Hey CfB, regarding IOTA, how do you stop the attack where I have 10 different accounts, all of which are vouching for eachother's fraudulent transactions and creating fake chains?  In fact you could have a few different people who join a 'coalition' and agree to vouch for eachother's fradulent transactions using their multiple accounts. Maybe I'm missing something but IOTA seems to be wide open to Sybil attack.

You may be right, and it would make sense, was just poking around reading about Ram Scrapers effect on Point of Sale systems  and wondering how big of a deal they are. Only needs to be briefly stored for it to be an issue for RAM scrapers. Might not be possible though. Seems most modern OSs have some form of memory protection to prevent this.

Yes, offline could do it but that's quite a hassle for consumers.

You can store the wallet.dat as encrypted as you want on the harddrive, but if you want to use it, you eventually have to decrypt it and store the private key in RAM. How can this be prevented? Is it possible to prevent other programs from spying on your RAM?

What do you mean quantum resistant algos are too big?  Have you checked out NTRU? Thoughts?  I figure if starting from scratch might as well use it.

Anyway, updated top post.  Little thing, I think that we as a community should stop saying anonymity, and start saying privacy.  Same idea, different connotation.

And.. so far I can do everything on the top list with the new cryptocurrency we're building

We've figured out how to do a true Proof of Person.. call me crazy but it's been reviewed by a few people and I'm convinced we can do it.

Regarding block reward, I'm thinking second years block reward is bigger than the first and I agree with a tail reward.  It'll basically be 2% inflation for the currency paid to miners.. that is ideal inflation and it is being paid equally to all, so everyone wins.

The only 'catch' is that these Proofs of Persons require about 200 MB on your hard drive.  And privacy will take a little while to implement, we'll get there though.

I'm thinking:
Anyone who wants to can mine with equal mining power, with no monetary investment what so ever. Semi-private accounts because after all you are doing a Proof of Person, if you can prove to the network you are a person, then there is a link to real world.
This should lead to maximum decentralization and therefore trustlessness
Private accounts possible
Fast transaction confirmations, under about a second.
Extreme blockchain trimming, blockchain never exceeds 10 MB on your hard drive, and only process local transactions, meaning you never process more than a few transactions a second, also leading to decreased bandwidth.
Quantum Proof
Some form of chargebacks that are trustless, meaning Mt.Gox type situations can be reversed.
No Nothing at Stake problem

Sound about right? Disagree with any of it? What would you add to the list?

Sort of could be XY problem..  let's put it this way, I have a method for basically 'mining' in a network, that method relies on something that I would prefer was closed source.  Is it an issue to close source a part of your mining algorithm?

I wouldn't but let's face, I could mine from my own account and this closed source part says make that account 2x as likely to mine or something.  I guess the question I'm trying to ask is: does a decentralized trustless algorithm have to be open source to remain trustless?

In a decentralized project, is there ever a need to close source parts of the code?

Imagine if you had a decentralized project with a open sourced algorithm for Google's search result. How would you keep people from studying the algorithm to cheat it? There is a reason they keep it private. Is it an issue in the open source community if you close source only that part in a dll and feed info in, get info out and the rest of the system works with it?

I'm working on something sort of similar in idea.

Thank you everyone!

Raft seems reasonably easy and apparently is correct.  Is there a reason not to use that?  Seems to me like it'd be relatively easy to implement.  Because yes, doing research would be great but need to be nimble since it's a startup app.

How resistant is Raft to 51% attack?  I guess a 51% attacker would just try to block or vote for each other as leader?  Anyone know performance?   Seems to me like bandwidth might be an issue if people are agreeing via the internet... which is one reason something blockchain like might be better and I do have a lot of blockchain experience by this point.

Edit: Actually I may want to tweak this a little bit.  If anyone who is an expert in this field would like to discuss my ideas an tweaks that work a little bit better given our known information, I would be willing to pay something, either equity or cash.

Let's say that I and my friends want to basically have a mini-version of Bitcoin.  We don't have to rely on Proof of Work because we know who the actors are and we can basically say that they all have equal mining power that is linked to their known public keys (aka wallet addresses).

Is the best way to come to agreement still to build a blockchain?  Assume we aren't that great of friends and can't just trust each other. Or are there better ways for coming to agreement when the miners are known?

Better can be faster or more secure or something else I'm not thinking of.

Note: I'm applying it to a different type of problem but occurs to me that Bitcoiners probably know their techy stuff and it might lead to an interesting conversation.

Thanks!

How does it's mesh network work?  What is the difference between this and Stellar?

Stellar also achieves the goal that if the majority of your followers are honest, then you get the right result, right?

Anyway I really am interested in learning more about this.

Though regardless this is still definitely too expensive to my taste... I want to be able to make an upside if people start using it, not hope to break even.

So, you basically do the same thing as Stellar, which has excellent documentation and an actual working product... but Stellar's market value is less than $10 million, yours is not yet released and you are selling it as if it has a market cap of $1 billion?  100 times higher?  Really?  Am I missing something?

Can I also short it for that price?

Hello,

I'm trying to do some analysis of Bitcoin's historical trading.  I'm wondering if you would know if it's possible to get a long list of volume per day and buy sell orders for Bitcoin.  Specifically it's important to know whether something was a buy or a sell order.  And I need to know volume in terms of USD, not BTC.

Thank you!

Not yet, I'll probably throw one up soon though.. trying to decide if we should just put it all out there before we are ready to launch.

Anyway, send me a private message with email address, and maybe a little bit about your background? I'd be willing to share my part of the source so far though.

We have two Rust programmers including me and two web guys.

Honestly that article is a little hard to read in my opinion, though I think I get the idea. Think this same idea might at least partially get around it too though... we'll see.

We've got 4 coders on board at this point anyone else interested? Maybe another guy who would be interested in learning Rust? Happy to teach the cryptocurrency side of things.

Or a lawyer, so we can ask a couple trademark like questions and maybe a couple other things?

Or a marketer? Though we mostly have that covered.

Basically anyone who thinks they have skills, let me know and maybe we can put you to work.

Howdy folks, how's life these days?

I'm trying to buy cheapish 5TB to 8TB hard drives, any one have suggestions for finding them?  Got me thinking about Burst.. it's been a while.

I had an interesting thought, given that every block in Bitcoin has a timestamp attached to it, is there a way to use the timestamps plus the time that you saw an average block in order to sync your clock to the time on the network?  What if someone fakes the timestamp and fudges a little bit, can you at least stay within say 15 seconds assuming the majority is honest and it takes 10 seconds for a block to propagate to 75% of the network?

On a similar note, how do Proof of Stake blockchains agree to time?  After all many of those algorithms involve a time component based on the time since the network saw the last block.. in those cases does the network need to have it's clocks in sync in order to mine together? Or can they work together to agree on a time based on blockchain info?

Indeed.. will have to think about it.

No, more unique.. not POW or POS or POC. It is a blockchain though.

Appreciate it 50_cent!

Anyone else?  I've got big plans for this currency.  This currency is going to be the result of almost 2 years of trying to fix all the things I thought were problems with Bitcoin.

Potentially.. the coin will mostly be given to people via mining but I may start with some initially sold in that fashion to raise some development funds.