Topic: How good is Decred? - page 4. (Read 8733 times)

Now that iamnotback and dbt1033 have stopped squabbling ( )i'll add my 2c

I still say I am fairly new to cryptos however I did a fair bit of research recently and looked at least briefly at every coin in coinmarketcap's top 100 and have settled on Decred and Monero as my favorites.

That said my largest investment by far is in Decred.

Like all coins I don't think Decred is perfect, my concerns with Decred are very different and less technical than iamnotback's and they are on the roadmap to be resolved but for the record they are in order of importance:
- Voting for 10% development block subsidy is not yet implemented (planned this year)
- Hard fork voting not yet implemented (planned next month)
- I currently think an ideal cryptocurrency coin emission curve includes a tail emission. Decred does not at this time. I believe 90% of the general public would prefer to pay for their network security via (small and gradual) inflation instead of transaction fees.
-I believe privacy is an important issue, and it is not yet implemented, but it is also in the roadmap

However I like the following:
-10% treasury I believe is important to keep good devs working on the coin and to pay for things like exchanges and getting on credit cards and online wallets and other marketing.
-Proof of stake mining has a genuine penalty (coins locked up)
-I am led to believe the dev team is very competent by the people I have spoken too, to include a Melbourne programmer who went through their github to make sure they where getting work done for me

I do trust iamnotback's opinion as a general rule and it did concern me that he was worried about the security, but I believe at this time the cost of the attack is very high. it is worth over 50 million at the moment and noone has bothered so far so.... I will just hope his fear is a little overblown for now

*edit* as I was typing this they started again lol, a more peaceful tone now though.

Actually, PoS enforces consensus.  PoS voting decides how the blockchain will evolve.  Features are activated through an automatic hard forking mechanism.  They are precoded, so this happens once "yes" votebits reach critical mass.

Two validation systems are integrated into the Decred blockchain, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The PoW system (miners) create and validate new blocks added to the blockchain. The PoS system allows ticket holders (voters) to participate in verifying a block's validity. The PoS system acts as a 2nd authentication factor on the chain. If 3 of the 5 randomly selected ticket holders approve, the block is added. The PoS tickets are also used to vote on a change to the protocol (hard fork) over a period of time. Without support of the super-majority vote, the minority chain will become unsustainable due to invalidated blocks.

To be honest, I just reached out to Charlie on twitter, and he took interest in the project.  He had written a PoA proposal years ago, so I'm sure that seeing PoA in action intrigued him.

Okay so you're the fallback if Litecoin can't get SegWit activated? That is why Charlie Lee was in on this, in case the miners of his Litecoin don't cooperate?

Intrigue.

Or maybe just putting your bets in many hats to diversify?


So the PoS control enables "the community" (of whales, lol) to overrule miners when they need to, e.g. on activating LN. So that is perhaps the big gain (if you consider that a gain).

Lightning network implementation is currently on our roadmap for 2017, and we are on track to achieve all of our goals.

However, the community will have to vote on it before it activates.

Well it is a good point because game theory can be considered in a narrow context wherein there are externalities which change the likelihood.

For example, the security issues I was discussing upthread are long-tail events so you guys speculating on near-term gain overwhelm any relevance of the potential obtuse security issues.

However if you want to take over the world as Bitcoin is attempting to do, then the game theory weaknesses have to be analyzed in every plausible context. Because it will get attacked.

So I would say that American foreign policy is a highly manipulated thing that has externalities we can't even see, so a model of it is prolly intractable to define.



Another issue with Decred may be that it doesn't appear to solve massive TPS scaling and real-time instant transactions. So all the new risky (i.e. not extremely well vetted) changes to consensus algorithm without significant gains at least in those stated areas afaik. So for me it doesn't feel like it could possibly be the next big thing unless I am not fully aware of the possibilities of that PoS+PoW design.

Interesting discussion. A question Iamnotback if I may. How well does "game theory"hold up when applied to systems...or just in general.

