Another big advantage is that when some node is suspicious, honest nodes can just unfollow it and then it loose the power.
But in PoW, top nodes can do anything and you have no measure to reject them.
Honest nodes can move which pool they send their shares too. Unfortunately the larger the pool, the more consistent the revenue for the honest nodes. However, I suspect a similar game theory disincentive will arise in your model also, because influence = power = money. I had become to get depressed about this and was thinking that decentralization is hopeless. Collective decentralization is not the natural order of how nature organizes. Rather what happens in nature is a plurality of centralized options (which is in effect decentralization), i.e. nature decentralizes through creative destruction. I've been trying to think about how to apply that to money systems, which is difficult because we need fungibility and volatility is eliminated through a common unit-of-account (a plurality of currencies is unnatural). At this point, I am thinking that collective decentralized currency is a lie. It can't exist. It will always come down to trusting some parties, whether it be the developers or the pools or the influential nodes, etc.. This is the dirty little secret that all the experts know but don't want to admit publicly. Thus I've started to think more about how the trusted parties can't be coerced by the government, i.e. anonymity. And less about the perfect decentralized consensus, which I coming to the realization that collective decentralized currency is a lie and an enormous waste of time. I expended a lot of effort to design a hash function which can't be monopolized by ASICs (note it can be accelerated by an ASIC, but in theory can't be monopolized and that is a deeper explanation revolving around making PoW unprofitable for large economies-of-scale by leveraging the fact the home electricity is already budgeted!). I was trying to think of clever ways to decentralize the pools. But when I forced myself to think brutally realistically, I started to come the realization that I was fighting against nature and I would lose. This is why I say I would like to do something more direct to the point of what is provable and less "pie in the sky". Research is nice and fun, but reality is where the rubber meets the road. P.S. If I realize I will no longer use my PoW hash, I will open source it so that everyone can see what I created. If I use it, it will be open sourced after launch (no current work on this, this is all shelved as I am working on other projects). Thus it will eventually be open sourced. |
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CoinCube, Japan is bankrupt so they will have to tax everything. China is not bankrupt, and everything the Communist Party does is for show, while the Communist Party members use Singapore to hide profits offshore. China will make a show of force but in reality 75% of what is being done will be free market. Asians say one thing to save face (and even to appease the G20), and do another thing to maximize profit. In China it won't be a completely transparent system, you have to know how to game the system. That is the way Asia works. It is strange concept for a Westerner to understand since we are so accustomed to transparency and openness of communication. What you think you see of China is not the real China. You would need to have many friends and relationships before you understand the real China and how to game the system in way that is unseen and unspoken. IMO you have not provided any evidence to refute my assertion that capital controls will applied mostly to Westerners (and Japanese perhaps) but not to Asians because their societies are not bankrupt. Btw, I could see European countries hunting down their expats for wealth confiscation because European countries are bankrupt. Plan B countries are those societies (private and public finances and social capital, education levels, socialism levels, etc) that are not bankrupt and thus will not self-destruct taking their citizens down into the abyss. |
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I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).
Note in page 5 of the paper: Note here even we follow the same naming convention with traditional mathematical optimization techniques, the meaning is totally different, instead, it’s only the driving force to producing emergent phenomena of a complex network. If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge.
Did you check the mathematical model? Actually, our final algorithm is a *compound* algorithm consists of the greedy and they simulated annealing algorithm. (note we just use the same naming convention) And even with *pure* simulated annealing alone, your assumpution is still incorrect. Mathematical model(also confirmed by simulation) tells that "oscillate indefinitely and never converge" will only happen when indegree/outdegree is not small e.g. degree>30. If degree=10, then it will still converge rapidly. You are correct I will need to spend more time studying this before I can argue or discuss constructively with you about the model. My oscillation assumption was based on my assumption that localized consensus is not overruled by global majority in your system, i.e. I don't understand how the local trust capitulates to some global aggregation of the majority. Does the model allow a minority opinion to be overruled such that the minority adopts the majority opinion (e.g. for disagreement over which transaction was first in a double-spend)? My concern is that the minority would continue to uphold their autonomous disagreement because the consensus process appears to be local trust and not global overrule, and thus not global convergence. In PoW, the minority submits to the majority opinion, else it is a fork which the majority ignores. Counting votes won't work, because that could be subject to Sybil attack. Does the local trust morph as the majority emerges holistically? In other words, are the peers allowed to change their opinion? I couldn't see this mentioned prominently. It is a crucial point. In my opinion, the explanation of this should be more prominent in the white paper. You jump straight into math and model details without giving an overview of how you've solved the problem. |
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From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.
