Bitcoin Forum

I found this:

"Ten minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it. If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste." -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Why_do_I_have_to_wait_10_minutes_before_I_can_spend_money_I_received.3F

If the broadcast of a newly discovered block could be made very fast to all the miners, couldn't the transaction time be significantly reduced?

Yes, however Bitcoin is desiged to be partially agnostic of lower OSI level protocols. With the proper agreement with authorities, I could be using GPRS to send blockchain data as opposed to an IP-level protocol. Thus, the protocol can't assume availability of the sub-second propagation of data across a TCP/IP link, and must be more conservative.

In practice miners have fast Internet connections. I don't know the technical details of how newly discovered blocks are broadcast to all the miners. Maybe it's a cumbersome process. My assumption that the broadcast can be done in milliseconds is perhaps unrealistic.

Then perhaps you should have researched this before creating a thread about "faster bitcoin transaction times," or posted your question in the beginner section.  There is a huge amount of discussion on this topic that you can learn from already.  

And it's not transaction times you're referring to anyways--it's confirmation times.  Bitcoin transactions are extremely fast as all that's required is for nodes on the network to accept the (valid) TX into mempool.

There are also several bitcoin clones with block-time targets at least as short as 30 seconds.  Look into these to understand how the block-time target affects orphan rates and convergence.  

That's not a guarantee, as infrastructure could be destroyed or damaged by some bad happenings (not going to go into conspiracy theories here) or the political situation may change restricting miner connectivity.

I dont really like the 10 minutes. its too long. Sometimes it can take even more time than that. 5 minutes is fine but 1 minute would be optimal for me.

actually bitcoin transfers need a change
10 minutes it is too long and almost everything requires a minimum of two confirmations,that is at least 20 minutes to take a bitcoin to another address
too long nowadays

Well thank god!  Without the noob crew showing up, we never would have known that we were doing it wrong all these years.

I think that's the point. Since transactions propagate so fast the confirmation time could probably be reduced safely.

With faster transaction times the capacity for the number of transactions would increase without needing to change the block size. What would happen today if there would be a huge spike in number of bitcoin transactions? I assume a queue of unprocessed transactions would build up, and with a risk of making the network unable to process many of them if the number of transactions would remain at a high plateau.

"Meanwhile, Andresen must also wrestle with a serious problem with Nakamoto’s design. The Bitcoin network is incapable of processing more than seven transactions a second, a tiny volume for a technology with global ambitions. (Only about one Bitcoin transaction is made per second today, but most people who own Bitcoin do so to speculate on its price, not to pay for goods or services). Visa processes almost 480 transactions a second worldwide and can handle up to 47,000 a second at peak times.

“I’m worried about it and there’s a big debate in the Bitcoin community about how are we going to do this,” says Andresen. His favored solution is to increase the size of the “blocks” of transactions that get confirmed by the network of bitcoin miners every 10 minutes. If that doesn’t happen, then getting a transaction processed promptly will require paying a significant transaction fee to promote it ahead of others, he says. Not everyone agrees with Andresen’s proposed fix. Some opponents argue it would make Bitcoin more centralized. Larger blocks would make mining the currency so computationally intensive that only major corporations could do it, they say, giving them a kind of centralized power over the currency’s use." -- http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527051/the-man-who-really-built-bitcoin/

I suggest reading this wiki page:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

The 7 txps limit is arbitrary, not a design choice, and can be increased quickly if necessary.
Miners won't suffer from this - they only have to confirm each transaction once per pool.

Quickly may not fast enough if it takes several weeks to implement as the wiki page said. And the miners must make changes so they can process larger blocks, which too may take a while for them to implement.

In reality what may happen is that payment channels will be used as a layer on top of Bitcoin. Here is Jeff Garzik talking about payment channels:

CoinSummit London 2014 - Will Bitcoin Last the Distance Beyond the 51% Challenge? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2q9pItnO0U&t=17m52s

That sounds like a good solution. It will prevent the block chain from becoming bloated and it will allow very fast (I guess) transaction times and a huge number of transactions per second. Would be excellent even for micropayments.

Relevant:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks

I don't know though if it's daily orphaned blocks or hourly or what.

Oh noes! Unless Jeff Garzik meant some new kind of payment channel in the video I posted earlier, I found a big problem with it:

"Example 7: Rapidly-adjusted (micro)payments to a pre-determined party ... This protocol has been implemented in bitcoinj" -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adjusted_.28micro.29payments_to_a_pre-determined_party

"This article describes how to use payment channels, a way to set up a pending transfer of value from one wallet to another such that the amount that will be transferred is incrementable at high speed and by very small amounts. Whilst this does not allow you to send micropayments at high speed to different recipients each time, many applications can fit within this framework - typically anything that involves micro-billing for a metered service." -- https://bitcoinj.github.io/working-with-micropayments

That's a serious limitation. The customer can only send microtransactions to ONE recipient. So, as I understand it, if you prepay say 0.1 bitcoins to do microtransactions with one company, you will have to make another prepayment in order to be able to do microtransactions with another company, and a third prepayment for a third company/service and so on. That actually sucks.

