You cannot "not rely" on the stakeholder generated blocks for double-spend prevention.
Let me try to explain what I meant. Let's disregard PoA signatures and have weight=1 for every PoW block, and assume that after 6 blocks the merchant's client displays some green signal which means that it's safe to assume that the txn from 6 blocks earlier won't be reversed. Suppose the the chain is: P0 --> S1 --> S2 --> S3 --> P1 --> P2 --> P3 --> P4 --> P5 --> P6 Where P0 is the PoW block that derived the three stakeholders blocks S1,S2,S3, and P1,P2,P3,P4,P5,P6 are regular PoW blocks. Suppose that S1 is the block that included the txn that's relevant for the merchant. If S1 has weight=1 and S2 has weight=1 and S3 has weight=1, then the merchant's client will display the green signal when it sees that the block P3 was generated, and then the merchant will send the merchandise to the double-spending attacker. Now, in order to reverse the txn, if the attacker controls (or colludes with) the stakeholders S1,S2,S3 then he could have prepared his secret branch by instantly generating 3 new blocks S1*,S2*,S3* that don't include the relvenat txn, and then use his hashpower to generate only 3 PoW blocks P1*,P2*,P3*, instead of having to generate 6 PoW blocks. So the attacker only needs to generate 3 PoW blocks to outcompete the honest branch, if he bribes the malicious/rational stakeholders to collude with him. However, if we have weight=0 for the blocks S1,S2,S3, then the merchant's client will display the green signal only after seeing that P6 was generated, and we're good. Does this make sense? I don't think that P6 is the appropriate time to send the green signal. I believe you should wait for 2 full cycles of stake blocks to be completed before sending the green signal. P0 --> S1 --> S2 --> S3 --> P1 --> P2 --> P3 --> P4 --> P5 --> S4 --> S5 --> S6 --> P6--> P7 --> P8 --> P9 --> P10 --> S7 --> S8 --> S9 --> P11 If the txn enters at S1, then I think you should wait to give the green signal until after P11 is found. That is after 11 PoW blocks. If each PoW block comes at 2.5 minute intervals on average and the stake blocks are very fast (say 20 seconds each), this is a total time of about 30 minutes. |
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Bitcoin doesn't make people do bad things
You wrote a very nice argument, with which I mostly agree. It is just your use of the word "make". If you meant "make = force", then I'm fully with you. But if you meant "make = induce" or "make = enable", then in my opinion you are wrong. Especially on the purely software technical side this project became a great enabler and inducer for incompetent programmers. Looking purely at the effects it is hard to distinguish incompetence from the opportunistic treachery, cf. bitfloor fiasco. But the end result can be widely observed: Bitcoin started as a rather low-quality proof-of-concept code. It had no (or very few) remote exploit-style faults and this somehow became equivalent to the claim that Bitcoin is almost perfect "Mona Lisa"-quality financial code, cf. Dan Kaminsky presentation. Well, the reality is that Bitcoin is far from perfect (in the financial software engineering realm) and has an unfortunate property of attracting some of the worst programming anti-talent. The profession of software engineering is completely unregulated, neither legaly nor morally. This is unlike eg. construction engineering, where enough people died in collapsed structures or simply lost the roof over their head to understand the value of the "building code". Similarly, one doesn't have to be electrical engineer to understand the value of "electrical code" or a firefighter to understand the value of "fire safety code". There's still not enough people who lost their savings or operating funds to make the broad Bitcoin users community understand the value of high-quality software. At least the bitomat.pl operator did his share and is now a perfect example of what will happen if you disregard the word "ephemeral" in the documentation of Amazon Web Services. If you are skilled in programming, why don't you just make an alternate chain? Bitcoin has serious problems that could use fixing. There is no way you are going to convince the developers to fix them. They will just deny the existence of these problems. If you make an obviously better product, you can convince users to adopt it. Just making the back-end better is not enough, however. You need to offer users some salient new features. Key problems include: 1) Long-run sustainable blockchain [don't know anything about scalability etc., but the bitcoin system will not be secure without block reward. I am sure of that. This is part of the back-end.] 2) Wallet security [There is no reason why users should have to expose their entire balance to theft whenever they send coins. Fixing this would be a salient new feature.] You suggest that there are other issues. I don't have any programming expertise and cannot comment on these. Why not fix everything you can and release a higher quality product? |
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I meant the weight for deciding the winning branch among competing branches. It'd be weight=1 for unsigned regular PoW blocks, (say) weight=5 for signed PoW blocks via simple-PoA, and weight=0 for stakeholders blocks. The branch with the highest weight wins. Also, because the PoW block the precedes and derives the stakeholders blocks is significantly more reversible than other PoW blocks, it should also have weight=0 until all of the consecutive stakeholders blocks were created (so it'd be weight=1 or weight=5 for the batch that consists of this PoW block together with the consecutive stakeholders blocks that follow it).
