Topic: ion discussion - page 4. (Read 9662 times)

I've been discussing the issues raised by r0ach and smooth in private messages. And I want to share something I wrote in a private message.

It seems like a smart idea to prevent a large corporation or financial institution from taking all the work, not utilizing the original system to give it value, and instead building their internal network, exchange, etc, with it.  Anytime you read coin news about banks, they don't seem very interested in doing things like buying coins from miners, they seem interested in taking the work, building their own system on top of it, or selling the coins to you.  I think people are underestimating the highly refined banker initiative to screw everyone over as much as possible.

Also remember I want to use this coin. Which means I want to go create services in the ecosystem and earn money on those. Even if for example my designs get implemented by Blockstream, at least I can go create the types of decentralized services and sites that can earn me $millions.

But while getting this coin to the point where it will scale out, I can't be targeting measily $20k to leech on my ecosystem for server infrastructure. If I create a product in my ecosystem later, it will shoot big B2C (to drive more usership to the coin helping the entire ecosystem), not vertical market B2B in a small developer market.

I see marketing idiots throughout this space. This is going to be as easy as taking candy from a baby for me from a marketing standpoint.

This is why being able to objectively filter 25 - 33% selfish mining attacks and 51% attacks is so critical. Satoshi's design can not do it. Mine can.

With that key improvement, then one can change the way mining is done so that those who are sending transactions are doing the mining, but they don't care about their profitability so then you drastically reduce the electricity used, yet simultaneously make it uneconomic to run an ASIC farm. And pools become irrelevant because no one is mining for profit, rather because they must mine to send a transaction.

So then you have the unbounded entropy of proof-of-work that insures its model of security and game theory, without any of the drawbacks.

TADA.  

One thing about the Bitshares people is they seem pretty willing to undertake new initiatives and switch direction. If they saw a reason to want to do something different I don't think it would necessarily have to be on the same coin platform at all.

My suggestion is to lock the thread and bump it when you have substantive updates.

The name has grown on me, ion cash.. sounds good  

A point worth considering:  If the delegated set is fixed over a prolonged period of time, then its not trustless.  If the delegate set changes constantly as the result of some random function, then it may be trustless depending on how large the source set is.

There were "issues" with this approach that I wasn't happy with and found myself running around in circles.

The higher the frequency of delegate election, the worse the service they can provide

Network latency prevents everyone knowing who the elected delegates are once you drop below 10 second intervals.

- at one extreme, the service is completely trust based and very efficient and at the other extreme there is no advantage at all to having delegates but they are completely trustless.

It reduces the exposure of the system to dishonest nodes, as providing that the function output that determines the set selection is random, these dishonest nodes will never know when they will have an opportunity to be dishonest.

This then requires these nodes to be online constantly in the chance that they do get selected in the next round of delegates.  If the selection set is sufficiently large, and the function output is random (or close to), then the time between subsequent selection may be quite long, thus acting as a discouragement due to costs.

Furthermore, if the selected set of delegates is short lived, then any disruption caused by selecting a dishonest nodes in the previous set will be minimal, as transactions that failed which are deemed legitimate can simply be re-presented a short time later against a new set of delegates.

You can increase resilience further if you delegate the work to ALL selected delegates instead of just one or a few of them.  Then they all perform the same work and you can think about using the output from that as a basis for consensus.

You have to consider Sybils and other things too, but the basic philosophy is as above.

Did I explain clearly? :|  Not sure lol

The higher the frequency of delegate election, the worse the service they can provide - at one extreme, the service is completely trust based and very efficient and at the other extreme there is no advantage at all to having delegates but they are completely trustless.

Furthermore, if the selected set of delegates is short lived, then any disruption caused by selecting a dishonest nodes in the previous set will be minimal, as transactions that failed which are deemed legitimate can simply be re-presented a short time later against a new set of delegates.

You have to trust that the person/node will do the task otherwise there is no point in delegating in the first place. Please see my quoted definition of the word DELEGATED.

Interesting point.

How does it change the issue of trust even if the delegating parties change randomly?

The delegating parties themselves for iteration n still are to be trusted right?

Not exactly. If I delegate to you, and your actions have no effect whatsoever on the system, then I don't have trust in you.

You didn't pay close attention to the phrases "verifiable truth" and "they make no discretionary choices of significance, persist the minimum state possible, are fungible with each other" I bolded in the generous excerpt that I quoted from my white paper draft.

