Topic: Made new video: "Solving Bitcoin's Centralization: NXT vs Clam" - page 4. (Read 3591 times)

You are "stating your opinion" as if it's the only reasonable one and all others are wrong. It's called an opinion for a reason. You continue to do it in this post...

See Bitshares, genius.

I'm not forcing, I'm stating my opinion. But if you want to just trade speculative assets and accomplish nothing else then it becomes a zero sum game. Might as well play poker or something.

No variants can. And the last time you debated me, I defeated you on every single point. Are we going to have to do it again?

I thought you wrote last time that you were going to be busy with your university semester beginning. I am ~51 (50.7), you are in your early 20s I presume. I have been a software developer since before you were born.

To whom?

I find it amusing when people try to force their vision as to what cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology should be onto others.

You are wrong here. There are PoS variants that distribute new coins. You guys all too often stereotype all PoS coins while forgetting there are many different variants with different pros and cons. Any argument against a PoS implementation should at least mention what version of PoS you are referencing.

PoW has many pros and cons that PoS coins don't have, and visa versa. I don't understand why everyone feels the need to push one or the other as superior, when they both have useful features that the other doesn't.

PoS(hit) can never be secure, because if it has a functioning markets (which it must in order to be widely adopted and liquid), then one can borrow stake, attack the coin (which requires much less than 51% to for example delay transactions by some N blocks where N is a function of percentage of coin supply held), and then pay back the borrowed coin with cheaply bought coin as the price collapses due to attacks. You could simultaneously short it (i.e. which you did when you borrowed the coins, but sell some for fiat before you attack) for profits. Alternatively borrow fiat (or other cryptocoin), buy stake and short to profit and pay back loan. Also PoS can't distribute new coins, thus eventually the coin supply shrinks asymptotically to 0.

With PoW, your borrowed mining hashrate would eventually reach end of contract and the coin would repair itself. And you'd need much closer to 51% to do damage. You would hope to be able to purchase the coin at cheap prices, wait for it to rise back up and then sell it for fiat to pay back your loan. Much less plausible.

However if you are up against the corrupt State that charges cost of PoW mining to the collective, then we're screwed with profitable PoW also, except I have the idea to use the unprofitable PoW of every person's computer in the world (with latency preventing them from farming out to ASIC), which seems might be even too much of an expense for China to hide the subsidization of.

It certainly does. The point of cryptocurrency is not Moon. The point is to have a system of enforced rules where all participants are protected not only from outside attackers but from each other.

Certainly not. It is entirely controlled by Alice. Alice might as well (and it would be vastly more efficient to) just keep the coin balances on MySQL.

But fairness is not required. A million holders where one person holds 1000 times more than each other person is still pretty decentralized.

(I assume we are talking about PoS here and ignoring other issues with PoS.)

I guess you have to ask yourself, "How much does decentralization matter if the currency holders are the ones that secure the network?"

Smooth - good points. The fee problem hasn't been solved by any system AFAICS. Transaction validation should be fairly compensated and to such a degree that it is roughly profitable (enough incentives so that supply can serve demand).

In terms of fairness and distribution. Imagine a coin called AliceBobCoin. Alice holds 51% of all coins and Bob holds 49% of all coins. Is it decentralised? Imagine a PoS coin called EveryoneCoin with 1 billion users where everyone has the same share 10^-9. Interestingly fairness is probably not even the best factor. It would be desirable for the system to compensate productive behaviour. Instead of everyone getting money for free or by lottery, its better to agree on some other method which rewards behaviour. In just the same way a company wants shareholders to be productive members and aligning with the interest of the corporation.

See above, search for delegated staking.

Concentrating stake like that does not make it more secure. It just creates a central point of control or potential compromise (custodial risk with respect to staking as described by monsterer is the same here, in fact worse because people are more likely to concentrate stake with centralized entities if their coins can't also be stolen).

In NXT you don't need to stake with active connection or online machine. You can lease your account to other address, maybe to some developers or whoever. At the same time you can spend your NXT when and wherever you like.

Just imagine how will that help CLAM. I know you are running CLAM pool but I don't trust you. In NXT you don't need that trust. My NXT is still mine.

No, you only need 51% of the coins that are actively staking, not 51% of the total supply. This is why exchange hacks have been a huge deal with PoS coins even when they don't approach 50% of the total supply.

In the case of Nxt (and most coins today that aren't really used much) the bulk of the supply is likely held relatively few people, each having large amounts, which motivates staking (and also makes them feel personally invested in the coin for a significant portion of their net worth, which means they will actively defend against attacks, while someone with pocket change would not particularly give a shit). If I own 300 EUR worth of coin out of a supply worth billions or even trillions of EUR, I'm just not ever going to bother staking it.

Some coins try to get around this with delegated staking but the problem there is further centralization to one or a few stake pools.

CLAM does at least have an incentive to actively stake since it uses proof-of-working-stake (no coin-age component). Still many small holders of CLAM don't bother to stake in practice.


It may be that Nxt is in fact 100% secure because >50% of the stake has always been held by a few people such as Marc De Mesel who will defend it against attacks. That doesn't make it decentralized nor does it make the method secure just because Nxt in particular might be.

The issue of Proof-of-Stake is not 51% attack, but 51% control. In practise it means that is a quite centralised system. Even if 51% of the stakeholders have the interest of the system in mind, they can dictate the direction. Nxt original code and ideas are great. It is however not a very open system - the code is tightly controlled. A more distributed system could also ensure that the project follows some guidance by users and features and services they might want. Its very hard to find the balance between a coherent vision and input of many people (design by committee problem). The last 12 months have been pretty quiet. It would be good to see more R&D in this direction and more new systems.

Peercoin, although the first coin with proof of stake, looks very much like a copycoin when you download the client, which put me off to further investigate.


There are many POS coins. What I like to see is unique utility.

I really need nxt if I want to buy or launch an asset on it's decentralised exchange.

I really need clams to gamble on just-dice.


For what do I really need ppc that I cannot do with bitcoin?

If so, then what's your opinion on PPC?  And will it traction in the future? 

Talk is cheap.

Who will attack NXT? Please use these exploits to attack. Attacker gets to win money.


Win money attack NXT with actions not words.

Not so - an exchange does not depend on one coin to run it's business; they typically have 10s of coins open for trading. In addition, as I mention below, the shorting attack can make this cost free.



In bitcoin you need a continuous investment of 25 BTC per block in order to attack the chain. That's $1,605,600 per day at current prices. And as I've already explained, the shorting attack in POS makes attacking a POS chain cost free.


Yet entirely possible.


The absence of a thing does not prove anything. Theory matters. A lot.