That's something I've been thinking about for a while. I've hinted at my ideas here and am going to post a more organized presentation of them. There are a lot of different possibilities in that spectrum. What I'm thinking of is that the pool will be based on something like exponential PPLNS where the "score" is expected pending reward, subject to variance and maturity time, and this score will become a tradeable commodity where risk-loving investors buy it from miners who want steady payouts. Of course this should be possible not only as one-time trades but as longer-term "renting". Another direction to approach it is a pool which is PPS from the start but solicits investments, where stakeholders share both the block rewards and the duty to pay for shares, in proportion to their investment. No pool does this currently, but I'll definitely at some point push this to pools I'm involved with. |
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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." joeyjoe, you may want to study CoinCard (the best Bitcoin-to-PayPal service that ever existed, until PayPal froze his account). RunningTotal, you may want to study bitmarket.eu (a p2p exchange, which used to support a PayPal option until fraud overwhelmed their safety measures). |
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You need a pool, but deepbit is a poor choice. Some better alternatives are http://mining.mainframe.nl, http://eclipsemc.com, http://rfcpool.com, http://www.yourbtc.net/ . looking purely at statistics and probability
Only if you ignore variance, which is a critical statistical attribute. (and taking into account the whole ethos of bitcoin being p2p)
That may be true now. But it's possible to modify the way pools work to eliminate the concentration of power problem, and hopefully this will be done eventually. I take it that solo miners aren't getting a lot in the way of transaction fees.
Transaction fees vary but they seem to be around 0.1% of the block reward. |
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99% of people don't care about gold, so having 5 of the 6 listed advantages compare it to gold is pointless. It's a theoretical advantage only at this stage (at least until Bitcoin has stable exchange rates and is actually deflationary).
Most of Bitcoin's advantages are only theoretical at this stage. There are very few people to whom there is practical advantage in using Bitcoin now. I think the "sales pitch" should focus on what Bitcoin can do in the future, thus attracting those with a bit of vision. |
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Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
He says he wouldn't want to keep cash on his computer given how easily computers can be hacked, and that we're losing the war on computer security.
I think that might be a bit of an overstatement. OS security has improved in recent years but has decreased in the application and web layer. The number of critical flaws in Windows, Wordpress, and and other mainstream apps has been decreasing but the proliferation of applications has made gross vulnerabilities increase. Adi more specifically said we're "winning the battles, losing the war". meaning what exactly? gov'ts gaining more ability to crack cryptography? I suspect he means that it's a hopeless cause to try and build a secure system on top of operating systems that are fundamentally insecure. You likely need to start over from the ground up and have security in mind at every step of the way (perhaps even getting into trust issues relating to the proprietary hardware and microcode that virtually all computers are based on). That too, but I think he was more pessimistic than that. He gave as examples that the OS / encryption software / whatever we use can be compromised (MR - even if open-source, since most people don't go over the source anyway and even if they do they might miss subtle vulnerabilities), the CA we use to know who's at the other side can be compromised, that cryptographic protocols that were thought to be very secure occasionally get broken, that even systems maintained by security experts can be and have been hacked with targeted attacks, and that whatever security progress we make, crackers will eventually find a way around it. Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
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He didn't express any concerns about the viability of Bitcoin's economics or core technology, though.
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That's the best news I've heard in a while. I'll likely be bumping up my hoarding operation and taking the acquisition part of it to the next level (once I study his comments for myself at least.) He didn't specify he's looked at it at any depth looking for flaws, though. |
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Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
He says he wouldn't want to keep cash on his computer given how easily computers can be hacked, and that we're losing the war on computer security.
I think that might be a bit of an overstatement. OS security has improved in recent years but has decreased in the application and web layer. The number of critical flaws in Windows, Wordpress, and and other mainstream apps has been decreasing but the proliferation of applications has made gross vulnerabilities increase. Adi more specifically said we're "winning the battles, losing the war". |
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Never heard of RSA before,
I assure you that Adi is someone whose opinion should be given the highest regard, even in matters outside his expertise (cryptography mostly). I wouldn't bother everyone with the details of our chat otherwise. I am interested in hearing the talk with that tagline. Links?
It was in Hebrew, and a cursory search didn't come up with any online version. |
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Today I saw Adi Shamir (you know, the S in RSA) and managed to talk with him a bit about Bitcoin.
He says he wouldn't want to keep cash on his computer given how easily computers can be hacked, and that we're losing the war on computer security.
He didn't express any concerns about the viability of Bitcoin's economics or core technology, though.
This was following a talk he gave with the tagline "why we need cryptography, and why it won't help us".
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You can't defeat "cause and effect." You can't force any of the participants to "unlearn" what they know.
