Bitcoin Forum

I mentioned in some thread about having an alternative blockchain idea. I received some messages about it, so I'm making this thread just to gauge interest in my idea. I don't feel I should give away all my ideas, but I will try to reveal as much as I can without giving away the cake. Here's some primary considerations of my hypothetical design:


1. This new ?coin involves controls that eliminate the early adopter syndrome as it's primary introductory consequence, which fosters a slower inflation rate, and prevents the perverse speculation bubble we've seen with BTC.

2. Mining is never a primary driver of block rewards in the entire life of ?coin, though there is a nominal fee, and mining does still produce ?coin, though in a much different fashion.

3. Specific block activity indicators are the basis of future block rewards. Nothing is arbitrarily set. Every reward has a logical indicator necessitating further payouts.

4. Transaction verification is carried out much quicker.

5. Pseudo-anonymity is preserved, however the option to identify exists, and offers certain advantages.


Those are some of the basics. The primary goals of of the ?coin are that:

A. Miners NEVER control the majority ?coin generation. (this is actually the secret sauce that makes ?coin so special, and I can't fully reveal how or explain it in total)

B. Because of the secret sauce of A, there will never be anyone that possesses a massive number of ?coins through ANYTHING but real economic trade.

C. Merchants are a first class citizen. There is more secret sauce that makes being a ?coin merchant very appealing, much, much more so than Bitcoin. I really hope I can eventually publish this portion, because it's the most clever and important part of what ?coin is.

Sounds attractive to me, though I hope you’ll find a way to publish it in detail. I’m skeptical.

How can a network automatically detect delivery of goods and/or services and thus distinguish 'real economic' trade  from fake trade (possibly run by a pool of systems around the globe) ? 

Unless you have a viable mechanism for this - it sounds implausible.

Ideas are cheap - implementation is king.

Your skepticism is not unfounded, as I personally only know how to write web apps in interpreted languages, and no idea how to code a stand-alone networked client app in an compiled language.

If this were to be actually be written, I would want it coded in Haskell (most preferable) or C, and I have only a vague grasp of how to program in either.

However, conceptually the system is sound, I assure you.  It became an obsession of mine a few months back when I was mining BTC, and I spent many many hours solving all of the possible issues for a viable, long term system (that I can't believe weren't solved to begin with, they seemed obvious to me).

I very much want to publish, but as I said in another thread, what's in it for me if all I do is publish the whitepaper without any real code to my name?  I get nothing, including the chance of no personal recognition either...

I mean that no-one will be able to simple put a bunch of iron on the network and amass a fortune.  The only way they will receive a "large" number of ?coins is by selling something or trading for them.

Again, mining is still "viable,"  it's just not a primary driver of the market in any critical capacity, including the "early adopter" syndrome.

Also, the point of this thread is to spark conversation, and maybe if people like what they're hearing, some kind of collaboration might eventually come of it.

I know how to code, but I have no way of taking on this type of project by myself.

So please, ask for as much detail as you like, and I will try to answer as far as I'm able without giving away what I feel to be the secret sauce that sets ?coin far and above Bitcoin and it's pathetic clones.

Without even a basic explanation of why a 'bunch of iron' (or even virtual iron) can't simulate trading under your system and therefore game your 'activity indicators' - this doesn't sound well thought out.

What is going to verify that it's real economic activity?
A central review agency? An AI you just need someone to code up for you?  A voting system of network participants? (For which you'd also need to provide mechanisms against gaming)

How is a transaction which didn't involve delivery of a good or service going to look different to the network than one that did?
How can the network know whether the 2 ends of the transaction are even genuinely distinct entities?

Ah, very good questions.  These were my first concerns, truly.  Unfortunately the economic activity indicators are the core of the "secret sauce" that I "developed." I feel it's clever because it maintains the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.  Part of it involves the identification scheme I mentioned, however it's not a necessity, as there is magic that I've developed that perfectly prevents gaming the system. It's really quite clever, I have to adulate about it because I'm actually quite proud of that part...

