Topic: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement - page 113. (Read 381579 times)

skycoin can u work together with the idea and drive skycoin? it sounds very tempting

No it won't be banned, because it is mostly traceable and the authorities love it because naive are putting all their incriminating transactions there. They G20 tax hunt will cometh and the block chain ledger will be cursed by the faithful.

China hates it because they have no need to hunt for taxes, and thus it only represents a western invasion of the taipan's control over the economy (but the Communist Party will lose in the end). When the Chinese own it, they will allow it. Or the grassroots will use it without being caught.

And that is why I have an idea that can both help Bitcoin and drive an altcoin.

Careful you can lose weeks reading Armstrong.

That is why I (shelby) did this:

https://github.com/bitwiseshiftleft/sjcl/issues/178
https://github.com/indutny/elliptic/issues/5

Security Update:

If you are running BSD and generated any Bitcoin privatekeys in the last 4 months, they are going to get stolen. SSH private keys too. Good luck. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-February/054580.html

Also if you random number generator is not good, you are leaking private key data with every ECDSA signature. Bug affected Debian.
 https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/06/15/suddendeathentropy.html

Why Bitcoin will be Banned in America:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/the-taxman-cometh/

Reputation and trust should be orthogonal to the ledger and consensus. Design principles of Least Power and Separation-of-Concerns.


There is only one way to win.

Make it popular, extremely popular among the masses (remember my model of what is peaking and declining is top-down control, and bottom-up is rising and to take over by 2033), and very difficult to block technically and politically. Such "very difficult to block technically and politically" will give it enough year or so to gain inertia.

When the Chinese businessmen (including the Communist Party members) are earning $billions in it, they give the middle finger to the USA. The Chinese say one thing politically and do another thing in business. The Communist Party is just a declining pony show now (it is for political show but 75% of what they actually do is free market and all about profit).

My preference is to stop thinking about perfecting every technological issue that the NSA can attack. I assert we will never get there if that is the strategy.

The world is not flat nor monolithic. Think outside the box. Paradigm shifts are my specialty.


Money is very important because it is what drives the world. If you want to succeed, you must enable other people to be profitable.

Everyone has an opportunity cost. Money is how we express it. It isn't a perfect expression because it is a collectivization and it attempts to make knowledge fungible (which it isn't), but it is very important because we have no other FUNGIBLE way to represent stored effort. And to penalize unproductivity (not just laziness but also people who waste their time on incorrect thinking and designs).

I actually need to make money right now. I am nearly bankrupt (which I can blame on a chronic health problem). OTOH, I agree that above a certain level, money becomes meaningless except to understand how it motivates others since we live in political world. Some try to invent ways to stay motivated to aggregate insane amounts of money (convincing themselves it is their duty to corral the unwashed masses), and they become sociopaths against the best interests of mankind.


Power is a fact of life. Do you want to live in delusion or reality?

Your Marxist leanings (perhaps similar to Richard Stallman?) worry me. At least Armstrong was motivated to earn money in order to invest it in solving a needed problem.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/02/18/what-makes-me-tick-good-question/

I am not trying to hype Skycoin or sell it or market it.

I am trying to describe what it is. Thinking in terms of absolutes like "Bitcoin bad", "Skycoin good" is surface reading. I am trying to contrast and make clear the differences. How can you even compare or describe Bitcoin to a person, when nothing like it has ever existed before?

IPO

The Skycoin IPO has been ready since last January. It has been almost 14 months now. I should just start the IPO. I do not understand why I do not feel motivated.

I think you are 100% correct. I should get excited and get it done.

I am going to read The Fountainhead for a bit and try to get juiced up about the moral virtue of making tons of money.

Money is important, but for me personally, I feel more motivated by the concrete objectives the software accomplishes in the world than what the particular price or market cap is. The impact and consequence is substance, where as Enron or Ripple can have a large market cap but it is just accounting fraud and mirrors.

All wealth, income, assets are grounded in power relationships and control of resources, assets and capacities. Bitcoin believes that the price itself is success, but in reality it is just accounting fluff. Relations of credit evaporate as soon as someone with a bigger stick shows up. Wealth and property rights are meaningless they cannot be defended.

You only own Bitcoin to the extent that you can stop someone from stealing your private keys and that is beyond ability of 99% of people and even Bitcoin exchanges with 20 million dollars in funding, full time security staff and dedicated hardware.

People who want a pump and dump, dont care about security. They dont care if the property is secure. It doesnt matter to them, they cant market it. They think deterministic builds and a new C compiler is reinventing the wheel.