Maybe a system of distributed payment channel servers could be used. Then a user can prepay an amount of bitcoins to the payment channel system and use it for fast transactions to all recipients that are connected to the same system.

I heard that shorter transaction times leads to more orphaned blocks. And someone said that Bitcoin will probably be used for large transactions. I think that may happen; that the block chain will still have 10 minutes transaction times and relatively few large transactions. And then a layer on top of Bitcoin will handle the fast and smaller transactions with payment channel servers or something similar.

So what we may have in the future are million dollar transactions on the block chain. :D And the large number of ordinary transactions handled on a layer above Bitcoin.

I suspect this is going to go one of 2 ways......

1.  Enough third party infrastructure will be built over the core protocol to make small transactions nearly instantaneous.  It is in the interest of the companies building the new ecosystem to increase transactional throughput as much as they can.

2.  If 1 doesn't happen quickly enough (and I suspect it will), an alt-currency with much faster block intervals will force those overseeing the protocol into a decision as to whether BTC is just for large value transactions or needs to change to respond.

A distributed system of payment channel servers could have the servers compete with each other in terms of prepayment fees. If there are too few servers and they have large fees in a cartel-like setup, new servers would quickly be added by other people around the world with lower fees. That will make the distributed system self-stabilizing and optimizing in terms of fees (costs for users). And the fees incentive would make sure that there will be enough servers to run the network. If the fees become too low, then many servers will be shut down, but many big merchants will make sure there are enough servers because their business depends on the system.

The fast off-chain transactions can then be done with zero transaction fees, since the fees have already been prepayed. This means minimal friction for the fast transactions all the way down to micropayments. Spam transactions would cost money due to the prepayment fees and will therefore be limited. If the fees go down to zero, then spam transactions would still be unproblematic since the system can handle a massive number of transactions per second. The fees also have a lower limit dependent on ordinary bitcoin transactions since the payment channel servers need to make bitcoin transactions to the block chain, and those ordinary transactions will likely have fees even in the future.

The distributed payment channel system allows both senders and recipients to interact in a full many-to-many way without the need for special payment channel servers for specific services. A customer paying at Starbucks, McDonald's and on an online gambling site can use the same single system.

To use the system the user only needs to prepay an amount of bitcoins to the system as a whole. An algorithm can automatically pick the server with the lowest fee. And the server will receive the fee gradually by performing transactions for the system as a whole and not only for that particular user.

The system needs to be trustless to prevent fraud servers to be able to steal bitcoins from people.

1) Start your own cryptocurrency or create a hard-fork of bitcoin.
2) Invite people to move from bitcoin to "fastcoin"
3) Profit!

Isn't it easy?

My inputs: (pun intended, as that's the name of wallet service that died in glorious flames.)

1. Off chain transactions. All modern gambling / gaming sites do this. Some online wallets did this. Some payment processors do this. You deposit once. You play hundreds of times, sometimes several times per second, depending on what game you're into (dice, poker, slots, blackjack, card games, etc), then you can either sit on the balance or cash out later. The problem here is trust.
2. On chain transactions are typically broadcasted and accepted by 90% of the entire bitcoin network within 10 seconds. I believe the term is called "transaction confidence" or something like that. Good transactions usually mean you pay the bitcoin transaction fee, and there are no detected double spend attempts within those 10 seconds.

On a personal level, if I ask someone to pay me some bitcoin, I give them the address and wait for their transaction to appear on my client. Then I go on blockchain and look at it. I usually accept it as good even without a confirmation as long as I can see that the minimum fee was included.

For most everything else, 1 confirmation is really more than enough.

Bitcoin is best seen as a really really fast check, one that you can clearly see is "good" meaning it is "funded" and will not bounce, and one that you know will probably "clear" in an hour.

If your business accepts checks or credit cards as payment, you can probably accept bitcoin and know with a high degree of certainty that you will get paid.

It can be faster but current times are good too. If you are paying extra fee for faster confirmations, then it takes not less than 3 minutes for multiple confirmations.

Wrong

You're essentially paying for space on the blockchain. You have to pay once for each recipient. It's not off-chain.

Yes the fast transactions would have to be synched with the bitcoin blockchain. With the current proposed solution, as I understand it, a customer would need to prepay one payment channel for say Starbucks and another payment channel for Amazon and so on; one separate channel for each service. That's really problematic. A solution is needed where there is a whole distributed system of payment channels. Then the customer only prepays into that single system. And all the different recipients use the same system. So it would be the same kind of technique with the use of the blockchain with the difference that it would be a whole network of payment channel servers instead of each payment channel being a separate silo. I don't know yet if that's possible to implement in practice though.

I do think that transaction times can be increased, but not upto much extent. The current rates seem ok, unless you are in hurry.

