Whoops:

That was satire because many people were accusing me of being BCX back when he threatened to attack Monero and I tried to figure out if there was a technical hole to attack from.

My technical investigation is how I first realized that Cryptonote is theoretically susceptible to combinatorial unmasking (and especially from overlapping rings).

The BCX incident is one I would like to forget. I was sincere but it didn't really reflect well on me that BCX was apparently lying so he could short Monero (or that is the conjecture). I did not short Monero.

You don't seem to understand the failure caused by vested interests (case in point: Bitcoin's scalepocalypse) which makes your $billion adoption market implausible, which was the reason we needed decentralization. Case in point: Apple Pay's inability to scale because it competes against other vested interests.

Market caps are not adoption valuation. They are greater fool illusions, especially when one can't even calculate a P/E ratio in the case of crypto trash. When five MAD men carrying box cutters and riding camels buy ETH from themselves to create the illusion of a $billion market cap, I know crypto has turned into a cess pool going no where.

You don't seem to understand the failure caused by vested interests (case in point: Bitcoin's scalepocalypse) which makes your $billion adoption market implausible, which was the reason we needed decentralization. Case in point: Apple Pay's inability to scale because it competes against other vested interests.

Market caps are not adoption valuation. They are greater fool illusions, especially when one can't even calculate a P/E ratio in the case of crypto trash. When five MAD men carrying box cutters and riding camels buy ETH from themselves to create the illusion of a $billion market cap, I know crypto has turned into a cess pool going no where.

The only way to have an external data feed that is not binary is to delegate to a centralized source, because even if we use reputation (or stake deposits) to prevent Sybil attacks and take a vote, the problem is that such a vote only surely converges to a majority outcome if the choices are only binary (e.g yes or no). Otherwise we can get forks which disagree on the consensus choice.

So conceptually an Augur-like prediction market could work if the bet outcomes are binary. But this reputation consensus has to be integrated with the block chain consensus and can't be orthogonal to it. Augur's mistake is building a reputation consensus on top of Ethereum's separate (but not orthgonal!) consensus protocol, which thus destroys the Nash equilibrium and creates a Prisoner's dilemma over which is the consensus choice.

But an additional problem, is that reputation systems are a power vacuum that ultimately centralize to a winner-take-all due to the Iron Law of Political Economics.

And the flaws of proof-of-stake have been enumerated.

I'd be interested in seeing a proof-of-work consensus for binary outcome predication bets. But that will have serious problems if the binary outcomes are not objectively clear to all miners.

The only way to have an external data feed that is not binary is to delegate to a centralized source, because even if we use reputation (or stake deposits) to prevent Sybil attacks and take a vote, the problem is that such a vote only surely converges to a majority outcome if the choices are only binary (e.g yes or no). Otherwise we can get forks which disagree on the consensus choice.

So conceptually an Augur-like prediction market could work if the bet outcomes are binary. But this reputation consensus has to be integrated with the block chain consensus and can't be orthogonal to it. Augur's mistake is building a reputation consensus on top of Ethereum's separate (but not orthgonal!) consensus protocol, which thus destroys the Nash equilibrium and creates a Prisoner's dilemma over which is the consensus choice.

But an additional problem, is that reputation systems are a power vacuum that ultimately centralize to a winner-take-all due to the Iron Law of Political Economics.

And the flaws of proof-of-stake have been enumerated.

I'd be interested in seeing a proof-of-work consensus for binary outcome predication bets. But that will have serious problems if the binary outcomes are not objectively clear to all miners.

Any good programmer who has remained productive and not tried hard to screw up his life (and health), has more money than he really needs.

The important goal to such a person should be to work on something interesting and which can give back to society happiness, creativity, jobs, productivity, and diversity.

This is the reason I am not interested to create a crypto currency that has no adoption being merely a ticker symbol and marketing for inciting greater fool theory gambling.

Of course the speculators will find a way to get at my coin if I launch one. And they will serve a free market role. I can't stop the free market. The difference is I plan to have significant user adoption which must exist BEFORE YOU DISCOVER THE TOKEN, so that it is the real deal in terms of a for-use token. And I will make no promotions nor give any speculators any reason to think they should base their expectations for gains on any actions of any entity or developers. Because I am not creating investment securities. I am creating a social network and a token for use on that social network (and beyond). And you all have confirmed that speculators aren't basing their expectations for gains on any fundamentals thus efforts of the developers. Instead they are basing their expectations on promotion and hype. Since I won't be doing promotion or hype targeted to investors of a crypto currency, they won't be basing their expectations on any particular promotion or hype. Their resultant free market speculation is based on their assumptions about the value of for-use tokens of the sort I want to create. I will not promote nor promise any one any gains. The for-use tokens will exist to facilitate microtransactions on the social network.

I will make no effort to get my token listed on any centralized exchanges and I am happy if it takes as long as possible before being listed on a centralized exchange. I am working on decentralized exchange.

Making it more difficult for get-rich-in-a-week speculators is a goal of mine. Long-term HODLers will find their way to accumulate.

P.S. I have been working on the logo for the new 6 letter domain name for the social network. I am very pleased with the name I thought of and also after some horrible logo designs were submitted to me, I sketched my own on paper and I think it is quite good. Now waiting for a professional graphic designer to complete the final logo and they also confirmed my latest sketch is good. My logo is superior to Ethereum's and I am only spending $200 (plus my time), not $18 million.

Bottom line is that the block chain is applicable for recorded state transitions that can be proved to be correct from data internal to the block chain. It is not applicable to anything which requires subjectivity about data external to the state in the block chain.

So most everything people are proposing for Dapps, can't work without breaking the objective census mechanism and thus destroying the Nash equilibrium security of the consensus due to a Prisoner's dilemma over which is the consensus choice.

