I would also like to know how TAU is protected against the following hypothetical attacks:

Greedy Flock Problem

I notice you have now changed the whitepaper to say that harvest power is now determined by the cumulative transaction fee paid in a pre-defined window. However, in the early days of the TAU network, this can easily be exploited by a determined individual to gain majority control over the block rewards. For example, if there a total of 10 harvest clubs existing of equal size (in terms of harvest power per unit time), then we would expect the rewards distributed to each of these clubs to be approximately equal. However, if one of these clubs suddenly offers a large incentive for users to switch (the early bird), then this will lead to a massive reduction in number of harvest clubs as everybody flocks to the single incentivized club. This would essentially easily allow one relatively high net worth individual to take over the entire network by incentivizing harvest club switching.

False Incentives

You mentioned previously that some harvest clubs would profit more on reputation rather than the transaction fees, which might actually lead them to incentivize club members by taking a loss. However, this leads them open to being sniped by other malicious groups which offer false incentives to get new members, e.g. $100 BTC per member, then chooses to ignore signal transactions to lock them in. If properly designed, this scam could lead to the creation of high harvest power clubs which members cannot escape from easily, whilst the club leader takes the entire reward.

Potential Resolution: Terms of the harvest club should be displayed to club members via a signal transaction from the club leader. This signal transaction would include data pertaining to the harvest reward schedule offered by the club.

The Bait and Switch

Under the new cumulative fee window system, there is an additional possible attack where a harvest club leader can achieve almost entire monopoly over the harvest rewards. Imagine a scenario where a successful harvest club manages to achieve among the highest cumulative fee, therefore achieving a sizeable fraction of future rewards. The club leader can then simply claim that the harvest club is shutting down, leading everybody to leave the club to join another. However, this was simply a bait, once all the club members have left, the club leader will then be in full control over the club, and hence be the sole beneficiary of the block rewards.

Potential Resolution: Implement a voting system to force change the harvest club leader.

Overall, I feel like the signal transaction concept is under utilized. Signal transactions should also be used to carry information relating to the parameters of the harvest club to its members and notify them of any changes. It would also be a good idea to allow people to set a timer on their harvest power delegation, either by automatically sending another signal transaction on X data (via the wallet), or by including a self-destruct parameter in the signal itself.

Identification vulnerability
I suspect that the signal transaction feature, though quite useful for the purposes of TAU, will also enable global blockchain analysis companies to easily track and identify relationships between wallet holders, as signal transactions can be considered a more intimate transaction than a standard one, therefore highlighting friendships, business relationships and partnerships, rather than commerce transactions. I suspect public visibility of signal transactions on the blockchain will eventually lead to a much more complete database of ID/Wallet holders compared to other similar projects such as Bitcoin. I think this can be resolved by ommitting one-half of the wallet details on the blockchain (or possibly both halves).

Also, there are issues whereby the harvest club leader can force its club members to collude with it for nefarious purposes by holding the block rewards hostage. For this reason I think a voting system is definitely necessary.

I think it will have good chances if we congregate a regulatory agreement with governments/corporations as I think they are the major players hindering complete crypto dominance.

I don't think China's decision on it's approach to digital currency would be deterministic for the rest of the world.

Bitcoin going down is always a concern because it causes holders to lose money on their investments.

Sometimes I can get hit by the same awful thought but I can never bring myself to do it.

There aren't shops around which take BTC and keep it as BTC but convert it back to fiat currency. Simple answer, no.

That must be a terrible move on their part. At least they could do is communicate something back to you.

I agree there is no good case without solid evidence which in this case is lacking.

I think its likely that ETF will definitely affect the price of BTC and that will make lots of people to buy in especially if at a price rise. And yes, this may include the rich but also new investors, at least we should be happy that there's faith in the BTC future

Ethereum without a doubt. There are other ones like Steam, NEO but its more difficult to predict what will really happen to them.

Its all dependent on how hard you want to go in. Yes, you can watch videos all you want and reading articles about how to interpret trends is important but above all one must get out there and learn from experience.

I think its fair to assume that as long as you still see any of these website online means that there's probably a good chance they're making some money at least, otherwise they can't stay open for business

Yes, I think so, banks will come to accept Bitcoin because the realization will soon hit them that there's a lot of profit to be made.

Having ATM lying around sidewalks is another way to promote the digital currency and I think having only 3000 total is a number leaving a lot of room for improvement.

Aswith every industry, if one such as in this case, online casinos etc if they can't attract enough gamblers then there's not much of a reason to keep it going.

Indeed, the 4 factors presented here are important but of course does not comprise all of the dangerous trading factors. Personally, one that's hard to battle with is the human emotion of 'greed'.

How will TAU intervene if a potential 51% attack is suspected? What mechanisms do you have in place to prevent a Sybil from disrupting the network if it manages to gain a majority share of the blocks or harvest power? Perhaps you could include a selective network rollback feature?

