From technical perspective.. Isn't it "simply" just because BTC chain has the most proof of work? What if BCH or BTG (hypothetically) get a hash-rate boost then its chain has the most POW. Did it then become the predominant among forks?
On a protocol level the amount of work put into a chain only accounts for something if we're talking about an chain split occuring within the same blockchain. That is, to resolve a chain split nodes will follow the chain with the largest amount of work that they are aware of and miners will add their next block to the chain with the largest amount of work that they are aware of (barring attack scenarios or other funky behaviour). Predominance between blockchains that do not represent the same cryptocurrencies (even if they used to, at one point) usually refers to the coin with the larger market cap. A metric which is admittedly rather arbitrary, but is also reflected in the hashrate of a given fork, assuming they share the same PoW hashing algorithm. Case in point, BCH currently being worth 0.12 BTC is reflected in BCH's hashrate currently being roughly 11% of BTC's hashrate. This correlation will of course shift with changing block rewards due to (1) BCH being ahead 7000 blocks leading to an advance halving by about 48 days and (2) transaction fees and thus network usage becoming more relevant. For now that's the relation we see though. I assume something similar can be seen with ETH and ETC, but I'm not too familiar with the details of their dynamic. It is also worth noting that once a fork coin changes its PoW hashing algorithm, as was the case with BTG, it becomes hard to meaningfully compare the amount of work put into it. Obviously you can make an educated guess which network has a larger amount of computational power behind it, but once you take a closer look and try directly comparing the work put into blocks mined with Equihash to the work put into blocks mined with SHA256 things get fuzzy.
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Following yours, the best option is write it down on paper. ![Kiss](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/kiss.gif) But for most sites, for example cryptocurrency exchanges, you can recover your 2FA by using ID or passport. But that paper can be lost or ca be burned (extreme circumstances). Is it not safe to store them on mail or some cloud with proper encryption of course? I personally write them on notepad, encrypt it and then email it to myself. I have a better suggestion. Download some app like evernote, save all your passwords and keys there. Now create an email ID and don't use it for any other purposes. Sign in in evernote using that email ID and encrypt the app. There. Now you can access your keys anywhere, on any device with no chances of losing them. Also safe and secure. Encrypted or not, once you start storing your 2FA code in the cloud to be able to access it from anywhere you are kinda killing the purpose of 2FA. Or to be more precise -- once the same device that you use to enter your password can also be used to access your 2FA key, you lose the "2 Factor" part of 2FA. Just a heads up.
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The mempool doesn't look too full though (around 1500 unconfirmed transactions as of the time of writing). Maybe your transaction contained a lot of inputs from various change addresses and/or incoming transactions? Either way it's nice to see that transaction fees of USD 2.50,- have become worthy of complaining again ![Wink](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
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Why will you stray away from a design where a lot of users are familiar with? If I am an ICO developer I won't stray away from the main design of my wallet software to avoid further inconvenience to the user/investor. In my own opinion I would like to see an Altcoin be more focus on other things besides on having a new kind of GUI for my wallet.
That design is super basic, why not jazz it up a lil is what I'm thinking. Because it's fast and easy. Why spent time on the GUI when you either (a) focus on the technological fundamentals of your alt or (b) just plan on pump-and-dumping it in the first place? Most people will throw their money at you either way.
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Shame achow101 did not take me up on my bet where i said i would leave if BTC went over $10k ever again and he would give me his job if it went below $6k While (true) Censorship(BTC); Looks like the jig is up with the lightning network promises, not many people are buying it When did it went below $6K. I am not finding any graph in coinmarket cap that shows it was below 6K recently. PS:I am just wondering if it really went below 6K, instead of filling your bags were you really thinking of achow101? It didn't. It looks more like a case of premature celebration (albeit a pointless one because what's to celebrate without a bet?), just like when people on Reddit prematurely celebrated BTC breaking USD 10k,- again.
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3c) Experts in the field, e.g., computer vision, after looking at the dataset, will know how difficult the problem is.
