Topic: Faster bitcoin transaction times - page 2. (Read 12326 times)

I don't believe that money can be or is evil. And getting paid is something that I'd never begrudge people for. What you're attempting to do there, however, is not to get paid for your work: You're attempting to get paid for other people's work (including mine, as a matter of fact), which made whatever you done possible and for which you did not pay a single bitcent. You are also attempting to get paid for the work other people may do in the future completely independently of you.  I consider this to be despicable and many other in our ecosystem will as well.  If you'd like to do useful work you can certainly find people to pay you to do so... if you're willing to actually do work, rather than spin your wheels encumbering the work others have done, I've certainly never complained about being unable to earn a living. (I thought I was clear that donations only amounted to a tiny amount? I've really tried to call for them.)  I worked on Bitcoin prior to having any expectation that it would make any money for me, it's an interesting technology which I believe is important for human freedom in the future (including my own and my families: my community work is not selfless, it's just merely not exploitive either).

Ah, this demonstrates you don't actually understand the issue there at all. Sad. I think it's explained quite clearly, but then again I've been working in this space for many years. It's a bit much to ask people to have a strong understanding of anything new to them in only six months.

Considering your lack of understanding of the basic technology, this tangent is probably uninteresting (that it's unlikely that you've found anything which is new and interesting or even secure in a meaningful sense). I recommend you confine your posts to the NXT thread rather than cropping up here to pump it and irritating others.

I'd demand that you stop pumping and actually post your design-- except since you've announced an intention obtain a monopoly ownership interest in the idea (and, accordingly, any cryptocurrency that used it), I wouldn't want to encourage anyone else in the ecosystem to review it and provide you with even more free labor to exploit for your personal gains.

Well, if they are using the algorithm I wrote, then I feel like it is reasonable to expect to be paid for it.  After all, I have spent a year learning all I could about blockchains and at least half a year figuring out how to make decentralized instant transactions work in the context of a blockchain and years before that learning about computer software, hardware, and math.  And patents are a good thing, because I will now be able to share this algorithm and provide Bitcoin with something very good in the process.  But I wouldn't have spent that much time working on it, if my intention wasn't to try to figure out how to make money off of it.  So in this case, patents are providing something new to the system that may have not been discovered for years to come.  If it was so obvious, then surely someone would have figured it out, right?

NXT's algorithm is actually very secure, I'm in the process of writing a paper explaining how Nxt solves the Nothing At Stake Problem.  Which let's face it, is only an issue if over approximately 50% of the forging stake is running a version of the software that tries to be selfish and work together to form attacking branches.  I would be happy to run it by you and hear your thoughts.  I suspect you haven't heard one key part of the algorithm that fixes the nothing at stake issue and provides 90% protection to the network.

Congrats on working for donations only..  but did you invest early yourself?  Maybe not the only reason, part surely part of your reason for working on Bitcoin is in order to increase the price of the Bitcoin you own. Maybe you actually are that selfless.. it's nice to have those kinds of people in the world.  But I've spent the last 6 months surviving off of less than minimum wage, specifically because I had and initial idea and wanted to flesh it out, analyze it from all angles and figure out how to do this.

And why do I want money?  Because most of my life I haven't had enough of it and have had to pinch pennies and scrounge to make sure that I could maintain a reasonable quality of life, it would be really nice to have a nice financial cushion.  At that point, I will likely be a lot more generous.  For me it's not about being greedy or wanting a nice fancy sports car.

It's funny that people working on money believe that money can be evil.. money can be a good thing and a good incentive for getting things done.

I've worked on Bitcoin for years without payment, and made no magical "early money" on account of having worked on it (it isn't like working on the software results in it paying you... outside of some scammy premined alts , I think I've probably collected a dozen or so in donations, on account of open source work on Bitcoin), and made a conscious and intentional decision to not patent or restrictive license many piece of novel technology used in the ecosystem. Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology which has the potential to improve people's personal freedom and autonomy and allow more of the world to interact as equals. This potential cannot be realized-- cryptocurrency has no future-- if the system is owned or monopolized through state granted artificial property rights. Bitcoin is also the logical progression of the work of thousands of people over many years, without which Bitcoin would not have been possible.

I think that it's unfortunate that providing freedom to the world also includes greedy parasites who think it's acceptable to go around trying to take small (and usually obvious) extensions of a system that was shared freely with them and take them away from the public for their personal gain. But fact that you're based on NXT at all suggests that you don't actually have the technical background to gauge a secure system from an insecure one, so, well, good luck with that. In the unlikely event that what you've done is at all worthwhile, I'll personally endeavour to ensure that it's replaced with superior unencumbered alternatives so that they only thing you receive on account of your anti-social behaviour is lost income.

