can you elaborate why?

to me it seems the nsa is pushing us companies strongly for a transition.

And then there is this, where Deutsche Bank complains that NIRP destroys their share price as money flees out of stocks into neg yielding bonds

Declining bond yields mean larger inflows into bonds at the expense of equities

A fundamental tenet of central bank easing has been to push investors out the risk spectrum. The impact has arguably been exactly the opposite.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-06/wounded-deutsche-bank-lashes-out-central-bankers-stop-easing-you-are-crushing-us

[...]

Yeah you are so smart and TPTB is so dumb. Thank you immensely for leading your generation to the truth. Amen.

The issue I pointed out is just to make sure the coins are widely distributed (i.e. not concentrated into fewer HODLers). And to give time for the coin to be adopted as the coins are distributed, so that wide participation (and thus wide distribution) are achieved.

That is not free market price discovery.

Their current braindead plan isn't generous to anyone, not even to themselves nor their investors!

btw. there is a lot of interest in quantum resistant encryption:

https://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/

This would fit in with Armstrong's debt crisis phase transition call ; he says a collapse in confidence in govt or some event that shocks this bond market will see a rush out of govt bonds and into the private realm of stocks. I presume this would also lead to the moonshot for gold etc as well.

Thank you for your understanding. Well I don't plan on failing! The main issue is the one I can't entirely control (yet)...

The main issue I am still struggling with is my health. Because I relapsed this week, I increased my intake of 80% concentrated curcumin extract (w/piperine) to 30 grams per day! (mixed with locally fresh cold pressed coconut milk/virgin oil). That means 1 kilo per month! And that is concentrated extract thus equivalent to consuming 100 kilos of tumeric monthly.

The result is I want to sleep always. But I think that is good. After I sleep, I awake with some energy and feel good for perhaps 4 hours. But then I take more curcumin and I feel sleepy again.

It seems I am so messed up in my pancreas/gall bladder/colon area, that it will require either surgury (but no MRI or diagnosis yet) or it will require massive doses of curcumin and massive sleep (I assume sleep is the body's way of repairing damage).

So all I can say is the curcumin extract treatment is very active in the area of the problem (gut/digestion) and seems to be efficacious in terms of calming the systemic imflammation and improving disgestion and (frequency/stool quality of) defecation. And it is causing me to want to sleep so much that it limits the hours I can be awake to work. And I can't yet discern whether it is actually curing my gut issue. I have some signs that cause me to believe it may be. But I can't yet detect for sure. I think this fight for cure is one where I will struggle while undergoing the cure (I do imagine there is really cancer in there and I am attempting to shrink the tumor with the curcumin). So much guessing bcz I haven't a MRI. I contemplate going again to try to get a doctor here, but then again I'd rather expend my time trynig to work. I will pursue the curcumin for some more weeks before deciding what to do next on my health issue.

About the work in front of me now, first step is I am working on the memory hard PoW function. After that, I will investigate the XXXXXXXXXXX issues. Then I will be able to make some sort of estimate as to whether I think we can do a quicker launch and ramp from a rudimentary set of features, or whether I really need a year of coding before launch.

I think our window of opportunity is more limited than you think, because everyone is searching for the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problem. And others are starting to get wind of the idea of combining social networking and crypto [e.g. GetGems]. I think we need to strike now asap. Also yes I need money to go abroad [for medical diagnosis].

The Byzantine Generals problem does not state "A majority of CPU power" as the problem. I already stated that is Satoshi's requirement but as the correct title of this thread points out, Satoshi's stated requirement is not a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem. Period.

One of the attack vectors in solving the Byzantine Generals is the Sybil attack. The Byzantine Generals problem is all about the need to trust that 2/3 of the generals are loyal without centralization where all generals are the same person, i.e. that there is no Sybil attack.

Anyone who has studied all the variants of consensus algorithms (as I have) will know clearly that Sybil attacks are always resolved via centralization of the protocol.

This is why as I looked for an improvement over all of what has already been tried, I was cognizant of that I would need to accept centralization in some aspect and so I began to look for the possibility of controlling centralization with decentralization, i.e. a separation of orthogonal concerns which is often how paradigm shifts arise to  solve intractable design challenges.

Every consensus design creates centralization. This will always be unavoidable due to the CAP theorem. The key in my mind is to select carefully where that centralization should be.

