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r0ach you are violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is explained in my blog.
You could be correct on a short-term horizon (and on human scale) but in the large scheme of things, it is impossible for you to be correct.
On the specifics, I believe there is more than abundant energy in the universe and mankind is clever enough to extract it.
And the decentralization of information and thus knowledge production is already revolutionizing our world. This will accelerate.
I am optimistic. Yeah we'll see the Western socialism collapse, which is good change. Along the way, we will see some negative things happen, such as potentially war, etc..
The Western world has had a long period of relative peace and affluence. Cycles dictate that must change. I don't view the future as continuous decline, rather as a cycle of up and down. Yet technology never stops improving our quality of life overall.
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And I am finally ready to write the sequel to the companion blog, The Universe, and more closely relate information to our tangible world described by physics. But I don't have time to write it formally with lots of equations. So I am going to write only the rough sketch now and refer to the equations and symbols in the prior blog. I want to focus first on Verlinde's derivation of the gravitation force from emergent principles of conservation-of-energy and Shannon entropy (upper bound of the information content) which I had explained in the prior blog. First of all, I want to explain why the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that energy must always disperse from a hot to a cold body, and not the reverse of a colder body giving up energy becoming colder and making the hot body hotter. This is because the equation for entropy of any system is maximized by having as many equiprobable possible states, i.e. the probability is very high that a hot body with its very highly probable collision of moving particles due to high kinetic energy will transfer some kinetic energy to the slower moving particles in the cold body because it maximizes the entropy of the combined system of hot and cold bodies together. But that is sort of a tautology. The point is that random events are unlikely to be able to keep a system highly ordered and concentrated, just as random twists on a Rubik's cube are unlikely to solve it. Since there can't exist any top-down omniscience in the universe, the probability of maintaining ordered systems trends towards zero on a large enough scale. This is why one can keep small things in order for a while, but large endeavors unravel more quickly. For the same reason, small things grow faster, such as a saplings grow to trees, but trees don't grow to the moon. Referring to the equations in my prior blog, Einstein related the mass of an object to the potential energy it represents at the speed-of-light squared ( E=mc2). So we can substitute energy for mass, or vice versa. And the energy that a colder body absorbs is related to the number of equiprobable possible microstates N it has and the temperature T it achieves. So the larger mass M is dispersing energy to the small mass m (via electromagnetic transfer, e.g. photons) exerting a gravitational force due to this probability to transfer energy. The number of microstates is dictated by the surface are of the imaginary sphere at the radius R which separates the two masses, because the photons only have two degrees-of-freedom, azimuth and altitude, to travel from mass M to mass m, corresponding to two orthogonal circles of radius R. Thus the surface area of the imaginary sphere (based on the square of the two degrees of freedom each with a range of R) and not the volume inside it, determines the possibilities for states that mass m could possibly be in.  When we put all those equations together, magically the correct equation for the gravitational force is achieved, although that equation was originally derived from Newton's laws which have no concept of entropy or microstates of the bodies in consideration. Verlinde's discovery was a major revelation for Physics. What I want to add is the insight that gravity emerges from the probability that the microstates of relative bodies of mass can't avoid dispersing some energy from the one with the higher energy (mass) to the one with less. As the bodies move closer to each other, the equations dictate the force increases, and this is because the number of equiprobably microstates is decreasing as the surface area of the imaginary sphere decreases, so relative acceleration between the two bodies must increase so as to maintain the rate of energy dispersion. Or in other words, as the bodies move closer to each other, the change in the relative entropies decreases, so the acceleration (and force) increase to compensate since the relative energy (mass) has not changed. So the upper bound for information content (Shannon entropy) of that system of two relative bodies is directly involved in physics of the acceleration of relative bodies due to the gravitational force. So intangible information content which is a dimensionless quantity, is projected into a dimensional structure in the physical world and thus interacts with energy and forces. This is profound because it seems to hint that information content is not orthogonal to our physical world. Although we can copy information at near zero physical cost, the mere existence of copies of information does not increase the entropy (nor information) of the system. For existing information to create new knowledge or do anything useful, it must interact with the physical world causing probabilities to disperse. Referring back to my Information is Alive! blog, the entropy of knowledge creation increases the more randomized, autonomous (because randomized requires independence) actors of knowledge creation exist. So as our means of interacting to disperse information into more randomized, independent actors becomes more efficient requiring less energy (mass) per unit of information dispersal (synonymous with creation), our reality will more and more be dictated by cost of information transfer than effects of large mass such as moving our bodies around. Tying this back into my essay on the Rise of Knowledge and Demise of Finance, I see humanity moving away from top-down control dictated by the power-law distribution of physical resources and stored monetary capital, and towards a more dispersed spread of information experts. It appears that Agricultural and Industrial Ages were actually just temporary orders that will now succumb to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and usher in a golden Knowledge Age.
