Bitcoin Forum

Just how good is Decred? Does it have what it takes to hit the big time?

Yeah

I don't know but I'm holding some jic.

There were a few coins I kept hearing people praise a few weeks back and Decred was one of them. I didn't know why it was meant to be good. When I looked at its price / market cap it seemed to not be doing too well, but some of the coins these people mentioned suddenly started rising, so I figured there had to be something to what they were saying. As soon as Decred started going up after the BTC ETF I decided to grab some too (and did it just in time). There were also some other highly praised coins I started paying attention to... Lisk, Komodo, GameCredits, etc. I don't completely understand the tech behind any of them (just the general idea), but I decided I'd take some risks. For example, I bought a load of Komodo when its price plunged because it sounded good to me. Now that the issue that caused the plunge has been sorted out I'm glad I did. It's rising (because of its team / tech) and I've made some money already.

But I digress. My point is that I don't have a clue, I'm just taking a serious look at any alt people are passionate about which doesn't look like a shitcoin / which doesn't stink of bagholder desperation. Decred is one of these coins, but I really have no idea how high it can go. At the same time, I feel like the worth of the top 50 alts will just continue to rise as crypto grows bigger. Nobody knew alts would be worth this much (versus a miniscule fraction of a penny/dollar) a few years back when crypto was still crawling. I get the feeling that anything with the potential to survive is going to give some nice returns in another two~five years... so why the heck not? ;D

Anyway we'll see.

haha, its def a good token, its its uniqueness that keeps it around and (now) raising in value tho :)
the PoS ticket system is just cool, GREAT way to tie up some value with GREAT APR%
Mining is unique, own algo, thats a selling point (usually)
and don't forget how they started, with the most profitable airdrop ever! (mine was worth 1BTC when i sold it)
DCR is sweet, tho pretty tecky, but hey: Crypto(graphy), right? :D

Had limited experience with it, but as I recall the transaction fees are insanely high. It seemed to start pumping around the time Coblee started shilling for it on twitter.  Has some unique governance system or some such thing.

What makes Decred "good" is that it's not another clone.

It's inspired by Bitcoin but added with new features that the devs believe is beneficial for the long term. The best part of Decred is their open governance and hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake mining system that ensures a small group can't dominate the flow of transactions or make changes to Decred without the input of the community. You're able to vote and have a voice, lots of potential for this project and out of 99% of the alts out there, this one will probably continue to rise and in my opinion is a worthy hold.

I was busy before. I will give a real answer now

Decred stands for Decentralized Credits

If any coin truly understands decentralization this is it. The mixed PoW and PoS allows room for ASICs to later develop and strengthen the blockchain against attacks while keeping a check on a known BTC issue, when a centralized group of mining whales call all the shots. The PoS system and its governance over the PoW mining is FAR more inclusive than Dash masternodes which only allows wealthy whales to have a say over the little guys. BTC has an awful consensus issue with 95% of miners needing to come to one decision for BTC to upgrade. In DCR just 30 credits is enough to enter PoS and earn DCR by having a vote in the future of the network. It's a currency by the people for the people more than any other coin can claim to be.

This stuff is not something for a cryptocurrency newbie to understand. I turned an eye to this when I was new just mining and holding what seemed to be the best moves. I did not understand the obsession with the overused word decentralized around here. I would read PoS and wonder wait do they mean Piece Of Shit? With some time reading up on coins, history lessons, seeing where some coins prevail or fail over governance issues and consensus, or centralization of various forms, it all began to make sense to me. It's clear to me that DCR has among the highest long term potentials in the entire lot

Decred is based on PoA which is a research paper written by 4 respected computer scientists including Meni Rosenfeld. However, the security has a major flaw which they admit in their equation (https://decred.org/research/bentov2014.pdf#page=12).

Notice in their example if a whale had 20% of the stake, then assuming 50% of the stake is online and participating then that whale would need more than 8 times the honest hashrate in order to double-spend, i.e. 88.8% of the hashrate (because 8 x 11.2 > 88.8%), where N = 3 is the number of stakeholders that sign each block.

((1/0.2 - 1) × 0.5)³ = 2³ = 8

But notice as a whales' (or colluding whales) percent of the stake climbs towards 50%, the design goes pear shaped and the security collapses:

((1/0.5 - 1) × 0.5)³ = 0.125

Which means you'd only need 12.5% of the hashrate to double-spend. The reason this is so, is because with the control over stake, the attacker can deny to respond to blocks found by the honest miners.

The problem is that to increase the leverage on the side of higher security at low levels of dishonest stake, by increasing N to 3 or greater, this causes the leverage to bite you back at higher levels of dishonest stake as shown above. And it is also damn bad at even lower levels of dishonest stake:

((1/0.33 - 1) × 0.5)³ = 1

Okay that is standard 51% attack but that assumes 50% of the stakeholders are participating in mining! Which isn't going to be likely for any mass adopted coin. Certain all the tokens on the exchanges aren't mining. At  33% participation it goes pear shaped again:

((1/0.33 - 1) × 0.33)³ = 0.29

Actually I am very disappointed that Meni would sign onto work like this. Because when you combine this with selfish-mining strategies on withholding PoW blocks and releasing them late, the security is just horrendous.

