Topic: John Nash created bitcoin - page 7. (Read 22273 times)

The relationship between Nash and bitcoin is not so strange: Nash was a mathematician who got a Nobel prize for economics, was interested in constructing an "ideal money", has essentially founded the field of mathematical game theory, was seriously interested in cryptography, and was considered paranoid for the down-to-earth and obvious observation that the government is the enemy of the people.  What well-known scholar could be closer do several aspects of bitcoin than Nash ?

So it is a very sensible hypothesis that Nash had something to do with bitcoin.  

Where @iamnotback and I differ fundamentally in opinion is:

- to me, bitcoin's design is "too little, too late" in a sense, and I tried to indicate many technical details where bitcoin's design is somewhat silly.  As such, I do consider that who-ever was Satoshi, was a smart guy that knew about the previous attempts of electronic money, and did an invention that merits our attention, the block chain with proof-of-work consensus resolution.  But bitcoin's design didn't live up to the desires set out by its inventor.  It simply didn't work the way he intended it to work, and technically/mathematically/cryptographically Satoshi didn't always understand exactly what he was doing, and was clumsy.  It turns out that bitcoin's clunky design results in quite horrible game-theoretical aspects, leading in the best case to an imploding speculative bubble, but in the worst case, in a financial dictatorship by a few maffioso who will own most of the world, it will be an ecological disaster and will be the end of any form of financial freedom and independence.  In other words, a kind of Frankenstein monster of finance.  Personally, I don't give bitcoin much chance to go beyond a certain niche of sleazy business.

- @iamnotback is absolutely convinced that Satoshi is Nash, an ultimate evil genius at the service of an Evil Elite, and sees all the bad design of bitcoin as on purpose, and is absolutely convinced that bitcoin will be this (planned) Frankenstein monster by the "elite", the Rothschilds or by some other dark force, and every disfunctional aspect is seen by @iamnotback as a sign of the subtly evil design meant to be that way.

Nevertheless, I think that both of us agree fundamentally that bitcoin is not what most bitcoin maximalists think it is.  I think it is because of its clunky design and the limited capacity of Satoshi, @iamnotback thinks that all of this was planned in advance by a mightily brilliant genius that fucked all those believers hard in the ass.  

But in the end, the intention doesn't even matter: bitcoin is NOT what it was said it would be by Satoshi, so much must be clear now.

In other words, the main difference in opinion between @iamnotback and me is that I think that bitcoin was simply badly designed, and that all the bad things we see are simply due to "stupidity" (everything is relative).  @iamnotback thinks that instead of stupidity, it is evil genius.

This is also why @iamnotback thinks that bitcoin will become world-dominant (an evil genius will do something that will work out his evil plan) ; and why I am not convinced that bitcoin is up to a big future (because a stupidly design will not go very far).

I think that @iamnotback suffers from cognitive dissonance, because he is working on "killing bitcoin" and of course, the more bitcoin was the successful work of a brilliant evil genius, the more he is Batman beating the evil genius.  @iamnotback thinks that I'm suffering from cognitive dissonance, because I would be too frightened in my currently comfortable position to see the full evil impact of bitcoin on the world.

I think my position is superior over his on this last point, exactly because he's working on his bitcoin killer: if he's right, he will kill bitcoin and I don't have to be afraid, and if he's wrong, I don't have to be frightened, because I'm right, so in the end, there's no reason for me to be scared, and hence to be suffering from cognitive dissonance after all


Bitcoin is not doomed, bitcoin is simply not what you think it is.  It is NOT a payment instrument that brings freedom to people ; it is a niche application only for very rich people (at best - my view) or is going to be the ultimate enslavement of people by finance (@iamnotback view).  And it will not change.  You are stuck for ever with 1 MB blocks.


Well, all empirical evidence indicates that it can't change, because it is designed that way.  Where @iamnotback and I differ in opinion, is whether this was on purpose.  I consider this as yet another mistake by Satoshi in the creation of his Frankenstein monster, he considers this as perfectly designed that way on purpose.

Yes, he indicated that in an initial phase, there would be a P2P network with (useful idiots running) full nodes, but when the network would grow bigger, the block chain would grow with 100 GB a day, only sustainable by a few big data centers, the miners.  He even considered that these big miners wouldn't even distribute the block chain any more, keeping their privilege to themselves.


You are right.  Satoshi's vision was an oligarchy of a few miners, that run the only few full nodes in the world, and everybody connecting DIRECTLY to them with their light wallets.