What I want to drive home though is that more processing power doesn't equate to a greater portion of the network. This was central to my design. My design is more concerned with identifying individual agents participating in the network that total hashing power. The way I account for this is unique, and doesn't have anything to do with the obvious identifiers. There is potential for abuse, but it's on par with Bitcoin's network security.

In one specific way it's superior, and that's the hypothetical 51% attack. While the 51% of Bitcoin attack is infeasible, it's still possible. With ?coin, it's most assuredly not. Let me think on this awhile and maybe I can distill it into non-technical terms that won't give it away.

Note that when I say "identifying individual agents" I don't mean breaking pseudo-anonymity. I mean it's baked into the function of the system that identifying real economic activity from automated activity is trivial. This is because the system makes certain assumptions that if resolve to being false, completely negate the intended use of ?coins to begin with.

As long as intended ?coin use resolves true, then the basis of the economic indicators will always secure the network from automated attack.

And as long as the network is secure, it can still be used for both white and black market transactions freely.  If the ?coin network security IS compromised, the state of the network reverts to essentially what the Bitcoin network is presently.

In this way, ?coins can be seen almost as an additional security layer on top of Bitcoin, geared towards merchant adoption. However there are additional advantages and features that set it even further apart from Bitcoin proper, enough that I don't even see ?coin as a Bitcoin clone.

Really?

There's THAT little interest in this particular idea?

Makes sense actually, the -coins are only popular as get-rich-quick pump and dump scams anyway, for which my ?coin would completely prevent...

There is interest but without a clear plan and with no chance of an implementation this isn't going to work. New ideas are great though.

Are you saying you have some way to tell the difference between me running two miners and me running one and you running one?
Are you saying you can tell the difference between economic activity and me running a bunch of clients that just transfer money between themselves?

I don't see how you could do either of the above.

No, the system has no way of differentiating "miners" on the network, and it doesn't need to. "Mining" in the Bitcoin sense is of a very little importance in the ?coin system. The block rewards are generated much differently.  "Mining" will still get you ?coins, but not in the same way. That is to say, there IS an incentive to running a ?coin node besides just being able to send and receive coins, but the nature of the system ensures that it's not a method by which you will receive a greater portion of the pie by putting more nodes on the network in any significant quantity. As I said before, there is potential for abuse, but as long as there's a functioning ?coin economy, the chance of a successful attack is exceedingly negligible.

Which leads to your second question:

Yes, the system can differentiate real economic activity from artificial activity. This is a tall claim to make, assuredly. However it's not as difficult as you might expect. Again, the system makes certain assumptions that make the task much easier than accounting for every form of use that might suggest real or artificial activity. While these assumptions resolve true, certain weights are applied to certain transactions, which balance out the meaningful activity from the "noise." Hypothetically, this could be simulated, but it would have to be a extremely complex and sophisticated undertaking, as well as having an extremely large portion of the network under your control for an extended period of time (proportional to the size of the blockchain).  If such an attack were to be successful, it would mean that the ?coin economy had ALREADY failed long before the attacker(s) succeeded. In this way, if the ?coin economy were to fail then the network essentially reverts to what Bitcoin is now, with all of the same network security implications, with the added difficulty of maintaining some excruciatingly elaborate economic simulation across a majority of nodes to trick the system into believing there is still a functioning economy behind it. And at that point, who would care anyway?

Not enough details to assess the feasibility or desirability of your system.

Perhaps some of the ideas here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37194) are relevant, where we have discussed how to reduce the amount of hashing that needs to be done for a given level of security. I suspect that your system may take into account "circulation", as I suggest here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37194.msg462786#msg462786) - real economic activity is determined by the total number of different coins that move around (whereas a client sending coins back and forth will draw on a limited set of coins).

Yes, something akin to "proof-of-stake" is incorporated in my system, but it's executed differently than in yours and is only one facet of an overall strategy.

EDIT: Sufficed to say, you're on the right track too, and it's obvious how utterly lacking Bitcoin is in many regards.