In other words, we wouldn't rely on blocks that the stakeholders create in order to provide double-spending security. Or maybe we could somewhat rely on stakeholders blocks by giving them some weight, if the security analysis of the various possible scenarios would make sense. This would be similar to the situation we have with ABAB, where the type-A PoW blocks provide double-spending security, and the type-B stakeholders blocks provide empty-blocks-DoS security.
You cannot "not rely" on the stakeholder generated blocks for double-spend prevention. These are mandatory components of the block chain. If you cannot create them, you cannot double-spend. In fact, these blocks will always be the primary obstacle to double-spending. The weights for mandatory blocks are more or less meaningless. Anything mandatory implicitly has effectively infinite weight. By comparison, voluntary components (whether signatures or blocks) have only a minor impact on double-spending. I would recommend a weight of 1 for unsigned blocks and a weight of 2 for signed blocks. If you raise the weight to try to make voluntary signatures matter more, you are opening the door to long, unpredictable reorganizations. That is highly undesirable. I see the voluntary signatures as stakeholder heartbeats. Their most important use is providing a record of which stakeholder participation. BTW regarding ABAB, post #68 was probably a bit too optimistic. If the attacker waits (say) several weeks so that he could generate (say) 3 type-B blocks much faster than the active stakeholders, then even if he has less than 50% hashpower he could outcompete the honest network by generating the 3 interleaved type-A blocks a little slower than the honest network, but overall his secret branch of 3+3 blocks wil be generated faster than 6 blocks of the honest network. We should have more exact analysis, but it seems to make sense that an attacker with less than 50% hashpower could double-spend if he waits for enough coin-confirms before he starts the attack.
Let's just drop my ABAB type blocks. The proof-of-stake blocks are redundant if random stakeholders can generate blocks. Complex nested systems should be avoided (unless they are necessary). Analysis becomes more complex in the nested system. I'm worried about the rewards that the stakeholders should collect. The stakeholders provide a useful function for the security of the network, so they probably should receive some reward, in particular if they take a risk by using unencrypted wallet or limited-withdrawal wallet. But it's arguable, we could claim that the stakeholders have an interest to protect their stake by keeping the network secure, so maybe it's appropriate that they receive little or no reward. This is also related to whether the reward should be determined by the free-market with stakeholders-fees, or enforced by the protocol so that the security would be more predictable. The issue the worries me is that if for example the simple-PoA fee is 10% of the block reward, and with 3 consecutive stakeholders blocks this 10% figure becomes even higher, then we can take some extreme scenario where a stakeholder who has 10% of the total stake doesn't spend his coins and waits until the other 90% spend their coins to collect 1/10 of that 90% so now he'd have close to 20% stake, then wait again until the 80% spend their coins to collect 2/10 of the 80% so he'd now have about 35% of the total stake, etc.
Let's hold off on this. We need to understand the blockchain structure first. Everything is interrelated, so you cannot usefully analyze one thing at a time without holding other aspects of the system fixed. Thus we need to fix some things before moving on. |
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regarding demurrage: miner could impose floor to transaction fee based on coin age. No code change needed for that just, their majority will to do so.
You could do this, but it is hard to get 51% to join a cartel. That applies to using a vhanged code too. How is that? Changed code allows an arbitrarily small minority to vote with their feet. Mining power requires majority consensus AND the will to impose that consensus on any deviant minority. |
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This idea would probably be more sensitive to the stakeholders' participation. With 50% participation, it will take 8 PoW solutions until the 3 consecutive stakeholders blocks will be created. So the performance of the network degrades, in particular in terms of double-spending security if weight=0 is used. How much degradation depends on the gap until the next stakeholders blocks.