In perfect contradiction with:

1) his introduction of 1 MB blocks (meaning, he wasn't serious, changed his mind, or didn't understand the implications of what he did)

2) all the bullshit about decentralisation and the importance of a large P2P network of full nodes that don't mine, as propagated by the Core people.

That's because of Satoshi's evil genius, that rendered me/us totally schizophrenic.  Just like Nash, BTW 

well you can tell the difference because

a) i don't talk about John Nash, ideal money, or "economic theories"
b) i don't say silly negative things like bitcoin is doomed or its too late
c) i don't promote the idea that bitcoin can't scale , shouldn't scale,  won't change, shouldn't change, or won't get consensus
d) i don't troll or have a big head

All I ever talk about is Satoshi's original vision and simple straightforward on chain scaling with bigger blocks.
Everything else is noise and a distraction.

  

Laugh out not-so-loud...

do you ever get tired of listening to yourself talk, i wonder?

dinofelis = iamnotback = trainscarwreck

This is not about voting.  PoS is not about voting, it is about acknowledging your set of received transactions, according to an agreed-upon (protocol) deterministic rule.  The problem with PoS, namely "nothing at stake" only comes because of the reward.  If there is no reward in PoS, there's no incentive to stake on multiple chains: you don't care.  You stick to a rule, an arbitrary but deterministic rule, to stake on one chain, and not on another, because by not staking on the other chain, you don't lose a reward.  As such, there is a normal solution to the "nothing at stake" problem: you apply the rules, because if you're not part of the cheaters that gain something by re-organizing the chain, you can only WIN by wanting the system to come to a consensus, no matter which one ; there's total indifference to what consensus and to whether you stake or not, if there's no reward.  Your only stake is that there's a consensus that is reached, or the system in which you are a stake holder, crashes down.

In PoS, it is not difficult to define a rule that you only stake on one of the possible chains (deterministic rule).  If you follow that rule, no "nothing at stake" problem occurs ; the only thing is that there's no incentive for you to follow that rule if there's a block reward !  This is why Casper tries to punish those that do not follow the rule ; but then this can be gamed too and you get a hopelessly complicated game-theoretical bungle.  If there's nothing at stake (in both senses) with staking, your only stake is that the system works well.  If the random deterministic choice of who can stake, is random enough, then it is also essentially impossible to BRIBE you into staking, because in order to find out WHOM to bribe, you'd need to spend a lot of "proof of work" and chances are you'll find one necessary staker who doesn't accept the bribe.

Of course, with sufficiently corrupt players, you can game the system ; and that's OK.  The system shouldn't be too secure, and the real risk that the system will one day break down, protects it from too much hot air speculation.  Only its real usage as a currency would determine most of the market cap, as it should, and no-one would dream to use it for a very long term hodling idiocy.

I think that this is where you go off the deep end.  Asic boost is nothing particular, and doesn't mean much, it is just a slightly smarter scheme to calculate hashes.   The whole thing about asic boost is that one of the Core devs patented it ; this could not have been foreseen by Satoshi that in 2016, a core guy would take a patent on it, and not someone else would find it and make it public domain, or that an asic producer would have patented it.  

There's nothing particular about asic boost, and has nothing to do with "double hashing".  It has to do with the typical structure of block-cypher-like hash functions that have a "data" and a "hash" input like a block cypher has a "key schedule" and a "data" part, and the Merkle-Damgard extension attack.  The "double hash" (which IS part of the PoW scheme) doesn't alter this.  The "asic-boost" scheme is applicable to any such Merkle-Damgard scheme with a block-cypher-like structure, where one can save one "key schedule" in the loop if one needs to do PoW.


Mmm.  It is about time you wake up of your delusion here.  You're an extremely smart guy.  But I've seen other smart people go off the deep end because they locked themselves up in such kind of delusion.  In fact, Nash himself is such an example.  Goedel also.  Take a step back and think twice, whether what you are claiming has any rational sense and isn't a self-referential argument, and you may see why this is not an on-purpose design:

- asic boost's "poison pill" only comes about because it happened to be a Core guy that put a patent on it (if ever it is upheld in court).  If it would have been someone else, or if it were open domain, the "poison pill" wouldn't have its effect.  The double hash structure limits the ASIC boost efficiency boost !  And this was "discovered" in 2016, 7 years after Satoshi designed his thing.  No way he could have foreseen at what point, by whom, it would have been discovered, and whether or not a patent would have been put onto it.  