SECOND EDIT: It should also be extremely paramount in any future crypto-currencies that "mining" be negated as a market stressor, regulator, or contributor. My design solves this elegantly, while still allowing for "mining" to be relevant, but not significant to any degree.

It's this total de-emphasis on mining that I think totally negates the possibility of my design catching on with this community, which is nothing more than a bunch of get-rich-quick maggots looking for a free ride.

This sounds interesting but we need the details. Maybe you should patent this? I can't think of any other way to tell us about this and still have any ownership over it.

I don't see how you could carry out some of the things you claim you can carry out but without the details I've just got guesswork to go on.

Patenting would be too much trouble.  I'm a busy man, I run a small business and have a family.  Just researching prior art would be a huge undertaking, and the application even more-so. Even then, there's no guarantee the patent would be granted, and I'm very unclear on how basing my invention on parts of the Bitcoin code would work out in the end.

Even if I were to patent it, then what?  We'd still be in the same position of needing someone to do the glut of the code necessary to publish a program...

But, if there's any programmers who would like to code such a project with me, then maybe this thread might serve a purpose.

So what's left? You either forget about it, publish it for free, code it yourself, or pay someone else to code it. You are not going to find someone to code it for you for free unless you can convince them it's a really good idea first, and that would require telling them all the details.

How about coding a prototype in something easy like python? It's still a serious undertaking but you should be able to do it with enough time.

I've actually been thinking of doing a prototype in Ruby...

We'll see I guess. Probably won't become much.

I'm still happy to answer any more questions as best I can.

It's not supposed to catch on with the Ixcoin community, it's supposed to catch on with the Bitcoin community.


Anyway, I'm not sure I understand the problem... Do you plan to profit from being the creator of this currency? I don't see how that's possible with a decentralized currency. You should write down your system, this way you can take credit for its invention before someone beats you to it.

I've already written it down. I filled about 30 pages of a college ruled notebook with the spec. It right behind me in the filing cabinet...

And I would profit because I would be first to market with associated services. My goal isn't to create a currency I can profit off of directly, like the shit-headed Bitcoiners, but a cryptocurrency so throughly desirable that the business services (which are 100% separate from the currency itself) I also have planned would likely be quite profitable for me.

However, it's important that I be the originator of the initial currency, to make sure that it's not altered before it's released and hopefully adopted.

I fear something along the lines of releasing the spec, and some asshole creating an alternative chain based on my design that omits the miner controls to allow for the disgusting profiteering and speculation of Bitcoin, which completely debases the point, and gives ?coin a bad name before it even gets off the ground.

I hope your paying attention to this Smoothie. He's talking to you boy  ;D

lol he is scared he will lose some money on his new "forK".

I am? Huh, I thought it was reasonable to expect to profit from one's own endeavors...

It's reasonable, but you are going to have trouble making it work with a peer to peer currency that isn't implemented yet.

Don't mind oldminer. I think lead poisoning got to him from mining back in the olden times. The silly old fool is just trying to derail the only on-topic thread in alternate cryptocurrencies.

I thought you were someone else. I get it now.

It is unfortunate that you do not appreciate the visionary revolutionaries that drive Bitcoin. I don't need to listen to these insults.

I have very little faith in your ability to understand and solve the challenges Bitcoin is facing. I still don't understand why you refuse to publish your design, and I can only assume that it is because it does not live up to the expectations.

Without opening it up to scrutiny, this is still just vapors masquerading as a fix for a problem that might not be that important in the long run.
It sounds like yet again - someone is concerned about the unfairnesss of initial distribution more than the other important characteristics of the system.

Perhaps you could fast-forward to a time where bitcoin distribution has played out (approx 21M coins issues) and the function of mining is to secure the system.
What advantage does ?coin give and what problem is ?coin solving at this point?

Also - have you taken into consideration the 'perverse incentives' your system of measuring economic activity may encourage?
You talk of:

.. but in fact it is possible nowdays (and moreso every day) to steam up entire networks of virtual nodes running sophisticated software stacks - and we don't need to talk of 'majorities' for this to be a problem.

