Someone PM'ed me links to the OP and the following two posts:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/sky-skycoin-launch-announcement-380441https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10475089I formerly posted under the usernames AnonyMint, TheFascistMind, and UnunoctiumTestacles (and a couple others I don't recall). I have
particularly relevant post in the On the Longest Chain Rule thread.
The skycoin author appears to be possess considerable technical knowledge. And he writes clearly with high information density.
Many of his goals mirror mine. I am also an accomplished programmer.
However, it only took me a few seconds to see several issues that I believe ruin any chance of his success. I speak from experience in coding and marketing million user commercial software projects. I hope he takes this as constructive criticism and not as an attempt to hurt his project. I currently have no investments nor vested interest in any competing crypto-currency.
1. A non-PoW consensus is DOA, because there isn't enough time to thresh out the issues and trust it before the global economy begins to collapse in 2016. For example, the selfish mining attack wasn't discovered (or let's say widely proven and recognized) until years after Satoshi published PoW. Thus, the serious marketplace isn't going to trust a novel non-PoW consensus. Instead I have designed a PoW system which resolves many of the issues that plague Bitcoin, including ASIC economics. Some hints are in my linked post above.
Also I have some mathematical intuition that avoiding the 51% attack will always tradeoff security in another facet.
2. Afaics, he has absolutely no marketing acumen. He wants to go directly to replacing the internet infrastructure without a viable marketing scheme for ramping up.
3. He doesn't have the most essential quality of success in software, which is to ship something in high demand first. Instead he wants to tinker with every feature under the moon.
4. If I was improving Tor,
I'd make it high latency and make is more secure, not less secure for higher bandwidth.
Time is of the essence. I am interested in working with highly talented authors, but unfortunately philosophical differences and differences in understanding how to succeed usually preclude such close working relationships.
There are two aspects of marketing
1. Getting people to use it
2. Public relations, media relations
3. Community relations
For #1. If people are not using it because it is useful and because It meets a need they have, then its useless and no amount of marketing will ensure adaption.
I was one of the first bittorrent users. I was downloading television episodes with bitornado when the client looked like this.
Bitorrent did not succeed because it was the best marketed program. The usability was horrible. It succeeded because it met a need that people had and because it worked. Does Bitcoin or Dogecoin or Ripple or Ethereum meet a need people have? In some sense, Dogecoin is more legitimate than Bitcoin and has been more successful at achieving adaption and building a community and user base.
"Failure" is also relative. The infrastructure for Skycoin is useful to me personally and I would still use it, even as the only user. Skycoin could have 10x the number of users of Bitcoin and still be considered a failure, by most criteria. There is not even a single cryptocoin to date that has more users than Farmville. In that sense, every single coin that exists is a failure.
- What is Bitcoin's user acquisition strategy and what does Bitcoin do to drive new users?
- Why would someone use Bitcoin over using a credit card?
- Why would someone use Bitcoin over fiat, when a stable currency like USD is available?
- Is there a reason to own Bitcoin or has Bitcoin and the alts become a real money forex trading game. Did Satoshi invent a legitimate challenger to fiat currency or did he invent a fantasy football altcoin trading game? The way I see people using Bitcoin, the new users and how they trade back and forth between Dogecoin, Litecoin and Bitcoin and thrive on volatility suggests a gambling, fantasy football like behavior rather the use of Bitcoin/alts as a tool for facilitating real economic exchange or production.
Different measures of success exist
- Is the coin and software useful for the people who use it, does it a satisfy a need they have. Is this something they will use or something they will download and open once and forget about.
- How many users does the coin have, how widely is it used
- What is the price or marketcap for the coin
1. A non-PoW consensus is DOA, because there isn't enough time to thresh out the issues and trust it before the global economy begins to collapse in 2016. For example, the selfish mining attack wasn't discovered (or let's say widely proven and recognized) until years after Satoshi published PoW. Thus, the serious marketplace isn't going to trust a novel non-PoW consensus. Instead I have designed a PoW system which resolves many of the issues that plague Bitcoin, including ASIC economics. Some hints are in my linked post above.
Also I have some mathematical intuition that avoiding the 51% attack will always tradeoff security in another facet.
Yes. In Skycoin the 51% attack does not matter. The network could be 51% attacked twenty times a day and almost no one would care.
