Topic: The state of crypto - The only serious thread on the subforum - page 10. (Read 19463 times)

I tried to stuff everything about general PoW under the Bitcoin section in main post, then did pros and cons of standard PoS vs DPoS below it.  Will add Vitalik's PoS implementation to compare if he ever finalizes one since it's all theoretical vaporware at this point...

r0ach - have you covered the differing security models of POS and POW?

A good discussion has been taking place recently: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pos-vs-pow-1171311

State of Crypto v0.03 changelog
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*edit - Removed the additions since it added too much fluff to main post.

The thread's opening post is reasonable but I didn't have time to check all the detailed points for absolute correctness. You will need to add my Delegated Transaction Consensus algorithm once it is published.


The first few seconds of this interview with bytemaster (Daniel Larimer) explains they hide both the values and whom you are sending to (i.e. the payee):

https://beyondbitcoin.org/bitshares-dev-hangout-bytemaster-stealth-confidential-transactions/

In other words in the terminology of the Cryptonote white paper, they have unlinkability but not untraceability.

He admits this at 13:45 mins point and (in his non-analytical summary) he highly understates the block chain analysis that can be done with traceability because they have not hidden the payer. For another thing he completely discounts the possibility that the adversary is gaining access to some of the hidden values because the payer and payee both know the transferred value, which then rapidly breaks down his other assumptions. The merging of balancing he is suggesting at 21:00 will break untraceability.

They accomplished the easy part. It is combining that with untraceability that seemed nearly impossible to achieve without Zerocash's flaws. But finally after many days of brain stumping I did figure out how to do it.

Well I have them beat. In July I wrote a white paper where I can hide the values, the payee, and the payer. Thus I also have untraceability. And I don't have any of the setup issues that plague Zerocash! I invented the holy grail of on chain anonymity.

My white paper is entitled Zero Knowledge Transactions.

P.S. About the 9 min point, bytemaster is explaining that payees can't anonymously scan for their Stealth (unlinkable) transactions, which means they even break the unlinkability. Very sloppy. Yes he is correct that it breaks scalability which is one of Monero's issues. I have solved this issue also!

This is at best a short term trend since ETH (though this doesn't mean this trend won't continue). The altcoin market cap share declined a lot from 2013 to early 2015, from at least 10% if not more, to around 5% pre-ETH. I don't know the number now (and one must be careful in assessing the market cap of tokens such as Ripple which have limited float relative to total supply and are subject to large changes as float number is adjusted).

I agree with your other points somewhat, although I don't entirely agree that number of transactions is so important independent of the value of those transactions.

State of Crypto v0.02 changelog
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Added to Bitcoin section:

I)  Many claim Bitcoin has a "monopoly" over crypto.  I would argue this monopoly was broken in December 2013, when Dogecoin broke 200,000 transactions per day, three times Bitcoin's 65,000 on-chain daily transaction volume (although Bitcoin is now leading again).  You could argue on-chain vs off-chain obscures the data, making it not show the full picture.  I would argue the on-chain metric is an important number to maintain, this is why scalability is important, otherwise the system can quickly devolve into a fraudulent, fractional reserve system if everything is done off-chain.

J)  The altcoin market cap appears to be increasing relative to Bitcoin market cap.  Just as we saw a transaction volume divergence in the two sectors before, I believe the price divergence will continue until an alt or two rival or beat Bitcoin market cap.  Ironically, Bitcoin would need enormous changes to reach huge market caps, but the higher cap it goes to, the more resistant to change it becomes.  This is why out of the box functionality and scaling is important.

K)  Financial instability is likely to accelerate in the next 1-3 years.  This could cause a huge crypto bubble overnight that helps both Bitcoin and alts.  Since Bitcoin has little hope of scaling well in the foreseeable future to meet those demands, most likely everything would be done off-chain.  Alts capable of high volume on-chain transactions and possibly coins with anonymity features would be the big winners here.  As mentioned further down, anonymity without scaling may be useless though.

Thanks for the response and for confirming my conjecture.

Cheers

Graham

This is 100% the wrong approach to it. It doesn't matter who "they" are, nor whether "they" promise to protect your privacy. Privacy statements are a sham. Ever hear of Ashley Madison?

MyMonero usage is pseudononymous. There is no registration. They don't know who you are, and if you access the site using private methods, they don't even know your IP address. You can create as many accounts as you want, and furthermore you can take your key and use it elsewhere (using p2p software or another service that operated the same way if there were one) without their permission.

Finally, they can't even see where you send coins, because stealth addresses are done in the client (browser). By the time a transaction is sent back to the MyMonero server for relay to the coin network, it is already opaque. Web wallet is a bit of a misnomer. In many ways MyMonero operates more as a standalone wallet in-browser.

if you're thinking in terms of p2p ledgers, yes, but nothing crypto wise you've seen todate has been decentralised, that's just a buzz word here. a truly properly setup dencentralised p2p currency would be indifferent to 'untrusted peers and pseudonymous entities'.