If fake economic activity gives even a marginal profit - it will become widespread enough to accelerate scalability issues on your chain.

Right, it is vaporware, no denying that. As I said before I started this thread, there's practically zero chance of this idea coming to market.

now to address your attack scenario:

I'm sorry that I can't provide in-depth descriptions of some of the critical measures that I wish to protect. I've already mentioned that there exists certain systemic assumptions that protect the network from automated attack. The only thing I can elaborate further on about these assumptions is that they don't RELY on breaking pseudo-anonymity to maintain the network, but that self-identification on the network DOES play a role. The only parallel that might be familiar to you is something like the intended functionality of namecoin. Use your imagination from there because I'm sorry, but this is already giving some good hints to any clever devs who know where I'm going with this.

Again, it's certainly feasible that ?coin could be gamed, but the point at which it's feasible for an attack to compromise the network is a point at which any sane end-user or merchant would have already liquefied his holdings into a competing currency. The beginning of the ?coin economy is protected from this because it will be built on trusted agents. This is what I mean by merchants being first-class citizens. This also ties into the namecoin-esque functionality of the design. Could some malicious merchant try to become established enough within the chain to at some point in the future leverage their position for ill? Sure, but unless that particular entity was basically 70% of the network transactions itself, all they would accomplish by trying to attack the chain by flooding it with bogus transactions is quickly removing themselves from the block weighting.

That's important to note: the quicker an attacker tries to exploit the system, the faster the system is able to remove their influence from the block weights,

So, why hasn't there been more interest or debate about this idea?

I think it's because handwaving and claims of secret sauces aren't enough to convince anyone you have a workable idea - and even if it is workable, your desire not to share your ideas fully goes somewhat against the grain of the open-source philosophy which most here would probably agree is ideal for a digital currency.

Look at the way the SolidCoin dev behaved - we don't need big egos who think they know how to do everything alone.
There's every chance that only a small portion of your ideas are useful, that others have similar ideas anyway, and that a pooling of ideas would come up with a better solution than one you attempt to tightly control.

I suspect that an interesting challenger to Bitcoin could come from a mining-less system along the lines of that proposed by Ben Laurie in his July 2011 paper
"An Efficient Distributed Currency"  http://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf

I expect this would be just as subject to speculation and hording though.

Interesting.  He touches on some of my design features, but is still lacking the most critical components protecting the chain.

I like the idea of mining for a profit, but the problem with bitcoin mining is profits are made by the rich.  That is whoever can afford the best hardware.  Rich people with already fast computers will mine lots of coins.  Poor people with crap computers can never mine jack.  Back when bitcoins were new my computer was 10 years old and I never mined a single coin with it despite trying.

Mining might be better with something like a CAPTCHA, but not those irritating CAPTCHAs that cause blindness due to eyestrain that computers can solve far easier than humans.

Basically what I think it should be is whoever can process an encrypt a transaction fastest gets transaction fees.  But who gets new coins is who can solve some puzzle a computer cannot.  And computers just process numbers and can't understand concepts so something on that nature.

No.

Mining is an outmoded concept.

I find it hilarious that cryptocurrency is supposed to be the next revolutionary thing in this world, yet still adheres to bullshit meat-space concepts like "mining."

Why the FUCK should there be some analogue to retrieving a physical asset and proffering it for exchange in a wholly digital medium?

Because I ASSURE you that there are people as intelligent or more intelligent that realize just as I do that were BETTER than having these shit-headed meat-space analogues driving a "revolutionary" new digital currency.

I also assure you that the Satoshi entity was in all likely-hood completely aware of the pump-and-dump fundamentals of Bitcoin, and designed it thusly. That, or he's an idiot-savant who is just really clever at crypto and completely fucking retarded in all other Bitcoin regards.

I think Satoshi read The Diamond Age and wanted a good chargeback proof currency.

I like mining, but I think it needs to stop being based on who can afford the most expensive computers.  The puzzles need to be made to be solved by humans far easier than computers so miners will be people spending all day at computers working 8 hours a day like a job.

