Topic: delete - page 34. (Read 165519 times)

Most people can barely understand the Byzantine Generals Paradox/Solution, much less Ripple's abstractions and Ethereum's average brain melting concepts like "Turing completeness."

The Cambrian explosion of altcoins competing has led to feature-fatigue.  New technology is moot as we endure innovation saturation.

EG: DOGE has a silly popular .gif, while XCN has mini-blockchains and safe zero-confirmation transactions.  Result?  DOGE goes to the moon as its legions of redditards sponsor NASCAR, post videos, and propagate meme clusters, while XCN languishes in the dark with a market cap incapable of buying a new Lexus.

Perhaps I am closer to describing more specifically how a BCX-like an attack might be feasible. Note I still haven't done any precise quantification so interpret this as probing FUD.

A key algorithmic insight may be that the attacker's hidden fork is evaluated when it is published according to difficulty in place at that time, not the difficulty that existed while the attack was mining the hidden fork.

TW and other difficulty adjustment attacks are based on lowering the difficulty at which the attackers fork is measured, non-linearly relative to the proportion of the attacker's percentage of the network hashrate.

For example, the attacker could introduce a lot of orphans and cause the network to waste hashrate, thus lowering the difficulty at the next adjustment.

Or the attacker can leverage flaws in the difficulty adjustment that cause the majority to mine at a higher difficulty than the majority's hashrate, then the attacker publishes his hidden fork when the difficulty readjustments. For example, Kimoto Gravity Well has a flaw in that it thresholds the adjustment so the attacker can trigger a huge difficulty raise, then pull his hashrate away but not too fast so the difficulty adjustment stays under the threshold and doesn't adjust until the attacker is ready for it to.

I believe the discarding of the 20% tails of the timestamp distributions in Cryptonote's difficulty adjustment might present such a flaw, but I am not attempting to quantify it and prove it (not my job). Imagine that every distribution of timestamps follows some bell curve. So if the hacker puts his timestamps on one side of the mean, he can shift the mean.

Not arguing in favor of byteshitcoin, but if they built the protocol with the sole intention of a premine dump...well then the code must be shit. Monero being built on a code that was developed for no other reason than for a scam premine dump must make Monero based on complete garbage code.

Saying every coin based on CN is a scam , by developers who are only out to scam, makes it stupid to invest in Monero which is based on bullshit scam code whose original authors intended to use it for nothing other than a scam, not a serious coin.
Bytecoin and cryptonote's stories have huge holes in them, some of the clone coins may also be related to them. No need to expend so much energy pointing that out, and proclaim XMR is the ONLY legit coin based on CN. Anyone even half serious will want to invest in a newer coin with a higher market cap, more profitable mining and active transparent community. Why run around like a cult trying to brainwash the community when you can just let them discover the benefits of XMR on their own. You seem like scared bagholders trying to pull off a pump and dump. First the big scare was BCN, now the XMR cult is scared of BBR and rather than build XMR your focus is to tear down BBR.

Honestly I think you are a giant bagholder, who used the datacenter at work to mine a shit ton of XMR and is hyper defensive trying to protect XMR even if it is a clone, released by who knows, raped by those with mining software magnitudes better than the public. If your intent was to build on the CN protocal and make a legit coin with a future, why not start over. One minute blocks are something the XMR community was against..why did you stick with XMR and not release a new coin that adopted the ring sig anon rather then take over a coin based on code written to scam that was released by a dev related to the initial scam who named it a shitty name and ignored the community and used one min blocks...could it be you were already a bagholder and wanted to make the illusion of a shitcoin clone into something valuable so you could dump it? I don't know, but it's why I mine and dump rather than invest and support the community and the devs. If you are sincere (which I doubt) forget everything about CN and focus on XMR. Forget bashing all other coins, and focus on the benefits of XMR and the personal privacy and freedom it provides it's users. Enough with the negativity, build something instead of tearing everything else down!
For what it's worth, I'm just some dumb fuck who wanted to invest in XMR, but the community leaders and cult folowers act so much like all the other shitcoin coordinated pump and dumps I can't. Being a strong libertarian, and not dumb enough to buy into the DRK get rich scam I'm left with CN..which would make XMR the go to coin, if it didn't have a cult like community acting like a pump and dump with more fear of other coins than belief in it's own.

Cryptonerds and ACs and LIBs have been shown to be a questionable demographic to start with, but even that is not proven. That plus a cute cat pic or hot girls could possibly work.

I'm sure you know this, just commenting for others. If someone else creates a great cryptocoin that changes the world for the better, I consider that a success.