This shitcoin is currently seeing a huge rise in price because n00bs don't know how to read a white paper. And thus they don't realize they are buying insecure shit that has no chance whatsoever of being the next big thing.

Its sad actually. Because this shit might continuing going up in price even though it stinks real bad.

https://i.imgur.com/wR18Mf3.png

Are these the bozos (https://www.companyzero.com/our-team.html) developers?

---

Note Charlie Lee admitted at the above Redditard that "PoA is an experiment and may not work".

They have hyped promo: The new Decred Promo Video... Never seen anything like it. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1750003.0)

But he shills a lot:

Yes, those "bozos" are the developers... they happen to be well respected in the bitcoin community for their work on btcsuite.  

BTC Suite Github:
https://github.com/btcsuite

Decred Github:
https://github.com/decred

That vulnerability is discussed in our whitepaper, which you can read here (you obviously didn't):
https://decred.org/dtb001.pdf

Conducting such an attack would require one to hold over 50% of active staking tickets (which would cost upwards of 18 million usd at this point in time assuming all tickets were purchase at the 30 day vwap [ once again... extremely difficult to do without significantly increasing ticket prices / the price of the attack])
It would also require a large percentage of the PoW hashrate to be controlled by the attacker...  again, prohibitively expensive.

You know I am not the most technical person ever, just confirming something, so you need 50% of the tickets, so assuming roughly 50% of the total coin supply is tied up in tickets you need roughly 1/4 of the total coin supply and then you need 12.5% of the hashing power to pull of the attack, is that right?

If so then I don't see it as an issue right now, however, when it becomes less valuable to hold tickets (due to the coin emission rate lowering) resulting in less people staking then maybe I see an issue? Or do you see it as a clear and present danger right now?

The only reason I have Decred is because it can be merge mined with Ethereum...that itself doesn't contribute to the discussion here but I think that it's probably important to note that a lot of the network strength in Decred comes from ETH merged-mining.

Do not step on the gecko!

Not technically "merge mining", as Decred does not have aux-pow and eth uses another pow algo... however, I agree.  The dual miner does contribute significantly to our network's security.

Being good at copying things doesn't mean we should trust them (you) with knives, i.e. consensus algorithm design.

They (you) should stay near the girls at the xerox machine.


Obviously you didn't read what I wrote.

There is no way you will keep any where near 50% of the users online and participating in staking.

So run the numbers with a more realistic participation percentage and you can see that this design can't possibly scale up to mass adoption. In the power-law distribution only about 33% of the wealth will be serious owners and of them many are not going to bother staking since that will end up pretty much an unprofitable activity due to competition. So in reality the math is going to look more like:

((1/0.33 - 1) × 0.20)³ = 0.06

Where the attacking whales only need 6% of the hashrate to double-spend. And I didn't even get into the math of selfish-mining attacks which are much much more damning. The security is absolute dogshit. The selfish mining is going to be much worse and quickly centralized the PoW control of the coin (even though nobody can detect this).

The only way this design makes any sense is for a very centralized stake where we trust that overlord. Which is precisely what you guys are counting on and you damn well know it. Else you are really really bozos if you can't do some simple math.

Whales can profitably attack their own coin by shorting it before they do. They can turn the price into a yoyo, going long and short as they know the timing. Centralized shit is a clusterfuck.

I hope you are proud to work on this shit.  ::)

This is simply not true!  If users are not online when their tickets are called to vote, they lose the subsidy.  It's not like traditional PoS where you only receive subsidy when you are staking.  There is a heavy monetary incentive to be online 100% of the time.  This is why Decred has stake pools to allow for offline staking.  

From the whitepaper (that you still did not read):

"It should also be noted that many well known mining
attacks, such as selfish mining [26] and stubborn mining
[27], will no longer function advantageously in a system
where there is effective decentralization of stake mining
and no PoW-PoS miner collusion. This is simply
because it is impossible to generate secret extensions
to blockchains without the assistance of stake miners."


I'm not here to argue with you about vulnerabilities.  Every system has them.  Hell, there are several ways to attack bitcoin.

But people just don't want to spend 18 million usd to destroy decred (and lose their investment).  Over time, it will only become more expensive.

Apparently you don't know what the word centralization means.


That was written by an idiot. Who wrote that?

That is not a correct analysis of the math and game theory. The attacking stake has a percentage of the stake miners and they can use this along with the selfishing mining strategy to amplify it.

LOL, come on man, just crawl back in your cave.

A little FUD is nice; we don't get much at Decred, but show up with better material next time ;)

You're an idiot. You deny the PoA math. And who ever wrote your white paper has not properly analyzed the vulnerabilities when combined with selfish mining.

You always know when someone has lost when they resort to name calling.  Have a nice day brother.

Tell that to the girls by the xerox machine.

Meanwhile those who understand math and game theory know that the adjective (not name) prescribed to you is accurate.

You guys are faking some level of competency that you don't have.

