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Title: Has anyone read "The Case Against Augur", it becomes more clear how shady eth is Post by: dwgscale11 on July 11, 2016, 06:59:22 PM Hivemind is a bitcoin peer to peer oracle protocol and prediction marketplace similiar to augur being on ethereum. Never knew this project was underway, personally. And didn't know the shady stuff that went on with vitalik and others.
http://bitcoinhivemind.com/blog/case-against-augur/ Title: Re: Has anyone read "The Case Against Augur", it becomes more clear how shady eth is Post by: BitTradeSkeptic on July 12, 2016, 01:43:34 AM This has been making it's rounds for a while and it seems like bitterness. It sucks because a Bitcoin version of Augur would be amazing, but I doubt this guy's project goes anywhere, just because of how he handles himself.
I'm new to Cryptocurrency, but I've followed prediction markets for years and there hasn't been a time in recent memory where so many exciting things are happening. I hear a lot of negativity about Ethereum, but I haven't been fully convinced by anyone's arguments yet. Enough people are making these arguments that there could be something to them, but the analysis out there is so shady and bias that I can't take any of it seriously yet. The fact he's said nothing about Gnosis is a simple example of why I don't buy this. Why I haven't heard more about Hivemind? I'm not sure how many in the PM world follow these, but the group he complains about at length seems to be the one working with respected people I've heard of, one with an actual team that is publicly named and have dwarfed the others in exposure. I'm still not sold on Augur, but the arguments I hear against them are shoddy at best. Title: Re: Has anyone read "The Case Against Augur", it becomes more clear how shady eth is Post by: iamnotback on July 12, 2016, 08:09:27 PM I am going to be analyzing some of Paul Sztorc's blogs.
Let's start with his criticism of oracles incorporated into smart contracts: CoinCube, Paul Sztorc writes (http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains/#when-shackles-empower-the-autonomyhttpswwwyoutubecomvlot2pfcvaversion3autoplay1-coordinationhttpswwwyoutubecomv93walxw7mjqstart146end442version3autoplay1-tradeoff) about your upthread concept of the tradeoff between defectors and top-down coordination (do you have a link in the OP?). Remember AnonyMint was proposing anarchism and a totally free market. You were pointing out that top-down organization is also necessary to prevent divergence (you had presented a biological model to demonstrate the point). AnonyMint had agreed with you that even bottom-up processes are composed of top-down processes, e.g. the owners of small businesses are on aggregate a bottom-up process, but individually they are each top-down run businesses. I visualize this as a fractal organization which nests (recurses) bottom-up and top-down processes within each other. Paul's makes several points. First he explains that if contracts (scripting) is free to copy the oracle's data feed without paying for it, then the oracles will have no incentive to be honest and thus the Nash equilibrium is destroyed and the oracle can gain more by cheating (e.g. some game theory of lying then shorting the coin or what ever): Honest Oracles Need To Overcharge The free market uses “brands” as robust indicator of reputation (allowing merchants to “add” quality to a good and “sell” it), but these brands don’t work if competitors are free to copy them. In all interesting cases, Oracles will have an incentive to lie today (if they don’t, we don’t need to worry about them at all, and can safely use multisig). However, we can sometimes overwhelm this lie-incentive with an even bigger incentive to remain honest... After it submits, it is too late to do anything about the result! Clearly, we must somehow use multiple results…but multiple results delivered at one time will all be attacked simultaneously (proof by simple addition, or task-redefinition). The real trick is to use multiple results across time: the Oracle has its future to lose. Why, the very concept of “Honesty” requires “Memory” (and “Identity”). Then, our focus is this very interesting and very common position: non-compliance is short-run profitable, but a period of lengthy compliance generates greater total well-being. A group can harvest that surplus and divide it up, effectively coordinating their mutually-prosperous joint-future... “Mechanisms that get external data” are going to need to pay data-providers, not just for their time/effort, but also for their honesty and cooperation (their “brand”). Yet this implies that the info-providers are always going to need to be overpaid relative to “bootleg” info-parasites. The problem is fundamental unavoidable. Speaking of unavoidable: Ethereum Can’t Overcharge. Anything Goes!... The Parasite Contract Behold this outline for a Smart Contract:... 3. Use that Host-Data to alter the Parasite’s state (without paying the Host anything). Because of this, any Host (external-data contract) can’t grow to a significant size without being invaded by Parasites and leeched to death. (Probably) Nothing Can Fix This How might we prevent Ethereum from supporting Parasite Contracts? ... I don’t think it’s fixable at all. The generality is the problem Paul then (as quoted below) argues that side-chains are a form of governance wherein miners can choose to kill side-chains which are leeching off the oracles (not paying them) or which have dishonest oracles. In other words, Paul's idea for a solution is that block chains should not be permissionless and instead should have governance and the miners should have control. Btw, I have argued that Paul's stance is the antithesis of why we needed block chains in the first place (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526067.msg15438863#msg15438863) and thus I think he is not only philosophically headed in the wrong direction, but that permissioned block chains will never scale due to competing vested interests and due to the power vacuum of the Iron Law of Political Economics they will collapse themselves just as the hard fork of Ethereum is doing to Ethereum's trustworthiness (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526067.msg15515962#msg15515962). ... Side-chains