Mmm.  Satoshi knew in 2009 that a core guy was going to invent a thing that interested Chinese manufacturers in 2016.


I haven't seen any rational argument.  I have seen a lot of handwaving, a lot of empty arguments filled with rethoric but not much tangible arguments, and then, claims that previously such "rebuttals" were definitive on the question, where they didn't settle anything.

Like the argument that Shor's algorithm is already a known way to kill ECC, and then, when it turns out that this goes against your defence of Satoshi-genius, namely that the problem was not that Satoshi was brilliant enough to "protect" ECC while it was going to get attacked by quantum computers, rather that a quantum-computer broken ECC was of no use to be protected by a hash function, it would kill the possibility of using a transaction, suddenly you argued that quantum computers would only be useful to attack "long term" but not "short term", as if that made any sense: a totally broken crypto (as per Shor's algorithm) is totally broken, as well in the short term as in the long term.

After pointing out the futility of this rebuttal, you maintain nevertheless that you "refuted this" and that I refused to comprehend your argument.

You're a very smart guy, but you're totally locked up in your need that Satoshi was an evil genius, because you need to be the super hero / James Bond that needs to save the world from the Spectrum of Satoshi.  As such, you fall into the trap of many people suffering from such type of delusion, namely taking everything, and its opposite, as a proof of their necessary hypothesis, and lose all sense of critical thinking.  This is also what happens to people locked up in religious or other sectarian ideologies. This is a pity it happens to you.  Your critical thinking is totally blurred by your need of having a sufficiently evil and genial adversary.  

You want people to point out your error.


If the whole thesis of a fee that gets too high for average joe to use bitcoin is based on whales colluding, then here are my arguments.

1. That scenario of whales ($billionaires, elites, etc) colluding will NEVER happen.
2. Humans (whales, $billionaires, $millionaires, elites, etc) are never rational. Forget about game theory. It works only on simplistic binary situation. Humans are scientifically documented to be far more irrational than rational in decision-making.
3. The whales ($billionaires, power brokers, shadow elites, etc) would be owning over 50% of all bitcoin ever mined. If miners give way to their "colludion" (pardon my English it's not my fault that English is a stupid language) by making the non-whales pay up, that is economical nonsense.
       1st, the miners are the gatekeepers. If the whales refuse to pay the fees, they can get the hell out from using bitcoin.
       2nd, if all non-whales are pushed into alts, leaving only the whales, then the whales will pay the fee. "Colludion" makes no difference.

The pareto effect of 80:20.
-> 20% whales own 80% of bitcoin.
    (whales pay 80% of total fee)
    (non-whales pay 20% of total fee)
-> The whales collude not to pay fee and push out non-whales.
-> If miners comply, they will force the 20% non-whales to make up for the 80% difference. This is economically impractical. The miners are not advantaged by complying.
-> If miners don't comply, they will still earn the fee as usual. The whales have no choice but to continue using bitcoin and pay their share of the fee. The miners are not disadvantaged by not complying.

Your reasoning/logic based on game theory is flawed/incomplete.

Note: Businesses make their profit from servicing the rich (those who can afford the price), not from the poor (those who cannot afford the price). This is valid throughout all economic activities.


A dialogue...
Whale: I am not going to send you transaction if you charge me fee.
Miner A: Where will you send your transaction?
Whale: To miner B.
Miner B: So you want me to NOT charge you any fee?
Whale: Yes.
Miner B: And if I refuse?
Whale: I will take my business to miner C.
Miner C: What now?
Whale: Okay, I pay my fee to you.
Miner A & Miner B: Get lost!
Whale: Well, at least I still pay.
Miner A & Miner B: Bluffer!

The next whale (whale #2) shows up...
Whale 2: Hi! I am here to make a deal.
Miner A: Fuck off and die if it's about free transaction.
Whale 2: Urmmmm...... no. I pay.
Miner A: Good.

One alternative incentive scheme might look like this:

- Nodes have to do certain tasks in order to stay alive. In my Proof-of-Membership proposal for example, minting accounts are required to make "heartbeat" transactions every now and then, otherwise the accounts are downgraded and lose their priviledge (interest rate that is paid with every block built by anyone).

- Now, running a node the whole time (or turning it on regularly) will be tedious to most end-users. That's why you can offer them as a block reward the the temporary or permament exemption from their obligation do make heartbeats.