There is no free lunch in consensus designs. You don't go merging PoS and PoW without introducing crazy game theory weaknesses. You guys are just lazy to actually find the weaknesses. And you even deny the math that was presented in the PoA paper. Pretending that staking pools aren't a form of centralization (as if the person who can't be online can delegate the responsibility without causing centralization).

They are a form of centralization... that was never denied.  We would like better decentralization of pools / better distribution of pool users.

I'm not sure why you are so angry man.  I'm not arguing with your math; you're obviously not a fool. 

However, it is prohibitively expensive to do what you describe.  Can we agree on that?

No we can't agree, because if you took the time to actually analyze deeply what happens with selfish mining strategies and stake combined, the PoW is going to become rapidly centralized but you will have no way to actually know it.

I am not really concerned about double-spending. More so I am concerned about attacks when it comes time to make protocol change decisions. Also the controlling stake+PoW will extract the maximum fees and they will monopolize everything.

It is really about milking the thing to extract all the value out of it. The system is designed to establish cartels which are rent seekers. Which goes against everything we hope to achieve with blockchains.

I hate shit like this, so it is difficult for me to agree. Sorry.

Well $18+ million dollars is a lot of money to attack a $50 million dollar network... come on.

You are 100% correct though, Decred, like bitcoin, relies on a majority of honest hash power and stakers.

You are not looking at it properly. The economics and design forces it to centralization so you'll have a few big whales running the whole thing eventually. And $18 million is nothing because they paid nearly nothing for it by the time they have it. They extract it over time for free due to the game theory.

Correct, but you are making a lot of assumptions here.

What I am saying is that mixing PoW and PoS sounds very cool. But if you actually do a very deep analysis of all the game theory, you'll realize it is really much worse than PoW alone.

PoW is also centralizing too, so it is not like we really have any solution. At least PoW is a stalemate w.r.t. to protocol immutability as we see now with Bitcoin.

Do you have a whitepaper or other published work discussing this?  I'd be interested to read more.

Are you interested because we have Decred's pump right now?

This altcoin might be labeled as 'experimental' on so many levels that I would be scared to hold it long term.
Good advice: better wait when the pump will be over, don't try to catch the rising wave - it will crash soon.

You are obviously in slack... why don't you come by?  Our development team is willing to have a more technical discussion with you if you are interested.

I do but it is not published yet.

If I have some time, I'll try to extract some analysis on the selfish mining aspect of PoA (which isn't actually the precise variant I studied in my paper), but the problem is the market won't listen. And I have more important work to do.

Really you guys should spend some $ to actually dig deep into the game theory. You have money now. You should hire someone impartial and pay them regardless of what they find out. If you guys aren't afraid. Any way you've already pocketed a lot of money. So why not try to research more. Spend your money on valuable activity.

Cool!  It will be an interesting read, I'm sure.  When do you plan on publishing?

edit to add:  This isn't a bad idea... something we will consider.

I know you think that we are a bunch of Bozos at Decred, but I think that if you found the time to come by and hang out, you would find that we are quite open to intellectual discourse / suggestions.

No ETA. And I welcome all criticism.

Again I hope you guys hire some independent researchers such as the guys from hackingdistributed to analyze deeply the selfish mining game theory and math.

@dbt1033 seems like a nice guy. Apologies for being so hard on you. I am just tired of all the scammy coins like Dash and PIVX.

Any way, you can prove you guys are really serious by hiring some serious researchers to analyze it. I don't trust your white paper. You guys are no doubt very good programmers. But being a good programmer doesn't necessarily mean you are an expert at this particular area of game theory and economics. There is no math backing up the claims in your white paper about selfish mining. It is just a claim with no proofs.

Never stop questioning man; that's how we will change the world.  I really do hope you take me up on my offer to come by slack (if you're an IRC type, we are bridged). 

Decred isn't going anywhere, and we would love to have more people like you in our community as we continue to push forward.

Kindof. Although when I started this thread the main part of the pump had not happened. I remember the beginning of the coin, and thought it was good, then it went through a period where it drifted down. When it started to pick up again I wondered about it.

Too late. I caught the pump and did quite well. It may not crash..or it may. I'll probably keep some now. Because although this coin may have issues it may be better than most...or it may be able to present itself as such. So it can still double triple ...or whatever. Or it can crash. As i don't know, I'll probably hold some until the Mr Market tells me to sell  ;D

They have a solid team so the market will prolly not care about the obtuse security and centralization issues.

The market rationalizes it as they can fix it later if they need to because they have a good team.

And the market thinks they can develop a lot of cool shit on top of a hidden pig. And the development team is strong and proven. I can see from the website that it has an attractive geeky meme, so it appears developer centric.

I investigated it because wanted to think about whether I should buy this dip. But i am waiting on feedback from the guy who does charting analysis.

Unless the charting guy says it looks like a 20X gain ahead, why should I sell LTC when I see a 5 - 8X gain ahead for it. And it has less potential problems (I think). I guess for diversification?

I probably won't buy DCR, because I have enough risk already holding LTC. Although I could buy it because it is on Poloniex.

But you guys will prolly buy it.  ;)

Interesting discussion. A question Iamnotback if I may. How well does "game theory"hold up when applied to systems...or just in general.