are insecure: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/side-chains-challenges-potential-1397614121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613520 http://www.rootstock.io/blog/sidechains-drivechains-and-rsk-2-way-peg-design My expectation is that Blockstream (+ the Chinese mining cartel) are going to either outright break or centralize the mining/control of Bitcoin. We need to be ready with something that works correctly for when they do. Quote from: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains/#sidechains-the-global-contract Of course, a single chain might enforce a globally-optimal set of rules, but who decides these rules? How do we manage the permissiveness-security tradeoff without a central administrator? If there is a dispute over which rules should be included, who should resolve it? Well, now I’ll stop complaining about broken things, and show you an idea that will probably work. Bitcoin’s Limited Government The world of Sidechains has the ideal global incentives for a prosperous blockchain-universe. Miners coordinate the global “law”, governed by a clear principle: maximize the total sale value of the Bitcoins that they mine. This governing principle is desirable for users: the sale value is maximized when miners [1] construct a “portfolio of sidechains” which presents maximally-useful Bitcoins to users (as measured by exchange rate), and [2] optimize the usage of these useful-Bitcoins (measured by transaction-fees). This essentially a perfect delegation of “the user’s preference for safe, useful cryptocoin features” to a governing authority. Especially because my expectation is for a very small number of active Sidechains (fewer than 10), making the decision making process very straightforward. Cool, right? The Monopoly on Violence So Far, So Good Peter Todd emphasizes a key sidechain characteristic: miners can destroy/steal-from any sidechain that they merged-mine …at no direct cost. But with the bad comes the good: miners (as a group) can and should censor any sidechain which threatens the value of the “sidechain portfolio” (or affects it superfluously). Consider “useful sidechains” (those which increase the market value of each Bitcoin). For these, miners are unlikely to 51% attack the sidechain, for the very same reasons that they haven’t yet 51% attacked the main Bitcoin chain: a failed attack would be costly to the miners (in the opportunity cost of wasted hashes), and a successful attack would also be costly to the Miners (in the devaluation of the Bitcoins rewarded to miners, and corresponding decrease in mining ROI). In fact, after endorsing a sidechain, for the mining community to suddenly betray it would almost certainly call into question their general dependability. The Long Arm of the Law What of a pegged sidechain which does NOT merge-mine? Can such a sidechain escape the governance of the merge-miners? Who cares? Non-mergers won’t get the 25-BTC-per-10-minute coinbase; they’ll only get transaction fees. Therefore, the hashrate is likely to be overwhelmingly insecure at all times: [1] at first, when the transaction volume is zero, [2] should the transaction volume ever fall toward zero for any reason, at any time in the future, or [3] should the Bitcoin exchange rate suddenly rise (making theft of the pooled funds more-profitable), for any reason at any future time. Every pegged sidechain needs a trove of at-risk BTC. An unreliable hashrate makes that initial-BTC hard to find. Once found, that BTC might vanish at any time, on the mere rumors of future tx-fee problems (impending theft, new competition, disagreements with rival miners, government action, …). Thus, the Bitcoin community is protected against globally inefficient (“parasitic”) sidechains, as long as they are pegged to Bitcoin. It just seems so complicated, and no matter what form the SPV proof takes, it can only prove SPV! Miners can, for free, steal all the coins. Drivechain: A Simple SPV Proof Quote Bitcoin blocks are SPV proofs. Since miners can always steal from a sidechain, lets give users “strength in numbers” and make the thefts unambiguous, easy-to-spot, and unforgivable. Fundamentally, a feature of any SPV proof is that miners can fake the proof, and steal all of the sidechained-coins. This is inherent to the definition of a sidechain, and, while it seems to be a vulnerability, it isn’t completely unsettling and can even be beneficial in cases... Drivechain’s Security This model allows a 51% miner coalition to actually steal Bitcoins. How likely are they to do that? What factors influence their decision? Ironically, Paul is arguing above that side-chains are in fact insecure and miners should be organized to attack the ones that the community thinks are detrimental (as if the community can ever agree on anything ::)). Paul has just stated that the power vacuum of "winner takes all" Iron Law of Political Economics (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984) is desirable. This Ivy League (Yale) indoctrinate is trying to tell us that insecure block chains in the form of side-chains are a good thing because they enable the power vacuum of democracy (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984) to be foisted onto to block chains (which was the damn problem we were trying to remove with trustless, permissionless block chains in the first place! :'(). No wonder he has been hired by the Peter Thiel BitPay bankster affiliated darkside Bloq group. Well Paul, you apparently forgot that side-chain merged mining has incompatible incentives: ArticMine, the merged mining for Namecoin with very minimal validation can't be compared to the extensive CPU resources required to verify smart contracts. I have no confidence whatsoever in Rootstock being merge-mined by Bitcoin miners. Fuhgeddaboudit. Rube Goldberg machines suck. Paul then argues that altcoins can't compete with his side-chain Quote What about Altcoin Smart Contracts (neither pegged nor merged-mined)? ... First of all, I think Paul is incorrect about non-existence of popular use cases for smart contracts other than oracles. For example, I have already designed a new concept (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15273183#msg15273183) for a "DAO" (some details were only peer reviewed privately) which I think can replace, decentralize, and