And validation will always end up centralized for any block chain (smart contracts or crypto currency) no matter which consensus design is chosen.

Ethereum will crash and burn eventually. For a while, they might be able to keep the market fooled with technobabble and centralized training wheels.

42 people voted 'Yes'   

No wonder the world is fucked.

And ETH declined 10%. Buy the hyped rumor, sell the underwhelming news.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/market-talk/market-talk-pi-day-march-14th-2016/

And ETH declined 10%. What were you babbling about?

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/market-talk/market-talk-pi-day-march-14th-2016/

There is no power vacuum for what people do decentralized such as fornication.

The power vacuum forms over what isn't impossible to centralize.

No.

The PoW doesn't need to be done on the payer's hardware. Payer (or payee) can pay a miner to do the PoW. The decentralized control (of which chain to mine on and which validators to trust & statistically verify) still resides with those paying for the PoW.

I do put a lot of effort into making a new hash that can't be optimized well on ASICs. So that everyone can get near equal access to efficient hardware. I think I have improved on Cryptonote's hash function. I wish I had more time to evaluate tromp's and other asymmetric hash functions (should probably buy tromp a Kill-A-Watt meter).


If I succeed on marketing and implementation, the people adopting and mining the coin won't have any idea about crypto currency nor mining. This is a very big challenge and I don't want anyone to expect anything. The chance of failure is much greater than the chance of success. But I am not asking any of you to take the risk with me. Hopefully if by the time you hear about it, it is because it will already be successful and it spread by word-of-mouth back to the forum.


By that time, it won't help Wolf, because the hashrate and unprofitability will be too great. If you are going to attack, you have to do it early near launch.

The flaw in my design, is the network doesn't spend more on security than makes sense for the value of the transactions on the network. So it requires the transactions to scale up significantly in order to have high security. A predominately HODL-er coin can't use my design. Thus Bitcoin could not use my design.

Also my design centralizes validation. But that is okay because every crypto currency ends up with centralized validation and control, as it scales up. At least my design keeps the control decentralized at any scale of transactions.


The NSA and the Deep State who created Bitcoin wanted a centralizing algorithm. They wanted the powerlaw distribution of wealth to be in control. Never would they actually want one-computer, one-vote. They put propaganda like that in the Bitcoin white paper to fool us.

Shorters provide liquidity during a crash, because they must buy to cover and profit. Shorters' gains are thus not ill gotten.

In theory, nothing is. Our computers don't have infinite memory.

The alarm clock works by saving a state on the block chain (recording the pending alarms), then it is invoked every time a smart contract invokes it to set an alarm. The alarm contract checks for any triggered alarms every time it is invoked by another contract.

But it is impossible for this to work with sharding and not destroy the decentralized consensus game theory.

I wrote this blog comment on my former boss's blog yesterday and it disappeared (or maybe he hasn't approved the comment yet). He works for Apple and was recruited by Steve Jobs, so perhaps he didn't like this speculation on his blog (which I suppose I can understand but it is difficult to have a discussion if only one side of the formerly jovial discussion can be shared). I am trying to reconstruct this from memory. Unfortunately we had a brownout here and so although I had the comment loaded in the browser from when I had posted it, the page was reloaded when I started the computer after the brownout.

Since my understanding of Apple Pay is only conceptual from descriptions written about and since some of the protocol may be secret, please correct me if you find any error in my analysis below.

Flaws:

1. Because Apple Pay allows tokens to be turned off at the centralized database (e.g. if the mobile device containing the token is stolen), then unlike for a crypto currency, a full node payee (a.k.a. merchant) can't validate from the public key cryptography signature whether the transaction is valid. Instead the payee must wait for the latency of roundtrip query to the centralized database. For some microtransaction applications (e.g. pay-per-download streaming), the latency can result in delays for the user which kill usability. The payee can't just serve the paid for content while awaiting for the query response, because a DDoS attacker could exploit this.

Although the crypto currency transaction isn't confirmed when validated by the payee, then absent a Finney attack, the payee is nearly certain the payer can't double-spend if the payee is the first to announce the said transaction to the block chain and thus doesn't need to wait for confirmation. Note Satoshi's (Bitcoin's) design has some significant vulnerabilities which make instant transactions risky, but an improved design can remove these flaws and enable great scaling (please don't confuse this with Vtrash's Zerotime which can't scale).

2. Afaik Apple Pay can't pay to two or more payees in the same atomic transaction. This feature will be crucially important for a mass adoption use case I will not reveal now.

3. Apple Pay can't scale because it requires users change the way they pay with credit cards, i.e. it fights against significant engrained inertia. Adopters need a smart (and secure!) mobile device. They need to choose from competing technologies. The billions can't sign up instantly in a permissionless, decentralized mannner.

4. Although Apple Pay may decrease theft of credit card numbers (although perhaps hackers may hack the users' devices to get at the tokens or the centralized databases), afaik it does nothing to fix what is paradigmatically broken about credit cards. That is uneconomic fees for doing fractional penny microtransactions, difficult to become a merchant, certain types of commerce even more difficult to become a merchant, large corporations holding the world hostage, etc..

Disagreement about whether the transaction was included (and then disagreement about the derivative smart contract state transitions), which cross shards. Because not all validators validate all shards. The externality is that including a transaction or not is not deterministic but rather is determined by the longest chain rule, but there is no longest chain rule if each partition has orthogonal state (which must be the case if not all validators validate all partitions).

Indeed when there is only one partition, then there is no disagreement about how to merge state from partitions. But I was writing about the sharded case.

Remember the alarm clock is triggered by blocks, but shards don't have their own blocks. Thus the state of the alarm clock is cross-sharded state. It is an analogous reason as to why gas destroys decentralized consensus in a sharded design.

Vitalik has himself deep in a clusterfuck.