If I delegate to you, but you have no choice in how you execute the delegated task, then I don't have to trust you.

I will not tell you the precise inventions of how I do that. Absolutely no hints will be given on that for now. Sorry.

Also DASH solved the last problem with an entry barrier of 1k DASH for masternodes.

...while retaining proof-of-work as unbounded entropy[1]:

...

[1] My position until I am convinced otherwise is that all non-proof-of-work consensus systems have a bounded entropy (e.g. the total stake and/or any initial seeds used for randomization) and thus their attributes (e.g. decentralization, censorship resistance, DoS resistance, Sybil attack resistance, impartiality) is subject to a game theory which is potentially undiscovered. Whereas, the entropy of proof-of-work is unbounded because it is externally added and the game theory is well defined.

IMO there is too much focus on 100% anonymity (not just here, but crypto in general) and I don't believe it is needed for a crypto to become mainstream for a number of reasons.

I used to be of the same mindset, but came to a few conclusions that led to the realization that providing the anonymity was as good, or slightly better, than what Bitcoin offers, then there isn't any real point to spend large amounts of time chasing 100% it down.  Of course, if a solution should show up right in front of your nose, then take advantage of it by all means, but I think you should consider following

1.  There has to be a trade off at some point of anonymity vs some other factor.  Be it the size of the transactions, the speed which they can be processed, or functionality limitations later on.

2.  TPTB will fight against any crypto that is truly anonymous, preventing it to gain any significant mass market adoption with the usual rhetoric of drugs etc....

3.  Nor will any infrastructure you need to build on allow you to use it to get it out there.

4.  The general public doesn't give 1 single thought to anonymity on a daily basis, most people don't care that the governments read their email/sms/web activities etc.

Anonymitys main purpose in a mass market targeted crypto IMO is to guard against criminals figuring out what you own and who you are, second to that is privacy.

If mass market adoption is your goal, I would seriously consider the above because it WILL come and bite you in the ass if you don't implement it wisely.

On the other hand, if you simply want to take over the worlds black market, then full steam anon is the way to go  

Nor is it necessarily an antithetical concept. Delegated can be decentralized and effectively as trustless as Satoshi's design is (with some differing assumptions that have differing tradeoffs).

I haven't noticed the word trustless anywhere - is this design trustless?

1   Decentralized transaction consensus

A Byzantine fault is defined as a disagreement by system participants on the state of the system. A centralized system is inherently Byzantine fault tolerant because it doesn’t disagree with itself. Such faults are only system failure if decentralized agreement on system state is required.

For example, the Byzantine fault of differing opinions of voters is not a failure if democracy by majority rule is acceptable. Systemic failure results from obstruction of voting, undetected ballot box stuffing, or purchased votes. These are respectively denial-of-service (DoS), Sybil, and resource-capture attacks.

Protection against the double spending of an account balance is an example of a contract that depends only on the relative order of spend events, and not on the events’ timestamp. The latter spend must be discarded otherwise the first payee would be defrauded.

In a decentralized network of observers of spend events, a majority vote on event order would fail due to DoS, Sybil, and resource-capture attacks on the observers.

• DoS attack on relayed events over the network.
• Sybil attack creating unlimited observers or network relay peers.
• Resource-capture of any resource required to be an observer.

These attacks can be squelched if for observers and peers their system function is verifiable truth, they can prove a trusted reputation, or they can expend or risk sufficient resources which exceed the gain from cheating.

2   Non-delegated transaction verification by longest chain of proof-of-work

In Satoshi Nakamoto’s longest chain of proof-of-work decentralized consensus system[Nak09], the participant nodes are distrusted and not capable of independently verifying the event order. They risk proof-of-work resources in exchange for block rewards with low probability of gain from cheating, unless the adversary possesses greater than 50% of the total network proof-of-work resources, or 25 - 33% in the case of selfish mining[ES13].

In addition to this Byzantine failure due to capture of at least 25 - 50% of the system resources, Satoshi Nakamoto’s system has other weaknesses.

