Topic: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?) - page 55. (Read 91117 times)

I kinda doubt that.

If he succeeds, then we will bow at his feet.

Got it.

First two quotes:



The entire point of DECENTRALIZED contracts, apps, databases is that they are permissionless. If we don't need the permissionless (End-to-End) principle, then a corporation/government can nearly always do that feature more efficiently and provide more robust servers to the users (e.g. have you scrolled the Facebook timeline lately and see all videos, games, and mesmerizingly addictive content that loads as you scroll it ... it is like a TV with 1000 channels).

DECENTRALIZATION is a threat to the Corporations (and they are the government), thus if a DECENTRALIZED paradigm becomes popular, the government is going to attack it the same as they did Napster.

Thus if your block chain design is not truly permissionless, then you've accomplished nothing.

Ethereum, BitShares, etc are Napsters. Daniel can't figure out how to make something truly decentralized so he argues that we substitute politics and governance for protocol. Sorry I am not inspired by that.

We are still waiting for someone to invent the Gnutella of crypto.

After that we can use that technology to go make the correct block chain for all these 2.0 features.

True DECENTRALIZATION enables the End-to-End Principle which enables grassroots wildfire viral adoption, because developers and others who invest in it are confident that no one owns it (i.e. just like open source, their investment doesn't depend on any third parties), as that is embodied in the definition of the End-to-End Principle.

And besides I've been thinking (since 2013 or 2014 when I first read gmaxwell's Coin Witness thread) the only way to do programmable block chain scalably is ZK-SNARKS. But first I want to perfect the block chain.

Sometimes the turtle and not the hare wins the race.

You are missing the point that a self-healing system is immune to politics. Math doesn't have to exclude politics as a threat vector.

The point is that if you mix politics with math you'll get useless mess in the end.

No, it was on these forums - there was a consensus primer, but it lacked critical information. What I could discern at the time was that it was vulnerable to long range attacks (like POS), and there were edges cases around when the validating nodes changed. Both of these problems challenge the idea of an append only ledger, unless you add trusted authorities.

The threat of government action is globally pervasive. Please reread my post, as I edited it. There is already a precedent. Btw, the USA is in control of Panama. They are just allow fools to incriminate themselves before the world government takes form. Putin is in control of where you are. Putin is not a saviour. He is part of the push to world governance.

Are you refering to this http://blog.emunie.com/?p=53 ?
Where do you see the similarities to POS ?

Well, in this case in Panama PoS doesn't have those flaws. Maybe you should add a note, something like "not applicable in Panama"?

By definition to be SUSTAINABLY decentralized, then a P2P system should be resilient to government action against nodes of the system. Given that PoS makes the owners of the currency culpable to the government and they are also the miners, then in theory the design is not resilient to regulatory control (and as per my complaint against Satoshi's design upthread, it forces nation-states to cooperate in a world governance to cooperate on multinational regulation).

Contrast it to the Gnutella where you pretty much have to ban the protocol to destroy it. PoS is Napster, except with the distinction that government would have to go after numerous stake holders, not just one company.

It doesn't logically follow that there surely can't exist other designs which are resilient. Thus IMO it is a flaw.

P.S. I linked the post on the first page to this post for clarification on the contention.

The last thing I read (months ago) was that eMunie was trust based, and followed a similar security model to POS, but things may have changed since then. Fusilier is supposed to be writing up his consensus summary when he gets a moment in this thread.

I agree that checkpoints in POW fail the trustlessness goal.  It seems you also agree that POW/POS are never both append-only and trustless.  But based on my reading of the consensus algo of eMunie, its possible to have a ledger system that is all three important qualities:  trustless, append-only, and resourceless (meaning doesn't waste resources).  Is there another crypto with those three?

Checkpoints in POS (and to a lesser extent in bitcoin) add trust to the equation. You might ask if checkpoints are so great, why not have them for every single block and the obvious answer is that this means you are trusting the checkpoint producer 100%, which is against all that trustless crypto attempts to achieve.

LCR should mean that you don't need checkpoints at all; this is something which POW has over POS and all other consensus techniques which do not expend a resource to create a block.

One way to think of the difference between an "append-only" ledger and one that isn't (e.g. LCR without checkpoints) is the difference between a strict teacher that allows no late work and a soft teacher that allows late work just the same.  Half way through the semester, a clever student in the soft teacher's class who hasn't done any work can still pull off a perfect total score in the class just by cramming at the end, turning in all homework, and getting all previous zeroes turned to perfect scores.  It's a function of what rule the system uses - does it allow previously confirmed ledger entries to change or not? Trustless or not.  Right?

I guess it is assumed that you are watching for rule violations constantly.  Once a violation is spotted, you just freeze your ledger and it remains append-only.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and state that having an append only ledger is impossible in trustless crypto.