Such a reward mechanism there's no incentive to own multiple accounts as users are trying to get emancipated from hearbeating as soon as possible.

I invented that already in collaboration with @jl777 for Komodo in 2016. It is named dPoW (delayed proof-of-work).

CounterParty does something somewhat analogous as well.

And really it isn't a secure and sound solution, but more of a gimick. Because the local consensus still have to decide what to submit for checkpoints because the PoW system isn't validating every thing and can't resolve conflicting double-spending orderings that occurred between checkpoints.

The government has more guns than you do...


I am like so Lolz when I read the below and remember how I (as @AnonyMint) was telling everyone that Tor was compromised back in 2013 and everyone thought I was a kook.

The thing is ultimately I dont even care about this lol

Im into doing application for blockchain, and with the script thing im doing ill be able to kick start test net with experiment like this to see if they fly or not.

The only thing im concerned with in short term about coins is that they can keep windows of 10-30 min of non extreme volatility, the rest ultimately I can do with it

Im more concerned about the currency side rather than the consensus / speculation / pow aspect, and for distributed application data data, the problematic is much simpler than this.

So ultimately for me it's just curiousity, and if I have time maybe ill do test with a blockchain like this without block reward, and using other way to solve double spent and resolve sybils "non attack" ( merging of the tx ).

And all together your comment also show that you dont see my perpective, and why the thing you point doesnt matter, and what I meant with checkpoint is that you would only need real pow consencus on this checkpoint to "harden" The chain if you want to enforce a particular order on the tx/block, but that would just be about one packet saying this block height is this block hash, and having a pow once in a while on this checkpoint instead of every block.

But even this is not even my main concern for the moment, and I wont speak more about it because anyway I know it's not complete at this point, and if I want to put time in making a blockchain like this and resolving all the issues, ill do it easily with the script.

And other than this for the moment I dont need this to be error free, and you dont seem to really read or understand my own thinking before to cherry pick a sentence out of context and making some kind of strawman arguments out of it, to counter some implication I didn't make to begin with.

In the same time it's also my bad because I dont do welling constructed posts to explain my thinking clearly, but to really do this i would need to really dig some math, layout some equation, and restating a whole lot of things on blockchain seen mostly as distributed ledger, rather than speculative coins or ideal currency.

And I dont have time for this and it's not my focus for the moment

I have put my father on it lmao he is retired so he has time and he is super good in math and economics lol

I showed him the pdf you sent me, he said it's the old notation and there are much better math to do this now, and the heart of the pb with modern math is simple. It's from 1929  he said there are much better book for this sort of stuff now

Then I talked to him about Nash and this stuff , he looked interested, and said he would look into it lol

But other than this, other than getting in the math myself which I dont have the time for, and I dont see the interest for me for the moment, I dont see how to reach conclusion about the whole math model that can be behind bitcoin.

And again im mostly interested in the currency aspect from app side, I dont specially plan on holding lot of coin to sit on them waiting that they Hatch with the invisible hand

So all this side is most irrelevant for me, and for the part it matter for running a coin with value today I would stick to already well tested protocols

The rest would be for pet toy or distributed application data, which is different logic all together.

@dinofelis, how many times do I have to repeat to you that voting is not free.

Ethereum's Casper shit is more of the same proof-of-stake (nothing-at-stake or centralization by economic weight, e.g. DPoS) nonsense. The betting stuff enables what Vitalik refers to as "dark uncles" or "dunkles", which Vitalik incorrectly thinks will solve the nothing-at-stake problem. Also Casper has the problem that all deterministic finality PoS and Byzatine agreement systems have, which is a 33% liveness threshold which if that many validators balk or stop processing, then the chain can't move forward without a hard fork.

The only way to replace PoW is with an Inverse Commons consensus protocol, which is my new invention.

Crypto is not long-term affected by geopolitical noise.

The crypto market is undergoing a painful Scalepocalypse metamorphosis as n00bs come to understand their idol Satoshi was an evil motherfucking genius.

So this cognitive dissonance is causing them to rail against Bitcoin (USAF nonsense, etc), and so they will be served up some event which steals their tokens to silence them so Bitcoin can move forward without the deadweight.

I am sorry but you don't understand. Your subsequent comments arguing with @dinofelis about checkpoints further confirms you have not studied the research I mentioned.