Why do you like mining?

Why should a 100% digital currency need people to have computers computing cryptographic hashes when those hashes aren't needed?

In my system, coins are awarded in a very clever fashion, only when necessary.

Encryption is for security.

Obviously.

I don't think you're going to get many technical people onboard with all this hand-waving and a complete lack of any details.

By who? The idea of a peer-to-peer anything is that you need a community of peers to actually use it. I could create bitplanecoin where the founder gets ten million coins a day and the only way to get one is by sucking his dick, but I'd be the only node on the network.

Why not gather people who believe the same things as you, debate the rules for a system you think is fair then create a community around this plan? Referring to your secret sauce as "very clever" (we'll be the judge of that) and wanting nobody else to use it makes you sound like an ego who wants to rule over everyone, not someone looking for a peer group.

Synaptic, it's clear that you have some great ideas but as you have admitted yourself, you lack the technical knowledge to implement them. Given this, I find it rather annoying that you still want to keep your ideas suppressed, rather than sharing them with the very people who you need to help you get your project off the ground.

You fear that disclosing your 'secret sauce' would lead to someone else taking the idea, and leaving out crucial parts that make the system work (for their own benefit). Well, if this happens... wouldn't the community be aware of it? And wouldn't this lead to loss of credibility in favor of any future full-implementation of the system you described? So, let the n00bies set up their shit-forks.

Heck and even if someone else did take the idea and implement it fully themselves, wouldn't it at least feel good to know that it only exists because of you? And like you said, they won't profit from the idea anyway. Don't you plan to make money from services derived from the currency and not from the currency itself? If so, then what does it matter who the one to compile it is?

The way I see it is that what you need in order to see your ideas into fruition is a group of people with a varied skill-set willing to work together to make it become a reality. Now, where I wonder could you find that? Oh wait...

It is obvious that you would have to relinquish ownership of your ideas for this to happen, but isn't this is the whole point of the open-source movement? Individually we are insignificant, together we can change the world! Yada yada..

I like your ideas, but I don't get your attitude. You have a fierce passion that is obvious in your posts, and are clearly intelligent with a lot to offer the p2p currency movement. But you also harbor a lot of enmity, evident from your insulting rants, and your egotistic attitude will only serve to segregate yourself from the very people who share you're beliefs and ideals and can help you implement your ideas.

So basically, what I'm saying, is either spit it out or shut the fuck up!

Also, can you stop with the self-praise and talking about how ingenious your ideas are? Like other's have said, we'll be the judge of that. I really hope you actually do spit it out, because, if there is anything to it you can count me in for one.  I'm sure, with a small attitude adjustment, you will be able to gather up enough minions to help you turn this vaporware into awesomeware.

But not if you keep acting like a proverbial crypto-hitler!

To be frank, it is extremely unlikely that someone who does not know core CS (e.g. what "Byzantine Agreement" or "Sybil Attack" mean) would have a correct solution.  There is simply no way one could simultaneously have the ability to architect distributed systems and not be able to write it out precisely as code.

My suggestion is you simply describe your scheme so the CS folks here can explain to you why it is broken, and you can learn from it.  You should understand that preventing sybil attacks is basically the core open problem in p2p network security research, and no one has any idea how to do it without either a centralized identity issuer, or via extremely wasteful constant resource-tests (as in bitcoin).

So there are 3 options:
1) Your scheme falls into one of two above: central identity issuer, or waste of resources.
2) Your scheme falls outside them and is totally broken.
3) Your scheme falls outside them and is correct.  Congratulations, you should write it up, publish it in IPTPS, and collect the best paper award.  Perhaps a PhD too.

In particular, we have known since the very beginning[1] that central identity issue or waste of resources are all one can do in particular natural models.  You would need an entirely new model.  

