Topic: ppcoin stake generation tournament - page 2. (Read 3621 times)

Well you can actually setup your own little blockchain and let each strategy play out. The purpose of a public tournament is to involve more brain power and to discuss the effect of stake generation strategies in the open.

It's of no use if one intelligent member figures out the perfect strategy to augment stake generation power, and the public only learns about it during successful double spend attacks.

can this not be mathematically modelled?

Meanwhile, difficulty of PPCoin is rising again 

I LOL'd

No seriously, if a bladder full of water helps squeezing out more stake blocks in a unit of time, I'd want to know

I would prefer if the blockchain behaves as realistic as possible without checkpoints - and it would make things easier to analyze if the forks are able to incorporate themselves into the main chain for delta>6, because of the lack an absolute clock.

To lead a more specific discussion, for the tournament net I propose to
1) deactivate POW
2) a genesis block is created, where each output contains 10k stake (this may need some fine-tuning) directed towards a ppcoin address of one participant
3) have a quick turn over of the stake, with a 1 day recovery (instead of the 30 days) and 3 days of maturing.
4) allow for a "warm up" period, e.g. 1 week or a number of generated blocks, in which each participant can setup their stake according to their own strategy.
5) After the warm up has ended, declare open season
6) finish the tournament at a later time, e.g. after 2 weeks or a number of generated blocks.
7) each participant should evaluate the block chain and determine the longest consecutive POS series they were able to generate from their own stake, which got incorporated into the main chain.
8 ) bonus points for successful double spent attacks?
9) declare the results and the winners, at least the winner has to disclose their strategy
10) rinse and repeat

further points:

- In the spirit of game theory I propose that each participant creates a strategy which can be expressed as an algorithm. It can be either a fundamental strategy, e.g. reject all other POS blocks at any given time, or a mix of fundamental strategies.
- a participant can have more the one contender, however each contender must work according to their own rules - and for the simplicity of it, contenders from the same participant should not collaborate. This can be enforced by forbidding mixing coins from different contenders (which would be a reason for disqualification).

outcomes:
- for the tournament we will likely create analytical tools which allow us to analyze and monitor blockchain forks in realtime
- we will learn which stake generation strategies perform best for maximizing the stake generation power
- we promote the POS concept and attract coders and smart people
- have fun

I don't think we will need monetary incentives right now. Later we may declare prizes for ppcoins on the main chain, which are generated from a fee collected for registering a contender.

And here I thought that this last release did not need check pointing.

Did I miss something?

Checkpointing -> broken code

My main concern is the removal of check point system. My thought is that it would affect others using the test net for other things, or that a mix of clients using/not using check points might affect the tournament itself.

However, if I am mistaken , it would certainly be easier to use the current test net. 
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Testnet doesn't have auto checkpoint.

Although I think it's hard to run on testnet as not many people would be interested.

You can run the contest on mainnet with checkpoint just try to claim consecutive proof-of-stake blocks. Even with checkpoint it won't prevent you from going way above 6 of them if you can generate them fast enough.

My main concern is the removal of check point system. My thought is that it would affect others using the test net for other things, or that a mix of clients using/not using check points might affect the tournament itself.

However, if I am mistaken , it would certainly be easier to use the current test net. 

Why do you need special testnet there is testnet running.

ppcoind -daemon -testnet

You can mine some coins on testnet with cpu easily. Or you can ask me for them.

I'll bring my bladder full of water and a case of bottled water for this PP contest. 

Sounds like a good plan.

I believe a special test net would need to be set up (remove check pointing and assign a new rpc / IP p2p port).

Possibly change the address version just to avoid confusion.

I will put the chain on cryptocoinexplorer.com

just seen this and skim read... am well interested and have a small sum of PPC that I stake generate with.. but not of late as wallet locked... but am willing to help test and experiment with, and will post more thoughts here once I have walked the dog

Abstract
=====

A perpetual tournament is proposed, in which stake holders try to compete against each other for generating the longest consecutive fork. This will provide an empirical means to investigate the security of the ppcoin network and show strengths and weaknesses of the current scheme.

Discussion
=======
The network security model of ppcoin is based on the premise that no particular stake holder can generate POS blocks faster than the network, i.e. the remaining stake holders combined. While this feature is implied by the proportionality between stake generation power and the amount of stake used at any given time, the proportionality is not proven yet. In fact, as the pre-0.3.0 version showed, it is not guaranteed for cases when stake generation power can be augmented by the use of computational power.

Due to incentive and time limitations, a thorough investigation of the POS scheme takes time. To advance this issue, I'd like to propose an empirical way of investigating the effectiveness of individual strategies to augment (temporarily) the stake generation power (POS blocks/time).

Since such a tournament would require lifting the checkpointing mechanism, which currently protects ppcoin from this vulnerability, it would likely have to be carried out on the testnet. However, even better, a special purpose tournament-net could be declared which could be equipped with features important for carrying out such a stress test.

I invite for a discussion of how such a tournament should look like. Comments are highly appreciated.