I remember seeing an Adam Curtis documentary where Adam Curtis looked at the way the ideas of Nash were applied to American foreign policy*, . In that case he argued that it the theory did not work very well. So..what can we say about how it might work in this situation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsAcocwBn8c

*added in edit: And other things

Well it is a good point because game theory can be considered in a narrow context wherein there are externalities which change the likelihood.

For example, the security issues I was discussing upthread are long-tail events so you guys speculating on near-term gain overwhelm any relevance of the potential obtuse security issues.

However if you want to take over the world as Bitcoin is attempting to do, then the game theory weaknesses have to be analyzed in every plausible context. Because it will get attacked.

So I would say that American foreign policy is a highly manipulated thing that has externalities we can't even see, so a model of it is prolly intractable to define.



Another issue with Decred may be that it doesn't appear to solve massive TPS scaling and real-time instant transactions. So all the new risky (i.e. not extremely well vetted) changes to consensus algorithm without significant gains at least in those stated areas afaik. So for me it doesn't feel like it could possibly be the next big thing unless I am not fully aware of the possibilities of that PoS+PoW design.

Lightning network implementation is currently on our roadmap for 2017, and we are on track to achieve all of our goals.

However, the community will have to vote on it before it activates.

Okay so you're the fallback if Litecoin can't get SegWit activated? That is why Charlie Lee was in on this, in case the miners of his Litecoin don't cooperate?

Intrigue.

Or maybe just putting your bets in many hats to diversify?


So the PoS control enables "the community" (of whales, lol) to overrule miners when they need to, e.g. on activating LN. So that is perhaps the big gain (if you consider that a gain).

To be honest, I just reached out to Charlie on twitter, and he took interest in the project.  He had written a PoA proposal years ago, so I'm sure that seeing PoA in action intrigued him.

Actually, PoS enforces consensus.  PoS voting decides how the blockchain will evolve.  Features are activated through an automatic hard forking mechanism.  They are precoded, so this happens once "yes" votebits reach critical mass.

Two validation systems are integrated into the Decred blockchain, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The PoW system (miners) create and validate new blocks added to the blockchain. The PoS system allows ticket holders (voters) to participate in verifying a block's validity. The PoS system acts as a 2nd authentication factor on the chain. If 3 of the 5 randomly selected ticket holders approve, the block is added. The PoS tickets are also used to vote on a change to the protocol (hard fork) over a period of time. Without support of the super-majority vote, the minority chain will become unsustainable due to invalidated blocks.

Now that iamnotback and dbt1033 have stopped squabbling ( :) )i'll add my 2c

I still say I am fairly new to cryptos however I did a fair bit of research recently and looked at least briefly at every coin in coinmarketcap's top 100 and have settled on Decred and Monero as my favorites.

That said my largest investment by far is in Decred.

Like all coins I don't think Decred is perfect, my concerns with Decred are very different and less technical than iamnotback's and they are on the roadmap to be resolved but for the record they are in order of importance:
- Voting for 10% development block subsidy is not yet implemented (planned this year)
- Hard fork voting not yet implemented (planned next month)
- I currently think an ideal cryptocurrency coin emission curve includes a tail emission. Decred does not at this time. I believe 90% of the general public would prefer to pay for their network security via (small and gradual) inflation instead of transaction fees.
-I believe privacy is an important issue, and it is not yet implemented, but it is also in the roadmap

However I like the following:
-10% treasury I believe is important to keep good devs working on the coin and to pay for things like exchanges and getting on credit cards and online wallets and other marketing.
-Proof of stake mining has a genuine penalty (coins locked up)
-I am led to believe the dev team is very competent by the people I have spoken too, to include a Melbourne programmer who went through their github to make sure they where getting work done for me

I do trust iamnotback's opinion as a general rule and it did concern me that he was worried about the security, but I believe at this time the cost of the attack is very high. it is worth over 50 million at the moment and noone has bothered so far so.... I will just hope his fear is a little overblown for now :)

*edit* as I was typing this they started again lol, a more peaceful tone now though.

So LN is definitely coming. We've got Ethereum's Raiden, Decred prolly a lock to activate it, and Litecoin also appears to have strong incentives to activate SegWit as the prerequisite.

So investing in Decred at this time is maybe diversification into the serious potential LN candidate blockchains. In addition the strong development team of Decred.

The long-tail obtuse issues about the security are prolly secondary in speculators' calculation at this time.

Well, Decred is evolving into a full scale decentralized autonomous organization.  When the necessary mechanisms are in place, it woudn't hurt for users to vote on funding for such an audit.  These mechanisms will be in place very soon.

You don't prolly don't need it with PoS combined. Tail emission doesn't provide enough security any way, so you've go to get a handle on the fee market issues. Thus the reason to want PoS control. But democracy is always a winner-take-all power vacuum.


That is actually a good thing for making the price go up because the float is smaller. Dash's masternode scheme with allegedly compounding concentrating stake to Evan Inc is a perverse example.

It is one of the clever schemes everybody seems to want to copy now.

If you don't lockup your stake, you lose value as everyone else is earning an interest.

True and true.

By having one's coins locked, it also requires people that wish to vote on Decred's future to have "skin in the game".  It's not a perfect system, but it does incentive people to vote in Decred's best interest.