Afaik the distribution difference of DOGE was not technological, but that doesn't mean a distribution difference can't be technologically driven.

And I agree seeding in the desired demographic is critically important.

That dilution is ignored, because investors think the supply is limited and they are rushing to get their percent of the future global economy pie. Remember the $1 million expectations for BTC.

Markets act on expectations.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/28/turkey-rates-rates-to-12/


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/09/03/the-september-start-of-war/

Certainly not.

I just cautioned technologists not to excessively focus on technology, because it is extremely apparent (from the controlled experiment of essentially identical technologies having enormously different outcomes) that other factors are also having a huge impact. Likely in my opinon huge enough to drive success of inferior technologies and doom better ones to failure. Even if in this case "inferior" and "better" refer to networking/viral effects. A cute dog picture and seeding in the right demographic can be tremendously important (with corresponding mistakes being equally important negatively), and these are just examples of a theme, not at all an exhaustive list.

Never said it was. But seemed you were excluding technological design as a component of marketing.

Marketing is not the same as advertising. Advertising can be a component of marketing but it certainly need not be. DOGE wasn't particularly advertised although some money has been spent on things like race cars.

Marketing can also be accomplished technologically. The internet is adopted not because someone advertised it, but because users need the technology. The first time you tried the internet, you couldn't pull yourself away. It is a technological magnet.

Most people should work for an income. Only a small fraction of the population is well suited to the stress of speculation.

Edit: I am not well suited to be a short-term speculator. I am well suited being a long-term value investor a la Warren Buffet, and remember he invests for income not for stock appreciation.

That is exactly marketing. If you are relying on network effects then your marketing better reach a large enough network, either directly or indirectly through viral or some similar technique. Otherwise you fail.

EDIT: BTC and LTC are still enormously dilutive. They might not be in the future, but that can't be the present problem. The problem lies elsewhere, mostly just lack of any compelling reason to care transactional use when fiat works perfectly well for most people I think. The only exception to that I can identify was Silk Road, and maybe Wikileaks.

The growth was probably because the large holdings had diminished so the usage as a currency could begin to dominate the value again. But then the speculative investors will come back in and try to ruin it again.

Thus it has the same technical design error as BTC and LTC, in that it doesn't dilute those large holdings that don't move. There must be a symbiotic balance. If you let speculative investors design your coin, you will never get a balance.

And it's difference was it put the currency in small amounts in many users hands. It wasn't just marketing, but rather the network effects of the marketing which created technically both the egg and the chicken.

It has always been about distribution. Always. No coin has done it correctly yet.

Having any sizable holdings of crypto-currency means either you are giddy or depressed and never leveled, hunky-dory.

Thus the size of holdings impacts how fun a crypto-currency is. As the size of holdings falls below a week's income, the currency becomes quite trouble-free and an interesting enjoyable outlet.

I disagreed strongly with rpietila trying to convert non-professional speculators into speculators. He will pay dearly for that mistake. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen.

It is growing again, and the growth in transaction volume proceeded the recent price increases.

That wasn't so much my point though, as it was that DOGE was technically almost identical to BTC and LTC yet its reception and trajectory has been very, very different. It is impossible to separate the effect of technical differences from marketing and even just timing, serendipity, etc. 

That was my point too. Great answer btw.


It was a function of there existing both an egg and a chicken in terms of usage as a currency. The problem was it didn't reproduce.

My theory is that failure to reproduce was as much a technical design error as it was the narrow market.

P.S. Good point that Bitcoin didn't start as a speculative investment, but my hypothesis it is dying (adoption slowing) as it becomes one.

There is no "the egg" and there is no "the chicken".

There is an egg, and there is a chicken.

This is probably true of all altcoins. It is less true of Bitcoin. Although its usage came to be dominated by speculative investors, I don't think it was necessarily targeted to them.

We can learn from that experience though, and try to build something that appeals more broadly.

The DOGE experience suggest that usage and adoption is not particularly a function of technology, so technologists should be careful not to overly focus there, and even not to dismiss "failed" approaches that have already been tried. If one almost-exact clone of Bitcoin (via Litecoin) can have such a different result based on branding and marketing then the scope of possible outcomes for one particular technology is extremely large.

This also refutes the argument that clone coins are inherently useless or harmful.

That is necessary but not sufficient by itself. Which comes first the egg or the chicken?

Usability and Security is all that's needed for cryptocurrencies. Make it simple to use and relatively safe, then you'll find a huge spike in people actually using the currency as a transfer of wealth instead of speculative investments.