I had read that. Isn't that much less % than a 51% attack? I understand we can't precisely compare the two, since your model is a different structure from PoW. The complexity here is beyond my comprehension at this moment. |
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Your disagreement was blanket, without exception. Period.
Incorrect. Read more carefully what I wrote the first time: What you wrote is true only if we collapse into a Dark Age, where only food becomes money as was the case in Western Europe after the fall of Western Rome and also in Japan. It is very unlikely we will collapse into a global Dark Age, because as I have explained, Asia is not burdened by large government liabilities and thus the wealthy will shift their capital there. Ditto during the fall of Western Rome, the Byzantine Empire rose. I don't think there is an example of a global Dark Age in the history of mankind? ... There will be a decline in the rule of law and ability to enforce property rights. If you can generate income from real assets, you will be limited in your ability to keep that income.
Agreed that will become increasingly the case in the West, but Asia is headed the opposite direction. I understand the elite in China and Russia have an incentive to align with the elite in the West in terms of creating a Technocracy slave model. But I want you to understand my model is the "bottom up is rising"[1]. Apparently you read one sentence and ignored the rest of what I wrote below it. I clearly indicated that I my disagreement was that capital controls would not be global and would instead be focused on Westerners, and I clearly pointed out that Asia was headed the other direction. |
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I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).
I studied machine learning in the 1980s, so some of this is familiar to me.
Afaics bottom-up, cascading trust relationships are not always going to be able to reach global consensus. If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge. Or you can accept that the network will converge on non-global groupings that don't agree with each other, e.g. a double-spend and they don't agree on which spend was first (because you said you don't want to depend on a delegated timestamp server). Perhaps I am wrong because I am not going to take the time to read and understand every detail of the paper (check the math, etc), but conceptually I am nearly certain I am correct.
And that is not even getting into the peers colluding due to game theory and/or political economics.
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Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science.
No, no game theory or political science are involved, in fact, the core algorithm is deadly easy that you can describe it within 15 lines of pseudo codes. Just because you model it without game theory and political science, doesn't mean there isn't an economic incentive to game it and a political motive to organize the "voting". Models can tell you anything you want to hear, and are not fool proof until they've been vetted in the real world. You are correct I can't comment forcefully until I read the white paper and understand it. But I don't think I need to read the paper to understand that peers vote by signing and appending to the directed graph. Any form of voting can fall victim to the Iron Law of Political Economics. OTOH I will grant the possibility that you've some how obfuscated such that political organization and gaming the voting is impossible. But I would need to see how. I doubt it. |
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P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus.
The account of "skycoin" is actually shared by more than one core developers. I am another guy who wrote the consensus paper. The consensus algorithm is cross discipline in some sense, the key words are "naming gaming", "opinion dynamics", "social consensus", "complex network" etc. and the topic is actively studied in the fields of statistics physics and system science. Most of the related papers are published in journals like "Physical Review E", "science", "nature" rather than ACM transactions. here is one related paper: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140704/srep05568/full/srep05568.htmlanother one(considering attack): http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130The basic principle is to drive the **immergent phenomena** of a complex network by *only local* information(no global clock or any other global information are needed). Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science. And you didn't answer as to whether it depends on a delegated timestamp server? And that is much more complex than I have time to analyze now. For example the linked nature article refers to consensus on naming, but afaics there is no economic incentive to game it. And moreover, because I currently don't think that is the highest priority task, i.e. I don't want to build a " pie in the sky" coin. But I don't discourage you. We need people doing all kinds of experimentation. Thank you and apologies for interfering. |
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Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase. By the time this starts, the capital flows get cut off and there will be no money or capital inflows left to pump into the assets...
