Topic: Technical Details of Bitshares ID System - page 2. (Read 5281 times)

Interesting.

I may see a design issue for BitID. The PoW difficulty has to be high enough to protect against 51% attack, yet the $ that the miners earn is based on how much users are willing to pay for names.

bytemaster appears to be trying to keep the difficult low enough that the users don't have to pay in $ and can pay in otherwise idle PC power. This is price fixing and will backfire by leaving the network less secure.

Merged mining with the coin has the advantage of increasing the security.

I remember he mentioned a/some strategy/ies in the whitepaper w.r.t 51% attack, but I will need to read again.

Thoughts?

Most humans (probably including you and me) if they can't eat without killing will kill.

A lion kills in order to live.

I once lived for a short while very impoverished where I didn't have $1, and I was eating 1 cup of rice and bananas per day. It does weird things to your psychology. When resources are plentiful, we can pretend that morality trumps economy efficiency, then when we waste enough resources with that delusion, we periodically cycle back to learning about resource scarcity.

We live in a world of competing priorities and we are not even in control of every dependency that rains down on our life (e.g. you get cancer). Fitness is the way we optimize resilency. Morality isn't.

what about the idea of "rational fitness"?

(have you read the book Shantaram?)

Interesting and rational point I guess but what exactly has that to do with the OP?

As you know already, I don't agree with moral technical design. It all boils down to economics and trying to fit your morals distorts rationality.

while making everyone who owns the crypto-currency a 'domain squatter' on all names and they get a share of the profits.    Combining the fact that high-value names cannot be purchased at below market prices (due to price fixing) and the fact that the profits from squatting are already distributed to everyone.  

I like it. If you are allowing 10,000 mined blocks per annum, then the cost is 1/10,000 of the PoW difficulty, since every name has to renewed annually. Hardware is fungible with money in this case, because a user could offer a bounty (tx fee) to a miner.

Thus it seems you need a way for the user to send his registration request with the name blinded. Or do initial registration requests not get put in the block header? Then what data are Merkel trees storing and why?


The regular system is already an auction as I explained above. Do you mean an individual auction for each name, rather than an auction for the next registration block for any name as is the case above?

Nothing stops someone from using more than one name, in fact that is encouraged.
These are not 'free' because the price you pay is CPU power.  
People will eventually bid up names with CPU power.

From an economics perspective, people perceive it as 'free' even though it is not free because they do not have to think about 'purchasing something'.

Note:  The DNS system for domain names is a dividend paying crypto-currency where names are auctioned.  

I must have missed something - but it seems to me that unlike Namecoin your system (which is apparently meant to be less flexible and just usable for your particular application, gaining a constant factor in scalability) can only store a public key with a name.  This is of course sufficient to establish identities, because once you have the public key you can use it to sign all kind of data transacted "off chain" should that be necessary.  However, what's then the difference between "name operations" that can only be done in the block header and "name transactions"?  It seems to me that the only actual operation someone might want to perform is setting a name's public key (or changing/revoking it), which must be done in the block header.  Thus transactions would be completely unnecessary - which would however also mean that light clients are not possible at all (because a "full node" would also be just validating the block headers) and that new blocks would have to be found at a hilariously fast rate (IIRC you estimated 3 per second for your target scale), which would never work with today's network latencies (and in fact probably never will just because of the finite speed of light).

So, what do I miss here?  For what purpose are the name transactions used, and how can your millions of users associate public keys with their names such that light clients only need the block headers (which presumably can't be 100e6/365/24/3600 = 3 per second)?

How do you stop people from using more than one name, in order to meet your 1 billion limit?

Seems the only way is to auction slots, which conflicts with your plan for them to be free.

It is impossible to give away for free a finite resource.

Registrations fees should go to pay miners to secure the blockchain. It could be merge mined with the coin.

Excuse my ignorance (and that I'm getting sleepy so maybe not thinking clearly). Why do you light clients need to be able to verify from a block header, and not from the branch of hashes of a Merkel tree that is presented to them?

I thought the point of putting data in the Merkel tree is that then one only needs to know the block header in order to verify someone's claim that a transaction occurred, as long as that someone presents the branch of hashes of a Merkel tree.

I thought the only reason heavyweight clients need all the data is because they don't ask tx senders to provide the branch of hashes of a Merkel tree.

will enhance the security of users against subtle bate and switch attacks as well as typos