There are also some issues with TAUcoin being the fairest decentralized network, though it does depend on your definition of fair. According to Google's definition, fairness means "impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination." However, by using the number of transactions, or average fee of transactions per window time (e.g. 1 year), you inadvertently favor tholse who either have more money to spend, or are more actively engaged in crypto spending. It could be argued that the differences in opportunity for these TAU users means the distribution of block rewards will never be fair. Rather than favoring those with investment power such as POW or POS coins, POT instead favors those with spending power. Although you could argue that that they fairly earned these coins as per the rules set out in Proof-of-transaction, the truth is the distribution inherits the inequalities found in life.

You also mention that TAUcoin is the most environmentally friendly blockchain, this means that the effects of its operation must be smaller than any other blockchain currently operating. However, because TAUcoin requires harvest club leaders to run a full node, there is an additional carbon footprint associated with its operation, which may not be necessary. There are a number of other blockchains that do not require specialist hardware to operate nodes, for example, using mobile devices instead. Until TAU can move to a similar system, without requiring the production of additional dedicated hardware, it cannot claim to be the most environmentally friendly.

I also suspect that the TAU network will be unusually vulnerable to denial of service attacks, by requiring only the harvest club leader to run a full node, the reduce the number of attack points to just a few. Even if we have 10,000 harvest clubs each with 100,000 members (total 1B users by 2040), there would still only be 10,000 points of attack. This means that a particularly large harvest club could instigate a DDOS attack on its nearest competitors to quite easily achieve a 51% share of the network harvest power. I think this could be potentially resolved by having only the harvest leader require a full node, whilst also having 3-5 oracles per harvest club run a partial node to achieve majority consensus if the club leader gets taken down. The IPs of these oracles should be masked to prevent a DDOS. Ideally, these oracles should be running a partial node on a mainstream device, perhaps being built into the wallet application on iOS/PC/MAC and Android. It would be quite simple to implement a centralization attack on a network with so few nodes, as the harvest club power will automatically lead to users gravitating towards the clubs with the largest harvest power, hence leading to just a few very large harvest clubs by 2040.  

I recommend limiting the size of harvest clubs to prevent centralization attacks, whilst adding a backup to the club leader in the form of 3-5 oracles running a partial node.

I very much agree with you. Diversification is as important as investing at all and it all comes with either a huge cost or mad profit.

Proof-of-transaction incentivizes users from an early stage to join a harvest club with the most harvest power. Because of this, it is unlikely that by the year 2040 there will be several thousand separate harvest clubs, as it is likely that one of the early large harvest clubs will become a majority pool, sucking up most of the new users that enter the network. In my estimation, by 2040 there will only be a few very large harvest clubs.

Potential resolution: Limit the number of members per harvest club to ~5,000.

Potential resolution 2: Require a physical authenticator for transactions.


I notice that later you state that you'll be using weighted transaction fee, rather than relative transaction number to determine the odds of who gets to mine the new block and receive the reward. However, this does not resolve the Sybil attack, it simply changes the nature of the attack. You assume that the the purpose of the sybil attack is to manipulate the network for financial gain, however, it can also be used to discredit the worth of the TAU blockchain and poison it from within. For example, if a bad actor with particularly deep pockets were to exclusively send high fee transactions in the scope of the 1-year window, then he would have the greatest chance of mining the new block. If the discrepancy between the transaction fees of the bad acting harvest club, and average harvest club is high enough, then they could mine and perhaps manipulate a significant fraction of the market, producing a situation where small, or poorly funded clubs simply cannot compete, and reducing the utility of the TAU blockchain for these individuals. A sudden increase in the transaction fees of one of the larger harvest clubs would also

Potential resolution: Limit the rate of change possible between the largest harvest clubs to ensure no club can suddenly (out-fee) the rest of the network.


Why not just fix the scaling to the relative change in transactions each month, or three months? And the relative change in the number of miners on the network.

For example if there was a 50% increase in number of transactions (A) in a 1 month period, and 50% increase in number miners (B), then there will be no scaling required. However, if either side of this is unbalanced (A /= B), then the percentage of block size increase can be calculated as A / B, if the number is below 1, then the block size is scaled down proportionally, if it is above 1, then it is scaled up proportionally

You also mention that TAUcoin is the fairest blockchain because it uses normal transactional activity in order to determine who has the highest chance of mining the next block and hence receiving their deserved fraction of the reward. However, this doesn't truly fit the definition of fair, as TAU essential inherits the biases in the users spending power. For example, a wealthy user and a poor user both start using TAU for their daily activities, the wealthy user is able to send more transactions as they have more disposable income and can afford to pay higher fees, whereas a poorer user will typically make fewer transactions, of smaller size and hence smaller fee. This system is therefore biased towards high net worth and high spending individuals.

Potential resolution: Rather than using simply the velocity of money as the main determinant of harvesting power, instead implement a second associated measure called transaction power. High power transactions would be those sent between high fee harvest clubs, and can hence be associated with high net worth. The true harvest power would be a ratio between the transaction power and transaction velocity, with transaction power acting to reduce harvest power, and transaction velocity acting to increase it. Though, overall this might incentivize network spam with low fee transactions.

I take your argument as a fair point as I too agree that the ETH is a good coin despite the current price drop