Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 5. (Read 91144 times)

I know !  But most people are simply *not capable* technically to cheat on that system, and are also kept in this mutual fear of cheating relationship.  On the internet, nobody knowns you are a dog, but if you piss off one or other maffioso, he'll find you.  So probably technically, most people don't know how ; and those that know how, mostly don't dare ; and those that know and dare, have stuff at stake.

But it's not really what bitcoin claims as security model it's more the theory of security in open source software that everyone is supposed to be able to understand. It's the whole point of this kind of system that the security is not based on hiding or obfuscating how the system works and it's still secure even when everyone know how it works.

But yeah ultimately it should be more the driving force that user want to keep the system functioning as a whole and cheating it will destroy it. But it require more than pure selfishness, and consciousness of the network as a whole. And willing to accept the compromise as opportunist predator that the system will become unstable if everyone is only selfishly motivated to cheat on others. But it require more consciousness than pure short term selfish benefits. Or the system collapse or become unstable.

Empathy is too unclear term, but consciousness of the conséquences of actions on the other user is maybe more clear than empathy  (which is different from sympathy). As you couldn't say you have sympathy for the mafioso, but still aware of the conséquences of actions on him.

Of course it works.  Because as a greedy bastard not finding enough others to collude, you end up behaving honestly, by lack of choice.  Anything you try to do to be dishonest, is only in your disadvantage.  So your "most egoist choice" is behaving honestly.

In as much as that works, you have a truly decentralized system. It is almost the definition of a decentralized trustless system.

I can easily prove in a Gedanken experiment that not 51% of the nodes are honest by intention but by lack of alternative.  Suppose that there is a button on the bitcoin wallet that allows you to create extra coins for yourself, but you are not supposed to click on it.  Suppose that it really works, that all wallets accept a specific extra coinbase transaction to your address if you click on that button, by a change in the protocol, and miners and most nodes have downloaded core to the latest versions including that protocol change.
But the button says that if you are honest, you shouldn't click on the button and not get 200 BTC.
How many people do you think are NOT going to click on the button ?  Do you think that more than 50% of the nodes are not going to click ?

The point is that most of the time, an altruist well intentioned and competent person doesn't exist, and if he exists, once he has created sufficient structure to be at an interesting place for an egoist, he will be replaced by a compentent egoist who masters the art of communication in building an image of a well-intentioned altruist.

In fact, for me, anybody who claims that he is not a greedy bastard, is a dangerous greedy bastard mimicking as an altruist which is a far more dangerous greedy bastard than the greedy bastard being proud of being a normal greedy bastard.

BTW, a great example of such dangerous person is someone like Mother Theresa.  A horror of a woman.

No.  If not 51% of nodes COLLUDE to be dishonest IN THE SAME WAY.  As there is only one way to be honest, and there are 100 ways to be dishonest, the dispersion of the dishonest systems makes that they can only settle on being honest, after all, because otherwise, they get nowhere.

The point is if 100% of node are greedy cheating bastards as in sociopathic theory, the system doesnt work.

Miners sell hash rate to pools against money.  I don't think they care what the pool does with their hashes.  They don't even need to be paid in the coin the pool makes with their hash power ; but usually the pool does this to hedge against coin value fluctuations.  But miners could rent their hash computations for fiat to pools if that suited people, too.  Miners play "amazon" for pools.  They put computing hardware at disposal against a price.

It's there that the whole idea of selfish seek for reward doesnt truly help to make the network more trustworthy, as they dont check tx and where this whole system of pow based trust is not really "it"


Where to me decentralisation to selfish motivated person < centralisation to altruist well intentioned competent person.

The essence of life, in my idea.  Only, you cannot live like that, so you are forced to gamble, and place your trust in not-to-be-trusted entities, and the only thing you can hope for, is that that not-to-be-trusted entity is just as much obliged to trust you than you are obliged to trust him, and the complex interlock of threats makes that you do not dare to scam him because of the house of cards of false mutual trust relations that it could let crumble.   This has the emergent apparent effect that it seems that you really can trust people, while in fact you can't, but you are tied together in mutual fear of the consequences of scamming the other one.  If this web of mutual threats is thick enough, your only choice is to behave honestly until you have not much to lose any more, at which point you also cannot harm much any more.   This web of mutual fear is what keeps together "relations of trust" other than those inspired by true empathy (close family and friends for instance although even there nothing is sure).

The essence of social relationships consist in obtaining more of this fake trust (that is, fear of the consequences of not behaving trustworthy) from others, than you have to be submitted to having to be honest to others.  This asymmetry determines your power over others, and hence the unfairness by which you can obtain value from them.  Playing this game is the essence of life at large and the engine that brings untrustworthy entities to power and propagates their offspring.