What is called 0-confirmation transactions can be used for things like buying coffee at Starbucks. Situations like that where the transaction times need to be just a few seconds. I'm thinking of Bitcoin as a system that can handle all (or at least most) forms of currency transactions, including very stressful shopping and other payment situations where transaction times of a few seconds are desired or even demanded.

But, then there is another problem and that is a too bloated block chain. Imagine if bitcoin became mainstream with as many transactions per second globally as Visa. In theory a slight adjustment of the Bitcoin protocol may be able to handle such large amounts of transactions, while in practice it may be too much to handle.

And also, small bitcoin transactions would have a very high fee, percentage wise.

A payment channel system would take care of both the problem of slow transactions and a potential future very high transaction rate.

I think the experienced bitcoin people are the ones that really understand why this isnt a viable solution to the transaction times, which are not actually a high level problem.

At present, transaction time is faster than before and I don't think it would increase more soon.

Yeah 10 minutes is too long, but sometimes It takes more than 15 minutes for confirmation.
We're really need faster confirmation time.

The idea that third-party solutions will fix 0-conf... it completely throws the baby out with the bathwater.  Sure, it could work -- Visa works.

But it would no longer be bitcoin.  It would no longer be a global peer-to-peer currency.

There is a third option, aside from third party involvement and shorter block times.  The third option is innovation in the bitcoin consensus system itself.  Economic incentives keep miners following the rules today.  It may be possible to add incentives that lead to 0-conf transactions being very reliable in practice, on a time scale much shorter than 10 minutes.

shorter time between blocks would mean we'd have to wait for more confirmations for the same level of security.
It does help with the 7tx/sec limit and gives more granularity in the level of security that you want, but if you had to wait 20 mins for 2 confs then you'd still have to wait 20 mins for 4 confs or you wouldn't have the same security

I think LTC proved that 2,5 mins can work, (async protocols like stratum helped with the problem of wasting power in old blocks) but I'd recommend against anything lower than that.

This is often stated, but has been demonstrated not to be true.

Since mining is a random process with a poisson distribution, there is no accumulation of progress that happens between blocks.

6 blocks with a total network hashrate of 1 PH/s is equally secure at 5 minute intervals, 10 minute intervals, or 20 minute intervals as long as there is no network latency and all participants can handle the bandwidth requirements.

demonstrated? how?

I understand the Poisson process, but: if you want to double spend in a network that uses 6 confirmations, and it has 10 min intervals you must sustain your attack for an hour (in average). If it had 5 min intervals, then sustaining your attack for 30 minutes is enough. So the costs of your attack (if you rent hashrate per time) are halved.

Also, more blocks per hour mean more chances to attack per hour. Imagine that you achieve 25% hashrate. This is not the 51% required to be certain that your attack will succeed, however with 25% hashrate there is a probability that you can eventually find 6 blocks in a row before the network does and perform a double spend. Now let's say that 25% means that you need in average N blocks before you succeed (I'm too lazy to do the math but it should be around 5000 blocks). So if you can attack once every, let's say 5000 blocks, then you can successfully attack about once in a month at 10 minutes per block. But at 5 minutes per block, your ETA ("estimated time to attack") is halved to around 15 days.

so they're not "equally secure"

True, regardig your first point, it does depend on what you are trying to secure against.  My statement assumed that the attacker owned and controlled the hash power rather than renting it.  I'm not sure that renting hash power is a viable attack strategy, but if it is then you are correct in pointing out that it would cost more to rent the hash power for a longer period of time.

On the other hand, regarding your second point, while a shorter block interval might mean that an attacker with less than 50% of the hash power would have more opportunities to attempt an attack, it doesn't alter the fact that for any given transaction secured by 6 confirmations, the odds of that particular transaction being reversed after 6 confirmations doesn't change based on block interval.

agreed that the odds of a reversal are calculated based on number intervals independently of the duration of those intervals. However my point is that since there are more opportunities if intervals are shorter, the odds of it actually happening in a given timeframe are higher (which is what matters to users: probability of problems in a given timeframe, not for a given number of intervals).

Why do so many people believe this?

There are risks inherent in transactions, for all parties.  Why do so many people insist that it is wrong to use third parties to manage those risks?

I get it that credit card companies are reviled, and for good reasons.  But bitcoin removes the power imbalance that allows them to act in ways that earn our ire.  If they want to continue to exist, they will have to provide valuable services at reasonable costs.

The bitcoin blockchain is global and public.  Do you really think it is necessary that all transactions, no matter how trivial, must be in it?  Keep in mind that we have absolutely no clue how much it really costs to maintain the blockchain, and we won't know for many years.  I suspect that all of our estimates are very, very low, and eventually we will realize that trivial transactions are just too expensive to store publicly.

It's like saying that you expect your friend to not double-spend against you, so that is against the spirit of Bitcoin. Very silly.

Appreciate the way it is bitcoin rocks well in the original state satoshi made it to be.I am no complaints regarding the transactions times

Really, for most uses I see right now involving bitcoin and the most popular payment processors, I don't see much of a problem with the way it works.

