Topic: How good is Decred? - page 3. (Read 8708 times)

You can't HODL coins on exchanges, can you ?  You can hodl IOU on exchanges, while they are hodling coins (or playing with it, or buying cocaine and prostitutes with it).  You hodl tokens in a centralized database for as long as the owner of the database wants to let you own them, but you don't own any crypto tokens.  Essentially, you've bought exchange IOU tokens in their database with crypto tokens with which you paid them.

Exchange IOU tokens are like holding bitcoin and thinking you hold the fiat you paid for them.  You've *bought* bitcoin with fiat, and your fiat is gone.

In the same way, if you "deposit" bitcoin at an exchange, you BUY their database IOU tokens with your bitcoin, and your bitcoin are gone.  But you hold exchange IOU, which are more fluid, fast etc... (inside the exchange) than bitcoins.  But your bitcoins are gone.

So as you are not holding any bitcoin it is normal that you can't profit from whatever these bitcoins were supposed to bring you.

==>  holding exchange IOU is EXACTLY THE SAME as holding FED dollars in a bank ; except for the fact that a bank has a whole legal machinery on its back that will trigger and put the banker in jail if ever he doesn't do what the law prescribed ; while an exchange is mostly unregulated, can delete its database and delete your IOU with it, and you *don't hold any coins or fiat* with them, so then all of that is gone.

Exchanges are unregulated banks in the crypto world.

Nope, we are only 98% attack proof 

There was a guy (well I presume he was a guy but that really isn't important) on these forums in 2013 that had the name Decrits for his project. He disappeared. I doubt this is his project reincarnated.

You cant stake coins on any exchange that I know of.

When you "stake" in Decred you "purchase" a ticket and when you do so you lose access to those coins that were used to purchase the ticket until the ticket votes or 140ish days has passed.

I have my Decred staked in a pool so I don't have to leave my computer on 24/7.

I think it would be possible for an exchange to implement Decred staking of the coins "you" (the exchange really) hold but obviously while staked you wouldn't be able to trade them.

Yes, I am a strong proponent of HODLING.  Exchanges cannot stake your coins because they would easily be caught with their pants down if people wanted to withdraw.

People who keep coins on exchange are speculators though...  you don't want short sighted speculators deciding the future of your blockchain, so it's ok that they are not able to vote with coins on exchange.

What about coins on exchanges? Do we lose the staking benefits thus we are being debased if we HODL them on exchanges? I realize HODLing coins on exchanges is risky and stupid. (⊙_◎)

I guess your implied policy is only use exchanges for trading them and get a wallet if you want to HODL?

Decred seems to have good developers, but I'm not sure about the long-term performance of the currency. I have some doubts regarding currencies using pos tech, even when it comes to hybrid technology.

My fundamental idea is that as long as one is combining several distinct aspects of a crypto currency into one single mechanism having to do everything, the system becomes or insecure, or centralized, and most of the time, both.

The different aspects to resolve are:
1) finding consensus over valid first spendings.
2) securing this consensus (immutability) once it is firmly established
3) coin creation and seigniorage
4) governance of protocol modifications and evolution
5) rewarding special people who do 1, 2 and/or 4, eventually with 3

The reason that combining these aspects into one single dynamics is problematic, is that you get complicated couplings between them.  In my opinion, there are two no-gos : 4) and 5).  4) is orthogonal to immutability.  I know that given that crypto currencies are heavily invaded by software people, they have a hard time thinking of something that shouldn't evolve.  But crypto currencies are not software, not any more than mathematics is software, even though both domains rely heavily on software to have practical implementations.  But the "software implementing a protocol" and "the protocol itself" are two totally distinct things.

The problem with 5) is that you get strategies for optimising obtaining the rewards, which can lead to a serious incentive to go away from the right consensus resolution or the right secularisation of the obtained consensus.  So, while it sounds logical that people "helping the system to come to consensus" or "helping the consensus to be secured" are rewarded for their efforts, the very fact of instoring *mechanical* rewards makes that you are open to strategies of reward maximisation, exclusion of less competitive, although honest, contributors to the system, centralization and corruption.

For instance, the very idea that proof of stake should be rewarded is somewhat strange: the higher your stakes in the system, the higher is the importance, for you, that the system is secure and comes to right consensus, because in the end, that determines the market value of the stake !

Finally, another problem is that the rewards are inside the system, while the true rewards depend on market valuation.  The market valuation can make that rewards as foreseen inside the system become crazily high, and people are going to kill their mother for those rewards, or become ridiculously small, so that people don't do it "for such small rewards".   Reward markets will emerge which will "regulate" aspects of the system that weren't foreseen, and will induce strategies to manipulate said market, like the spamming of blocks in bitcoin.