@dbt1033 I want to change the world. After you get enough $, you'll probably want to also. Or maybe that is already your priority focus. If so, we will cross paths again soon. I have a surprise.


Edit: thank you so much for the frank, apparently honest, and cordial discussion. I guess I am happy I looked and I understand what others are working on. And was able to get it straight from the developer. Met someone new. Got invited to Slack (which I may do in near future).

I really need to stop expending my time on these sort of activities (talking instead of coding). It had frustrated me that I hadn't looked at Decred nor PIVX and others were talking about it and asking me for my analysis.

I need to have my head in the programming cave sand.

So forum, you are going to be on your own for a while in terms of technological+economic analysis. I really need to discipline myself.

Who else is copying the locking up the coins?

Both Dash and Pivx dont really lock the coins properly, you can unlock them at a seconds notice. With Decred you could lose access to your coins literally for months. Though its possible you're aware of some new coins I am not. I think a proper lock like Decreds is better than a "sorta not really locked" lock like PIVX or Dash

I am certainly open to changing my mind about the benefits vs pitfalls of a tail emission, I was discussing it in the Decred slack yesterday and noone there wanted one but they said at the end of the day it will be up for vote. To me though it just seems you have to pay for security one way or the other and a tail emission is one way that doesn't ramp up transfer fees.

@iamnotback btw you still haven't told me why I was so wrong and silly about my Steemit post yet, and I have been waiting to find out where I went so wrong to get such harsh criticism from you :)

Ask @smooth. I really don't have time.

I'm not a developer... just Community Manager.  It was a fantastic discussion though, and we do hope to see you in slack sometime in the future.  Thank you for your thoughts!

I didn't found it good as I heard about it about some days ago .
since my attention goes toward this due to conversation but not find it good because it has high transaction fee .
Since my one of friend made buy but he is now saying that this is like a long time Investment now because in small transaction will charge you high fee , so instead of make small small sell in installments , we need to wait to do it a big .

Every coin that pays an interest to staking, including every coin with masternodes such as PIVX.

True, your coins are locked for a brief moment with traditional staking.  But you can sell a DASH masternode at any time you desire.

Decred locks your coins for a period of 28 days, on average.  Worst case is 142ish.

I suppose we are a lot with the same will "to change the world. But we don't necessarily need money, just a revolution!

My fundamental idea is that as long as one is combining several distinct aspects of a crypto currency into one single mechanism having to do everything, the system becomes or insecure, or centralized, and most of the time, both.

The different aspects to resolve are:
1) finding consensus over valid first spendings.
2) securing this consensus (immutability) once it is firmly established
3) coin creation and seigniorage
4) governance of protocol modifications and evolution
5) rewarding special people who do 1, 2 and/or 4, eventually with 3

The reason that combining these aspects into one single dynamics is problematic, is that you get complicated couplings between them.  In my opinion, there are two no-gos : 4) and 5).  4) is orthogonal to immutability.  I know that given that crypto currencies are heavily invaded by software people, they have a hard time thinking of something that shouldn't evolve.  But crypto currencies are not software, not any more than mathematics is software, even though both domains rely heavily on software to have practical implementations.  But the "software implementing a protocol" and "the protocol itself" are two totally distinct things.

The problem with 5) is that you get strategies for optimising obtaining the rewards, which can lead to a serious incentive to go away from the right consensus resolution or the right secularisation of the obtained consensus.  So, while it sounds logical that people "helping the system to come to consensus" or "helping the consensus to be secured" are rewarded for their efforts, the very fact of instoring *mechanical* rewards makes that you are open to strategies of reward maximisation, exclusion of less competitive, although honest, contributors to the system, centralization and corruption.

For instance, the very idea that proof of stake should be rewarded is somewhat strange: the higher your stakes in the system, the higher is the importance, for you, that the system is secure and comes to right consensus, because in the end, that determines the market value of the stake !

Finally, another problem is that the rewards are inside the system, while the true rewards depend on market valuation.  The market valuation can make that rewards as foreseen inside the system become crazily high, and people are going to kill their mother for those rewards, or become ridiculously small, so that people don't do it "for such small rewards".   Reward markets will emerge which will "regulate" aspects of the system that weren't foreseen, and will induce strategies to manipulate said market, like the spamming of blocks in bitcoin.

I think that as long as people are going to go that way, thinking that there should be governance (voting and central protocol power), that there should be rewards, and that all of this should be combined in one single system, one will always end up with a broken protocol in which a few people pump value from the gullible into their pockets and then dictate the fate of the system.

Rewards are a bitch.  You fight and cheat for them.

You will find that one will try to patch the difficulties with more and more involved mechanisms, each of them patching a previously recognized problem, and opening 20 doors for new strategies to game the system.  It can be a fun experimentation, and as we've seen, bitcoin has been running successfully for more than 8 years before finally hitting seriously the errors in its design.  So it can take a long time before the strategies that game the system because of its inherent rewards design, become visible and tangible. 
The security and honesty of bitcoin now comes essentially from the investment in asics that some Chinese guy has made and doesn't want to lose immediately.  The price of the computer is what still keeps bitcoin floating.