Survivalability was another design criteria for Skycoin. In Skycoin the consensus wraps the blockchain. If the network is attacked, destroyed, infiltrated, taken over. You just swap out the consensus module and its running again. It cannot be killed. The ledger cannot be shutdown. It does not relay upon DNS, or even IPv4/IPv6. It is more survivable than the Piratebay.

If Bitcoin is attacked at the level of PoW, the network is dead. It cannot recover. Its just dead.

Unexecuted, dead-ended code paths can be verified without running the wasted computation using hashes. But I fail to see how that solves the problem of global consensus. I assert it does not.


As I wrote since the days of BitShares, delegation is centralizing (and fiat). In order to have global consensus you need to all agree on that timestamp authority. The powers-that-be can get their hands on monopolizing the timestamp authorities and then they can require identification before releasing the timestamp.

Your afaics design appears to espouse minority chains that break away politically. In short, you are driving towards total chaos and unreliability.

I have thought out reasons why I assert PoS is PieceOfShit.

I thought for a long time about these issues and I am very skeptical you have provably solved them. I didn't read your whitepaper because I am tired of wasting my time crawling down more rabbit holes.

If you have succinct explanation, I am interested to read.


There are no orphans in my PoW design. I assume you have not reviewed the math I linked to in my first post in your thread.


In my PoW design only minority chains can be merged into majority chains, not vice versa.


That depends on a timestamp authority correct?


Indeed. This is essentially what my PoW design does. But ultimately the majority has to converge to consensus, otherwise you have chaos. I have a simplified design that works with PoW and is guaranteed to choose a consensus. Mathematically I don't think you can guarantee GLOBAL convergence with aggregation of incremental local additions to a graph as you seem to be referring to.


I am 99+% skeptical you have solved this problem.

>Vitalik has produced other dumb designs too

Yes. He needs another ten years of experience. You learn over time to simplify things and not do as much as you are able to. Perspective in software architecture and design takes decades until you start producing iPhone level elegance in design.

The decision to implement the coin in twenty different programming languages is just waste of resources.

Bitcoin and Skycoin has its own organizational problems, so expecting ETH to be perfect is unreasonable. I think they are doing good  good job.

Organizational issues are however, easier to fix than design issues. Organization can be fixed by bringing people on, but design relies on perspective, inspiration and experience. Organization is more fungible than design knowledge, which cannot even be bought but must be learned through self-investment and is painstaking.

>I had proposed months ago that a more decentralized solution for a programmable block chain...

Each person has their own personal blockchain. They sign the blocks with their private key. Other peers record the blocks peer-to-peer so everyone knows if there are two blocks at depth-N and if someone tries to backdate a block. You dont need mining or even consensus.

Code:
- setting up personal blockchain, writing data to it
-- https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/blob/master/src/aether/example/chain/main.go
-- https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/blob/master/src/aether/hashchain/chain.go

That is a full personally blockchain implementation in 160 lines of code. You can put ETH script or anything you want that can be serialized as byte, into your blocks. We will have peer-to-peer, blockchain replication in six lines of code, after the new merkle-dag libraries are done.

>turing complete

Choose a virtual machine. Take a program, the program hashes to H1. Take data, which hashes to H2.

H1(H2), H1 (function applied to data, producing output data H3). Programs are hashes. Data is hashes. The output of a function is data described by a hash.

You do not need a total ordering of transactions. You only need a partial ordering. This means that peers can actually discard the transactions/computations thay are irrelevant to them. They would only grab them when they needed them.

You do not need consensus on the whole transaction set. Bitcoin's consensus mechanism is very coarse, a total ordering. Distributed computation does not require a scarce, finite asset like Bitcoin.

Scarce finite asset, is just asset with rule "cant use same input twice". So you have to know if an input has been used previous in computation in network (requiring whole transaction history or set of the global state of the distributed computer). The distributed computer only becomes tractable and scales over millions of CPU nodes and makes sense mathematically if it is "local" and not "global". That means each node has a subset of the directed acyclic graph of computations.

There is a bipartite directed acylic graph.
- "Outputs" created and consumed by computations are square nodes.
- Computations or transactions are circle nodes.
- If a computation consumes an output, there is an arrow from the square node to the circle node.
- If an output is created by a transaction/computation there is an arrow from the transaction to the outputs it creates.

In Bitcoin there is a ledger and Bitcoin is based upon a deed system of real estate. Skycoin is based upon a triple entry accounting Torrens title or deed registration system.