I think that as long as people are going to go that way, thinking that there should be governance (voting and central protocol power), that there should be rewards, and that all of this should be combined in one single system, one will always end up with a broken protocol in which a few people pump value from the gullible into their pockets and then dictate the fate of the system.

Rewards are a bitch.  You fight and cheat for them.

You will find that one will try to patch the difficulties with more and more involved mechanisms, each of them patching a previously recognized problem, and opening 20 doors for new strategies to game the system.  It can be a fun experimentation, and as we've seen, bitcoin has been running successfully for more than 8 years before finally hitting seriously the errors in its design.  So it can take a long time before the strategies that game the system because of its inherent rewards design, become visible and tangible. 
The security and honesty of bitcoin now comes essentially from the investment in asics that some Chinese guy has made and doesn't want to lose immediately.  The price of the computer is what still keeps bitcoin floating.

I suppose we are a lot with the same will "to change the world. But we don't necessarily need money, just a revolution!

True, your coins are locked for a brief moment with traditional staking.  But you can sell a DASH masternode at any time you desire.

Decred locks your coins for a period of 28 days, on average.  Worst case is 142ish.

Every coin that pays an interest to staking, including every coin with masternodes such as PIVX.

I didn't found it good as I heard about it about some days ago .
since my attention goes toward this due to conversation but not find it good because it has high transaction fee .
Since my one of friend made buy but he is now saying that this is like a long time Investment now because in small transaction will charge you high fee , so instead of make small small sell in installments , we need to wait to do it a big .

I'm not a developer... just Community Manager.  It was a fantastic discussion though, and we do hope to see you in slack sometime in the future.  Thank you for your thoughts!

Ask @smooth. I really don't have time.

Who else is copying the locking up the coins?

Both Dash and Pivx dont really lock the coins properly, you can unlock them at a seconds notice. With Decred you could lose access to your coins literally for months. Though its possible you're aware of some new coins I am not. I think a proper lock like Decreds is better than a "sorta not really locked" lock like PIVX or Dash

I am certainly open to changing my mind about the benefits vs pitfalls of a tail emission, I was discussing it in the Decred slack yesterday and noone there wanted one but they said at the end of the day it will be up for vote. To me though it just seems you have to pay for security one way or the other and a tail emission is one way that doesn't ramp up transfer fees.

@iamnotback btw you still haven't told me why I was so wrong and silly about my Steemit post yet, and I have been waiting to find out where I went so wrong to get such harsh criticism from you

@dbt1033 I want to change the world. After you get enough $, you'll probably want to also. Or maybe that is already your priority focus. If so, we will cross paths again soon. I have a surprise.


Edit: thank you so much for the frank, apparently honest, and cordial discussion. I guess I am happy I looked and I understand what others are working on. And was able to get it straight from the developer. Met someone new. Got invited to Slack (which I may do in near future).

I really need to stop expending my time on these sort of activities (talking instead of coding). It had frustrated me that I hadn't looked at Decred nor PIVX and others were talking about it and asking me for my analysis.

I need to have my head in the programming cave sand.

So forum, you are going to be on your own for a while in terms of technological+economic analysis. I really need to discipline myself.

True and true.

By having one's coins locked, it also requires people that wish to vote on Decred's future to have "skin in the game".  It's not a perfect system, but it does incentive people to vote in Decred's best interest.

You don't prolly don't need it with PoS combined. Tail emission doesn't provide enough security any way, so you've go to get a handle on the fee market issues. Thus the reason to want PoS control. But democracy is always a winner-take-all power vacuum.


That is actually a good thing for making the price go up because the float is smaller. Dash's masternode scheme with allegedly compounding concentrating stake to Evan Inc is a perverse example.

It is one of the clever schemes everybody seems to want to copy now.

If you don't lockup your stake, you lose value as everyone else is earning an interest.

Well, Decred is evolving into a full scale decentralized autonomous organization.  When the necessary mechanisms are in place, it woudn't hurt for users to vote on funding for such an audit.  These mechanisms will be in place very soon.

So LN is definitely coming. We've got Ethereum's Raiden, Decred prolly a lock to activate it, and Litecoin also appears to have strong incentives to activate SegWit as the prerequisite.

So investing in Decred at this time is maybe diversification into the serious potential LN candidate blockchains. In addition the strong development team of Decred.

The long-tail obtuse issues about the security are prolly secondary in speculators' calculation at this time.