Topic: Satoshi didn't solve the Byzantine generals problem (Read 13613 times)

Yea, I'm locking this thread now that the Shamwow Zeitcoin salesmen has shown up.  It will just turn into 10 pages of jibberish with him trying to sell you his $20,000 market cap PoS coin.  That and the fact that we have no better alternative to the current PoW implementation so this topic is kind of pointless until we do.

Nonsense.

Any good news causes the price up?

Hmm,  disagree with that for the following reasons, (Especially your cute (hit) slander)
Just because PoS is Substantially cheaper to run than PoW does not mean their is not an increasing expenditure required.

There is always an increasing expenditure of required Disk Space as the Blockchain expands.
Additionally also an increasing requirement of Ram , as the Memory requirements grow.
As the Number of Wallets increase competition for Stakes, there is an increasing Time requirement to be online and staking.
(And with the above increased requirements, a slight increase in the electricity draw on the PCs.)  

 

Agreed, I also acknowledged that in the past, that the market might simply ignore the attack since it knows if the price doesn't drop there may be no way to sufficiently monetize the attack to offset the hashrate cost.

However there are other more certain ways to profit on an attack of PoW, and that is to do the attack on behalf of the world government and charge the cost to the collective (i.e. to the people of the world). This is essentially my greatest fear for the future of Satoshi's design if it doesn't otherwise fail due to being a cartel:

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Agreed one of the major reasons PoS(hit) is insecure— there is no ongoing expenditure.


Agreed.

Security of a coin will be very tied to its transaction rate × average transaction size, i.e. velocity adoption and wealth of the velocity. The problem I have with the fixed size tail reward as compared to the design I am contemplating is that tail reward only captures those metrics indirectly through exchange price appreciation. I am not sure if the two models are equally powerful. I will need to think more deeply about it. My design also has an orthogonal tail reward.

Edit: some aspects of Monero's tail reward and block size adjustment algorithm are analogous to aspects of my design. There are some other things I didn't mention. I will need to really take the time to distil this into a carefully written white paper. So I would caution readers not to form any concrete conclusions (either for or against any design mentioned here) from these vague discussions.

So, ad hominem is the only counterargument you have? Or you are saying that it's acceptable to post nonsensical phrases (that you refuse to support with money) without getting your reputation ruined? The latter is not a rhetorical question...

Please, spare me the garbage.  If anyone has a bad reputation it's all you IPO scammers.  Lol, you think I have a bad reputation beause I didn't want to send 50 btc to some random Russian mafia member so he can escrow an ambiguous terms bet you wanted that no 3rd party could possibly even fairly decide the outcome of.  Then need to trust that the escrow is not only a cryptocurrency expert, but also non-biased at the same time.

"Criticism"? After you ruined your reputation by producing tons of bullshit (which you admitted by refusing to put your money where your mouth was) it's not longer a criticism, you behave like a kid who knows that thing he did were wrong but he can't stop doing them because others will see that he regrets of doing them in the past. "Criticism" haha, keep playing the role of joker blabbing words you don't understand.

Your Term costlessly is exaggerated , IMO.


1.  If Shorting is so Easy as you guys like to pretend, why are'nt all of you rich from Shorting Coins & Stocks?
You Have to Fund Your Margin Account which holds Collateral used to Secure Loans used in Margin Trading.


If you have not received insider info (which is illegal by the way),
then you are a sucker and will learn the below term very quickly.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=17141.0

2. Even your claims of creating Online Wallets will have a cost involved , VPS & Internet & Marketing costs .
Plus the fact is that your amount of coins will fluctuate , and in no way guarantee your staking power stays high, and that is only if you actually get alot of coins, which will be doubtful as most PoS users distrust online wallets.

3. Buy or Create an Exchange , do I really need to point out the costs there.  

 

It doesn't matter if mining profit trends towards zero, it happens in the real metals market all the time yet miners don't cease to exist.  The function of mining in that case is solely futures market.  The function of mining in Bitcoin is identical, solely a futures market with no guarantees about profit.

Yes but if the attack doesn't succeed, the energy burn cost is still there (i.e. risk of failure)

If, by contrast, you try to attack a coin almost costlessly via PoS exploits and if your attack doesn't succeed then your your coins nor your short loses value. Then you can just try again, until you succeed...

I agree that "coins will go down in value" does not enhance the security of PoW; that would attempting to impute a some sort of stake-based incentive to mining, as some do, and that is flat out wrong, or at best, very weak security.