Gradual degradation of network performance can be resolved by removing inactive public keys from the lottery list. We can talk about this once we have the block mining order and signature requirements fixed. So the performance of the network degrades, in particular in terms of double-spending security if weight=0 is used. How much degradation depends on the gap until the next stakeholders blocks.
I'm not sure what you mean by weight. The key characteristic of these blocks is that they are mandatory and occur at deterministic intervals. I feel like we should ignore any possibility for collusion right now and maybe revisit it later. In any consensus system, there are so many ways people can collude that it is very difficult to defend against. The best defense is probably just a) ensuring that collusion requires cooperation from many different people, and b) ensuring that the set of people is difficult to predict beforehand. Maybe n=2 would make more sense than n=3.
I would prefer n=3. Are you talking about the derived stakeholders for simple-PoA signatures, or the stakeholders who were derived to create a stakeholders block? Not sure what kind of double-spending attack you have in mind. The purpose of simple-PoA is to reduce the risk of double-spending, and with weight=0 the stakeholders blocks become neutral to double-spending attacks, so they just degrade the network performance.
Okay, let me review this to see if we are communicating. I'm only trying to describe the block ordering and not rewards etc. We should tentatively agree on the block ordering if possible. Block 1: PoW Block is mined, random stakeholder is drawn. This random stakeholder is able to deliver an optional signature any time between block 1 and block 5c. Block 3: PoW Block is mined, random stakeholder is drawn. This random stakeholder is able to deliver an optional signature any time between block 2 and block 6. Block 4: PoW Block is mined, random stakeholder is drawn. This random stakeholder is able to deliver an optional signature any time between block 3 and block 7. Block 5: PoW Block is mined, 3 random stakeholders are drawn. Block 5a: Random stakeholder block 1 Block 5b: Random stakeholder block 2 Block 5c: Random stakeholder block 3 Block 6: PoW Block is mined, random stakeholder is drawn. This random stakeholder is able to deliver an optional signature any time between block 6 and block 10c. ... Block 10: PoW Block is mined, 3 random stakeholders are drawn. Block 10a: Random stakeholder block 1 Block 10b: Random stakeholder block 2 Block 10c: Random stakeholder block 3 ... Say the blocks have a 2.5 minute interval on average, so a full sequence 1-5 occurs about once every 15 minutes. The stakeholder blocks would appear almost instantly since they don't require work. Is that correct? I think it would work fine this way. |
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I had a short conversation with Theymos regarding this thread. From what was clarified to me, it is unlikely that Patrick will receive a scammer tag while he keeps trying to repay or to renegotiate his obligations. Since JoelKatz has already established that the mutual agreement was based on common mistake, and Mircea Popescu's spokesperson has already indicated that there is not a signed contract, the furthering discussion of this matter is useless.
Mircea Popescu is free to come to this forum and renegotiate his mutual agreement with Patrick.
Regarding the Kraken fund issue, I advise Patrick's investor to open another thread and provide evidence which indicates that he was trying to defraud or to deceive his investors.
LOL. Funny how libertarians are so comfortable writing in the style of Big Brother. Perhaps libertarianism is mostly about jealousy and there is not much else to it. |
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Of course that wouldn't be bitcoin and given there are no barriers of entry the remaining non-cartel miners could continue to real bitcoin fork. In time more miners would join the real fork because that is where the value (from utility, adoption, and scarcity) is at.
It would be like saying. Yeah someday gold miners could get tired of limited quantities of gold and start making coins made out of sand. Then people would buy the sand coins and the supply of sand coins would explode. Except they wouldn't. They would continue to use the gold coins due to their value (from utility, adoption, and scarcity).
How do the other miners mine without the cartel's blessing? You are dismissing the cartel by assuming that it does not exist. |
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I think you are referring to the DoS problem, where the attacker can submit empty blocks. You could also be referring to the double-spending problem.
It doesn't matter. In either case, there are two simple options. Please pick an option. If you do not like either option, please explain why.
Denial of Service:
a) accept that an attacker with 91% of hashing power and 10% of stake will succeed [this is fine with me, but I prefer b]
b) select n random stakeholders who will mine mandatory blocks in sequence. Say n=3. These blocks can be mined immediately. Then our hypothetical 10% stake attacker would need to mine 1,000 blocks before he could draw his own stake three times in a row. Thus he would need 99.9% of hashing power to deny service, rather than just 91%.