If anyone is threated on patent grounds by mczarnek or anyone else involved with the seedy "NXT" project now or in the future and finds this message, please feel free to reach out to me for technical, legal, or financial assistance. I've worked on defending against patents successfully for many years and would be glad to help anyone work around, uncover prior art, or otherwise invalidate patents in this space. Cheers.

Many people have looked at it.. no worries, it should work and provide fast, secure transactions.  I have spent a lot of time looking into prior art, I'm pretty sure it is unique.. though that is a risk of course.

And if it really does work as well as it seems it should, then I think that Bitcoin will be willing to pay a little bit for it.. either that or be beaten by Nxt which will have this feature working.  Which is fine by me too.

Also, I love cryptocurrency and I think it's got a bright shiny future ahead of it.. I'll be honest I'm mostly invested in it because I wanted to make money and the reason I invented this algorithm was because I was looking to make money and help out Nxt, and I don't think that's selfish.. you got in early right?  Why haven't you sold your Bitcoins and worked on Bitcoin for minimum wage in order to be selfless?

Patenting your idea will almost certainly guarantee its complete failure, patented cryptosystems are almost never deployed and there is a long history proving this out. Your patent will also likely be invalid, since it was almost certainly anticipated by the years a public work in support of the community done by people here and in other places. Even ignoring the situation specific factors, in the US a majority of patents have claims struck down on review; for small inventors the patent system is a scam to make money for attorneys and the patent office: the patents they get are usually unenforceable for legal (invalidity) or economic (patent litigation costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and ruins good will, so a small inventor can almost never afford it and everyone knows it) reasons.

If your idea is actually useful, you should make it available publicly where it can be reviewed and refined and have some chance of adoption and building your professional credibility. If you instead go the route of patenting it, then even if the idea is unworkable (which it likely is, most cryptographic proposals turn out to be flawed) you will have only been successful as identifying yourself as a thief who has taken from the enormous body of work in Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency and cryptographic ecosystem given to your freely and attempted to lock up part of it for your personal profit at the expense of everyone else who you've benefited from.

I read somewhere that the moon is made of green cheese. ... you might want to be a bit more specific.

Zero confirmations are inherently somewhat unsafe-- inherently due to physics, a decentralized system cannot have an instant consensus because light has a finite speed. As far as I am aware zero-conf cannot magically be made substantially more safe without invoking a trusted party in some manner. There are many proposals for instant payments that involve things like escrowed coins (E.g. micropayment channel hubs), but they all make some additional security compromise (though potentially a small one).  I am not aware of any magical mathematical calculation that helps you.

Federated servers are a form of centralization, an improved one-- for sure, which may be suitable for many applications. Man would it be nice if they weren't.

Actually, I'm in the process of patenting a decentralized, secure, fast instant transaction system.. should be easily able to be integrated into Bitcoin at which I'll have to see if Bitcoin is willing to buy the patent off of me.  We're sticking it into Nxt first though, partially to test if it works.  Should provide sub second transaction confirmations and works nicely with the current blockchain implementations.

Trivial transactions, like those lower than 0.0001 would be better served in an off-chain solution. Game sites typically do this.

There is also the supermarket credit card solution. The store has its own credit card, which can then be paid in bitcoin.

Or similarly, something like a starbucks bitcoin card. You can buy your coffee with that card, which can then be paid in bitcoin at the end of the month. Or typically it will be prepaid, so you store enough balance to afford a few days worth of coffee, depending on your use.

You don't typically use your cell phone like a payphone, where you insert coins for every call.

That's great news, should only increase the value of btc in the long term. Also I seem to have noticed that transactions are generally faster the last week or so, maybe it's just me, but does anyone else have the same feeling?

I have changed my mind. To have a layer on top of Bitcoin for faster transactions is not such a good idea after all, because if the Bitcoin network remains slow in terms of transactions per second then it would remain vulnerable of being unable to handle all transactions.

I read somewhere that 0-confirmation transactions can be made fairly safe with a mathematical calculation. So that in combination with simple changes in the Bitcoin software to increase the number of transactions per second is a better solution.

And a bloated block chain is probably ok, since most wallets would then use the truncated block chain or what it's called.

Would it be possible to use Open Transactions on top of Bitcoin for fast transactions?

