Topic: Replacing Bitcoin with something less wasteful (split from Is deepbit.com stealing coins?) - page 3. (Read 3900 times)

Who sets the capacity limit? Who make a cellphone and quad 6990 rig "level".  How do they do that?  

Now rethink this theory uses decentralized network.


Now you are just talking in circles.  Neither extreme has to exist.  Enough people mine so the network is strong enough.  If more people mine profitability declines and some people drop out restoring equilibrium.  If less people mine then profitability goes up and thus more people mine restoring equilibrium.  As economic activity of the network rises scarcity drives up the price of BTC in fiat terms increasing the revenue to the miners thus encouraging more mining and stronger network.

1)  Who maintains the blockchain based on cryptography?  If it is decentralized, what criteria would clients use to determine whether the blockchain is legitimate or not?  Obviously, anyone could create their own blockchain, then broadcast it in an attempt to "rewrite" history.  If the amount of computational power it takes to write a blockchain is artificially limited, then it can easily be overwritten by anyone with computing power greater than the artificial limit.
2)  The computing power is necessary to prevent someone from having an equal or greater amount of computing power.
3)  Inferior people?  If you really are as old as you say you are, learn some respect.  It makes you look pretty childish when you throw out insults like that.

Flip Tulipcoin, I understand exactly what you're suggesting. Thus, here's a much more specific question: how would you combat the potential for a sybil attack, without the assumption that every client must be connected to the network at all times?

That's only because BOINC does interesting and useful computing work from many fields, hence it's actually connected to reality and not a self contained game simulation featuring performance of the same simple operation over and over like the computing done in bitcoin. Spin those wheels, little hamster, spin! 

Makes no sense, BOINC is very centralized, it must rely on a central system to feed it with Work Unit to crunch.

Ok, so you have credentials and experience.  I applaud you.

Now with all of those degrees and years of experience, why have you STILL not come up with an answer to the question I continually present to you?  You criticize Bitcoin for its wastefulness of resources, but what sort of security would you put in place of raw hashing power?

Again:  How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?

Too funny! Ok, sonny, I won't trot out the string of degrees I have in mathematics, economics, and law. I won't cite my 30 years of experience in the financial services industry with 20 of that on Wall Street. I won't even discuss my role as one of the earliest implementors of the RSA cryptosystem in that industry. All that was a long time ago, I would pay people to do that stuff for me now had I not done so well as to be out of it completely. None of that is relevant in a world born yesterday.

In any case, the only practical value I see in bitcoin is as a transactional system.

I am sufficiently experienced to recognize that in the worst case a black box behavioral emulation of bitcoin as a transactional system could be built, perhaps out of as little as hamster wheels and rubber bands, perhaps more. Decentralized distributed data models are very common, there are many solutions to maintaining coherency in them. So on and so on. Yawn, been there, done that.

A really good way to not get sucked into the paradigms of a given tool set is to start with requirements. Rather than retype the work of others, I would suggest you take at look, FOR EXAMPLE ( just like BOINC is an EXAMPLE, you dingbat ) at this refined set of proposed requirements posted elsewhere on this forum:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.647423

You shouldn't be surprised that the adults in the room are not taking bitcoin as seriously as it takes itself, many of them have seen a lot more than you have. Did I mention I knew some of the implementors of Flooz? 

Ok, bright and enlightened one, what is your solution?  I see nothing wrong with accepting the longest blockchain as the correct one.  I can think of no other way to successfully implement a decentralized account ledger.  You seem to be so ready to criticize Bitcoin's methods without offering up any solutions of your own.  Once you can solve all the problems that Bitcoin solves, people might start taking you seriously.

What kind of jargon are you spouting off about here?  Way to completely generalize when I say "give details".   

Again, if you have a better system than Bitcoin, by all means, spill out the DETAILS.  Just saying "it'll use BOINC" isn't enough.  How would you create a public ledger that is unchangeable, yet decentralized?

By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.

No shit? To borrow a phrase from the mayor of Chicago, that's fucking retarded. Are you suggesting that this preposterous business of spinning wheels at ever increasing rates is necessary to maintain the security of the blockchain? If so, failure is inevitable. So many flaws, thanks for pointing this one out.

Give the technical details.
The means of benchmarking GPUs, FPGAs, or whatever are too obvious to waste space on, in fact the more heterogeneous the platforms, the better for having them cross-check each other. Besides, existence proofs are always compelling, witness the BOINC project does this for CPUs and GPUs as well and it is not centralized other than as a matter of recordkeeping convenience. Of course, the BOINC project generates work of tangible value, whereas bitcoin asks for unbounded resources just to barely keep itself going, so there's a shared interest in central recording in BOINC.

It's been said before, but Nakamoto was very prudent not to burn his real identity on a 1.0 prototype. He's obviously much more clever than the folks who have internalized his work as gospel, a silly thing to do with a wholly synthetic mathematical game.

I am having trouble figuring out how such a system would work successfully.  It seems like you are describing Bitcoin when you say "'Earnings' are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed".  And then you say that you will even the playing field between a cell phone and a power generator.  How, exactly, would that be achieved?  Give the technical details!  Most "evening the playing field" ideas are shot down pretty quickly by people who figure out how to circumvent such measures.  The best you could do is to limit the computations to something that only CPU's can calculate, not GPUs, but that's not going to save much power.

And what about security?  If it only takes a few cell phones to do the calculations, what would stop someone with malicious intentions from calculating and broadcasting their own blockchain?  By default, the Bitcoin client accepts whichever chain is the longest as the "correct" blockchain.  If you used a similar scheme, but limited the processing power behind the protection of said blockchain, it wouldn't be long before you'd start seeing 51% double-spend attacks on it.

Why is that? Please elaborate. Peers benchmarking each other could do the verification. Once again, you are only telling us how Bitcoin works, it seems you are having trouble thinking outside that tiny little Bitcoin Box. ROTFLMFAO, what's the weather like in 2008?

LOLNO

a BOINC-like system would require a central authority to verify the work, defeating the whole point of decentralization.

Good thinking inside the Bitcoin Box there. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like cryptography.

Why not a capacity-based mining metric as used in the distributed project software BOINC? "Earnings" are based on your percentage of commitment of a benchmarked resource as well as total capacity contributed. If capacity is really not needed in the aggregate, you could level the playing field between the cell phone processor used at 99% and the energy-wasting dedicated red hot pig breath generator running at 99% or for that matter dial in any skewing of reward you might want to achieve.

The whole weird hack of the difficulty level makes it clear whats really going on. Set it to minimum and rework the mining block creation rate meter, which could be amenable to something as simple as a consensus-based peer to peer counter.

Right now the mining hack is a lovely illustration of the fallacy of composition. The more it's done the less is the return to each participant for their investment. At the other end, where everyone recognizes pointlessly compute-intensive mining just costs everyone more individually so that no one should do it, bitcoins aren't created. It's a truly ludicrous situation.

If you don't have mining, you have no way to protect against double-spend attacks, etc.  People could change the blockchain at will.  All of that "wasteful" mining ensures that no single person can change the blockchain record.

Oh, RLY? #1 is not easy. There must be proof of work to ensure the validity of blockchain.

The whole mining thing is the most elaborate and wasteful means of trickling out a new block every ten minutes or so that the human mind could devise, so far anyway  
As you rightly point out, the exchanges thwart the concept of decentralization.

So, there's two requirements for Bitcoin 2.0, or the replacement for Bitcoin 1.0
1. Eliminate wasteful mining driven by computing capacity.
2. Decentralize the currency exchange function.

#1 is easy, #2 not so...