Topic: Is my crypto decentralized? - page 3. (Read 3406 times)

This is where we disagree, I think. It is not a political position because the delegate has absolutely no influence over the inflation rate or DAC policy outside of what is approved *before he is elected* by the stakeholders.

We keep saying "the shareholders rule the delegates, not the other way around" but you just don't believe it.

There *is* a group of powerful insider who form a plutocracy - it's the majority shareholders! In this sense yes, BTS centralizes power in the hands of BTS holders (+bitAsset holders) at the expense of non-BTS holders.


Again, the fixation on the delegate cap is bizzare. We considered making it unlimited with block production proportional to approval, and concluded this would make it *too centralized*.

Stan, nobody cares.  Stop trying to validate your position via the fact that you were a "rocket scientist".



The issue with Bitshares is that you have turned who is a "signing insider", as you call them, into a POLITICAL POSITION with the power to tax the rest of the stakeholders.  This political hierarchy that you have created is NOT, as you frequently refer to it, a representative government similar to the republican government of the US.  If every stakeholder regardless of their wealth, got ONE VOTE then it would be, but it's not.  The Bitshares' "government" is a ruling body with delegates who are the most powerful and influential members of the group.  These "insiders" will use all sorts of tactics to stay in power.  Bitshares' now has two classes of stakeholders.  The "insiders" who receive subsidies and the "outsiders" who are subjected to taxation to pay them.  What you have created is a PLUTOCRACY (government of the wealthy).  By centralizing the forgers, which is exactly what you are doing whether you want to call it that or not, you are practicing a form of wealth redistribution (aka COMMUNISM!).

In NXT, there isn't a government.  Nobody VOTES!  No one has the power to levy taxation upon anyone else.  NXT is a coalition of stakeholders who secure the chain in proportion to their investment.  You can't say that NXT is a plutocracy because the wealthiest NXTers forge the most blocks, because there is NOT A GOVERNMENT!  NXT is most similar to separate nation states participating in international trade and forming a joint coalition to protect the trade routes.  Yes, different nation states have bigger economies and are wealthier than others, but they protect the international trade routes according to their defense budget (stake).


I think "voting" with DPoS is "designed to make them feel like they are involved."  In a PoS system, THEY ARE ACTUALLY INVOLVED REGARDLESS OF THEIR SIZE!


True for Bitshares.  FALSE FOR NXT!


Wow.  This certainly is revealing as to your outlook on "decentralization".  Lol


What are you talking about?  With Ripple, you participate in consensus if you run a node and others mark you as a trusted validator.  With PoW, you participate in consensus if you contribute hashpower.  With PoS, you participate in consensus if you own coins and forge.  There are not just "101 pools of coins" in PoS.


Am I to interpret this statement as a declaration of revolution by the proletariat?


Oh please, don't use that "meritocracy" argument again.  You, I and anyone with half a brain, knows that the type of political system you have implemented is not going to turn into a "meritocracy".  Interesting fact, the Communists used to use that same argument!

You act like it is impossible to invalidate the stake of a bad actor in PoS.  It's not.

It might be hard but it will shed some light. I think we still have the main disagreement where you think block producers have some sort of advantage over non-block producers. You would claim that increasing the cap from 100 to 1,000,000 would make it more decentralized, I would claim that's nonsense (remember I said 1 block producer only doesn't work because of technical challenges of swapping him out quickly which matters for network availability - not because it is a control point). Let's figure out why we disagree - what is the goal of decentralization, what metrics are useful for measuring goal, etc.


BM is quite open to debate and has changed his mind in light of better arguments many times - I will ask him to enable comments. I won't drag him here to BTT unless there is a specific question you'd like him to answer (IMO there is nothing new in this thread so I won't pull him here yet because he needs to be coding).


Yes, "leprechauns" - like trolls but they have a pot of BTS. Again an interesting thing to note is that I would think a BTS bagholder is just as likely to be a leprechaun as a delegate. Heck, eventually I hope to see delegates not be major BTS stakeholders at all, and have them work to improve BTS with razor thin margins. Until then you will obviously see major overlap because there are only a few thousand community members and a few dozen who can commit full-time.