Please don't construct a Dunning-Kruger asshat for yourself. Just admit to yourself that you have not done the research. Its better to be honest.


I hope you don't take it personally that I correct people when they are making factual errors and/or if it clear they are not knowedgeable about what they are writing about.

I expect others to do the same when I state errors. And I thank them.

The thing is, ok it's easy to game, but then, there is nothing to win either

The whole problem of sybil attack become almost nothing.

Because even let say you have a whole new blockchain of 1 millions tx, vs the local blockchain.

Either

1 All the tx are identical, and it's just about reordering them to end with the same block header, which just involved sorting them on any kind of value that can be the same for every node, could be based on the hash or something else, even only the timestamp, and that just involve recomputing the merkle root and the block header hash, period.

2 One of the blockchain contain tx that the other doesn't have, and in the end, it's same than 1, just need to insert the transaction in the good block and recomputing merkle root and block header hash.

3 One of the blockchain contain a double spent for the other, and it's only in this case that there is any kind of need for a hard consensus, either via POW or other.


For all the other cases than 3, all the nodes can already know how to get the tx and block hash in the same manner than all the other node, if an algorithm is made in sort than given a set of N tx, it always end up with the same chain of block headers, then they just have to know they are on the same set of tx, and they have naturally the same blockchain.

Looking into what they are doing with the XThin block with bloom filters and that sort of things is intersting in this regard.

I'm 100% convinced if the goal is only to get to some sort of distributed ledger that protect against double spent, there are much much less expansive / risky manner to reach consensus than the game theory of reward & mining.



It's not that the mining is a 'bad idea', but it's clearly not made in sort to be an efficient distributed ledger system. It's made to induce game theory.

When you think about it, the only thing that make reward / mining game interesting is the speculative value on the other side, because if there is no speculative value, the block reward worth nothing.

In the end there is necessarily a direct connection between the speculative value of the coin on one side, and the cost invested in the mining risk taking. The two balance each other out.

And then it need some kind of 'clock' to be connected to real time economy, and it's how you get the fixed block time emission. Like this the whole thing is 'hard pegged' to real time economy, with the predictible inflation rate etc.

Remove all this problematic of speculation from the equation, and it become much simpler as a simple open distributed ledger. And the pow become overkill if it's just to solve double spend or sybil attack.

I agree with you.  The error in most crypto is the reward, which gives rise to strategies that do not necessarily induce the desired properties.  I also think that the only viable kind of crypto currency is where the validation/consensus decision is taken on a voluntary basis, the "reward" being that the system in which you are invested, keeps running correctly.

However, you still need a kind of deterministic decision *that is hard to game* (because you can do "proof of work" like calculations to get the deterministic solution in your advantage).  This is why a kind of PoS signature scheme is necessary in my opinion.


Checkpoints are no solution, because they are just another consensus problem.  If you have two conflicting check points, which one is the "right" one ?  You've just transposed the block consensus to the check point consensus.

Yes, you can *individually* decide that you won't allow any old modification of consensus.  But there is no guarantee that the rest of the network will follow you.

But mainly, yes, PoW is a bad idea, and rewarding (with fees or coin creation) consensus deciders/maintainers is also a bad idea.

The only way I can see that the fees won't rise egregiously on BTC on chain (with $trillionaire/$billionaire whales free riding on the rest of us) is if something can compete with Bitcoin such that the whales feel they are losing control of the blockchain (and eventually global) economy, and/or if fungible money can be removed as important from civilization.

Neither of those two caveats are likely to come true in the near-term. TPTB already have their master plan underway for collapsing the global economy in sovereign debt collapse with $quadrillions of derivatives, war, and pestilence. This will accelerate this May 2017 and even more egregiously accelerate in 2018.

Such caveats might start to become competitive with the plans of the global elite after another decade or so. In the meantime, such caveats will be nascent fledging saplings that are growing very fast, but not yet large enough to compete with TPTB.

I dont think you understand where I want to get at. If you want to build a réputation of the forum, please do it with someone else. If you want to add to my point of view, dont just claim I dont understand.

But I wont go in the full détails of it, the detail are annecdotic and it's not even the main point of the discussion, which you dont even seem to catch.

Maybe ill work on the full détails of how it would work with this idea, but in the context it's just annecdotic to show Pow only motivation is not necessarily only consensus

But for the moment all this topic is just curiousity for me

It's not really what im into, and if you want to even go at critic it, at least pick all the elements.