It's not meant for fast food, but it can be accepted. I don't think some black hat is going to waste time attempting a double spend for his fries and burger.

Great presentation from DaveJH on hashing stats, and to hear someone armed with the qualifications and statistics recommend reduced confirmation times.  Not sure how recently this was but hope the core devs have a chance to absorb and respond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aBKLmJ2ebM

Graphs are practically impossible to see but the content is really good.

Great talk. I'd really like to see some responses.

I feel like he kind of glossed over the issue of infrastructure being the most important thing, then saying we can just crank up transaction times/volume as much as the economics allow. Sounds like an overhead-intensive optimization.

That said, as computers/networks improve, I'm getting much more amenable to decreasing block times versus increasing block sizes.

Agreed on skimming certain bits, but to be fair I think the presentation was more focused on hashing stats than network infrastructure.  It is nice to see numbers backing up what seems intuitively correct about the accuracy of derived hashing power measurements and pool diversification.   It was also good to get some numbers on the probability of outliers in terms of block resolution times.

Dave said in the presentation that he does contribute to these boards, and I am sure the bitcoin tech world is small enough still for this to be noticed and taken seriously.

Would it be possible to use Open Transactions on top of Bitcoin for fast transactions?

"A financial crypto and digital cash software library. The software's author likens it to "PGP for money".

Open Transactions (a centralized transaction system) is complementary to Bitcoin in that it provides some features that Bitcoin cannot, such as untraceable anonymous (versus pseudonymous) transactions, no latency (instant finality of settlement / no risk of double spending) and more." -- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Open_Transactions

The quote says centralized transaction system, but it's actually decentralized:

"IS IT CENTRALIZED?

The vision is not of a central server that you must trust.
Rather, the vision is of federated servers you don't have to trust." -- http://opentransactions.org/docs/md__r_e_a_d_m_e.html

I have changed my mind. To have a layer on top of Bitcoin for faster transactions is not such a good idea after all, because if the Bitcoin network remains slow in terms of transactions per second then it would remain vulnerable of being unable to handle all transactions.

I read somewhere that 0-confirmation transactions can be made fairly safe with a mathematical calculation. So that in combination with simple changes in the Bitcoin software to increase the number of transactions per second is a better solution.

And a bloated block chain is probably ok, since most wallets would then use the truncated block chain or what it's called.

That's great news, should only increase the value of btc in the long term. Also I seem to have noticed that transactions are generally faster the last week or so, maybe it's just me, but does anyone else have the same feeling?

Trivial transactions, like those lower than 0.0001 would be better served in an off-chain solution. Game sites typically do this.

There is also the supermarket credit card solution. The store has its own credit card, which can then be paid in bitcoin.

Or similarly, something like a starbucks bitcoin card. You can buy your coffee with that card, which can then be paid in bitcoin at the end of the month. Or typically it will be prepaid, so you store enough balance to afford a few days worth of coffee, depending on your use.

You don't typically use your cell phone like a payphone, where you insert coins for every call.

Actually, I'm in the process of patenting a decentralized, secure, fast instant transaction system.. should be easily able to be integrated into Bitcoin at which I'll have to see if Bitcoin is willing to buy the patent off of me.  We're sticking it into Nxt first though, partially to test if it works.  Should provide sub second transaction confirmations and works nicely with the current blockchain implementations.

Patenting your idea will almost certainly guarantee its complete failure, patented cryptosystems are almost never deployed and there is a long history proving this out. Your patent will also likely be invalid, since it was almost certainly anticipated by the years a public work in support of the community done by people here and in other places. Even ignoring the situation specific factors, in the US a majority of patents have claims struck down on review; for small inventors the patent system is a scam to make money for attorneys and the patent office: the patents they get are usually unenforceable for legal (invalidity) or economic (patent litigation costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and ruins good will, so a small inventor can almost never afford it and everyone knows it) reasons.

If your idea is actually useful, you should make it available publicly where it can be reviewed and refined and have some chance of adoption and building your professional credibility. If you instead go the route of patenting it, then even if the idea is unworkable (which it likely is, most cryptographic proposals turn out to be flawed) you will have only been successful as identifying yourself as a thief who has taken from the enormous body of work in Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency and cryptographic ecosystem given to your freely and attempted to lock up part of it for your personal profit at the expense of everyone else who you've benefited from.

I read somewhere that the moon is made of green cheese. ... you might want to be a bit more specific.

Zero confirmations are inherently somewhat unsafe-- inherently due to physics, a decentralized system cannot have an instant consensus because light has a finite speed. As far as I am aware zero-conf cannot magically be made substantially more safe without invoking a trusted party in some manner. There are many proposals for instant payments that involve things like escrowed coins (E.g. micropayment channel hubs), but they all make some additional security compromise (though potentially a small one).  I am not aware of any magical mathematical calculation that helps you.

Federated servers are a form of centralization, an improved one-- for sure, which may be suitable for many applications. Man would it be nice if they weren't.