In Bitcoin, you have to go back to go prove the whole chain of transactions going back to genesis, proving ownership and that the block

Every single problem with Bitcoin ownership, double spending consensus, was already solved hundreds of years ago in the development of real estate property law
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel_by_deed
- what prevents double spending of real estate? What prevents me from selling the same piece of land to two different people

The bridge between local and global is time stamping. You do not actually need a block chain at all. You only need to determine consensus on
- whether an output has been spent in the past
- if two or more computations have spent an output, then determine which one came first (the valid one)

You dont need mining at all. For instance, you and the receiver can designate a mutually agreed about merkle-hash/hash-chain timestamping authority and require a time stamp for the transaction. You include the time stamp from the authority with the transaction. Anyone can go back to beginning of asset and independently verify property claim chain. If there are two claims for transfer the one with the ealiest time stamp is valid.

Deed registration is time stamping. It is creating a total ordering on transaction existence (transfer of assets).

If you are deal with transaction across different causal regions at a space-like separation, then you end up with vector clocks. There is a partial ordering, not a total ordering over events/transactions/deed registrations/timestamps.

Bitcoin is actually incompatible with the physics of our universe. It only works because earth is small compared to the speed of light. 0.2 light seconds distance across the surface of the sphere. This time is small enough compared to the consensus time to create the illusion of a total ordering of events in time. If you had Bitcoin miners on Mars and Jupiter or another star system, then proof-of-work cannot enforce digital property rights. If the separation between the miners if more than 5 light minutes, then the orphan rate hits the maximum. Consensus is not achieved. If Earth has more hashing power than Jupiter, then 100% of every blocked mined on Jupiter gets orphaned because of light propagation speed/latency.

Skycoin consensus is currently using a total ordering (for now) and consensus time actually increase with the latency of signal propagation across the causal region containing the consensus nodes.

To be compatible with space-like separation between the consensus nodes, you need to define a partial ordering over transaction (vector clocks) instead of a total ordering like Bitcoin. If Elon colonizes mars, the Martian Bitcoin miners are going to drive up the Bitcoin orphan rate or the blocktimes will need to be increased even higher. 0

Bitcoin is not the only model for decentralized systems of ownership and transfer digital property. It is not the final system. It is not the best system. It is a prototype first gen system.

Once you start doing consensus on the partial ordering on the transactions you begin to see that the bipartite directed acylic graph of transactions (consume outputs, create outputs) and outputs is the fundamental structure, not the blockchain. You begin to see that the blockchain is just a very special case of a more powerful and general mathematical structure.

People are still obsessed with the blockchain. It took them five years to even understand the blockchain and see its other applications, but what comes after the blockchain is something so powerful and general, that it will take decades for the full impact on civilization to be felt. The mathematical structure that generalizes the blockchain consensus to consensus on partial orderings, to me personally appears to be on the magnitude of the laser, invention of fire or the internet itself. This is the god tier for distributed computation.

The direction of time is enforced, because of  time stamping/registration and because you cannot go back and change transactions without a private key used in the inputs for the transactions. This is weak condition. There is a stronger "compression" function type system, that takes N inputs, destroys them and creates new outputs. It allows pruning of trees of transactions leading to inputs consumed in the compression function. This is a "checkpoint system".

These "Compression functions" destroy history or allow you forget state. They compress in the sense of destroying bits from the state or history set , to prevent it from growing infinitely. In Bitcoin these types of compression functions would allow duplicate coinbase outputs, unless constructed correctly. A system for data and distributed computation, looks different than the bitcoin system, which is designed to enforce property claims on finite resource tokens.

Feynman has something about this, in ASICs, about increase in entropy and heat creation when you clear bits or set them to zero in an ASIC circuit vs reversible computations. I dont know if there is a thermodynamic analogy. There are certain operations that "wipe bits" and allow you forgot transaction history. There are operations that increase the size of dataset and create data that must be remembered and operations that allow you wipe out old history and just forget it.

This means tracing outputs back to the last "compression function" event they were passed through, instead of needing to go back and trace the dead of the output, back to genesis.

The "compression functions" correspond to a bitcoin like, total ordering of consensus. However, the system still allows the partial ordering systems (these are roughly side chains). The bitcoin community has a path dependency and is redeveloping the same technology, but from a sidechains/colorcoins angle, instead of looking at the underlying mathematics.

There is no "intersection" operator between blockchain forks. There is an intersection operator on the bipartite transaction/output graph and partial ordering on the transaction set. This means that two nodes can disagree and not have global consensus but they can still achieve consensus on non-contentious sub-graphs of the bipartite transaction/output graph.