Put some research and factual numbers in and we could have a discussion. There are already two false assumptions I noticed (and one serious negative, presented as a positive). At the moment, these are just assertions in the same camp as your "trust me, I'm a rocket scientist" posts. They are style over substance.

Again, this is only considering today. At least one major blockchain is designed to become more decentralised over time. Bitshares path is fixed: it is distributed today and will tend towards centralisation as the network grows.

I'll bet if you look at the Top 101 most frequent block signers for any major block chain you will find that this same group signs over 90%, maybe even 99%, of the chain's blocks inside a typical transaction confirmation window.   For all such windows.


Everyone who is not a signing insider has a tiny fraction of that final 1% chance to sign a block.  This gratuitous honor is shared among all the outsiders and has no material effect on the reliability, integrity, or security of the network.

So it doesn't matter how many outsiders are eligible to sign a block, they have no relevance whatsoever.  Their chance to win the signing lottery is a mere placebo, designed to make them feel like they are involved.  


No outsider, much less the same outsider, will get honored with another turn in the same confirmation window to weigh in on whether any particular transaction should be confirmed.  Thus, all transactions are confirmed by insiders.


All block chains are completely controlled by their signing insiders.

With Ripple, insiders must appoint new insiders and have economic incentives not to go any where near 101 of them.
With POW systems, you appoint yourself to be an insider by acquiring control of one of the top 101 pools of hardware.
With POS systems, you appoint yourself to be an insider by acquiring control of one of the top 101 pools of coins.
With DPOS systems, you get elected to be an insider by acquiring one of the top 101 most preferred reputations.


So, its your call.  Do you want your blocks signed by people who appointed themselves as insiders through their ability to acquire large pools of coins or hardware?  Or would you rather have that job done by the people, even very poor people, who have done the work necessary to earn one of the best reputations?

I think we would find it hard to discuss without those two words! But I think we would still be disagreeing, as I have failed to explain clearly why a limit of 101 nodes isn't much different from the world we live in today. And probably the % who say BTS is decentralised will be the same as % that say the world today is decentralised. DE has a special way of expressing himself but I think he is right in a lot of what he says and the logical thread in his thoughts is sound.


As long as most Bitshares users are in the bitsharestalk silo, I think Bytemaster should allow comments on his blogs   Or better still, come here. I get the impression bitsharestalk is an echo chamber for his ideas. And with comments, Nxters can correct some of the BS he writes about the platform, when he is aiming "to be objective as possible"

I did note that out of the 7-8 BTS guys I have spoken to, that I think I have only 1 (maybe 2) of them weren't node delegates. I never said it but it did feel a bit like a series of ASIC manufacturers telling me POW is the best thing in crypto   Stan gets paid $2500 a month as a node operator just to tell people BTS is great (evangelising, he calls it), I bet there are a lot of people out there who would say anything is great for $2500/month!   More ordinary guys views would reduce this feeling.

Of those 50, 45 are sock puppets of the dev. Proven by dev creating a secondary fork and trying the same shit, this time being caught red handed.

Ok, that's a decent response. Here's some more thoughts.

Maybe "decentralized" means something different to most people. I hadn't thought that others might think it means something other than "lack of centralized control points". These concern us because they can be used by non-stakeholders to take money away from stakeholders. Again, I would like you to state the *goal* of building your system so that it is not centralized.

I'm still not totally clear what the cause of your concern for the small number of block producers is. Having more delegates does not give me more power or money unless the stakeholder choose it.

Maybe one day BTS stakeholders will do a cost/benefit analysis and realize that spending 10x on validation is worth the perceived extra decentralization. Heck maybe even spending a few thousand a year for anyone to opt-in to a mailing list that says "you, too, are helping secure the network" - equivalent to what small-time miners or forgers are experiencing right now.