Double-Spending:
a) accept that an attacker with 91% of hashing power and 10% of stake will succeed [this is fine with me, but I prefer b]
b) select n random stakeholders to sign each block. Say n=3. Then our hypothetical 10% stake attacker would need to mine 1,000 blocks before he could draw his own stake three times in a row. Thus he would need 99.9% of hashing power to double-spend, rather than just 91%.
Note: When I say 10% stake, I am referring to 10% of participating stake, which is likely less than 10% of total stake.
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Those of us who had information that proved how much Pirate was responsible for and how no business model that could have existed in Bitcoin at the time to make that kind of money was even possible were easily dismissed as Micon-style trolls. Sure, Pirate's supported saw our reasoning, but because of their preconceptions of us, they fought us tooth and nail. They would have found a reason to dismiss or ignore your arguments no matter what happened. Those who put money into these schemes do it because they believe what they want to believe. The only argument that is needed for people who think rationally about it is "If it's too good to be true...", and if they already at the point where they ignore that they will ignore every other argument as well. Right, Maged is assuming that the type of people who invested with pirate can be persuaded by rational arguments. This is incorrect. If they could think rationally, then they wouldn't have ever considered a pirate investment. One can however exert influence on these types using derision and ridicule. Trolling is the proper approach because it is the only effective approach. |
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Micon shows me that I could have trolled them even harder.
Which would of benefited whom?0 Whoever lost money on the pirate scheme AND would not have invested had pirate been more aggressively ridiculed. I don't think that is an empty set. Sadly, acting alone, I may not be influential enough make a difference. That is the free-rider problem. I think by calling him a troll, you are blaming him for your personal shortcomings. If you had trolled too, then Micon's troll label would not stick. Micon graciously put himself out there on behalf of everyone else. Let's thank him for it. |
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Zhuangzi and Huizi had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, "See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish." "You not being a fish yourself," said Huizi, "how can you know the happiness of the fish?" "And you not being I," retorted Zhuangzi, "how can you know that I do not know?" "If I, not being you, cannot know what you know," urged Huizi, "it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know the happiness of the fish." "Let us go back to your original question," said Zhuangzi. "You asked me how I knew the happiness of the fish. Your very question shows that you knew that I knew. I knew it on this bridge."
Would you care to formulate your argument regarding the subject discussed in this thread and explain how is related to the above circular logic? No. |
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I'd say no. If a Chimp can prove an understanding of, and both demand and respect individual rights, he's got 'em. Of course, They can't, so that's the difference. Reason.
That's why child rape is permitted. They can't prove shit, so they lay down and think of England and we pound their asses ad libitum. That is natural law. Some people prefer to use their cock and others prefer to use their hand or a paddle. That is freedom of choice. [Do I have it right yet? Or is it back to the reeducation forum?] |
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How do you know that you are 'more rational' than other animals? Do you speak fish? Your assumption is based on a false premise. There is not more or less rationality. Rationality is not qualified by a degree of quantity.http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/rational?q=rationality#rational__5Definition of rational
adjective
1 based on or in accordance with reason or logic:
I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation
(...)
rationality
adverb 莊子與惠子游於濠梁之上。莊子曰：「鯈魚出游從容，是魚之樂也。」 惠子曰：「子非魚，安知魚之樂？」莊子曰：「子非我，安知我不知魚之樂？」 惠子曰：「我非子，固不知子矣；子固非魚也，子之不知魚之樂，全矣。」 莊子曰：「請循其本。子曰『汝安知魚樂』云者，既已知吾知之而問我。 我知之濠上也。」 Zhuangzi and Huizi had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, "See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish." "You not being a fish yourself," said Huizi, "how can you know the happiness of the fish?" "And you not being I," retorted Zhuangzi, "how can you know that I do not know?" "If I, not being you, cannot know what you know," urged Huizi, "it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know the happiness of the fish." "Let us go back to your original question," said Zhuangzi. "You asked me how I knew the happiness of the fish. Your very question shows that you knew that I knew. I knew it on this bridge." |
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Moral behavior is a result of a rational decision since irrational animals cannot define the limits of what is acceptable or not acceptable.