Many people have looked at it.. no worries, it should work and provide fast, secure transactions.  I have spent a lot of time looking into prior art, I'm pretty sure it is unique.. though that is a risk of course.

And if it really does work as well as it seems it should, then I think that Bitcoin will be willing to pay a little bit for it.. either that or be beaten by Nxt which will have this feature working.  Which is fine by me too.

Also, I love cryptocurrency and I think it's got a bright shiny future ahead of it.. I'll be honest I'm mostly invested in it because I wanted to make money and the reason I invented this algorithm was because I was looking to make money and help out Nxt, and I don't think that's selfish.. you got in early right?  Why haven't you sold your Bitcoins and worked on Bitcoin for minimum wage in order to be selfless?

I've worked on Bitcoin for years without payment, and made no magical "early money" on account of having worked on it (it isn't like working on the software results in it paying you... outside of some scammy premined alts :), I think I've probably collected a dozen or so in donations, on account of open source work on Bitcoin), and made a conscious and intentional decision to not patent or restrictive license many piece of novel technology used in the ecosystem. Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology which has the potential to improve people's personal freedom and autonomy and allow more of the world to interact as equals. This potential cannot be realized-- cryptocurrency has no future-- if the system is owned or monopolized through state granted artificial property rights. Bitcoin is also the logical progression of the work of thousands of people over many years, without which Bitcoin would not have been possible.

I think that it's unfortunate that providing freedom to the world also includes greedy parasites who think it's acceptable to go around trying to take small (and usually obvious) extensions of a system that was shared freely with them and take them away from the public for their personal gain. But fact that you're based on NXT at all suggests that you don't actually have the technical background to gauge a secure system from an insecure one, so, well, good luck with that. In the unlikely event that what you've done is at all worthwhile, I'll personally endeavour to ensure that it's replaced with superior unencumbered alternatives so that they only thing you receive on account of your anti-social behaviour is lost income.

If anyone is threated on patent grounds by mczarnek or anyone else involved with the seedy "NXT" project now or in the future and finds this message, please feel free to reach out to me for technical, legal, or financial assistance. I've worked on defending against patents successfully for many years and would be glad to help anyone work around, uncover prior art, or otherwise invalidate patents in this space. Cheers.

Well, if they are using the algorithm I wrote, then I feel like it is reasonable to expect to be paid for it.  After all, I have spent a year learning all I could about blockchains and at least half a year figuring out how to make decentralized instant transactions work in the context of a blockchain and years before that learning about computer software, hardware, and math.  And patents are a good thing, because I will now be able to share this algorithm and provide Bitcoin with something very good in the process.  But I wouldn't have spent that much time working on it, if my intention wasn't to try to figure out how to make money off of it.  So in this case, patents are providing something new to the system that may have not been discovered for years to come.  If it was so obvious, then surely someone would have figured it out, right?

NXT's algorithm is actually very secure, I'm in the process of writing a paper explaining how Nxt solves the Nothing At Stake Problem.  Which let's face it, is only an issue if over approximately 50% of the forging stake is running a version of the software that tries to be selfish and work together to form attacking branches.  I would be happy to run it by you and hear your thoughts.  I suspect you haven't heard one key part of the algorithm that fixes the nothing at stake issue and provides 90% protection to the network.

Congrats on working for donations only..  but did you invest early yourself?  Maybe not the only reason, part surely part of your reason for working on Bitcoin is in order to increase the price of the Bitcoin you own. Maybe you actually are that selfless.. it's nice to have those kinds of people in the world.  But I've spent the last 6 months surviving off of less than minimum wage, specifically because I had and initial idea and wanted to flesh it out, analyze it from all angles and figure out how to do this.

And why do I want money?  Because most of my life I haven't had enough of it and have had to pinch pennies and scrounge to make sure that I could maintain a reasonable quality of life, it would be really nice to have a nice financial cushion.  At that point, I will likely be a lot more generous.  For me it's not about being greedy or wanting a nice fancy sports car.

It's funny that people working on money believe that money can be evil.. money can be a good thing and a good incentive for getting things done.

I don't believe that money can be or is evil. And getting paid is something that I'd never begrudge people for. What you're attempting to do there, however, is not to get paid for your work: You're attempting to get paid for other people's work (including mine, as a matter of fact), which made whatever you done possible and for which you did not pay a single bitcent. You are also attempting to get paid for the work other people may do in the future completely independently of you.  I consider this to be despicable and many other in our ecosystem will as well.  If you'd like to do useful work you can certainly find people to pay you to do so... if you're willing to actually do work, rather than spin your wheels encumbering the work others have done, I've certainly never complained about being unable to earn a living. (I thought I was clear that donations only amounted to a tiny amount? I've really tried to call for them.)  I worked on Bitcoin prior to having any expectation that it would make any money for me, it's an interesting technology which I believe is important for human freedom in the future (including my own and my families: my community work is not selfless, it's just merely not exploitive either).

