Anyone willing to waste their resources on mounting a 51% attack on Bitcoin will do so regardless of whether we try to tweak the incentive structure in one way or another. Assuming such an adversary exists, selfish mining or covertly aggregating (unused) reserve hashing power would be the least of our worries.

It is also worth noting that covertly aggregating (unused) reserve hashing power would not even be the most effective strategy in this case. Given Moore's Law an adversary able to attain enough hashing power to successfully mount a 51% attack would want to do so as soon as possible, lest their hardware becomes obsolete before they even scratched the blockchain.

Either way it all breaks down to: If someone is able to gain Bitcoin's majority hashrate and is willing to attack it, Bitcoin's fucked. But that's neither something new, nor something that can be easily fixed with currency issuance tweaks.



Obviously one possible outcome is the one you describe -- miners try to keep the hashrate at current levels or above.

Another imaginable outcome however would be a negative feedback loop, with miners either leaving Bitcoin for a competing blockchain or being taken offline as profitability plummets.

With the current system, as soon as Bitcoin becomes less profitable to mine, miners drop off and difficulty is reduced, with the hashrate finding a new equilibrium. If the mining reward is reduced with a drop in difficulty, Bitcoin becomes even less profitable to mine, with more and more miners leaving as block reward is further and further dynamically reduced, creating the very pool of "spare" hashing power that the difficulty-dependent-block-reward is trying to avert.

From what we've seen so far, miners already have the implicit incentive to keep adding hashrate. Adding complexity to a system that works just as good, if not better, with simpler rules, rarely works out well. Especially if it depends on miners working together for the common good (ie. "let's keep the hashrate growing or else the block reward gets reduced") rather than doing what is most profitable for them.

1) Stocks appreciate because the underlying company does well and earns money by selling goods and services.

2) Cryptos appreciate because they stand to disrupt and potentially supersede private and governmental infrastructures.

3) Foreign currencies appreciate because your local government fucked up their monetary policy worse than the corresponding foreign government.


(1) is putting money to work, (2) is hoping for growth of a currently small market and (3) is assuming your government fucks up.

To some extend however (1) (when trading a foreign company) and (2) also work assuming your government fucks up so the reasons for resorting to (3) are rather limited.

(That is, without knowing your individual circumstances and which country you reside in. If you're within the US or the Eurozone, dabbling in Forex is needlessly risky for what little there is to gain. If you're from Venezuela or Turkey things are less clear cut.)

Cooperation is only a viable strategy if no one defects.

Looking at PoW, anyone who agrees to not increase their hashrate further will get fucked over by those that are either (a) not part of the agreement or (b) part of the agreement but decide to increase their hashrate covertly.

PoW, pretty much by design, does not reward cooperation. It rewards putting as much hashpower as possible on the network, especially as economics of scale kicks in. It rewards securing the blockchain instead of attacking it, by means of opportunity cost.

The optimal strategy gets a bit wonky in systems with increased block reward variance (eg. post-block-subsidy Bitcoin), but that's a different discussion altogether.



Global markets don't work that way though. Price fixing barely works under totalitarian communism on a national scale, let alone within a capitalistic free market on an international scale.

Governments are barely able to figure out trade agreements. Fiat currencies fluctuate in relation to one another. Many -- if not most -- power plants are privately owned.

Even if 99% of governments would manage to arbitrarily increase electricity cost, the remaining 1% of governments would simply get rich by all the mining operations moving there.



Peak hashrate is being pushed as is, because keeping "spare" hashrate is simply wasted capital that could be put to work instead.

That's the technical limit for the maximum amount of the smallest unit you could reliably transfer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9,223,372,036,854,775,807

Beyond this number you'll get an overflow. Bitcoin having a max final supply of roughly 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis leaves some wiggle room for increasing the coin supply on clones (alternatively one could also increase the perceived coin supply by reducing the number of digits).

With 50% of the hashrate you're not Selfish Mining anymore; you're effectively able to take over the network since you now can outrun the other miners indefinitely.

Selfish Mining only requires you to outrun your competitors, say, 2-3 blocks at a time. For that you don't need quite as much hashing power. By itself it's not really much of a threat though (apart from causing low-confirmation-count transactions to be unreliable); it's when used as part of a larger plot to either bankrupt your competitors or force them to collusion that Selfish Mining becomes dangerous.

Unless you live in a country with an extraordinarily bad local currency I'd stay out of the forex market. There's little to be gained outside of daytrading with leverage, which is also an excellent way to lose money unless you're lucky and know what you're doing. The crypto market is obviously a very interesting one (otherwise we wouldn't be on this forum), however I wouldn't underestimate the stock market as a hedge against crypto market downturns (and vice versa, although this still needs to prove itself).

In short, I'd stay away from forex and find a mix of stocks and cryptos that I'm comfortable with. Don't forget to do your homework though!

Start by searching Bitcoin's repository for the term "subsidy" and go from there:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/search?p=1&q=subsidy&unscoped_q=subsidy


If necessary, adjust MAX_MONEY accordingly (does not change money supply, used for sanity checks only)

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/search?q=max_money&unscoped_q=max_money

As already described by ranochigo, selfish mining is about wasting other miner's resources by working on the longest chain in secret, causing competing miner's blocks to be orphaned upon broadcasting said blocks.

What would be the point of colluding to merely mine at a lower hashrate?

The longer Bitcoin survives the more trust it will gain and the wider its usage will become. The tricky question being -- what will Bitcoin's usage look like. Will it serve as a store of wealth, potentially becoming a globally used reserve currency further down the road or will it become an everyday means of payment, both as the native currency of the internet and in the physical world?