Even stranger it was suggested by a hardcore anarcho-capitalist who hates centralized control! Either he is an idiot or onto something more fundamental about the nature of consensus...


This is a good thread, thanks for being civil. Does it really end with disagreement about the definition?

If we banned the words "centralized" and "decentralized" and started this topic over, would we still be disagreeing?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/    What are we actually talking about here, if not "avoiding robbery via takeover of control points" ?

My repeated point is that your interpretation of decentralization (almost as bad a "decentralisation is just a tool" btw) is a minority view. Most people wouldn't accept it and was the point of me starting this thread was to gauge the definition (away from BTS or Nxt holders in the main Bitcoin discussion with the relevant vocab and numbers changed)  so it would be useful to our current situation. I could show you that I am right. But FandangledGizmo chose to sabotage any hope of that.

I won't go into asking why someone decided to start a crypto with a single block signer.. Ok, just one question. Which dev proposed this idea?


Who cares about the ratio of users to block producers? = Who cares about government and corporate control of the economy?

I remind you that we can vote people in and out now (in many countries). Not as quickly as DPOS, granted, but in real life we have the advantage of knowing politicians can't come back under a different name. And Politicians can't easily buy themselves votes to keep themselves in power or buy votes for their cronies to stay elected. I haven't discussed this but DE did have a point in the other thread.


Decentralization is about who is in control. 101 people (in the best possible scenario) isn't enough for anything of significant size to stay decentralied.

To the contrary, RIGHT NOW all other systems are more decentralized because they are small enough to afford more than 100 validators. DPOS will only become more decentralized AT SCALE, when you cannot afford that many validators unless you force them to be distinct. The argument is presented in depth in a few places:

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/07/The-Most-Decentralized-Proof-of-Stake-System/
http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/DPOS#Scalability

But as I said in my previous post, focusing on the ratio of block validators to users is a red herring. Focus on the ratio of stake in the network to influence over network behavior. Other POS systems force out the little guy.

Decentralization is about who is in control.

The original design was pure TAPOS with a *single* block signer! This would still be decentralized by our interpretation because SHAREHOLDERS decide who that block signer is and because the block signer does not have the ability to do any damage if clients refuse to roll back. The problem with this design is that it is a million times easier to coordinate the transition between block signers on-chain than off-chain, so we want enough block signers to stop them from coordinating to block all transactions and tada you've invented DPOS.

Who cares about the ratio of users to block producers? Block producers have no power and serve the BTS holders. Again, what is your goal?

Our goal is to protect BTS (and by extension, bitAsset) holders from non-BTS holders. That's it.

There are shades, the main three distinctions are centralised > distributed > decentralised with shades in each.

I keep seeing arguments framing everything in terms of decentralisation. I read stan's 7 ideas as an example of it and it is absurd.  

Imagine starting with the colour red. Add a bit of yellow an it is a different colour. Keep adding yellow and there will be a point were you can't call it red any more and soon it will clearly be orange in 95% of people's eyes. Stan is starting with orange and trying to make us think of orange only in terms of red. It doesn't work.

We already have a word to describe this setup, it is distributed. Attempts are being made to twist this into 'sufficiently decentralised', attempting to pass a clear orange in 95% of people's eyes off as the reddest of reds (most decentralised).  


Decentralisation is a very special word is crytpo, it is a foundation concept and core principle so its definition shouldn't be diluted.

Your statement is at odds with itself:

1. By describing "A system destined for growing centralisation" you acknowledge that there many shades/degrees of centralization/decentralization.
2. By stating "...can't be called decentralised", you force a description of said shades/degrees into a binary TRUE/FALSE state.

That being said, I think the point you bring up about increasing centralization with network growth is a valid concern, and is a useful contribution to continuously-improving BitShares hivethink.

You are talking about the situation as it is today. 101 nodes might be acceptable to some for the amount of users in the network today.


But what happens if node growth lags (way) behind network growth (which is likely do to the economic incentives of the node operators). Is 101 nodes for the economy of 3 billion people decentralised?