"A financial crypto and digital cash software library. The software's author likens it to "PGP for money".

Open Transactions (a centralized transaction system) is complementary to Bitcoin in that it provides some features that Bitcoin cannot, such as untraceable anonymous (versus pseudonymous) transactions, no latency (instant finality of settlement / no risk of double spending) and more." -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Open_Transactions

The quote says centralized transaction system, but it's actually decentralized:

"IS IT CENTRALIZED?

The vision is not of a central server that you must trust.
Rather, the vision is of federated servers you don't have to trust." -- http://opentransactions.org/docs/md__r_e_a_d_m_e.html

Agreed on skimming certain bits, but to be fair I think the presentation was more focused on hashing stats than network infrastructure.  It is nice to see numbers backing up what seems intuitively correct about the accuracy of derived hashing power measurements and pool diversification.   It was also good to get some numbers on the probability of outliers in terms of block resolution times.

Dave said in the presentation that he does contribute to these boards, and I am sure the bitcoin tech world is small enough still for this to be noticed and taken seriously.

Great talk. I'd really like to see some responses.

I feel like he kind of glossed over the issue of infrastructure being the most important thing, then saying we can just crank up transaction times/volume as much as the economics allow. Sounds like an overhead-intensive optimization.

That said, as computers/networks improve, I'm getting much more amenable to decreasing block times versus increasing block sizes.

Great presentation from DaveJH on hashing stats, and to hear someone armed with the qualifications and statistics recommend reduced confirmation times.  Not sure how recently this was but hope the core devs have a chance to absorb and respond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aBKLmJ2ebM

Graphs are practically impossible to see but the content is really good.

Really, for most uses I see right now involving bitcoin and the most popular payment processors, I don't see much of a problem with the way it works.

It's not meant for fast food, but it can be accepted. I don't think some black hat is going to waste time attempting a double spend for his fries and burger.

Appreciate the way it is bitcoin rocks well in the original state satoshi made it to be.I am no complaints regarding the transactions times

It's like saying that you expect your friend to not double-spend against you, so that is against the spirit of Bitcoin. Very silly.

Why do so many people believe this?

There are risks inherent in transactions, for all parties.  Why do so many people insist that it is wrong to use third parties to manage those risks?

I get it that credit card companies are reviled, and for good reasons.  But bitcoin removes the power imbalance that allows them to act in ways that earn our ire.  If they want to continue to exist, they will have to provide valuable services at reasonable costs.

The bitcoin blockchain is global and public.  Do you really think it is necessary that all transactions, no matter how trivial, must be in it?  Keep in mind that we have absolutely no clue how much it really costs to maintain the blockchain, and we won't know for many years.  I suspect that all of our estimates are very, very low, and eventually we will realize that trivial transactions are just too expensive to store publicly.

agreed that the odds of a reversal are calculated based on number intervals independently of the duration of those intervals. However my point is that since there are more opportunities if intervals are shorter, the odds of it actually happening in a given timeframe are higher (which is what matters to users: probability of problems in a given timeframe, not for a given number of intervals).

True, regardig your first point, it does depend on what you are trying to secure against.  My statement assumed that the attacker owned and controlled the hash power rather than renting it.  I'm not sure that renting hash power is a viable attack strategy, but if it is then you are correct in pointing out that it would cost more to rent the hash power for a longer period of time.

On the other hand, regarding your second point, while a shorter block interval might mean that an attacker with less than 50% of the hash power would have more opportunities to attempt an attack, it doesn't alter the fact that for any given transaction secured by 6 confirmations, the odds of that particular transaction being reversed after 6 confirmations doesn't change based on block interval.

demonstrated? how?

I understand the Poisson process, but: if you want to double spend in a network that uses 6 confirmations, and it has 10 min intervals you must sustain your attack for an hour (in average). If it had 5 min intervals, then sustaining your attack for 30 minutes is enough. So the costs of your attack (if you rent hashrate per time) are halved.

Also, more blocks per hour mean more chances to attack per hour. Imagine that you achieve 25% hashrate. This is not the 51% required to be certain that your attack will succeed, however with 25% hashrate there is a probability that you can eventually find 6 blocks in a row before the network does and perform a double spend. Now let's say that 25% means that you need in average N blocks before you succeed (I'm too lazy to do the math but it should be around 5000 blocks). So if you can attack once every, let's say 5000 blocks, then you can successfully attack about once in a month at 10 minutes per block. But at 5 minutes per block, your ETA ("estimated time to attack") is halved to around 15 days.

so they're not "equally secure"