I remember seeing an Adam Curtis documentary where Adam Curtis looked at the way the ideas of Nash were applied to American foreign policy*, . In that case he argued that it the theory did not work very well. So..what can we say about how it might work in this situation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsAcocwBn8c

*added in edit: And other things

They have a solid team so the market will prolly not care about the obtuse security and centralization issues.

The market rationalizes it as they can fix it later if they need to because they have a good team.

And the market thinks they can develop a lot of cool shit on top of a hidden pig. And the development team is strong and proven. I can see from the website that it has an attractive geeky meme, so it appears developer centric.

I investigated it because wanted to think about whether I should buy this dip. But i am waiting on feedback from the guy who does charting analysis.

Unless the charting guy says it looks like a 20X gain ahead, why should I sell LTC when I see a 5 - 8X gain ahead for it. And it has less potential problems (I think). I guess for diversification?

I probably won't buy DCR, because I have enough risk already holding LTC. Although I could buy it because it is on Poloniex.

But you guys will prolly buy it.  

Kindof. Although when I started this thread the main part of the pump had not happened. I remember the beginning of the coin, and thought it was good, then it went through a period where it drifted down. When it started to pick up again I wondered about it.

Too late. I caught the pump and did quite well. It may not crash..or it may. I'll probably keep some now. Because although this coin may have issues it may be better than most...or it may be able to present itself as such. So it can still double triple ...or whatever. Or it can crash. As i don't know, I'll probably hold some until the Mr Market tells me to sell  

Never stop questioning man; that's how we will change the world.  I really do hope you take me up on my offer to come by slack (if you're an IRC type, we are bridged). 

Decred isn't going anywhere, and we would love to have more people like you in our community as we continue to push forward.

@dbt1033 seems like a nice guy. Apologies for being so hard on you. I am just tired of all the scammy coins like Dash and PIVX.

Any way, you can prove you guys are really serious by hiring some serious researchers to analyze it. I don't trust your white paper. You guys are no doubt very good programmers. But being a good programmer doesn't necessarily mean you are an expert at this particular area of game theory and economics. There is no math backing up the claims in your white paper about selfish mining. It is just a claim with no proofs.

No ETA. And I welcome all criticism.

Again I hope you guys hire some independent researchers such as the guys from hackingdistributed to analyze deeply the selfish mining game theory and math.

Cool!  It will be an interesting read, I'm sure.  When do you plan on publishing?

edit to add:  This isn't a bad idea... something we will consider.

I know you think that we are a bunch of Bozos at Decred, but I think that if you found the time to come by and hang out, you would find that we are quite open to intellectual discourse / suggestions.

I do but it is not published yet.

If I have some time, I'll try to extract some analysis on the selfish mining aspect of PoA (which isn't actually the precise variant I studied in my paper), but the problem is the market won't listen. And I have more important work to do.

Really you guys should spend some $ to actually dig deep into the game theory. You have money now. You should hire someone impartial and pay them regardless of what they find out. If you guys aren't afraid. Any way you've already pocketed a lot of money. So why not try to research more. Spend your money on valuable activity.

You are obviously in slack... why don't you come by?  Our development team is willing to have a more technical discussion with you if you are interested.

Are you interested because we have Decred's pump right now?

This altcoin might be labeled as 'experimental' on so many levels that I would be scared to hold it long term.
Good advice: better wait when the pump will be over, don't try to catch the rising wave - it will crash soon.

Do you have a whitepaper or other published work discussing this?  I'd be interested to read more.

What I am saying is that mixing PoW and PoS sounds very cool. But if you actually do a very deep analysis of all the game theory, you'll realize it is really much worse than PoW alone.

PoW is also centralizing too, so it is not like we really have any solution. At least PoW is a stalemate w.r.t. to protocol immutability as we see now with Bitcoin.

Correct, but you are making a lot of assumptions here.

You are not looking at it properly. The economics and design forces it to centralization so you'll have a few big whales running the whole thing eventually. And $18 million is nothing because they paid nearly nothing for it by the time they have it. They extract it over time for free due to the game theory.