Rather than enforcing decentralisation, the fundamental concept of capping participation enforces centralisation over time as the network expands.

The ratio between node operator and user can only have an upward trajectory in a capped system;

1:10 > 1:50 > 1:200 > 1:1000 .....     > 1:1Million


This pattern is growing centralisation. A system destined for growing centralisation can't be called decentralised. Where is the logic?


You need to show why Bitshares won't follow this path.

When the BitShares devs get a little uppity, I love to remind them that what they are doing is not exactly rocket science.  

But, while trying to find a way to communicate the architecture of BitShares to folks on other forums, I've stumbled on the following description, drawing on my past experience with continuously reconfiguring fault-tolerant flight control systems.  (Yes I wrote a technical report with that title back before there was an Internet or even a word processor.)  See if you buy this way of describing the BitShares architecture:

We tend to get three different attributes mixed up causing endless confusion even among men of good will.


Fault Tolerance. We are saying 101 highly-reliable, tested and proven, hand-picked parts dispersed across the globe and selected by the entire owner population is sufficient redundancy to achieve reliable fault tolerance.  The only thing those parts can do is -- do their job to spec.  We can observe their performance and swap them out in ten seconds if they don't perform to spec. So, really, they are just interchangeable slave machines.  Producing the blocks is a mindless task.


Decentralized Control.  The total decentralized population of the all owners participate in selecting the most reliable machines to run the network. Those 101 parts have no power over the owners. 101 dispersed redundant parts is a decentralization red herring! That's not where control lies. Those 101 chosen nodes can be completely reconfigured or replaced by the fully decentralized participating owners in 10 seconds.  


Throughput Scalability is also entirely different.  Any of the 101 nodes can scale up by adding parallel machines, side chains, and a thousand inventions we haven't dreamed of.   When we get to a billion owners and need a thousand machines per node, we can do that.  It will still be decentralized enough to ensure that the 101 (now bigger) parts that make up the distributed, fault-tolerant machine will perform their mindless slave jobs reliability - from positions scattered across 24 time zones.

Those million decentralized owners do not want to have to think about managing more than 101 redundant parts to their unmanned company's processing infrastructure. 101 is plenty, maybe too many, for the average owner to keep track of how they are performing.  Adding more parts reduces the degree to which each part can be vetted and therefore reduces the system's reliability.   Total reliability is a combination of node redundancy and node reliability via reputation-based vetting.

In BitShares, absolute control is fully decentralized down to the votes of every single atomic BTS satoshi.  You can't get more decentralized than that.
 
EDIT:  I have updated the above post because I get smarter (and better looking) each day.  
My thanks to my fencing partners here who have helped me to hone my explanation with each post.

It is crazy to me how people focus on the block producer cap instead of the underlying consensus metric. If you remove the cap and let people produce proportionally to their approval, you would see a higher concentration of blocks produced by a smaller number of nodes.

Having 101 validators is FORCING the network to be MORE decentralized than the other consensus protocols, where 99% of blocks are produced by far fewer than 100 validators. As a stakeholder, your control over block producers is exactly proportional to your stake whereas in other systems it becomes unprofitable to validate unless you control huge amounts of the stake (or hash power in POW, or unique nodes on ripple UNL)

What is the goal of decentralization? It is to make it difficult for anyone but majority stake-vote to decide what the rules of ownership are. To protect the stakeholders from everyone else. The goal is not to make everyone feel like a part of the validation process and pay them for make-work.

He is king of the dodge, sidestep and misdirection 

Fuck, I'm starting to like Stan.  

I'd consider BTS to be somewhere around plausibly decentralised, with good ol' NXT (or, ignoring the mining pool issues, BTC, LTC etc) as being fully decentralised.

While I'm here....could we decentralise NXT any further?

You are the only one left arguing it is still decentralised stan.

As long as there is a cap on participants,  I don't think it will matter how you try to spin it.