I roughly agreed with everything you had written, except for the clarification on Armstrong's model complexity, and I disagree with the above quote. That capitals flows will get cut off is a possibility and worth discussing. If that happens, even partially, it will surely have effects, Dark Age or not. You cannot just ignore it or declare it not so. I did not write that capital flows will not get cut off. They surely will! Disagreeing with a quote that says "capital flows get cut off" surely looks like you reject that argument. Now you say you agree. So which is it? Why can't you understand the difference between disagreeing that capital flows will get cut off in every nook and cranny and agreeing they will get cut off for Westerners?? I disagreed with his pronouncement that capital flows would get cut off to such a degree that gold and silver would not rise in price. Even you don't agree with that. You think gold and silver will rise. So why are you agreeing with him and against me? I was saying that gold and silver will rise because not all capital flows will get entirely confiscated. The capital flows will be confiscated, but not 100% to the point where only food becomes money every where on earth and gold and silver are useless. I am sure you agree with me. So I don't know why you are making trouble with me? Please do not quote me out-of-context then accuse of saying capital flows will not get cut off. Here follows what I wrote, and I clearly stated that capital controls will not get entirely cut off, but also agreed they would to a large extent for Westerners: What you wrote is true only if we collapse into a Dark Age, where only food becomes money as was the case in Western Europe after the fall of Western Rome and also in Japan. It is very unlikely we will collapse into a global Dark Age, because as I have explained, Asia is not burdened by large government liabilities and thus the wealthy will shift their capital there. Ditto during the fall of Western Rome, the Byzantine Empire rose. I don't think there is an example of a global Dark Age in the history of mankind? ... There will be a decline in the rule of law and ability to enforce property rights. If you can generate income from real assets, you will be limited in your ability to keep that income.
Agreed that will become increasingly the case in the West, but Asia is headed the opposite direction. I understand the elite in China and Russia have an incentive to align with the elite in the West in terms of creating a Technocracy slave model. But I want you to understand my model is the "bottom up is rising"[1]. Which I further clarified for you as quoted below, when you indicated your misinterpretation of what I had written above: I wrote that it is very unlikely that capital controls are successfully enforced in every nook and cranny of the globe, such that all global wealth is destroyed and we go into a Dark Age where only food is money. As far as I know, that has never happened in recorded history. Dark Ages have occurred (where only food was money and all the gold and silver gets buried in the ground because it is useless), but they were always limited to a portion of the globe. Asia has no economic incentive to do capital controls, they are not bankrupted by huge government socialism and cultural decadence as the West is. Asia will cooperate with the USA and Europe to hunt down the non-Asians, for as long as USA and Europe remain important markets. But Asia will not and has no incentive to apply wealth destruction to its own citizens, other than going after corruption in government (e.g. coup in Thailand, firing 900 party officials in China, and the Napoles scandal in the Philippines). Rather it is launching free trade and migration Asian Union in 2015. Asia is moving the opposite direction, and is becoming more financially liberalized, not less. |
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OFF TOPIC. For those who are wondering about my chronic health issue. Photos of back of my oral cavity: severe viral infection or oral cancer    Note I have not seen a physician on this particular aspect of my throat recently. If someone feeds back to me that I should, I probably will at some point soon. I think I am correct to become aggressive in my treatment, because I have so many confirmations of HPV attacking in the head & throat area where it normally kills men with cancer about 10 - 15 years after initial infection. In theory I was infected in 2006. See 3 attached pics. Note also that my dangling soft palate is not pink not a solid color, rather more off whitish with pinkish spots. Note I've had difficult swallowing for 2 years and larger tablets that I used to swallow easily not get lodged in my throat more easily. Note I often have tightness in my throat and also nearly always have to clear my throat (of Flem) before I can speak. http://whitespotson.com/white-spots-on-tongue-on-side-of-tongue-and-under-tongue/Since the bulk of papillae is focused on the back of tongue, it is the most common place for the appearance of fur. Besides, this part of the tongue can be affected by vesicles (bubbles), which result from herpes infection
Uniform fur, located all over the back of tongue, is one of the
distinctive features of inflammation. It can appear on the background of acute respiratory infection, as well as in the aggregate of symptoms of such serious ENT diseases, as tonsillitis or diphtheria (in case of diphtheria, however, the fur has grayish hue). Sometimes, blotches concentrate in the view of the tongue tonsil, without spreading all over the back of tongue.