Global consensus is much more difficult than local consensus. Some forms of local consensus lead to global consensus naturally.

The other way to verify a programmable block chain is delegation and reputation, i.e. some peers are paid and trusted to perform the computation. I believe this might be the direction Ethereum has chosen. As I wrote publicly on this forum a long time ago in discussions with Daniel Larimer, reputation is a centralizing paradigm.

If you go that route or PoS, then you are headed towards fiat and political economics.

Frankly I am not sure if (and quite skeptical whether) it is possible to achieve with a crypto-currency true decentralization devoid of the Iron Law of Political Economics.

I've come up with an idea which is I believe is truly decentralized, and I believe it is viable and readily implemented way to market a cryptocurrency to the actual demand in the market (not imagined demand) and also I believe it helps Bitcoin too. And it is very much needed overall for our anonymity in general. So it is a good first step of something that has wide utility.

If we are serious, we need to stop all this nonsense of criticizing Bitcoin as a way to gain zealot speculation marketshare (tempting because they are so eager to part with their money). Embrace Bitcoin, add to it, while also driving massive demand for the altcoin. I have that idea. I have even written about it publicly on this forum, but (luckily?) afaik nobody is paying attention.

P.S. I agree that raising money via an IPO is exciting. And there are many exciting features to work on. But if someone builds my idea, they will race right by you in terms of adoption. NXT did many exciting things but it was also as argued by some raided by scammers and subject to political infighting (hey I was in close contact with one or two of the NXT's key players, so I was hearing about the stuff going on behind the scenes). And where is it today in terms of actual adoption? Insignificant.

Can we check how much the IPO has currently raised using the bot on TOX? I can't find anything in the OP stating how many coins have been sold or remain to be sold. Will there be a list published showing the investor's bitcoins in the IPO address(es) and a skycoin address holding the coins remaining to be sold?

This is getting heated up. Please find a common ground to produce magic

I need to take a nap and then I will reply to your longish post. You've made some points there I agree with.

A programmable blockchain is of course very exciting for any programmer. But as I wrote in a prior post of your thread, Ethereum has a fundamental error in their design—every node in the consensus network recomputes the script to verify it. That is the antithesis of decentralization. They will need centralized censorship and a script whitelist, or a cap on script computation bandwidth. No peers can opt out of that computation, so the network computation bandwidth is limited to the weakest CPU peer. SNARKs technology is a potential solution, but it is not yet a realizable solution and may never be.

IMO, that is just dumb.

Vitalik has produced other dumb designs too (I guess we all have at one time or another). Originally Charles asked me before he started to work Vitalik about Vitalik's original whitepaper (before Ethereum) PoW algorithm and I blew holes in it, which have hence been publicly admitted by Vitalik. Vitalik is math smart (smarter than myself), but appears to be common sense dumb. Typical geek trade-off.

I had proposed months ago that a more decentralized solution for a programmable block chain is to let each script be an orthogonal merge mined block chain. So then consensus network peers can opt in and out. This also allows more competition on the design of the scripting language. The disadvantage is you just can't inject your script and have it run (need to convince peers to run it) unless that chain runs a scripting language that has a cap on script computation bandwidth (i.e. just like Ethereum with the advantage of competing merge mined block chains). In my proposal the computation cap could be specified per block chain, so only peers with sufficient CPU power would mine it. Thus weaker CPU power peers could mine chains with a lower computation cap.

This is not a currency market because the money just sits there, rather it is a store-of-value market. There are several problems with targeting this market which also plague Bitcoin and every altcoin.

Actually that market will not invest for safety and stability because cryptocurrency will not be reliably safe and stable for decade or more. That won't help us in the near-term to produce an altcoin.

Instead you'll end up only with the speculative investors, which is all that cryptocurrencies are except for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has actually become an alternative means to pay for things when the ignominy of credit cards is not acceptable.

In short, the entire market for cryptocurrency is:

1. Speculation

2. Nefarious activity

You either accept this market reality or fail.

Skycoin, I agree that high net worth individuals (including the corrupt politicians) are going to be looking for Private Assets to hide their (ill gotten or honest makes no difference when rule of law is gone) wealth. That is what I wrote in an earlier post in your thread, that we are in Martin Armstrong's 51.6 year Private Wave which will end 2033. By 2033, there will have been a global monetary system reset with Shanghai and Singapore (Asia) replacing New York and London (the West) as the new financial centers of the world.

I don't know how you got from there to "Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase.". In order for those private assets to not rise, then all capital flows would have to cease and we would have to decline into a Dark Age every where, and only food would be money.