Skycoin has different mathematical properties than Bitcoin and is stricter. If you are trading coins back and forth between five people in a closed network, the 51% attack does not affect them. You need a private key of someone in the transaction chain to do any damage in a Skycoin 51% attack. There is no transaction malleability in Skycoin. Almost ever will have exactly the same outputs and same balances and same transaction histories on both the original chain and the fork, except the attacker and people they were trading coins with. If there is a fork in the chain, it just copies the transactions over from the other chains.
The 51% attack is only going to affect people day trading with shady people and gambling sites. It will not affect commerce transactions very much. If an exchange follows best security practices and keeps the user wallets segregated, there worse attack is pretty mild.
Bitcoin is doing 100 million dollars a day transaction volume. Total transaction volume in Bitcoin is about 200,000 Bitcoins. Bitcoin has transaction malleability, this means that if someone 51% attack and rolls back transactions in the last hour, then about 4 million dollars and 10,000 Bitcoin in transactions balances will be screwed up. A rollback attack going back 24 hours could be 100 million in damages and up to 200,000 Bitcoins. An attacker can roll back any transaction in Bitcoin.
In Skycoin, they cannot affect or modify a transaction chain without knowing a private key for an address used in that chain of transactions. So if five banks are just trading back and forth between each other for settlement and they all have good wallet security, the 51% attack would not even be noticed. Their balances are the same. That is assuming, the 51% attack is even mathematically possible, that someone bothers expending the resources to attempt it and that it succeeds.
If someone manages to 51% attack Skycoin (which may be possible, but is mathematically unlikely) merchants will sing and dance with great rejoicement because losses will be so much less than for a Visa charge back. Many merchants sell laptops and make less than 5% margin on each laptop. Someone claims they didnt get the laptop and the merchant loses $1000, does not get the laptop back AND has to pay Visa an $80 fee. The company has to sell 25 laptops to make back the cost of the loss of a single fraud. If someone steals a credit card and buys a laptop with it, Visa does not take the loss, Visa tries to push the loss on the merchant.
The Skycoin consensus algorithm and the ledger are separate. The consensus system is modular and can be swapped out. If there is a better algorithm five years from now, we can just swap out the consensus for the new one. The ledger and coin balances will be completely unchanged.
Skycoin
- fixes existing problems with Bitcoin
- future proofs Bitcoin
- eliminates the death spiral conditions that Bitcoin has engineered in
1. A non-PoW consensus is DOA, because there isn't enough time to thresh out the issues and trust it before the global economy begins to collapse in 2016. For example, the selfish mining attack wasn't discovered (or let's say widely proven and recognized) until years after Satoshi published PoW. Thus, the serious marketplace isn't going to trust a novel non-PoW consensus. Instead I have designed a PoW system which resolves many of the issues that plague Bitcoin, including ASIC economics. Some hints are in my linked post above.
Also I have some mathematical intuition that avoiding the 51% attack will always tradeoff security in another facet.
It is 100% true. There are severe tradeoffs. There are tradeoffs, faster consensus times for Skycoin type relational consensus means that a smaller number of nodes are required to DDoS the network. However, people can react and remove the nodes from their trust lists.
There will be issues and they will need to be worked out.
Look at Skycoin Coinjoin
-
https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/blob/master/src/coin/transactions.goA transaction is just
1> A list of output hashes, being spent
2> A list of signatures authorizing the outputs to be spent (signature of hash of inner part of transaction)
3> A list of outputs to be created
Coins cannot be created or destroyed. The number of coins in has to equal number of coins out. Transaction fees are in "coinhours".
There is no difference between normal and coinjoin transactions.
- Two people choose the outputs they want to spend, the outputs they want to create, send to remote server.
- The server creates a transaction and scrambles orders of outputs in/out. Then sends it to each person
- Each person sends the signatures for their outputs to the server
- The coinjoin server injects the transaction into the network
- The coinjoin server cannot steal the coins
- only the coinjoin server knows how many people are involved (1, 2, 4?)
- only the coinjoin server knows which outptus belong to who
- there is no difference between coinjoin and normal transactions (they look exactly the same)
The signature in the ith slot is for the address owning the ith output. The inner hash of the transaction is hashed with hash of output being spent, then this is signed with the private key owning the output.
So it is very simple compared to other coinjoin systems.
That is marketing.