What I understood is that the OP doesn't want participants to unlearn what they know, rather that they will never know. The public key should never exist. Rather, each participant will only have his own piece, and with a joint computation they can obtain a signature which is equivalent to what the private key would generate, and can be verified with the public key, but again without anyone sharing their secret or the private key ever existing. This sounds like one of those things that seems impossible at first but cryptography comes to the rescue. I'll see Shamir today and if I get the chance I'll try to ask him about this. Anyway, the solution for the use cases will probably not be in new cryptography but rather adding an address type which simply needs signatures from several keys to send coins. |
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Secret sharing is relevant to this, but it needs a "dealer" to do the initial generation of keys, since this is about sharing of an arbitrary secret. Doing this in a distributed way for ECDSA without changing the protocol has been discussed here. Doing this by changing the protocol has been discussed here, as Stephen linked. And this seems also relevant to some of your use cases.
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If you mined on a pool it goes to their account then gets paid to you, which is a payment not generated?
That's how most pools works. In Eligius, the blocks miners work on directly credit worker addresses rather than the pool. You can see this in the generation transaction of the block in question. |
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Remember, Mark already had the access he has now before the whole CosbyCoin thing even happened.
Which is part of the problem, AFAIK it was never mentioned that Mark has access to any forum data. By the way, do we know what kind of access he actually has? Can he host the site without having read access to people's PMs? |
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Wow. Way to miss the point of my comments.
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Hotel is now unbundled from the package, we won't be offering accommodation at all but will recommend some hotels where participants can book to stay in the same place as others.
I don't understand this. Was it not possible to have the bundle as a default and add an unbundled option for the minority who have other accommodations? |
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Straight-up PPS pools are fatally flawed because they will eventually go bankrupt unless they have massive fees.
PPS pools aren't fatally flawed, they just aren't very attractive right now because most PPS operators don't know what they're doing. I believe PPS will be the reward system of the future, but I won't derail the thread into discussing my vision of it. Maybe I'll write about it in its own thread sometime. |
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Very cool. Why did you choose a value of .5 for o out of curiosity?
Compared to o=0.99, c=0.01, the choice of o=0.5, c=0.5 allows to decrease pool-based variance, at the cost of increased operator risk. Which is substantial, doing this with 0 average fee is dangerous. |
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https://bitcoil.co.il/Bitcoil - Exchange bitcoins for ILS Buy and sell bitcoins via bank transfers in Israel. This is a fixed-rate exchange, we set our prices based on the rates at the big exchanges. 
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I want to be up front and clear about it, though:
The first and second block after the change will see a lower than average payout for everyone as the scores slowly build up, as time goes on and blocks get solved, your payout will increase to what you expect (+ whatever we get from hoppers). If you ever stop mining, your payout will slowly decrease (even if you aren't mining in the block) which will effectively even out what you did not make at the start of the new system.
Additionally, as an incentive to remain in the pool, on long blocks (those that exceed the expected shares), your payout will be slightly more than you would normally expect and on short blocks (those that are less than the expected shares) your payout will be slightly less than you would expect.
Looking at the numbers, it will take at least 5 or 6 blocks for the pool to normalize into a more or less steady state, so payouts will be "not quite right" in comparison to what you expect from proportional, or even the current geometric scoring.
I'd like to clarify that this does not affect your expected eventual income per share. In the old system, if you submit a share now you will get for it at round's end, on average, (50 BTC) / (Difficulty), or pB as I like to call it. In the new system, you'll still get on average pB per share (even if this share is submitted now in the startup phase) but it will take more time to clear, so you could for example get 0.5pB in the next block, 0.25pB in the one after, then 0.125pB and so on (these are made up numbers). This, again, is done to reduce your variance - the eventual total will be closer to the expected value than it was in the old system. |
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The geometric method is basically like slush's method but
1. With share-based decay rather than time-based.
2. With operator score to always maintain a steady state.
And a moment of satori for free. I followed your explanation on the thread but I don't think i really understood it until just then. Yeah, I tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to get across the idea that the 1/(r-1) operator score in the method represents infinitely many shares submitted by the operator before the round starts. So at any point a miner who wants to submit a share sees behind him an infinite sequence of shares, so the competition with existing shares is always the same. That is, in the beginning of the round, the past, present and future shares look like this: ..., r^-5, r^-4, r^-3, r^-2, r^-1, (r^0), r^1, r^2, r^3, r^4, r^5, ... 10 shares into the round, it looks like this: ..., r^5, r^6, r^7, r^8, r^9, (r^10), r^11, r^12, r^13, r^14, r^15, ... This is exactly like the previous case, but with everything scaled by a factor of r^10 which doesn't matter. Thus the statistical properties of the payout for a submitted share are always the same. |
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Yes, I meant during a round and you answered my next question too.
Even if a score = score + exp(n/constant) proportional scoring would still be hoppable, I'd have thought it more stable. A score look-up table for the nth share could then be used instead of a recalculation. I think.
The geometric method is basically like slush's method but 1. With share-based decay rather than time-based. 2. With operator score to always maintain a steady state. Each of these improvements can be used regardless of the other, and what you're suggesting is basically doing the first without the second. This is an improvement over the current slush method, but the second improvement is more significant, so if you're thinking about these things you may as well just go geometric. (Or PPLNS if you want to decrease variance and are ok with crossing round boundaries and increased maturity time). And there's no point in a lookup table, the calculation isn't expensive, you only need to make it robust against overflows. |
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