Besides, white spots on back of tongue accompany diseases of the digestive tract (ulcer, colitis, cholecystitis, pancreatitis). In case of the last 2 pathologies, the fur has more of a yellow coloring. http://www.foodpyramid.com/conditions-disorders/white-spots-on-throat-causes-and-symptoms-10618/Mononucleosis, also known as mono, is a contagious, viral infection that can cause white patches on the throat. This condition can cause symptoms for months and tends to be associated with severe fatigue and a sore throat. If you have mononucleosis, you may notice yellow or white spots on the back of your throat (where your tonsils reside). It is important to note that a strep throat infection that refuses to go away, even with treatment, can signal mononucleosis.
You may experience recurrent rashes, drowsiness, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, a lack of appetite and/or a swollen spleen, along with the white spots on the throat, fatigue and sore throat. Treatment may involve learning how to effectively manage your condition and/or any related infections. You can expect your fatigue to subside within a couple months.
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Ok let's see then what develops... Thank you also.
Agreed and now is not the right time to cater to me. If my ideas or interests fit with what develops, I can come back at that time.
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I agree with chompyZ. I'd prefer you expend scarce time down your current path and it would take me more time to convince you (I mean I could never convince you to change your philosophy, you have to learn trying), than to code it all myself. I did this discussion to illustrate to those who keep wondering why I don't work with others, how difficult it is to work with others when my thought processes are so out-of-sync with the way most people are thinking on these forums. I don't agree that Ethereum is doing very well. I think they will be an enormous bust and they are just expending a lot of zealot money while receiving nice salaries, capital gains,and having fun attending conferences and socializing. The fundamental issues were never solved. I have my own ideas and path to forge. Best of luck to you. P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus. And apologies for cluttering your thread. I'd prefer not to comment on any more altcoins. If anyone messages me about such and I don't reply, you know why. I don't enjoy making enemies or creating animosity.
skycoin can u work together with the idea and drive skycoin? it sounds very tempting
No! Not even close to working together. We disagree. Your simplistic idea of my unstated design and marketing strategy matching his is ludicrous to me because I know we are not even close to synergy. There is no way to marry the two. He would have to mostly quit most of what he has developed up to this point and start over. There is no way he would do that. Caveat being if he could prove to me that his algorithm guarantees global consensus. Perhaps there might be some way to incorporate all his existing code and design. |
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I don't know how representative this is of France, but looks like a Islamic volcano ready to explode when the economy turns down. |
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No it won't be banned, because it is mostly traceable and the authorities love it because naive are putting all their incriminating transactions there. They G20 tax hunt will cometh and the block chain ledger will be cursed by the faithful. China hates it because they have no need to hunt for taxes, and thus it only represents a western invasion of the taipan's control over the economy (but the Communist Party will lose in the end). When the Chinese own it, they will allow it. Or the grassroots will use it without being caught. And that is why I have an idea that can both help Bitcoin and drive an altcoin. Careful you can lose weeks reading Armstrong. |
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That is why the consensus/trust network is important. It gives each person an identity and a web of trust. It gives them a transaction history and allows tracking of reputation. It lays the foundation for credit markets. This is more powerful and devastating than either Skycoin or Bitcoin as a token system. This is the death blow to the existing financial system, credit cards and taxes. This is what will drive four billion people who have cell phones but do not have access to bank accounts, into the crypto ecosystem.
