Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 82. (Read 387491 times)

I may have done it while correcting Zoidberg's grammar. The error will, of course, be corrected ASAP.

I originally thought the use of unconscionable was a bit strong but now I see where fluffypony was coming from. The CryptoNote white paper says one thing as the goal of CryptoNight and Zoidberg's write up says another. That is misattribution and shouldn't be done.

Zoidberg might have his own opinion about what the "goals" of CryptoNight were but unless he can document it, he should just stick with the goals that were published in the white paper (or web site, etc.)

There also might also be a bit of a language issue as Zoidberg has stated before that English is not his native language. So I wouldn't necessarily assume malicious intent, but the wording should really be cleaned up.

I have already asked you not to call me Michael. Now you are on my list of people to karate-chop in the throat.

Michael, I did not create the CryptoNight PoW, nor am I particularly attached to it. I am, however, against blatant incorrectness in a technical document, and would be just as vehement if the incorrectness were about scrypt. This is not the first time I've reacted this way - in this very forum I've passionately argued against incorrectness in all manner of "whitepapers" dished out by "developers" regardless of whether or not it relates to something I'm involved in.

That you feel the need to pop your head in and pass a smug and arrogant comment is not unsurprising, but it would behove you to tread carefully, as such behaviour reflects extremely poorly on the cryptocurrency you represent.


I stand by the turn of phrase I used. Lying, or misrepresenting a fact that he should know, in a formal technical document is unconscionable. In fact, I agree with everything else he said about the algorithm, but that entire last sentence is unnecessary and disingenuous. I'd expect something like this from a Newsweek reporter, but not from somebody who obviously understands the facts of the matter and is writing a technical document. If it was a developer working for me they would be in a disciplinary hearing, but spending a few years C-level at a listed company has maybe made me overly demanding.

I do not claim or pretend to be a dispassionate person.

Come now, let's nip the antagonism in the bud.  The "unconscionable" word was a bit...insensitive...but not worth starting a feud.  BBR and XMR should be able to cooperate well, to mutual benefit, and overblown rhetoric won't help either.  Oil on the water, please.  (And no smoking.)

Idiotic nitpicking.

In addition, it's not fluffys job to correct such a gaping hole in the whitepaper integrity, not via google documents, nor via pm's. The guy who writes it has to be able to get the basics right all by himself.

Unconscionable? The way you over react to anything negative (real or perceived) about your adopted cryptocurrency bemuses me.

This was included in the original post:



I even left the typos

It won't help them for at least three reasons.

1. The most used contracts must be put on ASICs to get scaling, because Moore's Law is ending (unless POET rescues it), i.e. they will force more centralization of mining not less.

2. Algorithms aren't fungible.

3.

I shared a conference call with Daniel Larimer, listening to progress on DPOS and explaining my own work. I commend Dan and his team. My greatest interest in DPOS is not how they secure the blockchain but rather the Distributed Autonomous Corporation, which I believe can be implemented in my Texai cognitive architecture.

As I consider the design of my own work, I see less reliance on proof-of-stake as a method to secure the blockchain, and much more emphasis on traditional financial software techniques. CPOS will have a single mint agent that migrates over a network of paid full nodes, creating new blocks without effort, and whose results are verified by other agents that replicate and verify the canonical blockchain. My approach is much less complicated than reinventing Satoshi's design from scratch. I merely encapsulate bitcoind and control what nodes it connects with, and give one of them at a time permission to generate the block.

I plan to fork the most popular PoW coins Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Namecoin on separate networks with separate branding - CPOS-B, CPOS-L, CPOS-D and CPOS-N respectively. To buoy prices, I would allocate a modest portion of the block rewards as dividend payments proportional to unspent transaction outputs. The remainder of the block reward finances generous support of full nodes and developers. The extreme low costs of CPOS with regard to PoW - which consumes the entire block reward, allows CPOS to offer 100x lower transaction fees. That feature, together with modest dividends and immediate acknowledgement of accepted transactions, should entice users to migrate over to CPOS from the PoW networks. All they need to do is configure new seed node addresses on their wallets and services. Their pre-fork coins will be present for spending.

Vitalik is trying to get his PoW to use the general purpose computations from the contracts to prove that they are running CPU's.