Full decentralisation of control imposes a harsh and demanding regime on the participants. To be fair to ourselves, this group configuration of untrusted peers and pseudonymous entities is a brand new ball game and punts us far beyond the scope of even the more radical modernistic organisational models in trying to build a set of solid working practices adequate for such a challenge.

My research indicates that even these modern organisational models remain irretrievably mired in the existing centrally-controlled hierarchy (the main thread of thinking even uses the term “healthy hierarchy”).

As an example, Zappos’ switch to the watered-down Holacracy wasn’t seen as a good move by Forbes columnist Steve Denning in his piece Making Sense Of Zappos And Holacracy.

By contrast to peer-to-peer, Holacracy’s near-obsessive attention to prescriptive procedural detail just looks Byzantine --- and we’ve beaten them before, in one of the early rounds, IIRC.


Cheers

Graham

however the problem is many of us who've been around awhile have watched bitcoin grow, yet head down the regulated, centralised, corporate path......defeating much of the whole point of a p2p currency.

i know people will reply thats likely inevitable with any successful currency, however i think if you setup a truly decentralised p2p currency its possible to avoid.

The real problem IMHO is people keep jumping into every new coin as if they're somehow special. There's a vast underestimation of how much effort is poured into Bitcoin Core, and seemingly the belief that it was easy for Bitcoin to get this far and/or its devs are lazy and not pushing the coin forward. The result is you get badly considered one-trick-pony coins that launch and hit the difficulty curve like it's a mountain, but that's going to happen anyway, the problem is people keep buying them too.

Meanwhile, even Bitcoin has huge potential room for improvement, that gets ignored. Lets deploy payment protocol on more systems, formalise payment protocol over NFC, improve bitcoinj or any of the other libraries to let developers get involved, integrate hardware wallets with open source shopping sites, etc. etc. etc.

You just described Linux distributions.

you must be aware of the prices of coins its good to have just 2 to 3 types of coin and none of them its much alt coin like LTC or doge and even soo those ones are becouse of stairs factors into dollar of its price you need to be aware that BTC its the price that regulates its importancy you say BTC walking dead i say its never the second coin to have will be like this 7 years the first top of top of all crypto not the alt cryptos not even 42 coin

Although this may be true, it's something that we can't do anything about. It's natural.

I believe the members of these communities will consolidate into one, or a few coins, when worthy ones appear.

When a platform comes that answers that elusive question of "why crypto" to the general public, we will be off and running. Until then, we will only be a bunch of small communities and individuals trading amongst ourselves for the most part.

I also agree that the goal so far seems to be trying to become the new bankers.

Until there is a shift in motivation, and strategy, we will continue in this holding pattern.

on the topic of the state of cryptos, i'm in the process of going around the many exchanges consolidating where i've odds and ends of coins, converting them into the few coins i like.

what i notice, damn there's such a stack of pointless coins, so much dilution, you see it on coinmarketcap etc but you don't really notice until you go from exchange to exchange trading, how utterly pointless and counterproductive most of it is.

i know many go free market, competition is good, let the market decide etc etc etc. but no, such dilution is not helpful. you have ton of good honest hard working positive people, but spread thin through so many communities.

i'm not saying there can't be multiple coins, but the scene would be so much better off, and healthier liquidity, if the pack was thinned alot.

I keep reading your positive assertions and I keep wondering whether I'm missing a trick, yet every time I follow up it seems I get a different experience to you.

Is it possible that you are underestimating others’ expectations?

Case in point - the Mymonero web site fails to canonically identify the entity making the privacy statements, rendering them worthless. That's an obvious, no-brainer FAIL --- and worse, whoever’s responsible for the site is apparently either careless or ignorant of that fact which, for me, has to call their competence into question.

Given the cryptocurrency context and all that this implies, it’s a triple word score fail in my book and changes my perception of the service from an untrusted one to an untrustworthy one.

Cheers

Graham

The non techy investor would probably prefer the more polished project because theyd know it takes proper software development from management down and years to achieve. Cli is just the first step (the data layer) which will serve the next layer to complete the polish. Once you get past that youd look for support and how easy you can find it or lack thereof. Put those 2 things together and you achieve network effect if there is a market for that tech.

Investors meaning those who would invest in cryptos at all.

Bitcoin has a GUI, and had one since 2009. So you just disproved the connection between GUIs and any relevance to the outside world.

Ron Paul, if he could figure out cryptos, could certainly use MyMonero. His technical experts would probably do key management, secret sharing for cold storage, etc. using command line tools the way early Bitcoin investors did, and probably some still do.

The GUI argument is a red herring. The other arguments about lack of mass market appeal are not, but they apply equally to cryptos that do have GUIs.

The richest people around are the 50-90 year old guys that can barely work a VCR.  I would say, no, the serious investor is not served by the CLI.  Even if they, or one of their henchman can, they'll be put off thinking it's a duct taped together operation.  I mean, look at people like Ron Paul, he's pretty damn good at economics, but by his own admission can't figure out how Bitcoin works and would probably have trouble using a Monero CLI.  At that point you have an Austrian proof, Austrian currency.