• Satoshi's PoW consensus design centralizes because a) SHA256 has orders-of-magnitude lower electrical cost on ASICs, b) full nodes must centralize (maximize pooled hashrate) to win the battle over who will have the most profitable verification costs (which can be accomplished with a Sybil attack), and c) variance of block rewards require maximizing pooled hashrate (at least up to double-digit percentages and Sybil attack incentives kick in from there).
• Stellar's SCP consensus design centralizes because although it can't diverge, it requires that slices are not Sybil attacked to avoid eternal preemption (being jammed stuck forever).
• Ripple's consensus algorithm diverges unless it is centralized trust, as confirmed by Stellar's divergence before it switched to the SCP algorithm.
• Iota's (any DAG's) consensus diverges unless centralization can force the mathematical model that payers and recipients encode in their interaction with the system.
• Ethereum never solved the issue that verification of long running scripts can't be decentralized. They are now off another deadend tangent (consensus-by-betting, Casper, shards) trying to deny the CAP theorem.
• PoS is centralization.

Extracting the generative essence of an issue is what I do. That is where I have made my career in the past and will do so again.

Still another approach to consensus is Byzantine agreement [Pease et al. 1980; Lam-
port et al. 1982], the best known variant of which is PBFT [Castro and Liskov 1999].
Byzantine agreement ensures consensus despite arbitrary (including non-rational) be-
havior on the part of some fraction of participants. This approach has two appealing
properties. First, consensus can be fast and efficient. Second, trust is entirely decou-
pled from resource ownership, which makes it possible for a small non-profit to help
keep more powerful organizations, such as banks or CAs, honest. Complicating mat-
ters, however, all parties must agree on the the exact list of participants. Moreover,
attackers must be prevented from joining multiple times and exceeding the system’s
failure  tolerance,  a  so-called  Sybil  attack  [Douceur  2002].  BFT-CUP  [Alchieri  et  al.
2008] accommodates unknown participants, but still presupposes a Sybil-proof cen-
tralized admission-control mechanism.

Generally, membership in Byzantine agreement systems is set by a central authority
or closed negotiation. Prior attempts to decentralize admission have given up some of
the benefits.

The stated problem bounds do not include being able to tell whether someone controls >50% of the hash rate. That isn't in the paper at all. The wording of the paper is "As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network". It doesn't matter whether they cooperate via pools or otherwise, either way it is outside the bounds.

> Fat.com.idiot is a roly-poly savvy marketer and we should partner with him

Anyone can be a good marketer if they create a site to help steal via Bittorrent and then charge a small commission on that activity.

Fat.com had his 10 minutes of criminal fame. Now will receive justice for his crimes.

> As to 'theft' and 'copyright' we are obviusly in disagreement - and let us leave it at that, no need for us to spend energy on that.

Huh  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1350711.msg13796388#msg13796388
Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 05, 2016, 03:45:47 PM
And he will not also admit the following is why he incorrect about stealing content.

Governments are organizing now around controlling the internet. The illegal activity through Bittorrent (which also steals from ISPs which have higher upload bandwidth allowances) is helping the governments feel they are justified in regulating the internet via Net Neutrality and other measures. You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent. You are not going to create the new Knowledge Economy with your theft model. And by advocating theft, you are helping the NWO totalitarianism to take form by providing an economic incentive and political support from millions of artists who are violated by piracy. Dumb. But I expect that from you.

Bitcoin solves the byzantine generals problem within the bounds of the assumptions in the model. If one entity controls a majority of hashing power, that is outside of the bounds.

this is a complete fucking insanity to compare the development of revolutionary technologies with Holocaust

I have not heard a delusional arguments and comparisons.

It looks like this guy really loves BDSM and far from understanding the real thing. All his chatter, there is one lie.

In a system with no block reward, you can calculate the probability that an attacker can outpace the rest of the network from N blocks deficit. However, I don't see a way to put bounds on when it is safe to accept a transaction of size X as confirmed because the amount of PoW on top of any given transaction doesn't have a value which is easily observed.

If the block reward is unprofitable in a system with adjustable difficulty, this is not an equilibrium, so the difficulty will adjust downwards until it there is one. If your design includes other factors which you are not revealing, this may be different, but with what I know this is how I see it.

...but there is no monetization route for a quantum resistant digital currency at this moment in time.
 

...and another incentive structure must be developed to encourage decentralized p2p mining.

Switching to an ASIC resistant PoW coin doesn't solve this problem but merely delays the inevitable. As interest and hash power grows ASICS will be developed within time regardless.

I am working on it for a white paper.

Details are upthread.

I made this same point in either 2013 or 2014.

Afaics, the only solution is unprofitable PoW which is the design I am now pursuing.