Ah, this demonstrates you don't actually understand the issue there at all. Sad. I think it's explained quite clearly, but then again I've been working in this space for many years. It's a bit much to ask people to have a strong understanding of anything new to them in only six months.

Considering your lack of understanding of the basic technology, this tangent is probably uninteresting (that it's unlikely that you've found anything which is new and interesting or even secure in a meaningful sense). I recommend you confine your posts to the NXT thread rather than cropping up here to pump it and irritating others.

I'd demand that you stop pumping and actually post your design-- except since you've announced an intention obtain a monopoly ownership interest in the idea (and, accordingly, any cryptocurrency that used it), I wouldn't want to encourage anyone else in the ecosystem to review it and provide you with even more free labor to exploit for your personal gains.

I'll address history key attacks as well, which I assume is what you are talking about.  Nxt has thought of those as well and has solutions.

Please stop trying to make me out like I don't know what I'm talking about.

You know, if you'd had a reasonable discussion with me, instead of dinging my reputation, and believing that there is no way that I could possibly understand how blockchains work..  you may have actually been able to convince me not to patent.  A discussion might change my mind.. but putting me down and telling me I don't "understand basic technology"? Forget about it. Back to work on the patent.

I will agree that there are a lot of generous people in this field.  You also realize that you have no idea how much I'm willing to sell it for.  I wasn't planning on being unreasonable but if this is the kind of reception I get?  I actually thought that I was being helpful to Bitcoin by announcing that I've solved one of your biggest problems.

Sure, let me finish up this patent and as soon as it's patent pending I can throw something up and let people analyze it and attack it.

You keep making claims that strongly support that you don't know what you're talking about; e.g. the completely brain-dead claim that there is an assumption of majority of participants in the problems with PoS.  Perhaps you do actually understand things, if so, kudos to you. But it certainly doesn't appear to be the case... and it would surprise me genuinely consider that past inquiries to NXT's creators (like come from beyond) for even simple things like "What are your security assumptions?" have resulted in technobabble and even threats.

Considering that fact that you're yabbering on about NXT (in the wrong subforum) and patents without even bothering to disclose the idea it's seeming to me it's just more garbage altcoin hype. I used to be more tolerate of this stuff, but my patience is wearing out after encountering the 1000th person to pull this kind of nonsense.

You realize that you're continuing to demonstrate poor character here, right?  The only purpose not disclosing your grand idea at this point serves is to preserve hype in order to profit from asset speculators or fools who would pay you for an unsound unreviewed idea (when they can get neigh-infinite unsound ideas just going through the forum history).

Feel free to try to justify your abusive behaviour because you feel slighted by me personally if it helps you sleep at night... but everyone else knows that you and only you are responsible for your actions.

Transcribe it. Watching an hour long video intended for a general audience is too much to ask given zero information.

I was saying that this algorithm was something that Bitcoin could use as well.. yes, I happened to mention Nxt.  It's a great coin.  You insulted it, so I defended it.  I was not going out of my way to advertise it.  In fact I specifically said I was implementing it there first as a test case.. though to be honest it's because it's a great coin, with a great community, and because I promised them I'd implement it and I want to stay true to my word.  Also because I have received a lot of help from the Nxt community with this idea, so I feel it's fair to give back.  I haven't gotten any help from Bitcoin on this project.. I don't feel I need to give them my idea for free. And yes, my signature does advertise Nxt.  Because it's a great coin that doesn't get the credit it deserves and I want people to see that there are supporters out there.  Just because this isn't a Nxt thread doesn't mean that I should sit back, as you attack Nxt and not defend it.

A patent isn't an attack, it's a protection to make sure that I don't do the hard work so someone else can profit off of it. Just because nobody else around here is patenting things, doesn't make it a bad thing.  I'm grateful that a lot of work has been done in this field by people who are truly committed, but yes I want to make money off of my ideas.  I've only been out of college a few years, and I love the idea of being an entrepreneur and helping make the world a better place.  That doesn't

And you notice that you never just asked what the idea is?  But yes after you announce that you want to help invalidate my potential patent, then I don't exactly feel like sharing the idea with you and helping you do so.

And the issue with 'Nothing at stake' is that everyone argues that you could forged you could forge along multiple chains.  But in order to do that you have to get a stronger chain than the competition to have the network accept it or else they will discard it. In order to do this, probabilistically 50+% of the forging power would have to participate in this to sustain it for any reasonable about of time.  So yes, you do need a majority of the forging power to participate.  There are other attacks as well.

If this is the kind of reception Come-From-Beyond recieved, then I don't blame him for not having a great attitude.  Maybe something got lost due to this being done via text instead of in person.  I'm defending myself and the coin I'm involved with, I have not criticized Bitcoin or attacked you, and in fact was offering to help out by fixing one of Bitcoin's biggest problems.  You mean while have implied I'm a parasite, called alt-coins scammy, insulted my intelligence, etc.