Reputation and trust should be orthogonal to the ledger and consensus. Design principles of Least Power and Separation-of-Concerns. If it does this however, it will be attacked by the nation state, destroyed, shutdown, eliminated, discredited and there is a real risk the rest of the cryptocoin developers will be hunted to the ends of the earth and cremated.
There is only one way to win. Make it popular, extremely popular among the masses (remember my model of what is peaking and declining is top-down control, and bottom-up is rising and to take over by 2033), and very difficult to block technically and politically. Such "very difficult to block technically and politically" will give it enough year or so to gain inertia. When the Chinese businessmen (including the Communist Party members) are earning $billions in it, they give the middle finger to the USA. The Chinese say one thing politically and do another thing in business. The Communist Party is just a declining pony show now (it is for political show but 75% of what they actually do is free market and all about profit). My preference is to stop thinking about perfecting every technological issue that the NSA can attack. I assert we will never get there if that is the strategy. The world is not flat nor monolithic. Think outside the box. Paradigm shifts are my specialty. I am going to read The Fountainhead for a bit and try to get juiced up about the moral virtue of making tons of money.
Money is important, but for me personally, I feel more motivated by the concrete objectives the software accomplishes in the world than what the particular price or market cap is. The impact and consequence is substance, where as Enron or Ripple can have a large market cap but it is just accounting fraud and mirrors.
Money is very important because it is what drives the world. If you want to succeed, you must enable other people to be profitable. Everyone has an opportunity cost. Money is how we express it. It isn't a perfect expression because it is a collectivization and it attempts to make knowledge fungible (which it isn't), but it is very important because we have no other FUNGIBLE way to represent stored effort. And to penalize unproductivity (not just laziness but also people who waste their time on incorrect thinking and designs). I actually need to make money right now. I am nearly bankrupt (which I can blame on a chronic health problem). OTOH, I agree that above a certain level, money becomes meaningless except to understand how it motivates others since we live in political world. Some try to invent ways to stay motivated to aggregate insane amounts of money (convincing themselves it is their duty to corral the unwashed masses), and they become sociopaths against the best interests of mankind. All wealth, income, assets are grounded in power relationships and control of resources, assets and capacities.
Power is a fact of life. Do you want to live in delusion or reality? Your Marxist leanings (perhaps similar to Richard Stallman?) worry me. At least Armstrong was motivated to earn money in order to invest it in solving a needed problem. http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/02/18/what-makes-me-tick-good-question/My question to you is this, “What makes you tick, or drives you?” No doubt you’ve made substantial sums of money in your life, he’ll you’ve enjoyed exotic cars (Ferrari), flown like royalty (Concorde), but you don’t seem to be of the ilk that so many in the finance arena are; caught up in all of the traditional trappings (yatchs, 10th home, penthouses, etc.), as if one’s trying to over compensate for a small penis or something? – like a Blankfein or Dimon. What expensive hobbies you do have are collecting rare, ancient artifacts; hardly sexy stuff to most people. I can say, yes I made way too much money for a kid at 13. But in retrospect, that made me not impressed with money from an early age. Oddly enough, I could step into a crisis and was never scared. Others would be so afraid of how much money they had to make a decision on they could not do it. So I could be called on on trillion dollar portfolios and made the same calm decision as if it were $100. Having the richest clients in the world also showed me that money did not buy happiness. So while other spend their hundreds or millions of houses and yachts, I spent it on models and computers. I was curious. I wanted to know what made the world tick. What I do, is not for money but the challenge. I do not need money and the more you get the more you are a target for government anyway. |
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H1(H2), H1 (function applied to data, producing output data H3). Programs are hashes. Data is hashes. The output of a function is data described by a hash.