How do you know that you are 'more rational' than other animals? Do you speak fish? 莊子與惠子游於濠梁之上。莊子曰：「鯈魚出游從容，是魚之樂也。」 惠子曰：「子非魚，安知魚之樂？」莊子曰：「子非我，安知我不知魚之樂？」 惠子曰：「我非子，固不知子矣；子固非魚也，子之不知魚之樂，全矣。」 莊子曰：「請循其本。子曰『汝安知魚樂』云者，既已知吾知之而問我。 我知之濠上也。」
Zhuangzi and Huizi had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, "See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish." "You not being a fish yourself," said Huizi, "how can you know the happiness of the fish?" "And you not being I," retorted Zhuangzi, "how can you know that I do not know?" "If I, not being you, cannot know what you know," urged Huizi, "it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know the happiness of the fish." "Let us go back to your original question," said Zhuangzi. "You asked me how I knew the happiness of the fish. Your very question shows that you knew that I knew. I knew it on this bridge."
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but that would not in any fashion excuse a rape.
I'm sorry, but I thought you recognized these children as your property. How is it different from 'raping a fleshlight'? Do I sense statist backsliding? I also find it really ironic that this religious wacko is a libertarian. Accept some personal responsibility like god wants you to, LOL. Well, hello Cunicula. Am I out of the penalty box, or did you lift your ignore just for this special occasion? As for the children as property statement, I don't actually regard my children as property, I was presenting that argument because it's a common atheist/libertarion one with regard to the reality of children in the absence of any recognition of a God. The religious argument being quite different, and as you pointed out, being a religious wacko I tend towards that one; yet I don't consider that one intelletually satisfying either. Still, you don't even have a coherent philosophical perspective here to cling to. What has Paul Krugman said about this topic? You'd better go check. The thread was too rich for me to resist. I don't justify my decisions using a 'coherent philosophical perspective.' Therefore, I am not troubled that I don't have one to cling to. |
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In order to deal with an attacker who has 99% hashpower, we can have scrypt based derivation function to choose the lucky stakeholder which takes (say) 3 minute to calculate.
Edit: even though the 99% attacker is 100 times faster than the honest hashpower, the fact that the scrypt derivation function is sequential means that he wouldn't have advantage over an honest miner who solves the block, so the penalty for the honest network when the lucky stakeholder is absent would also be (say) 3 minutes, which is good. However, there is a huge problem here, because nodes will have to spend 3 minutes to verify each stakeholders block. So if a new user download the blockchain (with e.g. 250,000 blocks) for the first time, it will take him weeks to verify it. So this is another reason why the advance notice and derving the winning stakeholder from the last several blocks is useful, unless we find a way around this problem.
I feel like you are trying to address an imaginary problem. Why not just have people continuously try to find and broadcast new block candidates until one of these block candidates gets signed and can be built upon? This is like how PoW mining operates currently except there is an additional hurdle to meet before you move on to mining the next block. Why wouldn't this work? What concern are you trying to address with the special scrypt function (i.e. I don't see why it would be helpful)? [The above questions are all basically the same, but I am rephrasing them in case one of the versions is easier to understand than the others.] |
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He also recognised early on that an "arms race" may eventuate and perceived that as a "flaw",
It obviously is a flaw. And he deserves credit for pointing that out. Timekoin seems ill-conceived though. |
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but that would not in any fashion excuse a rape.
I'm sorry, but I thought you recognized these children as your property. How is it different from 'raping a fleshlight'? Do I sense statist backsliding? I also find it really ironic that this religious wacko is a libertarian. Accept some personal responsibility like god wants you to, LOL. |
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I will also nominate him. I trolled these scammers (aka borrowers) and idiots (aka lenders) hard. I always called them by their true names.
Micon shows me that I could have trolled them even harder. I'm sorry for my mistake.
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regarding demurrage: miner could impose floor to transaction fee based on coin age. No code change needed for that just, their majority will to do so.
You could do this, but it is hard to get 51% to join a cartel. The idea of rejecting blocks from independent-minded miners would be very controversial. You may see something like this in the future, however. As mining gets more centralized, it will be easier to form cartels. The decrease in block reward will also make cartels more profitable. |
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