Topic: More Bitshares Greed - page 3. (Read 12243 times)

I'm not a fan of whitepapers and math, I prefer modelling.

A flase flag isn't needed. You fellas are doing a fine job on your own  


An aeronautical engineer of a new airplane design was asked "How do you know it will stay up if one of its three engines starts to malfunction?"

"I don't." came the reply. "When it comes to flight, I prefer to innovate empirically. But if you could work it out, I would be very interested to know. You could be famous.."


I can't imagine Come-from-Beyond will be back until someone has worked it out and it is documented, backed with analysis and not analogies or hand waving. It would be a waste of his time.


I will leave you guys to it.

Looks like a false flag attack to me.

What makes BitShares attractive is that you have a developer who actually understands economics.  The blog posts are quite refreshing and serve as a reminder about the immense potential this experiment has.

I do not see many other crypto dev's that combine immense economic understanding with the ability to code.

Thanks largely to the recent professional example set by Come-from-Beyond, this thread has taken a decidedly more civil tone and therefore may be a candidate for us to engage in serious discussions with a community other than our own. Having read some of our sincere responses above, perhaps some of the many repeat viewers of this thread are a bit more inclined to engage with the BitShares community as potential friends.  We hope so.

We are often, correctly, criticized for not vetting ideas here on bitcointalk.  This is primarily because others were nice enough to set up a dedicated forum at bitsharestalk.org and we wanted to support that generosity by spending a lot of our time there.  But I'll admit, part of the reason has been the same reason people learn not to touch a hot stove.  After getting burned a few times, the natural reaction is to stop touching it!

While this thread started out as an unfortunate attempt to inflict damage, it has thankfully now turned into something else entirely.  After 3500+ views it has become a nice little cross-pollinating mini-forum of its own where some good exchanges are beginning to take place.  We want to support that.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and post an article for discussion that Bytemaster just released.   The article is intended to share some the author's insights on a somewhat neutral topic in an edifying and professional way.  We hope you find it worth your time.  We would value all serious comments.   Those who have asked for a way to comment on Bytemaster's blog directly, you now have a test case before you:


Who knows?  If this works out, maybe we can continue to honor this community with useful content you can review on your own home turf!   I certainly would enjoy that.  

The academic vs engineer was in regards to the B. Generals problem.

If there are more than 2 forks then the delegates cooperate to resolve it.  We could automate it for most cases by picking the chain with the highest total shareholder approval where you sum the approval of the delegates producing blocks on each chain.  This would resolve the tie in almost all cases.   In practice, delegates in the smallest group would pick one of two largest groups.  IE: the 33 group would want to pick a horse as soon as possible so they can start getting paid again.   Eventually you would get 50/51 and then the losers would have to join the majority.   

There is no reason for a delegate to produce blocks on a minority fork unless he believes the majority fork is "bad" and is hoping the shareholders will vote new delegates to support his fork. 

So Bitshares chose 101 nodes so the network with two chains would always have a majority, 51 to 50.

When asked "What if we get [three chains of] 34 + 34 + 33?" the answer is...




It seems you are saying there is no mechanism for regaining consensus in Bitshares for when there are more than two competing chains? If you don't have an answer to "what if we get 34 + 34 + 33?", then it would follow that there can't be a mechanism to resolve it in the protocol?


If that is true, how would any consensus ever be regained?





(hadn't planned to expand on my previous 'yikes!', but the mods didn't like just that on its own)

Bytemaster asked me to post this for him (since I have a keyboard right now and he has an iPhone).  He thought your metaphor of an alloy was quite good.  He admits that he is "an engineer and not inclined to academic rigor", so his approach is to stand on the shoulders of giants, innovate empirically, watch to see how it works, and adapt.  


This is an opportunity for someone who is inclined toward rigor to step in and become famous by laying the underpinning theory for everybody.  It would probably be more generally accepted if somebody from outside the BitShares community did it anyway.
  

I envision that a deep thinker with suitable academic credentials could write an award-winning paper with a title something like,


We would certainly study such a paper if someone were to produce it!

Come-from-Beyond, your presence here is quite refreshing. Thank you.

Much appreciated. 
Thanks! 

While we are waiting I'd like to add few words to the discussion above.

The humankind knows several ways to counteract Sybil attack and all of them can be categorized into two distinct groups - centralized certification and resource testing. BitShares uses an interesting approach, it's an alloy of the both, people can do their own certification and trust becomes a resource here. Quite often alloys have better qualities than their separate components, you guys should spend more time on formalization and analysis of your method to get rid of big part of accusations voiced upthread. Perhaps you could borrow some stuff from http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf, that paper sounds similar to BitShares delegates without bells and whistles.

I called your question to Bytemaster's attention, so it's in his queue.  

Keep in mind that the reasons for the number 101 also include the fault tolerance aspect.  As a design rule of thumb, loss of one node for any reason should not drop average block production rate per 1010-second rotation by more than 1% .  Now that BitShares also uses most-reputable-node delegate slots as a way to pay support providers we like having 101 such slots available for flexibility in stakeholder allocation of authorized equity funding streams.

When you fold in the fact that the 101 generals have public reputations to protect and that treasonous acts are detectable and correctable by the stakeholders, then even if you max out at only 33 allowable traitors, you are probably doing fine.  

This is just a space holder answer from someone who claims no qualifications to respond at your level.  I'll leave the more Byzantine parts of your question for Dan.

 

Before this thread goes to total off-topic I'd like to remind about my question.

Well played. 

I've been waiting years to use that line on bytemaster and I figured this might be one of the last chances to do so.

He's a part of Bitcoin history: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6306 Probably the most famous Satoshi quote there is.

Please give us the link where you trying to convince someone about questions of this topic.
Or you prefer to copy/paste that Satoshi says and run away?  

If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

I guess one man's consensus is another man's collusion.   

People are merely agreeing on who they trust, proportional to the stake they have at risk.

That's true that in all blockchains stakeholders/hashpower can collude, but they can only collude in a one-to-one proportion to their stake/hash.  Since approval voting is used in delegate elections, I maintain that large stakeholders can effectively collude to a multiple proportion of their stake.  Whereby, for example, 20% of colluding stake can disproportionately influence the elections of more than 20% of the delegates.  This leads to a coalition of a few wealthy stakeholders being able to determine the outcomes of the mass majority of the delegate elections.  This is especially true considering that voter turnout of smaller stakeholders will be lower than the voter turnout of larger stakeholders.  As I said previously, it would be the intention of the colluding wealthy stakeholders to not harm Bitshares, but to elect delegates from which they would derive monetary gain in excess to their proportion of stake in the system at the expense of all other stakeholders.