Topic: Proof of Min (Read 1753 times)

It would be fun to test but I know too little about how to actually implement it. And without miners the name would have to be changed to something like Proof of Nada. Or maybe miners are needed, because who else would mint the coins?

thanks for the feedback -

I think zero confirmations are possible for a number of reasons - common sense prevails, at a value point ( price) payment processors should/could roll with zero and use "insurance" to buffer the difference.

on a zero fee (core base) like Quark that makes sense as the payment processor can add more profit (though fees) ( the market will determine).

then anything that goes above the "zero confirm value"  has confirmations added , these would be any online or "non face to face" transactions.

to the degree that for example a some online businesses can ask for 20 Confirms - (QRK are 30 seconds)

so its a use case - value and common sense.



as for your idea - i say do it ! sounds like a great thing to test.

It would be fun to test the idea in practice on a small scale. Lots of tedious work needed though. And I would have to learn a lot in order to be able to implement even just a part of it.

As gmaxwell pointed out, there wouldn't even need to be any miners. For example if the incoming transactions get timestamped, then each block could contain an ordered list of all the transactions for the time interval. And the servers then simply add the new blocks to the block chain. If a fraud server adds a fake block then that block will be rejected by the honest servers. This means still 51% attack risk I guess.

Would zip compression help to reduce the size of the block chain? Probably a little bit at least.

How will the servers be compensated? They will not be. It would be more like BitTorrent.

A fellow South Park aficionado, I see.

The Starbucks use case I posted was a bit funny, but there is truth to that I think. One solution is 0-confirmation transactions.

"The intrinsic danger to accepting a zero confirmation transaction on the Bitcoin network, or any altcoin network, is that of the sender committing a double spend attack.  However, given the finite number of Bitcoin nodes at any given time, it is possible to use math and verify in real time that a second (double) spending does not and will not enter the Blockchain." -- http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/the-mathematically-secure-way-to-accept-zero-confirmation-transactions/2014/02/13

If zero-confirmation transactions can be made as fast as less than say four seconds and be safe enough, then ok, then even bitcoin would be good enough for ordinary purchasing use. I have my doubts though. If any cryptocurrency is to become mainstream I think real transaction times of around two seconds are needed.

interesting concept - (ignore my trust rating; people just hate me)

Why do you say that (traditional PoW crypto) with under 1 min block times are doomed?

just out of interest?

And where, pray tell me, is the incentive then for setting up Bitcoin servers? The miner reward is still needed. Unless there is either voluntary Bitcoin servers or servers run by governments. You want to stick with up to over one hour transaction times? Will not work in the long run. And even altcoins with only like 1 minute transaction time, doomed to failure.

My prediction is that a cryptocurrency regulated and run by governments can use something like PoM, with two-second transaction times and with zero transaction fees, and with a user ID system that removes the dark ages need to store coins "under the mattress".

Who will be allowed to set up NTP servers? Anybody! But the miners will connect to the established NTP servers. Reliable. Proven. Tested and with roots in the 1980s! Fraud time servers = rejected.

The miners look for the distributed time server for the correct real-time UTC timestamp. Be it with NTP or some other protocol. Fraud miners will be unable to fake that. That's like a claim: today is the year 2015. And the distributed time server says: no, it's not, today is the year 2014.

> The other miners would check your nonce and see that it differs from the UTC timestamp and therefore reject your block.

How miners understand, which time message is valid?

I remind: I send fake time message, contains my nonce.  Time-server also will send valid time-message, contains it's own nonce.
Miner receives two time-messages. My message little earlier, message from server little late.

To which message it will be trust?

You can say now: "time server can sign message with public cryptography signature. And, fake message is impossible."

I will answer:

OK. If so, you propose centralized system, depends on single time-server with single signature.
If that server will be done, all your payment network will freeze.

In addition, your system give unlimited power to manipulate with blockchain for time server owner.
He can generate any blocks himself, without problems. And by this way - can create/cancel transations as he wish.

If so - maybe, we can just resign, move all coin accounts into TimeServer's computer?

If the distributed clock server is wrong it will not work. My idea depends on the real-time clock being reliable.

The other miners would check your nonce and see that it differs from the UTC timestamp and therefore reject your block.

Yes, pretty much.  That's the entire point of mining.