Decred seems to have good developers, but I'm not sure about the long-term performance of the currency. I have some doubts regarding currencies using pos tech, even when it comes to hybrid technology.

What about coins on exchanges? Do we lose the staking benefits thus we are being debased if we HODL them on exchanges? I realize HODLing coins on exchanges is risky and stupid. (⊙_◎)

I guess your implied policy is only use exchanges for trading them and get a wallet if you want to HODL?

Yes, I am a strong proponent of HODLING.  Exchanges cannot stake your coins because they would easily be caught with their pants down if people wanted to withdraw.

People who keep coins on exchange are speculators though...  you don't want short sighted speculators deciding the future of your blockchain, so it's ok that they are not able to vote with coins on exchange.

You cant stake coins on any exchange that I know of.

When you "stake" in Decred you "purchase" a ticket and when you do so you lose access to those coins that were used to purchase the ticket until the ticket votes or 140ish days has passed.

I have my Decred staked in a pool so I don't have to leave my computer on 24/7.

I think it would be possible for an exchange to implement Decred staking of the coins "you" (the exchange really) hold but obviously while staked you wouldn't be able to trade them.

There was a guy (well I presume he was a guy but that really isn't important) on these forums in 2013 that had the name Decrits for his project. He disappeared. I doubt this is his project reincarnated.

Nope, we are only 98% attack proof  ;D

You can't HODL coins on exchanges, can you ?  You can hodl IOU on exchanges, while they are hodling coins (or playing with it, or buying cocaine and prostitutes with it).  You hodl tokens in a centralized database for as long as the owner of the database wants to let you own them, but you don't own any crypto tokens.  Essentially, you've bought exchange IOU tokens in their database with crypto tokens with which you paid them.

Exchange IOU tokens are like holding bitcoin and thinking you hold the fiat you paid for them.  You've *bought* bitcoin with fiat, and your fiat is gone.

In the same way, if you "deposit" bitcoin at an exchange, you BUY their database IOU tokens with your bitcoin, and your bitcoin are gone.  But you hold exchange IOU, which are more fluid, fast etc... (inside the exchange) than bitcoins.  But your bitcoins are gone.

So as you are not holding any bitcoin it is normal that you can't profit from whatever these bitcoins were supposed to bring you.

==>  holding exchange IOU is EXACTLY THE SAME as holding FED dollars in a bank ; except for the fact that a bank has a whole legal machinery on its back that will trigger and put the banker in jail if ever he doesn't do what the law prescribed ; while an exchange is mostly unregulated, can delete its database and delete your IOU with it, and you *don't hold any coins or fiat* with them, so then all of that is gone.

Exchanges are unregulated banks in the crypto world.

Really you shouldn't refer to the Dash wallet (or the wallet for any centralized coin run by whales debase your tokens at will, manipulate the exchange value, and "accidentally" have bugs that ... etc) with such brutal frankness.  ;)

Lesson: control over a public/private key pair doesn't necessarily mean you own anything.

I hope your not insinuating that when Evan Duffield released the coin early so he would have no competition and then had a "bug" in the code that caused it to spit out many many more coins than it was supposed to while he was the only one doing it, and then forgot that he could do a relaunch after the bug fix which he had previously done before, I hope your not saying he did all that deliberately?

I presume your talking about some other coin than Dash?

First i want to say that i am not that experienced in the involved maths or economics behind CC.
And my nickname and that this is the first posting should give you an idea that i am a 100% decred advocate. So, yeah i am a bozo butthole at its best...

Thanks for your mathematical proof of that if you control a majority of stake you need a less fraction of pow to control the network.

The conclusion comes down to something like:
Bad News: If someone owns the network - they can own the network!

I am impressed what a mathematical genius you must be to come to that conclusion! Wow! I am wondering what the fuck you are doing here at crypto at all... please tell us some more news we did not knew before your appearance! The coin you will release must put everyone else into its shadows!

So lets keep on analyzing your abuse of charlie lee, the btcsuite developers and everyone involved in decred....

So you need a majority of +75% of staketickets to pull of your attack.
Additionaly you need a good amount of PoW under your control.

That would enable you to pull of an attack that will burn your investment, which have to be locked into tickets to pull that attack of :D

I mean, thanks, this is a pinky & the brains wet dream at its best! Have fun achieving this you economic genius.

people don't realise there's a hard cap of 20 tickets per block accepted so it's almost impossible to flood the pool unless the price is very high and then, of course, you run into capital restrictions.

https://forum.decred.org/threads/what-can-be-learned-from-peercoin-nubits.5020/#post-24035

Can you please show an example of an coin where it is not possible to attack the network if you own the network? Anyone? Please help me, this finding is so fundamental i think i just should go back to investing in fiat! :D

Man you guy is just a joke on cocaine... thats a impression someone gets of your genius conclusions you get!

The initial airdrop gave 284 Coins which is currently worth +$3400 - Staked for one year its more like +$3600 (thank you bozo developers, this is decentralization)

You are talking about centralization... of course thats a scenario that "Decentralized Credit" is trying to prevent at all costs. Lately we see a lot of people jumping on the hater train which i laugh out loud about. Go guy... give some more of your genius economic analyses and keep on bubbling shit like an butt with an inlet!