How to know who is an expert? Why would experts spend time evaluating datasets for a cryptocurrency? How to ensure that they evaluate the difficulty of a given challenge fairly and objectively? Introducing the need for experts to evaluate the nature of the work to be solved (ie. the dataset difficulty) means introducing trusted third parties. This means you lose the core value propositions of cryptocurrencies -- being trustless and permissionless. And since the nature of evaluating the difficulty of a dataset appears to be subjective, you even lose the security aspect of cryptocurrencies. Don't get me wrong, if you turn this project into a sort of incentivized Folding@home there might be some merit in terms of gamification to it. But from my current understanding of this approach it would make for an awful cryptocurrency. 1) bootstrapping is similar to how bitcoin started, no miners, easy to control 51% of the hash power. Value of coin is low. the pioneers will have to bootstrap the chain by giving out coins, etc. or follow the footsteps of ETH. Need to do research on how these 2 started.
I was referring to the following statement: Sybill attacks can be discouraged by requiring each dataset that has a defined problem to come with an attached processing fee. According to this, you have to pay a processing fee for either (a) submitting a dataset or for (b) solving a dataset challenge ie. mine a block. I'm not quite sure whether you had (a) or (b) in mind. Either way this means that currency needs to exist before the first block can be mined. In essence, this introduces another centralized entity, namely one that has to issue the first units of currency. 2) yes, authentic dataset creation is a tough problem. Dataset contribution can be constrained as follows:
only aggregate datasets are considered, i.e., 100 individual user profile pictures, contributed by 100 users. This will increase the sybil attack cost. The mining problem could be to classify the user pictures into male/female, different races, etc.
3) fake dataset if contributed by a single person, is hard to detect. That's why I suggested the above. Some one posting a dataset and solving it himself would not reap benefits, unless he mobilize an army of miners, as described earlier. 100 individual users? Users of what? Facebook? Google? Some other form of online account? How does relying on the accounts of a third party service protect against a sybill attack? How do you even know that 100 users are 100 different persons? Identifying 100 individual users (or votes, or however you may call it) is at the core of the sybill attack problem. Not its solution. How to stop rogue clients from DDoSing the network by flooding it with wrong timestamps and turning 2 minute block intervals into 2 days or weeks or years?
By attaching a cost/fee to each broadcasted result? So miners are paying to mine blocks? Why would anyone pay to mine a block? How would currency be issued in a system where miners pay for mining blocks but don't receive any block rewards? Or does the fee simply get substracted from the block reward? In which case, how is it a fee if miners simply receive reduced block rewards to begin with?
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Evaluation of difficulty will depend on the individual miner's experience after reading the dataset's metadata and existing reported results (if any) recorded also on the block chain.
How to prevent sybill attacks on the evaluation process? Or is reading and evaluating a dataset also subject to a processing fee? How would existing reported results help in determining the difficulty of a challenge? What metric is used to objectively define the difficulty of a challenge to begin with? Sybill attacks can be discouraged by requiring each dataset that has a defined problem to come with an attached processing fee. X% of miners could collude to pick one fake dataset, and pretend to do work on it, where X is simply the dataset with largest number of miners (colluded). but in the end, only one winner earns the reward. But this does not prevent the remainder miners from also working on it, possibly with better algorithms or experience, and who may eventually win the competition. How to bootstrap such a cryptocurrency if mining a block requires a processing fee? Ie. where do the first miners get their coins for paying the processing fee if no coins have yet been mined? How to determine if a dataset is fake? Note that when referring to sybill attacks I'm not even yet talking about the mining process. I'm talking about the dataset contribution process that happens beforehand, where no miner is yet involved. Or are you suggesting that the miners solving the challenges should also be the ones contributing the datasets, each dataset submission being attached to a fee? This leads to another problem: if the dataset is artificially generated with a known formula or DNN by the colluder, then he already knows the answer (perfect fit model), so he could guarantee to be able to win. but he must then control enough miners in order to make this dataset the chosen dataset for the next block, so in effect he will have to gather on average 30% of the node power in other to fake the win. How did you reach the conclusion that 30% of computational power would be sufficient for faking a challenge win? 30% seems an awfully low threshold for maintaining security. This timing will have to be solidified into the protocol's design, a fixed number, e.g. 2 minutes.