• Reliability of the event order requires a proof-of-work confirmation to prevent a double spend due to the Finney attack[Fin11] or gaming of differing mempool heuristics[Hea15]; yet remains unreliable if there is network fragmentation or with too few confirmations given a significant orphan rate combined with some network propagation opacity.
• Variance of mining[Ros11] incentivizes a limited number of pools of nodes thus concentrating the control of system resources.
• The scaling tradeoff that all nodes incur the bandwidth and processing load to relay and verify all system-wide transactions, otherwise they delegate to pools which concentrate the control of system resources.
• Satoshi’s protocol doesn’t verify if pools implement getblocktemplate to enable a node to insert transactions into its winning block to mitigate the pools’ power to censor transactions.
• Satoshi’s design depends on concentrated control and monolithic network coherence—which sacrifices censorship resistance and network fault tolerance—in order to provide scalability and reliable instant transactions.

Concentrated control accruing naturally or via a resource-capture attack could alter the protocol— such as increasing the money supply of cryptocurrency (even gifting the debasement to any publicly acceptable entity such as government¹) or only validating events which accompany some KYC (know your customer) proof of identification. Some argue that a political outcry would move away from such an attack on the protocol, but in reality the preoccupied masses tend to continue to the use the clients they are told to use and are accustomed to such as popular web clients Coinbase, Blockinfo, etcetera. The masses didn’t abandon the dollar in spite of its malevolent holistic effects. Most people would not agree the dollar is malevolent.

The security model of the longest chain of proof-of-work in Satoshi’s system is ultimately founded on the principle that each participant minion will act unselfishly in the short-term to protect the long-term collective benefits of trustless consensus— yet this has proven not to be the case throughout all recorded human history when the individual selfish incentives are great enough.

¹ Some influential people such as Martin Armstrong have simultaneously outlined an expectation of a one-world currency monetary reset solution to the current prolifergate nation-states sovereign debt crisis; and called for (a world?) government to tax the money supply instead of income taxes[Arm08].

3   Delegated transaction verification by longest chain of proof-of-work

To overcome the weaknesses in Satoshi’s design, we delegate the verification of event order to _________ nodes which provably record their system functions in the longest chain of proof-of-work.

Delegating to these _________ nodes is harmless because these nodes obey the fundamental end-to-end principle of networks in the sense that they make no discretionary choices of significance, persist the minimum state possible, are fungible with each other, and can’t be monopolized. _________ nodes do set the transaction fee they charge which is based on transaction data size and not value since transaction values may be concealed.

3.10   Security model

The security model assumption of Satoshi’s design is that every miner—whether alone or in collusion with other miners—has a greater opportunity cost when mining on an incorrect or shorter block chain. Additionally unlike other reputation-based or proof-of-stake schemes, it is implausible to game the order of block solutions because the source of the entropy for proof-of-work is external thus an open instead of closed thermodynamic system. Also each miner can verify the entire history of the block chain, including every transaction.

The security model weaknesses of Satoshi’s design detailed in the prior sections derive from the generative essence that miners can’t autonomously determine the correctness of the longest chain w.r.t. to double spends, censorship resistance, mining centralization, collusion, and selfish mining.

Our security model retains the assumption of greater opportunity cost when mining on incorrect or shorter correct block chain, while adding objectivity to the correctness of double spends and censorship resistance. The model is founded on the principle that published data can’t be unpublished and that nodes listening for compliance will need to do so for other reasons, such as _________ nodes maximizing the efficiency which payers can send non-instant transactions...

Although block chain miners don’t verify for themselves every transaction in the chain of hashes for each hash stored on the block chain, the nodes listening and checking for compliance insure that the block chain is verified against the distributed and independent _________ nodes.

Any entity that downloads an archive of all the historic distributed data could perform a full verification to attain the same security as a full node that downloads the entire block chain in Satoshi’s design. The distinction from the security model in Satoshi’s design is that if the compliance checking nodes fail to report cheating, the cheating will become nearly implausible to revert. This is why the incentives offered to compliance checking nodes are lucrative and compliance checking node membership is permissionless. Compare the odds that no party will avail of the profit incentive to the security assumptions in Satoshi’s design:

• Network fragmentation never occurs.
• The masses will politically take time from their preoccupied lives en masse to fork away from an insidiously (perhaps undetectably so) malevolent 25 - 51% attack, e.g. one that requires KYC or adds some debasement to fund social welfare in a world government or collaboration of regional governments such as EU, G7, G20, Asian Union, and Mercosur.
• Pools with different names, IP addresses, and servers aren’t controlled by the same entity, i.e. Sybil attacked.
• Scaling transaction volume and zero confirmations by centralization is secure.