You made my day, enlight yourself but leave the drugs away please...

i think he means Xcoin...btw..what ever happened to xcoin?

I remember back when at DCR free distribution around 3500 people participated. It was a great start, good potentials in future IMO.

I have not much experiences with it but when price goes up usually also fees go up in USD. So if price when up 30 times ad now fee is $1 then before raise fee was only 3 cents. Developers will just need to adjust fees to fit DECRED value.

it's good but i don't like how the dev hold a gigantic amount of coins, it worry me for a dump one day like vitali did with ethereum


they were giving away a very good amount, 350 dercred or so per person, which has a value of more than a bitcoin!, giving for free a whole bitcoin, is crazy

Idiocracy   ???

http://gph.is/1SqtnGA

On the issues with and ramifications of centralization:

That is obvious because your statement below is nonsense.


It isn't my wish for you to remain ignorant, but only you can decide whether to put in the effort.

I know it comes as an unpleasant shock to naive fanboiz that what you thought could be the next big thing, is in fact a dud. Therefor, your psychological reaction is to want to blame your mistake on me, somehow coming to the incorrect conclusion that I am all about ego or a corrupted vested interest.



You did not read carefully the upthread discussion. The following example was only with 1/3 control of the stake, the attacker would only need 6% of the hashrate. In other words, combining PoW and PoS makes the system less secure.


Even with only 25% of the stake, the attacker only needs 22% of the hashrate when only 20% of the stake is online (and again it is all much worse than this once you factor in selfish-mining strategies):

((1/0.25 - 1) × 0.20)³ = 0.22

So where in the above math is the majority ownership of the network which you insinuate?

The Decred community manager pointed out that users MUST stake through pools (else their tokens are effectively debased) with lockup durations of 42 - 142 days, and I replied that delegating to pools is a form of centralized control.

Tangentially, considering that staking (buying tickets) is a fungible, highly competitive activity with no competitive advantage, then the marginal profit from doing so will trend to 0 unless there is some advantage due to economies-of-scale. In any system where the profit is 0, then the participation rate should fall to near 0%. So actually the security of this dogshit is horrendous:

((1/0.10 - 1) × 0.01)³ ≈ 0

You are forced to stake in a pool not because of any competitive advantage in mining (the entire thing is just a farce to obscure that whales control everything and extract the maximum that the market will bear), but because they are debasing everyone who doesn't delegate staking to pools. Thus it is just another scheme that forces the float towards 0 to make the price go up by highly disincentivizing trading. So this is Steem's model of locking up tokens. What happens is then you can't sell when the peak is reached (go look at Steem dropping from $4 to $0.10).


Have you not seen that I have been pushing hard on buying Litecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1848055.msg18399606#msg18399606). And I even dropped a suggestion for Charlie to rename the coin unit of Litecoin to ecoin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1848398.msg18400124#msg18400124).

And upthread I stated that I come to understand that Decred is probably a backup plan for Charlie if the Scrypt miners on Litecoin don't activate certain necessary improvements such as SegWit for Lightning Networks.

My commentary seems to be fairly supportive of Charlie, although I must say that he needs to stop shilling dogshit technology because he is causing me to doubt his competence (his respectability will decline if doesn't disown this Decred dogshit).


Incorrect. Re-read the quote above of what I had written upthread. And pay attention to the part about shorting your own token.


Only those who are too fucking dumb to read and think, agree with your nonsense misinterpretation of the facts.


That has nothing to do with why delegating to pools is a form of centralized control.


Retards do often think that very smart people are talking nonsense, because the smart people communicate on a level that the retards can't assimilate. Thus to the retard such as yourself, the smart person appears to be stupid. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect):

The design space (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1747897.msg17475116#msg17475116) for incentivizing miners (and other benefical activitities) is so much bigger than just plain rewards or transaction fees.

currently more than 40% of DCR are in the PoS mining and every voted ticket get the same reward when picked, it's a lottery system, only 1/3 off all ticket are in the PoS pools the majority is solo staking, like me.

What part of this can't you understand?

Hey hey, don't put words in my mouth.  I never said users MUST stake through pools, only that many were.  We do have several users that are staking on cloud servers or their own personal computers...

edit to add:  Also, unlike other PoS models, there is an incentive built into DCR that encourages 100% wallet uptime.  If you are not online when your tickets are called to vote, you lose your subsidy!

Right. I simply mean that afaik users are effectively forced to delegate to pools ("manipulable into voting as a colluding bloc") because otherwise they will be debased relative to those who do. Which I stated that. Apology if my wording incorrectly implied that you wrote they MUST.

Finding viable (decentralized) alternatives to PoW is not easy. No one has yet. Upthread I explained why in theory PoW is immutable and decentralized (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1831784.msg18407161#msg18407161).

By the way... our pools are NOT reward sharing as you seem to think.  All they do is vote according to a users preference so that a user may remain offline if he/she chooses to use a pool.  Individuals still retain control of 100% of their funds.