Bitcoin-like things work because the earliest transaction is the valid transaction, and later ones are invalid and orphaned.  The trouble was how do you know what's earliest?  Your clock might be wrong.  Outside sources might lie to you.  Information propagation takes time.  And on top of it, when money is involved, you have to assume everybody else is trying to lie and cheat and steal from you.  And that on top of THAT, you want the system to be able to work with nodes coming on and offline, and they need to be able to download updates and KNOW, not trust, that they are accurate.  Sure, a signature could contain a timestamp, but the signer might have just lied, even if he had accurate information.

So how the hell do you solve that?

By not relying on time, but instead relying on WORK.  Churning through sha hashes until you find one within a specific range.  If we assume sha hashes are not predictable, then we know that if you found a specific hash, you HAD to have, on average, churned through some number of hashes.  And given that it takes TIME to calculate a hash, we know that it will on average take some amount of time to do that work.  Now we have a basis for coordinating our clocks.  We may not know the exact time, but we CAN quite easily verify that work has been done, and we know that that work HAD to have taken some amount of time.

So now we can all synchronize our clocks, not by time, but by the longest valid chain of work done, because we know that it could not possibly have been faked.  The work WAS done.  The valid hash is proof of that.  And now, we can have nodes coming on- and off-line, lying to us, and on and on, and all we have to do is get somebody, anybody, to send us the valid chain, and we'll know it's valid, because we can check it very easily, and we've all agreed ahead of time that the longest ("longest" meaning most work) valid chain is the real chain.

Yes, bitcoin mining's whole purpose is to solve the distributed time server problem in a TRUSTLESS manner.  The purpose of doing the work is to PROVE that time has elapsed.  The transaction with more work done on top of it is OLDER.  Thus, we can now verify which transaction came first.

If you can solve the time server another way, you will have done what nobody could do for decades until Satoshi.  Go for it.

Propose attack:

1. I select my own nonce, and generate block with it (maybe, spend some work resources).
2. I send fake time-message (with senderIP and so on belong to official time-server), contains my own nonce,
a little earlier, than official time server.
And, instantly, send block to my peers.
 

Another problem to consider: How many bitcoin transactions per 10 minutes are done today? Around 400 perhaps. Compare that with the millions and millions ordinary money transactions per ten minutes happening in the world today. If Bitcoin is supposed to become anywhere near mainstream, it would have to cope with several orders of magnitude increase in number of transactions. Block chain bloat, anyone?

The variance in Bitcoin today could lead to transaction times of several hours! The probability for that may be exceedingly small, yet remember Murphy's law.

Let me tell you a true story about Nobel laureates in economics who developed a "foolproof" model for derivatives trading or something like that. The model worked wonderfully until one day the stockmarkets dropped more than "they are supposed" to do, leading to a catastrophic crash of their entire model.

So what, you may think. An occasional long transaction time would only be like a bump on the road. Again, consider Murphy's law where Bitcoin has become mainstream and several financial systems rely on Bitcoin transaction times being less than two hours.

I've been meaning to put Anders on ignore for a while now.  This thread finally reminded me to do it.

I'm getting a bit bored with his poorly thought out, hey, let just do the following and all the problems of the world will be solved:

• Step 1. Collect underpants
• Step 2. ?
• Step 3. Profit

The number of newbies that show up here thinking that their ideas are brand new and nobody has bothered to think of them in the past 6 years just astounds me.

I'm not saying that a newbie can't come up with an original idea, just that most of them don't, and none of them seem to even consider the possibility that their idea isn't new and that they should learn a bit about what has already been discussed regarding their idea before they present it as revolutionary.

Granted, I don't know much about the technical details of Bitcoin so it may be a bit over my head. Anyway, the main idea is that instead of the miners reaching a target they have a deadline. This means zero variance and very fast transaction times. The miners would still get the usual reward in bitcoins (25 at the moment I think) and the transaction fees. Another difference is that yes Bitcoin is a timestamp server but not a real-time one. I don't know much about distributed systems, so that's why I posted this thread without having my own solution to it in terms of implementation.

You are saying nothing but "I want this, I want that" without really knowing what you are talking about.

The Bitcoin miner network IS already a distributed time server. Due to its decentralized nature its resolution could not be too high. If you believe you are able to create an even better distributed time server than the miner network, just do it.

Hmm... Not good. It should definitely be trustless. Otherwise it's a step back technologically. Unless NTP is so established by now that it can be relied upon. That could be worth investigating. The Internet itself is actually not trustless. NTP I assume is a very battle tested protocol.