You might also find this useful, a scheme I described that makes the coin generation set by vote.  My scheme falls into (1), as it is still wasting resources: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24929.0

[1]  http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=2275703DE2E08EC0E7CEF3321E53506A?doi=10.1.1.17.1073&rep=rep1&type=pdf

EDIT: This is the first time I've written a post in this kind of condescending tone.  Mostly it's because of the fact that on the one hand, you  recognize 99% of people on this forum are get-rich-quick retards, and on the other, in this thread you are basically behaving in the same way.  You have an irrational faith in something that you are not an expert in,  have not had vetted by anyone, and refuse to even discuss/describe so that others may attempt to reason with you.  You have basically come here and announced that you've struck gold and are going to make it big, but just need someone to code it up (reminds me of the million "I have an idea for an iphone app" crap from MBAs).  Anyway, I'd encourage you to look through my posts and recognize I (and the other CS folks here) could probably offer quite a bit of help to you if you're willing to be rational and explain your system in a complete and coherent manner.  But until you do that, your posts of "why isn't anyone interested?" are laughable.  Noone has anything to say because you've provided absolutely no information to respond to.

Really.  Go back and read your "I'm so clever I have a scheme for a perfect crypto-currency;l but I just need a coder" posts earlier in this thread.  Then go to the main discussion and read some of the "We are all going to be rich when bitcoins are $1M each because we got in early; but we just need to get more new buyers".  Then realize the logic in both cases is identical.

The mere fact that you mention some sort of "cake", some sort of advantage you'd lose by fully exposing your concept puts this whole thread in my TL;DR stash.

I'm going a bit off-topic, but as long as we're here... Can you briefly describe where in this taxonomy fall proof of stake (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37194) ideas of myself et al (eg this comment (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=37194.msg462786#msg462786))? The general idea is to make sure that those with the ability to game the system are those with the least incentive to do so. The motivation is to enable high transaction security for those willing to wait long enough, with only a small amount of wasteful proof-of-work.

Well your "proof-of-stake" doesn't have anything to do with issuance.  You are assuming coins have already been issued, and then just suggesting using digital signatures by current holders as a way of maintaining the transaction ledger.

Indeed that's reasonable, and also pretty straightforward.  I didn't read your thread carefully but there is more to it than just using signatures; you need to atomically commit transactions to ensure all honest participants agree on the current ledger state.  The basic primitives in distributed systems to do that is a distributed consensus procedure (aka "Byzantine agreement") and state machine replication.

Szabo wrote up a sketch of such a system long ago; it explains the correct way to do what you want.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html


The problems I was referring to don't come up in maintaining the ledger for transfers, but rather in the mechanism for issuance of new coins/property.  Once you already have a notion of a "participant", "voter", or "owner", maintaining the ledger is just a straightforward application of distributed consensus.  The problems arise when you want to add new participants/voters/owners.

But I bet you already understand this.  In fact, I'd guess you came up with proof-of-stake and then realized "hey wait, proof-of-stake makes transfers much simpler".   Equivalently, what you actually realized is "hey wait, that means issuance is a much, much harder problem than transfers".

Ok, I misinterpreted the scope to which your comments applied.

Well, I didn't ponder much how difficult issuance is, because I don't think it is ultimately consequential, at least for a currency like Bitcoin. Once every coin passed hands hundreds of times, facilitating trade each time, will it really matter to whom it was originally issued?

I wonder if there's some way to make a currency that always has the same value.  Not just equivalent to today's EU or US currency, but adjusts according to cost of living over the years.  So if you buy one at $1 today, it's still worth whatever that $1 + inflation would be in the future.  It couldn't be limited like BTC, because if it were limited it's value might increase.

Isn't one of the primary goals of bitcoin to provide a refuge for those who disagree with government sponsored inflation?

The cost of living is increasing because of all those extra USD being issued by Ben Bernanke. What you are suggesting, essentially, is to inflate the currency in line with the inflation of fiat currencies, so that it's value gets debased also.

That goes against everything that bitcoin was set up to achieve.

OP

Give us full details.  If people like it and start it for you, then it will happen.

Ah, this is a great post!

I hand't seen, it got lost under other posts before I noticed it.

I'll respond appropriately when I have some time!

Thanks