enough to really understand how monero works and how it might be flawed re: fungibility (an abstraction of privacy, an abstraction of opaque block chain), but your argument seems to be that true fungibility is impossible due to data out of band. And thats always going to be the case. Even with zerocash etc., I'm sure somehow you can get information from non-protocol data.

What is true is based on what I can see and actually use, and right now the best implementation of this tech seems to be Monero (and to address the IP thing, some integration of tor or i2p). The rabbit hole you're going down though has one inevitable end: p2p wireless mesh networks built from home routers and some kind of zero knowledge proof cryptocurrency.

The first doesn't exist, and will have a hell of a time coming into existence. The second will probably exist at some point. But for now, if I want to send money to someone in Australia in less than 2 minutes and have it relatively traceless and private, I would get their address, load up my simplewallet, and then type in transfer 20

amount. Mixin 20 should do the trick. My point is that it is what is implemented now.

The trick going forward is keeping the fiat <-> cryptocurrency channels operating (at least at this point), and might be the *only* reason to keep bitcoin (or other 1st generation currency networks) propped up at this point, decentralized or not. Because thats all that matters at this current moment to give this stuff legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the people (monetary value).

but I know nothing.  

Some thoughts on decentralisation and anonymity -

There exists a set of at least two cryptocurrencies 0, 1, ... N. The minimum set
contains at least one cryptocurrency with these characteristics at the limit :
 
*a fixed number of coins. This money can attract no interest. This is preferred
for hoarding and has a deflationary effect on market prices. This tends to
depress the economy. Transaction costs are paid for by fee income. Transactions
are relatively infrequent.

*a known number of coins, with a guaranteed cessation of trading X years in
the future. Accounts holding these coins attract interest at rates approximating to
the geometric increase in the quantity of these coins in circulation. These coins
are preferentially spent into circulation, and have an inflationary effect on
market prices and tend to stimulate the economy. Transaction costs are paid for by
mining. All debts denominated in the coins die with the cryptocurrency.
There are always two or more cryptocurrencies in the market. A voting algorithm
provides a majority of cryptocurrencies the means to ensure that a valid cease
trading order is effective. Ideally, that blockchain should be destroyed.

The intent of this writeup is to show that it is possible to design a system that
should restrict the ability of an elite group to concentrate economic resources
via the use of cryptocurrencies.

While CAP theory suggests that one cryptocurrency cannot know the internal state
of another cryptocurrency, it should be possible for cryptocurrencies to
collectively decide whether another cryptocurrency should continue to exist.

There is thus no restriction on individual choice on whether to begin a new
cryptocurrency or on individual choice on whether to use a new cryptocurrency
for transactions. Total collective freedom of choice.

And so the n00bs moved their delusion over to Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0r3d5


https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/41a3nb/is_anonymint_correct/cz0rgdv

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Sorry that won't solve the problem, which as smooth pointed out in my vaporcoin thread recently is the generlized ability to move profit to externalities (where I was already mentioning shorting as an attack on PoS coins).

Checkmate.

Afaics, it is not off-topic. Decentralized exchange is an integral aspect of overall decentralization of crypto currency.


There was another project for a decentralized exchange I was looking at recently but I can't remember the name off the top of my head. Go to monsterer's thread where he is selling the 200 BTC profit shares in his metaexchange and I put some links there about decentralized exchange. The name of that other project can be found from there. Monsterer could you quote my post from there over here for us? I don't have time to go digging for your thread.

Afaik, the insoluble fundamental problems of decentralized exchanges that operate directly on the block chains of the coins being exchanged are:

• Block chains don't have fast enough transactions and can't handle the trading volume.
• The exchange protocol requires long delays (partially because of the third issue below), which means the paradigm can be DDoS attacked[jammed], thus rendering it unsuitable (since exchange is normally a very time sensitive action).
• Orphaned blocks can lead to one of the parties losing all the coins.

And yes afaik malleability makes decentralized exchange impossible. But even after fixing that, the block chains of all the altcoins need to have special changes made to their protocol (hard forks) and still you will have the insoluble problems I bullet-pointed above.

I think the more viable solution may be to have digital assets as Bitshares has done, e.g. BitUSD, BitBTC, BitShitCoin, etc. And these can be traded on a single block chain in a decentralized manner. So then all the inconsistency and DDoS issues of the latter two bullet-pointed above are afaics ameliorated (but let me dig deeper into that in the future before I can say this will 100% confidence). You'd still have the problem though of needing a centralized exchange to obtain the digital assets, so I am not sure this solves anything. The entire problem of decentralized change seems rather insoluble. The issues that plague decentralized exchange are related to some of the issues that probably make Blockstream's side chains insoluble.

As for the block chain scaling issue of the first bullet-pointed above, that is what I am working on now with my proposed design which was discussed upthread.

As for Bitshares, they have some ideas that are useful, but they seem to shoot themselves in the foot continuously as the following linked posts exemplify:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13566505
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13515793
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13513902
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13501040
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.13516897

Users can't set the block size, because it is a global setting for all users in a single longest chain rule. You would need to attempt something like Raiblocks' design where every user has their own block chain, but in my analysis Raiblocks is fundamentally flawed (which can be discussed if monsterer creates a new thread to discuss various variants of models for a concensus model of transaction state).

I beg your pardon for being off-topic.
But as you have an immense understanding of crypto currencies, I thought I might ask a question regarding a part of the recent conversation.
I'd have asked via PM, but I bet a lot of people are interested in your assessment.


Don't you think that decentralized exchanges like
MercuryEx or
Blocks & Chains Exchange
are on a good way, because in difference to other decentralized exchanges they use no proxy tokens, but do transactions on the native blockchains.

My understanding is, that MercuryEx has been stopped, because transaction malleability makes using it unsafe until OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY is widely available.

And Blocks & Chains Exchange is not as decentralized as some might wish, but for a corporation that might still be ok and much better than the current centralized exchanges.