So is the unknown of China's pools controlling 67% of Bitcoin's hashrate, and the potential of the Bitcoin money supply not only inflating like crazy the past years, but inflating more than the originally promised 21 million coin limit.

Also the tail reward is usually designed to be much smaller than initial distribution, so if you are worried about inflation, you should be really worried now. If the tail reward is less than the population and economic growth rates, then it is still deflationary.

Additionally if Bitcoin has no tail reward and due to the Tragedy of the Commons (if it remains decentralized) then transaction fees decline to costs, then it becomes a permissioned block chain as you alleged with no circulating coins passing back through mining.

I'll make these points much more well explained and convincing in a future white paper.

If attacking a coin causes its price to decline, shorting can return a profit. If that profit exceeds the cost due to PoW, then that cost was erased. Cover the short, stop the attack. Repeat if the price rises again.


Agreed at the appropriate time. I deem it necessary to be vague since I am months (or moar!) away from implementing my design.

I edited one of my above posts to articulate the problem with inflation...aka "tail reward"


The amount of inflation you can slop onto a system before it compromises my above statement is far too arbitrary and unknown, to the point where it should just be a taboo subject in the first place changing it to anything but zero.  Anyone arguing for inflation should be looked upon with great suspicion (even though I've made the mistake of considering it possibly useful in the past)

It is still ambiguous what is "sufficient".


Shorting can't erase the cost due to PoW (burning energy). It can only erase a cost from loss of value of a holdings (PoS and other methods that claim to turn holding coins into "virtual miners").

BTW, I would suggest that Tragedy of the Commons is an ineffective analogy for explaining whatever it is you are trying to explain because obviously-intelligent people such as ArticMine don't understand it. It may be that you are entirely correct, but if you want to communicate effectively you need a differently-worded explanation.

There is no inflation with a tail reward.

Any smallish level of inflation will result in a constant spendable money supply (click the quoted link for the math):

I'm honestly not ready to throw in the towel on inflation due to being a completely arbitrary number that opens an enormous slippery slope for alteration by succesors.  Inflation also just being a form of social engineering that people will always attempt to bypass by utilizing other systems.  It has further benefit due to the fact that Bitcoin mining profit trends towards zero, but with a deflationary system with no inflation involved, there is still incentive to mine it anyway due mining acting as futures market with a time opportunity cost that allows for forward profits.  Also due to the fact stated below:

There is a permanent tail reward turnover in my design. And it is still unprofitable.

Which I do not see as a solution due to my criticism of IOTA where abstracting block reward from the external entropy process defeats the purpose of the external entropy process from existing in the first place, giving you something that's functionally equivalent to a closed loop proof of stake system.  Or to put it more simply for people who didn't read the IOTA thread, without permanent coin turnover via either transaction fee as block reward or permanent inflation, you technically have a permissioned ledger and not a decentralized system.  Transaction fee as block reward with zero inflation being the far lesser of evils to the point where it can only be considered a work of art.  I believe unprofitable mining is therefore pointless mining.

My, to borrow a slightly overused Anonymint term, "holistic" grasp of all cryptocurrency elements was not where it is now when I originally made this thread, and Satoshi indeed did not implement any Sybil prevention due to pools acting as an unforeseen abstraction layer, but Bitcoin is otherwise a work of art that no alternative systems have been able to improve upon yet.  Even the supposed negatives the media likes to push such as being "a waste of power" aren't true, when in the future, it's entirely plausible you'll be mining Bitcoinis as a byproduct of doing things like turning on central heating in your house.

I will argue my statement was correct as stated, because there are other parties with significant resources and incentives who may not be mining normally but once the hashrate declines to the tail reward cost, they can then decide it is easier to attack the coin.

The better retort would be to argue that the as the adoption increases, the price will rise so the fixed size (in coins) tail reward has an adaptive valuation.

But I will retort that the value of shorting also scales up accordingly.

Rather what I do in my improved design, is to set the cost of mining to the reasonable fraction of the transaction value.

That is why I say the only way to solve the block chain Tragedy of the Commons is to require what is effectively a minimum transaction fee in the protocol. But then there is the problem of miners competing with each other to rebate the fee to the payer/payee so how to enforce a minimum transaction fee?

There is only one way to do that, which is to burn the fees. But if you burn them then the money supply declines to 0. So the only way is to burn hashrate. And that is why only my design which makes mining unprofitable will solve the problem.