Miners sell hash rate to pools against money.  I don't think they care what the pool does with their hashes.  They don't even need to be paid in the coin the pool makes with their hash power ; but usually the pool does this to hedge against coin value fluctuations.  But miners could rent their hash computations for fiat to pools if that suited people, too.  Miners play "amazon" for pools.  They put computing hardware at disposal against a price.


I know !  But most people are simply *not capable* technically to cheat on that system, and are also kept in this mutual fear of cheating relationship.  On the internet, nobody knowns you are a dog, but if you piss off one or other maffioso, he'll find you.  So probably technically, most people don't know how ; and those that know how, mostly don't dare ; and those that know and dare, have stuff at stake.


No.  If not 51% of nodes COLLUDE to be dishonest IN THE SAME WAY.  As there is only one way to be honest, and there are 100 ways to be dishonest, the dispersion of the dishonest systems makes that they can only settle on being honest, after all, because otherwise, they get nowhere.

http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2014/08/economics-as-a-moral-science.html

On questions of morality, contemporary economics stands mute. Writing about Adam Smith in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008, Harvard's Amartya Sen put it bluntly—

The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society


This looks a bit like bitcoin today


2. In-Group + Self Interest — an individual who follows pure self-interest (in economic exchange) within the groups he belongs to will not be a member of those groups for very long. This space is "unstable" in this sense. This case comes closest to stating how morality and social control evolved in small hunter-gather bands. If you were banished from the group during the paleolithic, death was sure to follow.

https://www.amazon.com/Amartya-Sen/e/B0024JEM5E/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

  


More my kind of economic theories

This is not communism. 
You help, the system can work, you don't help, the system dies and you have nothing to complain about.  BTW, the fewer are the active minters, the higher the probability becomes that these minters can collude.  If you don't mint, your fault.  You contribute with your "civil duty" or you increase the chance for the system to break down.
That's enough motivation.

The way to game the system is to be a whale that corrupts the system with an incredible majority of nodes.  If everybody contributes according to his stake, this cannot happen.  If you don't, and you let the whale do, your fault, don't complain.  And if the whale nukes his own system, his problem.

The system is not designed to "withstand the storm".  The system is self-destructive in case people are not motivated in supporting it.  As such, it cannot become a monster.  It kills itself before.

The problem of censorship occurs when an attacker manages to bribe more than 51% of the minters to not include certain transactions and to not mine on top of blocks that contain such transactions.


Unfortunately, "undercover" minting (as I call it in my own design) doesn't solve the issue. All you need is offering a reward to those who prove after the fact that they didn't include certain transactions or didn't mine on top of certain blocks, even though they had the chance to do so.

What can help in that context is the sheer size of the minter group. If you need to bribe 10000 (potentially) anonymous/pseudonymous minters (rather than the top 10 whales) to get majority control, the only way to achieve that would be to publicly announce your bribe, which would make defense much easier.

Other defense mechanism against bribing could be...

Such a scheme will be prone to stake grinding attacks if not designed with care. My approach to the problem is using massively combined pre-committed hash chains and account activation times.


Does that imply that a minter would not always choose the longest chain but apply some other (subjective) scoring rules? If that's your idea, you might want to take a look at chapter 3.2 of this paper.


How do you prevent that a user creates several accounts to stake the minimum value multiple times?

That is a flaw. Communism doesn't work.

There is a way to game your system because only those who are incentivized will mine (or those with more stake will dominate the mining). So for example, extortion and side-band fees. Or disrupting the system and shorting the token on the markets.

You were on the correct path of removing economies-of-scale from anything which can do harm such as double-spending. But as I said, there are other necessary details.

If all the systems in the world that is designed by man is corrupted  because of the greed that humankind has shown so far, what keeps bitcoin to be not corrupted in the end ?

Well that is why satoshi designed the bitcoin in a way that the personal profit could never be ahead of the general favor. What you are seeing with miners and forks and discussions is people who want more and more profits for themselves instead of other people which is exactly what bitcoin was created against.

You can’t rely on human to be less greedy but you can rely on a system that is less greedy friendly.

It's what I call the sociopathic/paranoiac theory, that no one can be trusted, everyone is the enmy, and you are on your own against everyone else.

Trustless is to be taken in the context of cryptography, ultimately you still want to trust the network, even if not relying on the other party of transaction or a single third party, but there is still need to be trust in the network.

And this idea that the network is populated only by greedy cheating bastards and that it's only the good cop software that keep everything in check, is really overrated.

When you look at how pooled mining work, it's even very unlikely most miner even check the validity of transaction and merkkle root and that it actually match the block headers template.

Where I want to get at is that the level of security that is actually provided by the network in term of trustlessness and decentralisation is very overrated.