I am operating at a higher level of meta economics wherein your "preferences" differentiation is afaics irrelevant. The users who don't align their preferences with the majority will lose rewards, because the majority can censor every block of the minority. Now go back to the point that voting (i.e. "preferences") is not cost-free and thus is manipulable (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1831784.msg18407161#msg18407161).

Delegating preferences means users can't be bothered, i.e. the cost of voting is not free. Thus they will not be expert. They will not be able to organize because they can be divided and conquered and many different pet "preferences" (analogous examples from current democracies include e.g. gay rights, abortion, etc). They can even be incited via propaganda to diffuse their efforts into a multitude of preferences.

This is why @dinofelis is correct when he states instead the rules must be hard-coded immutably into the protocol.

Not true, rewards are available regardless of one's alignment.  You are rewarded for your say, not what you say.

Also, if voting were "cost free", as you propose, wouldn't it be easier for bad actors to forge the future of the Decred chain? 

If this were the case, why would they care how they voted?  They have nothing to lose.  No skin in the game.

You can't have it both ways. You made conflicting statements. Either way it is centralization. I'll let @dinofelis explain it to you.

You can at Burger King.

You must be my age (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2633053/Burger-King-scrapping-Have-It-Your-Way-slogan.html).

WTF how could they?  That's madness.

Edit:  I see you are a Steem fanboy  ;D ;D :D :D

Decred is legit

never heard of it before

good, stay away

wow this energy wasted on fighting, dcr gave coins away for free to call them bozos..

i think decred is a good coin with a hard working team behind it, to see dash at 100$ while one of the founder said recently he OWNS 265k dash premined is sad.

i may not know alot about programer stuff but ive researched the monetary system and the flaws in our politcal system for years. and as long as we are in this system there will always occur centralization. money always hords money, you can try with all will to prevent it but it will always occur, those with the best pcs, those with the most masternodes etc, bc SOMEONE has to put the money on the table in the first place.

still i think the crypto movement tackles philosophical questions that have far to long been ignored and replaced by the ignorant lie that there  is no alternative to this system.

the questions how we gouvern ourself, who rules, how to keep power in place are very interesting and need to be discussed.

but dont make the mistake like its something clear or easy, everyone has their own opinion on how to get there, and we will.

in the meantime lets try something that is deeply missing in our society COOPERATION.

instead of fighting who has the best aproach we should help eachother to get better at it.

also i have an idea for a new coinsystem that i would like to discuss with someone deep in the matter, so if someone interested pm me .

besides i love this forum and the high end discussions going on here, i learn alot and wish you all the best.

I am looking at an unreleased white paper which claims you are incorrect.


I think Decred is essentially the same as Dash in terms of centralization trend. There are some differences, but I think looking at it holistically then roughly the same centralization effects. Whether that centralization is captured by developers or some other whales is irrelevant to whether bad things happen with centralization. Afaics, the system is structured so that the centralization increases over time regardless if some tokens were given away for free.

Centralized blockchains will not scale adoption and network effects. They are speculation toys for those who like feeding the whales.

I agree the Decred team are apparently good programmers and hard working and probably even good intentioned. And that would make them bozos if they wasted all that effort (and their lives) on something which can't really impact the world. There are a lot of people (perhaps even smarter than myself) who end up being bozos, because they get trapped in some inertia.

I would hope to interest their development team on something better when that better thing is ready for their attention.

If some readers dislike me for being frank and expressing my opinion or analysis of the situation, so be it. I am trying to be honest with myself about what I think is important.

What centralisation are you talking about, iamnotback? With a current market price it will cost you ~ $50,000,000 to get 75% of votes.
Pretty expensive "speculation toy", don't you think so?

Obviously, you cannot even buy such amount of coins in the marketplace. You can buy maybe 100K coins (2%) and then you will have to pay 500$ for every additional coin in your bag.

If you want to manipulate with decision-making, you will have to lock your coins up to 5 months and accept the risk that during this period exchange rate can drop dramatically as the result of your "manipulations".

Good luck with that :D

@Dcrstats I will not repeat myself for those such as yourself who lack reading comprehension. Understanding this is above your pay grade apparently. Or perhaps you just didn't read all my posts carefully. Try again.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Pd184OEuC30/maxresdefault.jpg

Sorry @iamnotback, but I don't have time to read posts of every troll in this forum ;)
There are plenty of interesting projects in Altcoin section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0) of the forum.
I'm sure you can find something suitable for yourself.

Then why are you reading yours.

Lol. You'll end up realizing later who I am when you get your foot out of your mouth.

I checked your shitposting statistic from your signature and it's pretty obvious that you are either professional troll with no life, or you are out of mind.
I don't see any sense to continue discussion with you in both cases ;)

Who are you?  Asking for a friend  ;D

yes it does

I consider deCRED one of the cryptomonete with the best governance currently in circulation: from tomorrow it will be listed also on Binance. And in fact, many are already taking advantage of it!

There is a man upon these types of discussion boards within 2013 which experienced the actual title Decries with regard to their task. He or she vanished. We question this really is their task reincarnated.

That will be good news towards the end of 2018, Decred is listed on the binance that has become the top exchange to date. Hopefully it brings many benefits to users. Thanks..