And no, I didn't 'pay a single bitcent' for your knowledge.. I spent months and months working and thinking and trying to solve a problem, which is a form of payment itself.

If you have really done this much great work, you should ask the Bitcoin Foundation or people if you can be paid for it.  How do you keep yourself alive off for years off of the donations of a dozen Bitcoins?

If someone else thinks I'm being unreasonable there, please tell me so.

Your first post in this thread was advertising that NXT was implementing an unspecified, undescribed, instant transaction system which you have/are patenting.  Your posting history and signature are plugging NXT in many inappropriate places.

That isn't what a patent does. A patent invokes the state to prohibit people from freely communicating and acting on ideas which they invented completely independently of you. It grants you a monopoly ownership over an idea and, in the rare cases where they're actually successful (as mentioned a _majority_ of patents lose claims on review), allows you to extract rent from others who have worked hard to invent and build the infrastructure that your work rests on.

Funny, you're surely not expressing it. Instead you're promoting competing systems which have ripped off ideas from Bitcoin (and broken them), and claim to be working on extensions which you plan to exclusively control for your personal profit.  Foolishly too, since as I've mentioned: we have decades of experience that patents completely suppress the adoption of cryptosystems, even very useful and powerful ones (like Chaum's invention of digital cash).

Why would I have? If you wanted to discuss an idea you would have. Instead you wanted to promote NXT and try to ring up customers for your patent based purely on the promises that it will do something useful. I'm not interested in giving you free review for you to further go and turn a private profit off my back and the backs of others who worked for years (and even decades) inventing the things you just learner about in the last few months... though you should review my very first response to you: "If your idea is actually useful, you should make it available publicly where it can be reviewed and refined and have some chance of adoption and building your professional credibility."

You can't stop me from doing so, any patent application will be made public, My ability to make your patent commercially worthless is not reduced. All keeping what you're doing now secret accomplishes is reducing the risk that someone points out the the ideas are old (thus making it harder for you to engage in the inequitable conduct of hiding the actual prior art), or that they're unsound (stifling your ability to pump NXT or sell the ideas to an unsophisticated buyer).

This isn't true. Please take the time to actually read Andrew's paper on this.  One of the points that you're missing is that "50% of the forging power" is defined _inside_ the chain and is meaningless outside of it, so your security definition is circular. Likewise, any probabilistic process repeated enough times where only one success is required tends to probability one, there is no reasonably retying limit external to the system, so the protection is, again, circular.

No, if you were actually offered to do these things you would have actually helped instead of bragging about vaporware proprietary technology, which you helpfully provided no details on except to promote NXT. Give it up.

I've worked full time for close to 20 years doing good and valuable work on technology that has helped people solve real problems, much of it shared with the public, and none of it abusively encumbering the ideas and work of third parties via patents (rather, I've done a fair amount of patent busting along the way). I'm not asking here for money from anyone because I don't need to, I've made money by doing work and not preventing other people from working, and as a result I don't need any more (though more is always appreciated and put to good uses). I don't begrudge you for wanting to get paid: good work deserves pay, but locking up ideas isn't work, and it doesn't deserve pay-- quite the opposite. Instead, it marks you as a wanna-be-thief in my book who would seek to profits of my own efforts and would use litigation to prevent me from inventing on my own... you could ask people to pay you to work on useful things, but given the approach that you're taking I, for one, would rather pay someone who has better ethics.

If you care to propose something technical, feel free to start a new thread. Otherwise, you're in the wrong subforum. Cheers.

Well.. maybe if Bitcoin had patented the blockchain we wouln't have all these scammy coins you are talking about. lol

You are both saying that other competing systems have ripped off Bitcoin.. then saying that normally inventions are are invented in parallel.  If I truly had the best instant transaction system and it worked, the Bitcoin would copy it right?  If I had a strong patent, then they couldn't, correct?  That is the purpose.  Yes, it is possible for parallel invention to occur and that is not the intended purpose of patents to block.  But that is not the purpose of a patent.

But seriously.. Bitcoin has dismissed Proof of Stake, so another group of people stepped up to try to show that it could be done securely.. that doesn't make alt coins scammy.  If he didn't want alt coins around, then Satoshi shouldn't have released Bitcoin open source.

And yes, the work is internal to the blockchain BUT as long as you have the correct genesis block, you can check it all on your own.  Somewhere along the way someone would've had to cheat the system otherwise.  I will agree that it makes trimming the blockchain harder to do.. but not impossible.  Not to the point where it can't be done securely.

I will grant you that some of the proof of stake security enhancements do use information that requires a little bit of trust but once you are up and running and sure you are on the correct branch, then you will continue along that branch, even in the face of an ~90% attack on the network.

Anyway, clearly you and I have moral compasses and looks like we'll just have to agree to disagree on the patent issue.  I'm not intending to use it to block Bitcoin from anything or chrage extremely unreasonable rates or anything like that.

I think the part about 10 second transactions is called "transaction confidence". It's just a few simple rules to follow and easily check:

1. check the transaction if it has the minimum tx fee.
2. check if there are no double spend attempts seen on the network within 10 seconds.
3. check how many nodes have relayed this particular transaction.

