Does anyone else find it curious that nearly all the accounts posting in support of IOTA and that expressed interest on the IOTA crowdsale thread were created at the same time, shortly after the Nxt launch, and many of them show the same long period of inactivity from 2014 until IOTA ?

It's already vindicated if you care to pay attention. We're at the point where everything is a remake and we've seen it all before, including how the future plays out. Nxt, Bitshares, etc.

BTW

Qora = Java
Nxt = Java
IOTA = Java

Other cryptocurrencies in Java?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=attention+whore

(BTW, I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way. Creating attention-getting threads and posts helps keep the discussion vibrant. People like r0ach and a few others who do so intelligently are an asset to the forum.)

How many of the IOTA pumpers are new sock puppet accounts or >1 year dormant accounts that were likely purchased or left over from some previous organized pumping effort?

Or maybe the botnet theory was shallow reasoning (CPU-friendly alg, therefore botnets) and wrong (or at least exaggerated) all along.

In 2014 there were loud and frequent claims of the mining being botnet-dominated. Well it turns out that was in time proven untrue and most of the mining was being done with cloud computing (verified by at least two sources).

Yes there are botnets but they don't really have zero cost, and seem to be a limited share of the network. The more mining is done in a bot node the more likely it is to be disinfected by its owner. Other uses of botnets may have a better return on investment, and putting mining on such a node increases the attrition rate (i.e. depreciation cost) and may therefore be unprofitable. Many bot nodes are older and inefficient, and have a very low hash rate even before factoring in the necessary throttling for stealth (and certainly after). The current network is about 60K mid- to high-end desktops (or a slightly lower number of midrange GPUs). As bot nodes that would be hundreds of thousands or millions. If such botnet(s) existed it would be making headlines. It probably doesn't exist.

Empirically mining is reasonably profitable even if you pay for electricity (with some combination of low rate and/or efficient equipment). If there were a lot of botnets with 'zero costs' the difficulty would be driven higher (which might even be a good thing from a security perspective). Botnet mining capacity seems somewhat self-limiting, for better or worse. So, again, such botnet domination of mining probably doesn't exist.

All of which was true even before Eth, btw.

Also, at the present time mining is a rather small portion of market activity, something in the neighborhood of 1% of daily trading volume. Speculators and holders are much more important market participants now.

Earlier miners are slightly more likely to have their shares paid than later miners. This depends on a continued supply of new miners (and variance) to keep the payouts going.

It isn't a large factor, but it is there.


This is very possible but the future is uncertain. A few years ago p2pool was down to roughly its current share of the net hash rate, then experienced a period of significant growth as some very large miners adopted it. Now it seems to be going in the opposite direction.

Nice! Thanks, Cryptopia.

Correct, there is no effect on block reward per day. The blockchain size will be slightly smaller since there will be fewer block headers.

EDIT: papa_lazzarou is correct to point out below that there are numerous other factors affecting blockchains size, and the net effect is difficulty to estimate.

I don't think so, and I've thought about it. There may be adversarial issues with the specific implementation in whatever Bitcoin forks are implementing it (I don't keep track). Of course, you can't entirely get around the possibility of isolation, but if you can manage to disseminate 500 KB blocks somehow (which you assumed), then you can disseminate suitably-compressed blocks of the same size.

I don't know that we need that. I recently got a postcard offering symmetric 3 gigabit internet service (expensive, but fractional service is competitive)

Thin blocks are a reasonable ad-hoc alternative to the relay network. It is a bit less efficient but only by a small factor (and probably not even that if further optimized). Works just fine for Monero too.

Monero also doesn't suffer from many of the script-related scaling bottlenecks in Bitcoin (or worse Ethereum), because it isn't trying to programmable money or a world computer and is focused on doing one thing and doing it well (A pays B). That said, Monero will probably have some sort of programmability at some point, when it is understood how to add this programability as an optional enhancement over the optimized base function in a scalable and suitably-private manner. (The recent update on Ring Multisig being one small step in that direction.)

Wealth accumulates wealth. Large stakeholders will earn large returns, and spend a little. Small stakeholders will live paycheck to paycheck and spend whatever they earn.

Furthermore, most proof-of-stake systems have in-built mechanisms that exacerbate this phenomenon. For example, a quieting time before you can stake. If you transact a lot (say from working and buying food) then you never stake. If you sit on your wealth you stake all the time, thus your return is higher. So more accumulation.

And we haven't even gotten to superlinear returns on unequal voting power. I'll leave that to someone else because I'm bored of you.

No you don't. https://www.google.com/search?q=off+grid+electricity

And beyond that there are many, many, different electric companies throughout the world, all largely equivalent in terms off the service they provide. To the extent that they are centrally controlled that is through a paper wealth system (i.e. fiat proof of stake).

Your argument is terrible. Nearly all of the things you mention (excluding new cars perhaps) are inherently available from many different sources. Food, water, etc. Go to probably millions of distinct habitable locations on earth and you will find them. Companionship is available from billions of people, healthcare from millions of providers, etc.

In nearly all existing proof-of-stake systems, the stake is highly concentrated by anywhere from a handful to possibly a few thousand people, in the latter case a group which likely has large internal concentration.

Moreover, the nature of paper wealth is that it is not subject to physical constraints of space or crowding and therefore tends to reach extraordinary concentration. Nearly all of the paper wealth (trillions or quadrillions) that exist in the world are controlled by a handful of banks, or in turn collude via entities such as central banks and the IMF. That control over the bulk of wealth allows them to extend that control all the way down to banning weed stores from getting bank accounts and encumbering nearly all physical wealth in a web of debt.

Any system based on control of notional wealth is in practice permissioned.

Systems based on control of physical devices such as computers or even physical phenomenon such as electricity may become permissioned (as I would suggest Bitcoin largely has at least for the moment), but they have a fighting chance in a way that wealth-based systems such as proof of stake do not.

All of them, without permission from an existing stakeholder (hacking exception from previous post noted)

In theory yes. In practice it closer to permissioned. You remember USB dongles for copy protection? Much the same as Bitcoin ASICs. They're not an absolute barrier to copying of course (which if possible would make use only by permission), but they put up a wall. In theory you could hack a stakeholder and steal their stake, making it permissionless. But the wall is there.

Agree.

Bitcoin is dangerously close to that as well. The pricing of SHA2 ASICs is basically an extortion scheme.

This's exactly what was done with Peercoin. You still have "independent" mining and PoS mining, but the developer has to sign the blocks for them to be valid. Nobody gave a shit, and the coin kept going. As long as you can still pump it, people are happy. Few care about fundamentals.

Their web site home page says otherwise, and claims the fees are paid out.

However I'm not a huge fan of their payout method, which has a small degree of Ponzi-ness to it. That said I should say that I have personally used it.

I like the idea of some of the hash rate continuing to support p2pool because it is good for Bitcoin and some on a centralized pool for regular payouts. Some could even go to plain old solo mining (but solo mining on a centralized pool for lottery purposes is silly, and literal solo mining may be too much work). Splitting it up that way has the effect of reducing overall variance.

On the idea of moving away from p2pool, I would discourage too much emphasis on the recent bad luck as that can reverse quickly, but at the same time I do understand that getting no income from too long can be harmful.

I have only a few seats here so while I'm a spiritual supporter, I don't expect much weight to my views, nor request it.