If a majority picked dataset is too simple, such that it completes training (converges) before 2 minutes elapsed, then there will be no clear winner, then the next dataset is picked as the candidate dataset and everything restarts?
How to stop rogue clients from DDoSing the network by flodding it with wrong timestamps and turning 2 minute block intervals into 2 days or weeks or years?
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1) problems/datasets will be contributed by the populace. Selection of problems will also be decided by the miners; each miner pick a problem he is interested to work on, and broadcast his progress periodically. Picking simple problems risks immense competition, picking difficult problems will be easier to make progress if the miner has good hardware. The dataset picked by the majority of the network will become the dataset for sealing the next block. And competition will begin, with a check on everybody's progress every 1 minute, for example. How is it decided whether a dataset is "simple" or "difficult"? How to prevent a sybill attack on the dataset contribution process? 4) As mentioned above, we can just do a rain check every minute, and the best progressive learning node wins the round for that time period.
How to determine how much time has passed, ie. how to coordinate that the network checks every minute (and not any other arbitrary timeframe that may be beneficial to would-be adversaries)?
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It's almost as if regulations are worth next to nothing if the largest offenders are not meaningfully held accountable ![Roll Eyes](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/rolleyes.gif) Still I'd argue that pointing fingers at the traditional markets won't help anyone. Crypto needs to be better than that, but I'm afraid that market manipulation is hard to mitigate. I guess the reason for the recent focus on market manipulation within crypto is that people are looking for an explanation for its price increase. Since prescribing value to something virtual is rather counter-intuitive for most people, market manipulation is an easy cop-out explanation. (that is not to say that market manipulation isn't taking place. I just doubt that its the only reason for the recent rise of crypto.)
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monsterer2 and ETFbitcoin pretty much stated the core of the matter. To expand on what they pointed out:
1) How to provide viable problems in a decentralized manner? Just picking one up at random from a previously agreed-upon set is not enough -- who provides the set? How does the set get agreed upon?
2) Requiring the likes of Docker and Kubernetes to verify transactions adds quite a overhead for running nodes. Also this opens up the question of how the datasets are provided to validating nodes in a tamper-proof and reliable way. Additionally the datasets would increase the overhead for running nodes even further.
3) It seems like you are suggesting block times of 1 hour which, given the flak Bitcoin occasionally gets for its 10 minutes, would definitely need to get reduced if such a cryptocurrency were to gain any form of traction.
4) How to keep block times steady? How to reliably know when 1 hour has passed without having to rely on an external, centralized oracle? Traditional PoW can easily quantify how much work is to be put into a block to keep block intervals steady. Time is derived from the timestamp of said blocks, without an external time source. How to quantify how much deep-learning PoW is to be put into a block?
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What can I do? If your transaction is under $5000, you can only hope Bittrex will at some point change their cross chain recovery policy. Public pressure may help, but ultimately it's the shitcoins that are to blame for using the same address format as Bitcoin. I can imagine exchanges creating an "annual cross chain recovery day", in which they handle all requests from the past year. USDT may be a shitcoin but it's a token running atop the BTC blockchain so there's little they can do about the address format. That being said, sucks to see that OMNI (eg. USDT) and XCP tokens are apparently harder to recover than ETH tokens. Good luck OP.
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They are not to be confused with the seed words used by HD wallets [2], based on the BIP-0039 wordlist [3]. For this standard most wallets use 24 words and upwards, which should be sufficiently secure for the foreseeable future.
Minor correction... BIP39 specifies that: The mnemonic must encode entropy in a multiple of 32 bits. With more entropy security is improved but the sentence length increases. We refer to the initial entropy length as ENT. The allowed size of ENT is 128-256 bits.
As it must be in multiples of 32 bits, this equates to a mnemonic sentence length between 12-24 words in 3 word "steps"... so 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words. Ah, good catch, thank you for correcting me. I was thinking about hardware wallets and for some reason I misremembered Ledger using 32 seed words as opposed to Trezor's 24 seed words Turns out Ledger also uses 24 seed words and it's just the custom passphrase that is longer than Trezor's (100 characters [1] vs 50 characters [2]). [1] https://support.ledgerwallet.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005214529-Advanced-Passphrase-options[2] https://blog.trezor.io/hide-your-trezor-wallets-with-multiple-passphrases-f2e0834026eb
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[...]