I am not sure how far he is along with this idea, because the latest is that he is considering this new dPoS thing. But if he uses PoW and uses the turing complete contracts as proof for the PoW then a cpu would be the optimal hardware for mining, because an ASIC for Ethereum would simply be a better CPU, and then you're up against Intel.

Of course, his ideas might not be possible, which is why they still have no mining algorithm.

SlipperySlope and anyone else who has an interest in PoS:

What are you opinions on this DPoS? Is this the holy grail that people have been waiting for? I thought Vitalik was a PoW hardliner. So I was a bit surprised to read this.

I like that this kind of decisions are on the table. I think most devs just chicken out of fear of ruining the price while that's what they're actually doing themselves by sticking with the easy way.

That is true, but you and I are resigned in the knowledge that a purpose-built device will always be able to outperform a general purpose device, even if the cost of that purpose-built device is fiscally prohibitive. Thus, the gap cannot ever truly be closed, in the truest sense of the word. Thankfully, this is clarified somewhat: "It is appropriate that some users can have a certain advantage over others, but their investments should grow at least linearly with the power."

Holistically the take away is and should be that the performance gap needed to be reduced between CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs. CryptoNight delivers on that goal quite sufficiently.

Note: I much prefer Cuckoo Cycle over CryptoNight, and am watching its ongoing development with expectation and excitement. Although we do not expect to switch PoWs anytime soon, Cuckoo Cycle is on a very short list of candidates for future consideration.

If we're nitpicking, then closing the gap would mean that GPUs are no faster than (the fastest) CPU.
A 2x-3x gap is a narrowed, not a closed gap.

The full sentence in the whitepaper is: "These constraints were supposed to protect hash from GPU and ASIC implementation, but a GPU miner appeared on the scene in 2 weeks after this technology got public attention." Thus, contextually we know that his meaning in the word "protect" is "ensure they do not exist". He considers the very existence of a GPU miner a failure of the algorithm, when, in fact, a GPU miner can and should exist as long as it the performance gap is closed. Currently GPU miners are 2-3x as performant / efficient as CPU miners, and by dga's calculations they shan't exceed ~5x the performance / efficiency. Thus the algorithm has completely succeeded at what it purports to do, and has met its primary goal.

how does the saying go...when the accidental becomes unconscionable the neurotic become...demotivational?

when you have to explain the joke you know you've failed.

Looks like two different ways to say the same thing.  "protect from" has the same meaning as "close the gap between" in terms of reducing the ability for GPU/ASIC to skyrocket the hash beyond the capabilities of CPU to do so.

Busy reading through it - he leads into it with a huge fallacy that is either incredibly naive or very disingenuous of him. When describing CryptoNight he states: "These constraints were supposed to protect hash from GPU and ASIC implementation" [sic]. Literally the first paragraph in the CryptoNote whitepaper that describes the PoW algorithm says: "Our primary goal is to close the gap between CPU (majority) and GPU/FPGA/ASIC (minority) miners. It is appropriate that some users can have a certain advantage over others, but their investments should grow at least linearly with the power. More generally, producing special-purpose devices has to be as less profitable as possible."

Misrepresenting the facts of the matter in a whitepaper, purposely or not, is unconscionable.

Apologies if this is a duplicate, but trying to add more actual information to the pile of cryptonote derivatives -- BBR's Zoidberg wrote up a whitepaper about his Blockchain PoW construction and its realization in Wild Keccak:

http://boolberry.com/files/Block_Chain_Based_Proof_of_Work.pdf

As a follow-up to his earlier explanations of
  Improved anonymity:  http://www.slideshare.net/boolberry/boolberry-solves-cryptonoteflaws-37055246
  Ring signature pruning:    http://www.slideshare.net/boolberry/boolberry-reduces-blockchain-bloat

I'm sure there will be pushback on these as there was to the others, but kudos to him and the Boolberry team for putting it out there for others to read, steal from, and criticize.  (Disclaimer:  I looked at an earlier draft of this one and provided some minor writing feedback.  I'm not an author of it and am not part of the BBR team.)

It does not take much for ASIC owners to work out that they will break even and start getting ROI much faster on currencies that are growing rather than shrinking.