---

I am so tired of hearing this nonsense. I have refuted it many times. I live in the 3rd world. The people who need to have a bank account, get one. The rest have no need for a bank account and that is why they don't have one. My neighbors work online for USA companies via odesk.com and they have bank accounts. The poor, uneducated I encounter do not have any use for a bank account. I helped a lady who works 12 hours a day, 6 days per week in a factory to open a bank account with MasterCard debit ATM card, but she has never used for it. She is paid in cash and spends it locally for daily needs.

Imagining market demand that doesn't exist won't help you.

If we cut through all the bullshit and nonsense, we can distill down to an actual viable marketing plan that doesn't revolve around implementing everything including the kitchen sink before release.

I am not wondering. I've seen him already allude to the overconcentration of the wealth among the rich and I detect already he is younger than I am and victim of Western culturalization that blames social decline on capitalism. Marxist/Socialists are entirely incompatible with me. I am here to make a profit, and to make something that people clamor for. Not for ideological bullshit.

There is very strong likelihood that we have generational attitude incompatibility because I am X-gen which means traditional (non-liberal) values, free markets, a very acute distaste for bullshit, and strong affinity to "Just Do It" with minimal overhead. We X-gens were not spoiled and we just had to get shit completed without our parents.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/02/18/what-makes-me-tick-good-question/


I did see it a long time ago and dismissed it for the reasons I already wrote. I just didn't bother to comment publicly until someone asked me to.

Again I've stated that doesn't mean I am correct. I've stated my opinion.

".... and built Germany back up industrially, instead of extracting capital from Germany like a colony, because US needed Germany to maintain the balance of power against Stalin ..."

a reason for that was also that after cheating in the bretton woods agreement they needed to spread the us dollar to establish it as the lead curency

Urbit. Peter Thiel didnt develop it. He just paid someone to drop out of college and do this instead.

I did not write that capital flows will not get cut off. They surely will!

I wrote that it is very unlikely that capital controls are successfully enforced in every nook and cranny of the globe, such that all global wealth is destroyed and we go into a Dark Age where only food is money. As far as I know, that has never happened in recorded history. Dark Ages have occurred (where only food was money and all the gold and silver gets buried in the ground because it is useless), but they were always limited to a portion of the globe. Asia has no economic incentive to do capital controls, they are not bankrupted by huge government socialism and cultural decadence as the West is. Asia will cooperate with the USA and Europe to hunt down the non-Asians, for as long as USA and Europe remain important markets. But Asia will not and has no incentive to apply wealth destruction to its own citizens, other than going after corruption in government (e.g. coup in Thailand, firing 900 party officials in China, and the Napoles scandal in the Philippines). Rather it is launching free trade and migration Asian Union in 2015. Asia is moving the opposite direction, and is becoming more financially liberalized, not less.

Skycoin was arguing that it was impossible for gold to rise because he was asserting that all wealth would get cut off. He was using that as a justification for why we need his Skycoin. I disagreed with him and also I think that is very pitiful marketing strategy. Good for a pump and dump on wide-eyed crypto zealots only. Rather I'd actually like to create something that normal people would flock too without any self-flatulating doom porn pumping.

Hey hey now, I saw the exchanging of multiple charts and graphs between you two!

I would say that means you're surely gonna keep reading, especially if people keep saying your name more than a few times I promise that's not a beetlejuice reference

You know why I really think you're not gonna leave - because regardless of whether or not Skycoin is invested in his current design, the glaring intelligence behind both of you has led yourself to wonder how skycoin came to a different conclusion than you did, even though you're both very much in tune with your motivations. You're both brilliant.

You're gonna stay, because you might be able to adjust your own perspective as soon as Skycoin has time for you. Please don't discount skycoin for that, because I know I haven't done the same with you even though I've wanted to at times, and the result has been largely positive.

Actually, if you don't say whatever it is you're gonna say then someone else is gonna pipe up anyways. Same thing you're doing now happened to me on the SPR thread, and it was tacotime that came by and put the time into explaining exactly what I was thinking when I dismissed the entire thread in the same way you just did.

The difference is, I was talking to the people and had no real opportunity to learn. You're not talking to three or four people who haven't developed the currency here, you got a direct line to Skycoin going by the post above mine. I've been watching this one since about march of last year, quietly .. and honestly was kinda hoping for about all that time you'd eventually take note of it. Sorry if I came off as dismissive before, I guess I was passive-aggressively asking you why you waited to get asked to come here rather than come here by yourself and ask some questions.