Unexecuted, dead-ended code paths can be verified without running the wasted computation using hashes. But I fail to see how that solves the problem of global consensus. I assert it does not. For instance, you and the receiver can designate a mutually agreed about merkle-hash/hash-chain timestamping authority and require a time stamp for the transaction.
As I wrote since the days of BitShares, delegation is centralizing (and fiat). In order to have global consensus you need to all agree on that timestamp authority. The powers-that-be can get their hands on monopolizing the timestamp authorities and then they can require identification before releasing the timestamp. Your afaics design appears to espouse minority chains that break away politically. In short, you are driving towards total chaos and unreliability. I have thought out reasons why I assert PoS is PieceOfShit. I thought for a long time about these issues and I am very skeptical you have provably solved them. I didn't read your whitepaper because I am tired of wasting my time crawling down more rabbit holes. If you have succinct explanation, I am interested to read. If the separation between the miners if more than 5 light minutes, then the orphan rate hits the maximum.
There are no orphans in my PoW design. I assume you have not reviewed the math I linked to in my first post in your thread. If Earth has more hashing power than Jupiter, then 100% of every blocked mined on Jupiter gets orphaned because of light propagation speed/latency
In my PoW design only minority chains can be merged into majority chains, not vice versa. Bitcoin is not the only model for decentralized systems of ownership and transfer digital property. It is not the final system. It is not the best system. It is a prototype first gen system.
Once you start doing consensus on the partial ordering on the transactions you begin to see that the bipartite directed acylic graph of transactions (consume outputs, create outputs) and outputs is the fundamental structure, not the blockchain. You begin to see that the blockchain is just a very special case of a more powerful and general mathematical structure.
That depends on a timestamp authority correct? The mathematical structure that generalizes the blockchain consensus to consensus on partial orderings, to me personally appears to be on the magnitude of the laser, invention of fire or the internet itself. This is the god tier for distributed computation.
Indeed. This is essentially what my PoW design does. But ultimately the majority has to converge to consensus, otherwise you have chaos. I have a simplified design that works with PoW and is guaranteed to choose a consensus. Mathematically I don't think you can guarantee GLOBAL convergence with aggregation of incremental local additions to a graph as you seem to be referring to. Global consensus is much more difficult than local consensus. Some forms of local consensus lead to global consensus naturally.
I am 99+% skeptical you have solved this problem. |
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The other way to verify a programmable block chain is delegation and reputation, i.e. some peers are paid and trusted to perform the computation. I believe this might be the direction Ethereum has chosen. As I wrote publicly on this forum a long time ago in discussions with Daniel Larimer, reputation is a centralizing paradigm. If you go that route or PoS, then you are headed towards fiat and political economics. Frankly I am not sure if (and quite skeptical whether) it is possible to achieve with a crypto-currency true decentralization devoid of the Iron Law of Political Economics. I've come up with an idea which is I believe is truly decentralized, and I believe it is viable and readily implemented way to market a cryptocurrency to the actual demand in the market (not imagined demand) and also I believe it helps Bitcoin too. And it is very much needed overall for our anonymity in general. So it is a good first step of something that has wide utility. If we are serious, we need to stop all this nonsense of criticizing Bitcoin as a way to gain zealot speculation marketshare (tempting because they are so eager to part with their money). Embrace Bitcoin, add to it, while also driving massive demand for the altcoin. I have that idea. I have even written about it publicly on this forum, but (luckily?) afaik nobody is paying attention. P.S. I agree that raising money via an IPO is exciting. And there are many exciting features to work on. But if someone builds my idea, they will race right by you in terms of adoption. NXT did many exciting things but it was also as argued by some raided by scammers and subject to political infighting (hey I was in close contact with one or two of the NXT's key players, so I was hearing about the stuff going on behind the scenes). And where is it today in terms of actual adoption? Insignificant. |
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I need to take a nap and then I will reply to your longish post. You've made some points there I agree with.
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