Correction follows.

It will be impossible to design a memory hard PoW that is not electrically more efficient on an ASIC, unless the hash function employed (for randomizing the read/writes over the memory space) is insignificant w.r.t. the RAM power consumption, which is probably not going to be the case in any design where that hash function has sufficient diffusion to be secure.

The only way to make an ASIC resistant PoW is for the proving computation to be memory latency bound, because DRAM latency can't be improved much in general (whereas hardwired arithmetic computation and memory bandwidth can be accelerated with custom hardware):

http://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/ii/archive/2011/11/17/arm-techcon-paper-why-dram-latency-is-getting-worse
http://www.chipestimate.com/techtalk.php?d=2011-11-22

However, what a GPU (which starts with 4 - 10X worse main memory latency than CPUs) and especially an ASIC will do to get better DRAM amortization (if not also lower electricity consumption due to less latency) is run dozens or hundreds of instances of the proving algorithm with the memory spaces interleaved such that the latencies are combined and amortized over all instances, so that the effective latency drops (because reading from the same memory bank of DRAM is latency free if multiple accesses within the same bank are combined into the same transaction). This can even be done in software as interleaved memory spaces without needing a custom memory controller. More exotic optimizations might have custom memory controllers and larger memory banks (note I am not expert on this hardware issue). This is probably why Cryptonote includes also AES-NI instructions because GPUs have only at best at parity in performance per watt on AES, but that won't be enough to stop ASICs.

However that optimization for ASICs will bump into memory bandwidth limit so the amortization will have a limit. Theoretically memory bandwidth can be increased with duplicated memory banks for reads but not for writes!

Using larger memory spaces in a properly designed memory hard PoW hash function (not Scrypt) can decrease the probability of that instances will hit the same memory bank within a sufficiently small window of time necessary to reduce the latency. Also using wider hash functions (e.g. my Shazam at 2048 to 4096-bits) reduces the number of instances that can be interleaved in the same memory bank (and standard DRAM I think has bank/page size of 4KB?). The ASIC can respond by designing custom DRAM with larger memory banks and run more instances, but that not only raises the investment required but the memory bandwidth limit for writes seems to be an insurmountable upper bound.

So although I think a memory hard PoW hash can be made which is more ASIC resistant than current ones, I think it will be impossible to sustain parity in hashes/Watt and hashes/$hardware. Perhaps the best will be within 1 to 2 orders-of-magnitude on those.

So all profitably mined PoW coins (with sufficient market caps) are destined to be centralized into ASIC mining farms running on cheap or free electricity, but the scale and rate at which this happens can be drastically improved over SHA256 (Bitcoin, etc).

My design of unprofitably mined PoW will only require that the difficulty from the PoW shares sent with transactions is sufficient to making ASIC mining unprofitable for the level of block reward offered. Keeping the CPU implementation of the PoW prover within 1 to 2 orders-of-magnitude of an ASIC implementation reduces the level of such aforementioned difficulty needed.

I hope I didn't make another error in this corrected statement. It is late and I am rushing.

<r0ach> you can't solve byzantine generals problem with a probabilistic model unless you've first solved sybil with a probabilistic model and Bitcoin doesn't do that
<r0ach> because there's no way of telling if all pools are owned by the same person, then it's not collusion or 51% attack, it's a sybil attack
<r0ach> since the essence of the byzantine generals problem is sybil attack, dealing with sybil comes first in the hierarchy before byzantine generals is discussed at all

Some of it does involve Social engineering, yes. The distinction between PoW and PoS/PoI/DPoS is that several of these attack vectors cannot be accomplished with PoW. With PoW all you can do is steal the account holders coins with a mtgox, ponzi scheme, or when a large bagholder is compromised. With PoS you can also attack the network and steal other peoples coins as well. Additionally, a compromised wallet cannot attack the network with a 51% attack with PoW as in PoS.

I suppose one could social engineer their way into Ant-pools mine and covertly reflash the firmware on all the miners. This attack would be much more difficult to do because large farms have multiple engineers who look over things and they have to constantly check their equipment and have large incentives to keep ontop of everything because of razor thin profit margins.  

It is no surprise that many PoS coins use checkpoints to add another security layer which is essentially centralization by a few developers approval. Checkpoints don't prevent these attacks just narrow the window of attack which is absolutely no problem. Developers Like Vitalik have studied these security weaknesses long and hard and despite desperately wanting to use some form of TaPoS for security still have not found an acceptable solution to mitigate these threats.

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