It's well known bitcoin works if 51% of node are honest.

Uh, I was talking about society in general, not bitcoin

In fact, Satoshi mixed several totally different things into one, to come up with a system that seemed brilliant, and turns out to be seriously flawed.

He wanted:

1) to adhere to a sound money theory in order to get a monetary belief (illusion) going.  Sound money theory in a setting with monetary competition is an illusion (and suffers from a version of Gresham's law).  Sound money theory only makes sense if that money has the monopoly on money and where people are FORCED to use that money, and no other means of exchange, in other words, only under strict economic totalitarianism.  But as such, he wanted a convergent series of coin emission.

2) he wanted newcomers to be able to win coins by anything else but buying them from the original devs.  As such, he needed a way to create coins for non-stake holders from scratch.

3) he needed to solve the decentralized consensus problem.

4) he needed to cryptographically secure the old consensus (immutability), so that one cannot "redo" old transactions.

These 4 totally different problems to be solved are done in ONE SINGLE SOLUTION, and this was a severe error.  Because the requirements are essentially mutually exclusive.  His solution was to get external people do coin creation (2) at diminishing rate (1) in a competitive lottery (3) in such a way that it would cost too much to redo it (4).

However, by doing (1), he caused a need for a squeezed fee market, to pay for the huge amount of work needed to secure the chain (4), in ways that could compromise the permissionlessness of solving the consensus problem (3) by people that may not have vested interests in the system (2).

The 4 problems needed 4 different solutions.  In fact, (1) was a ridiculous assumption, but which is still driving the illusions in bitcoin.  (2) was important at a certain point, but now the miners are not exactly "newcomers" and the way newcomers acquire coins is not by mining them but by buying them.

(3) it is better to solve the decentralized consensus problem by many stake holders, instead of a few concentrated industrials

(4) digital signatures are cryptographically much, much less wasteful and much, much more secure than proof of work.

Block reward motivation is not based on empathy. Beyond empathy id say consciousness of the network at bigger scale. Of the network operation as a whole.

But it's more involved than running an Asic to compute hashes for reward.

I think calling the obvious, "sociopath theories" is exactly the social lie I was talking about.
I'm not excluding empathy, btw.  Empathy is included in joy and suffering, in the same way that eating chocolate is included in joy, and getting a hammer blow on your big toe is included in suffering.

That is exactly what I expect of a decentralized, trustless system: a web of greedy cheating bastards wanting to rip off one another so much that they can only come to the consensus of a working, fair system ; and in fact, of any form of society in general (which, at its most abstract level, IS a trustless, decentralized system, governed by the immutable and non-centralized laws of physics).  I think any picturing of anything else but that is but delusion, with the purpose to misguide the preys at best, and based upon misunderstanding at worst.

It's one of the composent, but far to account of all aspect of human psychology. Aka plato myth of caverne or body as tomb of the soul.

Reward based system is Pavlovian. It's good to train dogs and breed kapos in nazi camps.

If that's your view of human psychology, and expect everyone to act upon such theory of mind  ill let you at it

I guess it become the norm now.

But if the network is entierely built upon selfish interest, you cant complain in the same breath that miner act selfish and steal your money because it's profitable to them, or miner empty block for the same raeson. Perfectly acceptable behavior then. Nothing more to expect from any conscious being.


And I still maintain that bitcoin is built upon sociopathic theories.

https://youtu.be/ImbQwCu5GdM

This is the essence of living, conscious beings.
Consciousness defining pleasure and suffering, and life defining offspring preference, the obvious behaviour of any conscious, living being is what you just stated.

The negation of this is what I call the social lie.

I don't see the problem.  Why would an arbitrary minter censor you ?  And if he censors you, the next one probably won't.


Who are you going to bribe ?  The guy that just minted a block, but if he changes something, he's not the preferred minter any more, but some other dude ?

The idea is that, if the preferred minter order is a random function, depending on every individual bit in the block, you cannot know who will mint the modified block ! 

As iamnotback said, this is just at high conceptual level and not a "design", but essentially, you take a hash function of the block, and you find the Hamming distance between this hash result and the minter's stake address.  The one with smallest Hamming distance is the preferred minter.  Change one byte in the block, and the preferred minter becomes someone else. Many minters can mint blocks almost simultaneously.  Another function will tell future minters which chain to prefer to mint upon.  This function should be well-designed so that there is almost no way to "orphan" many blocks, by increasing exponentially the preference for the currently longest chain.

I'm not doing anything PROPORTIONAL to stake - you simply have to stake a given amount, somewhat like the master node scheme in DASH - but the amount shouldn't be very high - as there's nothing to WIN in staking, you don't care about your probability to mint, you only do it altruistically to keep the network running.