There are many people work on resolving and emptying the used wallets.
Especially they claim that addresses which start with "1" and addresses generated with secret words (thus brain wallet) are not secure at all. I'm not familiar with the details that much but this seems dangerous to me, because almost every system generates addresses using brain wallet method with 7-8 words. This makes the most addresses weak. There are really good DEFCON briefs in youtube about this subject if anyone is interested.
Not quite. Addresses starting with "1" merely indicate P2PKH (Pay-to-PubkeyHash) addresses [1], the format used for single-sig, pre-SegWit addresses. [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/AddressBrain wallets are a type of address that in which the private key is directly derived from a secret word or phrase. Their insecurity stems from people's inherent disability to generate and remember phrases that are random and long enough as to outwit automatized approaches. Brain wallets are usually P2PKH addresses because most of them were generated long before SegWit. In theory one should be able to generate a SegWit P2SH or Bech32 as well, meaning the address type has little to do with whether the corresponding private key is generated randomly or within a human mind. They are not to be confused with the seed words used by HD wallets [2], based on the BIP-0039 wordlist [3]. For this standard most wallets use 24 words and upwards, which should be sufficiently secure for the foreseeable future. [2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki[3] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.mdOkay, this is something new to me. I only thought there were private keys. What are these public keys?
Read up on public-key cryptocgraphy, also known as asymetric cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptographyTLDR; For cryptocurrencies this means that public keys are what enables people to verify people's coins while not being able to steal them.
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In case SegWit actually gets destroyed, you would just need to be holding your keys on legacy addresses before it happens. Just move your coins to legacy addresses, wait a safe amount of blocks and you are set, so it's not that big of a deal in this regard, price wise it will probably be a disaster.
Why are you repeating this (what I believe to be) incorrect information after I already responded to it before as quoted below? But still, in case something wrong happens, moving your SegWit addresses into legacy addresses (before it happens) should be enough.
I don’t understand why you think that will secure against potential SegWit theft? If the lineage of your BTC had SegWit in it, then the hard fork can steal[accept as a donation to the protection of immunity] the lineage and thus your recent spend to a new address will be invalidated. Why though? If you move coins from a SegWit address to a legacy address, those coins have already been spent. Any attempts to "harvest" anyone-can-spend transactions after they've been moved to a legacy address would result in an invalid transaction.
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Instead of miners solving computationally difficult "puzzles" for every block, what if they only had to demonstrate they have the MEANS to do so?
Those "puzzles" are the cryptographic functions that keep the blockchain from being rewritten and thus securing transaction finality. It's more than just computation for the sake of computation. For example, there might be a 5-10 minute contest once a week, during which all miners demonstrate how much processing capacity they have. Those with the most capacity would be granted the right to publish a larger share of the blocks over the following week, against much lighter competition and with much lighter processing power per block. Who grants the right to publish blocks? How to ensure that all miners involved only publish their predetermined share of blocks, ie. how to limit their respective hashrate and thus prevent someone without the right to publish blocks to simply rewrite the blockchain? How to keep block times steady? How to prevent miners with the permission to publish blocks from blocking other people's transactions or forcing double spend attacks of their own? How to determine how long a week is without relying on an external centralized oracle? How to determine how long 5-10 minutes are without relying on an external centralized oracle? Edit: Apart from the above, what then prevents these miners from simply pointing their hashrate at a different cryptocurrency when no contest is taking place? What prevents these miners from simply spending resources on hardware rather than electricity, now that they have less electricity to pay for?
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To be more on topic, I'm fine with gambling advertisements on Bitcointalk. People who want to gamble, will find a way to gamble. And most crypto casinos seem to be at least more social in nature than most of the "traditional" online casinos out there.