Either seems to be a possibility; whether these use cases will be compatible with one another is a different question though. I'd love to see Bitcoin as a viable store of wealth, however I'd also hate to miss out on the internet getting a native currency.

Encoding the whole private key + checksum in Base58 is not the same as encoding both separately and then concatenating the result.


For example let's use the (hashed) private key from the Bitcoin wiki [1] and encode it in Base58 [2]:

Private key + checksum in hex:

Private key + checksum in Base58:


Private key without checksum in hex:

Private key without checksum in Base58:


Checksum only in hex:

Checksum only in Base58:


You see the difference?


In hex 2 characters equal 1 byte (e.g. 0xFF = 0b11111111, i.e. 8 bits). In Base58 2 characters equal something like 1.375 byte (e.g. ZZ = 0x0760 = 0b11101100000, ie. 11 bits but then again not really). Hence when trying to remove the checksum by truncating the string of a Base58 encoded private key you lose a few more (or less) bits than intended.


[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format
[2] https://incoherency.co.uk/base58/

I think monsterer2 is pointing out the absurdity of centralized cryptocurrencies rather than claiming that decentralized cryptocurrencies are non-viable.



There's no hint of a later decentralized stage though. Even if such a stage would be advertised, its feasability would be rather questionable seeing how centralization lies at the very heart of this project. Centralized token issuance, centralized consensus... heck, even the name "Proof of Honesty" is trademarked apparently.

Alt coin and token scams are what makes it all the more important to call out questionable buzzwords such as Proof of Honesty. Dressing up federated trust as a trademarked term called "Proof of Honesty" is borderline deceptive. Selling a centralized solution as "100% Byzantine Fault Tolerant" is like selling asbestos free milk -- it's good to know but the least that I would expect.



I'm not saying that people are not fond of federated trust. I'm just saying it's a regressive and naive approach at cryptocurrencies.



So we do agree after all that even in the conceptional phase valid criticism is productive



Many corners are still shady because the whitepaper claims to solve various problems without proposing concrete solutions. The implementation is irrelevant if the very concept is flawed.



The problem of hard forks is effectively ignored on the protocol level.




Owning large amounts of currency does not equate authority. Large amount of hashing power do not equate authority.

Anyone can participate in the network. No one can block or censor transactions. Block subsidy is not something that gets handed out by a central authority but is what pays for electricity, hardware and infrastructure, keeping the network's security autonomous without external oversight.

Falling back on a centralized authority just because PoW based cryptocurrencies have mining pools is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Federated trust as decribed by GeeqCorp is precisely how humanity has done monetary transactions for centuries. Merely throwing in a blockchain for good measure doesn't change anything. Getting rid of federated trust is what made Bitcoin so revolutionary. Returning to it seems rather regressive.



That's how public discourse works though. Otherwise they should have just worked in the shadows and presented the world with a finished product.

Interesting whitepaper!

I wonder though, are you (a) pessimistic on how long LN will take until it reaches more widespread adoption or are you (b) optimistic regarding how quickly one could implement and deploy Superspace?

Seeing how LN already hit mainnet earlier this year and how long it took for SegWit to reach maturity starting from its conceptional phase I believe that either must be the case; at least considering that we are looking at "a short-term proposal, intended to provide a temporary ease from scalability issues". Or would you see Superblocks as part of a long-term scaling approach, with temporary ease being a mere side-effect?

There's a difference between hard forks as a democratic option (see blocksize debate) and chain splits as a regular occurance. A blockchain that hard forks regularly without internal consistency becomes unreliable as users end up on different forks and transactions get "lost" due to users following different chains.




Why use a blockchain then? If the network is centralized and permissioned one might as well just the classical banking system and the likes of VISA and PayPal. Same difference.

There's a short overview of the regulatory status of ICOs in various jurisdictions on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_coin_offering

However it's rather incomplete and doesn't do the complexity of the issue justice. International law is no joke. It gets bad when finance is involved and even worse when looking at unprecedented asset classes such as cryptocurrencies and ICO tokens.



If you plan on starting on ICO, professional legal support will be indispensable. Whether it's worth the money when merely investing depends on the size of your investment though, I guess.

Yes.

Well, sometimes people make money in USD / EUR terms due to rising crypto prices, however simply buying and holding said crypto would have usually yielded higher profits.

For the most part you're likely to get less money out than you initially invested. Problem being that even mining contracts that may look profitable at first will suffer from quickly diminishing returns as network difficulty increases.

Sounds pretty much like Ripple's and ByteBall's consensus algorithm, which suffer from either centralization, vulnerability to Sybil attacks or both.



Let's look at their whitepaper.


Centralized it is, then.


Facing the problem of hard forks by simply ignoring it is... brave, I guess?



GBBs are unfortunately never explained, neither in their whitepaper, nor on their website.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I assume it's something you'd have to purchase from GeeqCorp? If so, that means: First you buy a genesis block, then you buy consensus access? Is that what it would look like if EA created a cryptocurrency?

They don't.



Exactly.



They don't.


What you are referring to is commonly known as cloud mining. The only ones profiting from cloud mining are the companies providing the hashrate. The only way to profitably mine is by physically setting up a mining operation yourself, with hardware you own, infrastructure you can use and cheap electricity.

Because in some territories ICOs are either illegal or legal grey areas.

For example as soon as founders allow US citizens to take part in an ICO, without actively seeking out the SEC's approval or abiding its regulation, the SEC will have a close eye on them; legal problems being almost assured regardless of the founder's country of origin or operation.