Even with an orphaned block or two, I have seen many such "valid" transactions get included in all blocks concerned.

As for the BTC vs NXT thing, well, if BTC is more expensive, then its harder to attack, right?

With Bitcoin, anything above zero is extremely unreasonable. It's supposed to be open source.

Who is this "Bitcoin" that would have "patented the blockchain"?

Now that the discussion on side chains is more advanced, it looks like a side chain with faster block times could help with this. If it's merged-mined with bitcoin then it could be secure enough for smaller and faster tx.
You would have some money for everyday use on the fast side chain.

Perhaps but global consensus is inherently slow. There have been many good proposals for faster transactions which don't require a global consensus, and so they can achieve speeds that no global consensus system can achieve.

I was hoping they'd have published their results by now. That'd be the shorter route. I'll see if I can get something on paper.

For now you can check out the slide deck(which is frankly pretty easy to understand): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nVGCU6MDdLad8yOAmNWDbCUqXerq5Ss1B5J7AcLmZ1w/edit#slide=id.p13

edit: for me slide 66 is the money shot. Shows how changing to 2 or 5 minute block time would make 10% pools significantly less variant in returns. (and makes it harder to hide selfish mining style attacks, etc)

Quite true. If Bitcoin had been patented it would have been a total flop, and thus no alt-coins would have been created.

So I'm supposed to spend months of my life working for free?  Don't get me wrong I like crypto but I want to make some money.  I was pretty excited about sharing the idea..tell you what.

Anyone willing to pay me not to patent the idea? lol  I'll share the idea with you first given a non-disclosure agreement.

I will pay you not to post anymore. 

Linux is open source.
Bitcoin is open source.
LibreOffice is a multiplatform open-source office suite.

I'm sure I can give you hundreds more examples. Each of those projects are "free to download and use" but the developers have happy lives and are being compensated somehow.

In the beginning, open source software looked like a saintly gift. Programmers would work hard, then give away the fruits of their labor to anyone who wanted it. Everyone would benefit from this act of pure charity.

Over time, however, companies realized they could make money and give away the software at the same time. They could do well by doing good. This wasn't a shock to some of the original open source advocates -- it was how some intended it to be. Richard Stallman, for one, always said that "free speech" was more important to him than "free beer." He embraced the idea that companies could charge anything they like -- as long as the user could fiddle with the code and distribute the result.

There is a common misconception that there is no money in open source software. It is true that open source code is free to download. But when it comes to making money you should think of this as an opportunity rather than a limitation.

    Businesses who make money in open source software include:

    MySQL (now owned by Oracle): Popular relational database.
    Red Hat: Major distributor of Linux for server and desktop use.
    WordPress: Widely used blogging platform.
    SugarCRM: Business customer relations management.
    Magento: E-commerce shopping platform.
    Zimbra: E-mail and messaging server.


If your idea is truly worth something, even if you give it away for free, you will surely get compensated somehow. I don't know how.

If it's not, then no one will pay for it anyway.


Reference: (parts of the above text can be found here)
https://www.cio.com.au/article/528999/greed_good_9_open_source_secrets_making_money/
http://opensource.about.com/od/basics/tp/5-Ways-To-Make-Money-With-Open-Source-Software.htm

Exactly. We should just ignore the guy, we're feeding the troll. He'd be building something if he had anything worthwhile or the money to waste on patents.

Appreciate it, the problem is that if I'm implementing this nto someone else's coin, they are making money and I'm not.. because I didn't get in on the ground floor. the only way that I can see to make real money with it seems to be to start my own coin.. But there are already too many as it is, in my opinion.

But maybe the name recognition alone is enough.

Thank for treating me with respect.. I was on the fence about whether or not to patent or pursue anything like that. NXT community was encouraging me not to actually. But I was thinking about it.. and you know the biggest reason I want to pursue it? This thread, being called a troll, being told I don't know anything, etc. But if my initial reception had been closer to Dabs, might've freely shared the idea.. honestly, I'd prefer to just talk openly about it and bounce it around with others.. But there is something to be said for trying to make some money of it.. and for not wanting to help out Bitcoin if type this is the reception I get.


It isn't exactly the kind of thing you do overnight.. But again, thank you for providing me more incentive to try to jump through the hoops and hassle and spend the money to try to patent.

Try putting up a donation address or something. You might be surprised. (It won't come from me as I'm just as "poor" as you are.)

This is still early times for both BTC and NXT. My money's on BTC though. :)

Currently we do see an issue with many transactions clogging the queue. Could we convert the wallets to broadcast anyone can pay transactions so that any wallet that sees the transactions could append to it? That would mean many people could accomplish all of their moving in single lump transactions. Perhaps just by letting anyone can pay transactions be rebroadcast and used if available is a better solution. Could that also be a great method of mitigating dust attacks on top of keeping the minimum send amount?