There is something called "traditional" online casinos? But yeah crypto ones seem much better, only their way of handling things sucks a bit. They are probably not called "traditional" online casinos, but your typical non-crypto gambling website is usually very different from your typical crypto gambling website. Crypto casinos very rarely offer sports betting and non-crypto casinos usually have a strong focus on slots. I've never seen dice games outside of crypto. Unlike crypto casinos, non-crypto casinos seem to rarely focus on community building / group chats. Oh, and then there's of course that whole "provable fair" thing. I don't think we're ever going to see that outside of crypto, especially since the house edge of non-crypto casinos seems to be much higher than one would like to publicly advertise (ignoring games such as Roulette, obviously, as here the house edge is pretty much the same). I guess that's mostly because non-crypto casinos usually target players that go into meatspace casinos / sportbet bars as well, while crypto casinos target, well, crypto-enthusiasts.
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[...]
Tell me, don't you think biggest problem on this forum are scam ICO's which are lurking naive investors? Ponzi scams?
You are basically bashing few gambling site for reasons known only to you and you are blind to see hundreds scam ICO's stealing money from people.
See, that's the thing I like about the gambling industry. At least it's not pretending to be anything else but. And some of the longest running crypto casinos out there have shown more respect to their players than some of the "investment opportunities" to their "investors". To be more on topic, I'm fine with gambling advertisements on Bitcointalk. People who want to gamble, will find a way to gamble. And most crypto casinos seem to be at least more social in nature than most of the "traditional" online casinos out there.
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Thank you for your replys. I did not understand everything you wrote. What, for example, is a VPS?
A VPS is a virtual private server, often used for hosting websites and other services, sometimes used for anything else that requires an always-online machine. Unless you want to explicitely support the network by running a full node (and paying a VPS provider for it) you don't really need to bother though. (not to be confused with a SPV client, which is a sort of wallet software that doesn't require you to run a full node and instead delegates this responsibility to a central server, for example Electrum: https://electrum.org/)
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Sometimes miners mine blocks with a hash quite a lot lower than the target value
And that is exactly the problem, since such unexpectedly low hashes will then cause multiple blocks to get orphaned. There will be a permanent state of uncertainty about finalization of recent transactions. 6 confirmations will no longer be particularly safe. This has no basis in fact. All blocks must have a hash lower than the threshold, there is no logic in Bitcoin block validation that behaves in any way differently depending on how low the hash value is of a new block. Either a block is the lowest hash value for the next block solution, or it's not. "Unexpectedly low" is therefore completely meaningless. The only logic that exists in Bitcoin block validation is "lowest", not "how low". [...] I'm not sure you read tromp's post correctly (well, or maybe I didn't), but the way I understand it is this: 1) Bitcoin follows the chain of the longest cumulative work based on the difficulty at which each block was mined 2) spartacus rex suggests calculating the cumulative work based on not the difficulty (which is the same for each block within a given difficulty period) but rather using the amount of work that is put into a block beyond this difficulty (ie. how far the hash is beyond the difficulty threshold) 3) tromp then points out that this would make the logic for following the longest cumulative work less stable, as a single "hard" block (ie. far beyond the difficulty threshold) would supersede multiple "easy" blocks (ie. within, but close to the difficulty threshold). This would lead to both (a) more orphans and (b) some confirmations being more worth than others (ie. 6 confirmations by "easy" blocks would be nullified by a single "hard" block), making it hard to reliably asses transaction finality. While I wouldn't go as far as claiming this to make selfish mining easier, pointing out that block equality within a given difficulty period is important for a stable network and thus network security seems to me both correct and important. Feel free to correct me though.
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But it is still a lie to insinuate the signaling or non-mining full nodes are indicative of the economic majority. That is a social justice warrior lie.
Carlton Banks stated a clear technical fact. I expanded on it. While I obviously can't speak for Carlton Banks I personally definitely never said that SegWit nodes are a reflection of the economic majority -- neither explicitely nor implicitely. However the market is. And I can't say for sure, of course, but I personally doubt that SegWit-booty-coin would fare well in the market. Even given plenty of room for market manipulation. It’s also a lie to state that Core is the canonical Bitcoin.
As there is no central authority to say otherwise, and pretty much everyone refers to the "Core blockchain" as Bitcoin, it is the currently canonical Bitcoin blockchain. That's what canonical means.Unless you're the Pope of Bitcoin you have no say in what constitutes the canonical Bitcoin blockchain.
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