revolutionize stock markets. And it doesn't require an oracle. The key insight that Paul is missing is that when each investor votes independently, they are entirely in control of their own vote signature and their own real world observations, i.e. each voter is a self-interested oracle so we only have to consider the Nash equilibrium in the context of the game theories around their self-interest. This can be done entirely within a block chain without an oracle. Secondly, I don't agree that Bitcoin will end up being the CC of the Internet. Microtransactions are going to drive the CC of the Internet, and I have a lock on the superior technology for that. I am nearly certain that Blockstream is going to blow-up Bitcoin in a heap of Rube Goldberg complexity such as that insecure, permissioned, non-trustless, side-chain nonsense. Thirdly, as for the interaction of law and permissionless block chain smart contract outcomes, the law will not be able to reverse the outcome of a permissionless block chain, so the law will irrelevant. And if we really want oracles, we can possibly employ multi-sig voting to establish external data feeds. As long as each data feed isn't pervasive enough to have a large impact on most outcomes in the block chain, then any gaming of the feeds won't impact the Nash equilibrium of the block chain overall. In summary, Paul is a somewhat smart guy, but he isn't omniscient. Others are also thinking and working on these issues. He should get out and converse more outside of his Ivy League bankster circle. Note in the comments on his blog post, Paul got schooled on the issue of the block size. I have a technological solution to the block size dilemma/quagmire. Title: Re: Has anyone read "The Case Against Augur", it becomes more clear how shady eth is Post by: iamnotback on July 13, 2016, 01:45:16 PM Thirdly, as for the interaction of law and permissionless block chain smart contract outcomes, the law will not be able to reverse the outcome of a permissionless block chain, so the law will irrelevant. One might point out that if a block chain is resistant to control by the law, then anonymity protocol should also be immune to the law. However, the distinction is that the governments can regulate their own citizens and require they reveal their transactions. I think it is nearly impossible to prevent the NSA from tracking our metadata. It is true that without the control over 51% of the hashrate (the miners) in order to fork the protocol to enforce something like MIT's ChainAnchor, the government might have difficult gaining complete complliance: 1. The protocol change can in theory eventually be implemented on Bitcoin (and even Monero once it scales up) because Satoshi's block chain design centralizes. With a block chain design which doesn't centralize, it becomes more difficult to implement such a protocol change. A block chain should be practically unforkable (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1526067.0). One of the issues that my design fixes, is that the miners are everyone (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg15502169#msg15502169), not just a few farms in known locations. The governments are not very successful when they try to regulate end users, because some people are hard-headed and there are always outliers who disobey and take their chances which causes others to become emboldened and copy them. The government can't stop what becomes popular and which is a leaky sieve (e.g. decentralized file sharing). They need a smaller set of entities (the miners) to regulate. Don't give up yet, I still have something to offer as a potential solution. However, my point is that the government forcing users to reveal their transactions does not force a protocol change. The government doesn't need to force the block chain to change its data. Whereas, I contrasted this above with the outcomes of smart contracts on the block chain, where the law can't force the block chain to change its data (e.g. to force some money to be credited to another party). Of course the law could compel some user to pay another user something, but this would not undo the result of the smart contract in terms of the congruence of the data on the block chain with the rules of the contract. Any risk of intervention by the law will be factored by humans who use smart contracts. My prior posts that are relevant: TPTB will allow a privacy coin and use it for themselves so they can hide their wealth, but they will demand they have the viewkey for all of us. Btw, the best technology for anonymity appears to be Zcash, because the anonymity set is the all tokens. But I don't yet know how the viewkey will work on Zcash, someone may need to fork the technology and add a better viewkey. Monero/Cryptonote/RingCT is a weaker technology and overlapping rings could in theory break the anonymity. That is why I didn't appreciate your bullshit when you tried to pump Monero as being better than Zcash. The only possible way to counter TPTB, is if the masses want something which TPTB can't give them. The masses want privacy, but they don't want anonymity and to destruct taxes, governance, and socialism. I argued to generalizethis recently that just paying our tax on each transaction anonymously would not be sufficient, because governance is a power vacuum (winner-take-all) and since we will never have a uniform distribution of wealth, it will always be the case that the peons want TPTB to steal from the collective on their behalf and thus it will always be the case that TPTB must know what all the millionaires are doing so they can keep them down and prevent them from rising to compete with TPTB. This is why anonymity without a mandatory viewkey for TPTB will not be a sustainable nor mass adopted direction. When China's mining oligarchy can implement MIT's ChainAnchor which turns off your ability to spend unless you comply with your local government's taxation and capital controls, then where Bitcoin is accepted is less relevant than whether it is no longer a permissionless system. In order for Bitcoin to scale, the mining must become (already is!) centralized. Blockstream's SegWit makes that even more so. A centralized control over which transactions are allowed, is not an alternative to fiat. It is just fiat by another name or metaphor. |