Past writings of mine which are applicable to the above: I am quite flabbergast that Eric S. Raymond (self-professed to have 150 - 170IQ, the creator of the "open source" movement) could get the logic so wrong on the coming Knowledge Age. In his critique of Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, he misses the key generative model of open source, which is that the source is always changing. The enslavement of knowledge by capital is due to the transactional cost of the propagation of creations. As we lower that friction, knowledge takes over. And he apparently fails to comprehend capital can't buy knowledge because thought isn't fungible, and this becomes more evident as the diversity of innovation becomes more fine-grained. The claim that the material input costs will be significant relative to the marginal cost of distributing more copies of intellectual property is wrong because the only costs in material production that can't be reduced asymptotically to 0 at economy-of-scale and automation are the knowledge inputs. Thus knowledge is infinitely more valuable than material production at the asymptote. The only reason that capital has been able to enslave the knowledge portion of the cost in the material cost is due to inability of fine-grain, autonomous knowledge to control the creative outputs of material production. The 3D printer changes this because the printer will be in every person's home. The commodity value relative to knowledge value of raw material inputs will fall asymptotically to 0. What Eric misses is that many types of intellectual creations and creative processes can be incrementally fluid and shared, including music, video production, medical processes, etc.. People can take the designs of others and refine them. This is precisely open source. It is not that we won't possibly use fungible money (micro payments perhaps) to pay each other for creations, but that money won't be in control of the startup costs. Individuals will choose what they want to work spontaneously. This destroys the power of stored capital to enslave knowledge. We will still use this money to buy those non-creative things that drop near to 0 in price, such as raw materials and food. This is what I was trying to explain to Eric a long time ago, but it just flew right over his (and his readers') cuckoo head(s) so he banned me. Note this doesn't mean I am agreeing with Rifkin's Marxist conclusions about the end of private property rights. All the indicia of cod-Marxism are present. False identification of capitalism with vertical integration and industrial centralization: check. Vertical integration enslaves knowledge and will fall away. Capital will increasingly become knowledge instead of stored fungible claims on labor. Writing about human supercooperative behavior as though it falsifies classical and neoclassical economics Supercooperative doesn't have to mean Communism. It can mean more finely-grained, autonomy of work. Eric is conflating here, even though Rifkin was also apparently erroneously introducing Marxism. They both got it wrong. the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems Wrong! The commons means knowledge takes control. For example, physics assures us that energy is neither created nor destroyed, so it is only the lack of knowledge production that makes energy finite or scarce. And I am not referring to perpetual motion machines, rather to more efficiency and automation of extraction of energy through greater innovation due to faster propagation of knowledge. Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn. Correct. Rifkin doesn't understand fine-grained, autonomy is the key element of the commons. >So @esr, how do you align the long tail of maintenance into the sunk v marginal cost framework? Er, simply by observing that it is neither of those things and can’t be jammed into that framework. He makes it clear that he didn't even consider that the lower transactional propagation cost of digital distribution of editable creations increases the frequency, granularity, and autonomy of those maintenance edits. He apparently doesn't remember that Metcalfe's or Reed's Law says that as the number of those editing nodes increases, then the value of the knowledge network increases squared. When people speak of “capitalism” and “free markets” as being separable ideas, and I inquire into that, I generally find that they’re identifying capitalism with the way free-market economies behave in the presence of high communication and transaction costs – big firms with lots of vertical integration, deskilled employees treated like cogs in Taylorized processes, and elaborate hierarchical management structures designed to manage the largest possible lumps of capital to collect economies of scale.
Economies mostly stop looking like that as the costs of transaction and communication drop and technological leverage increases revenue per employee. But it’s still capitalism because specialists in capital accumulation drive most of the productive activity. Ah he was so close to getting the point, then he screwed it up on the last sentence. Yes Eric, but what capital are they accumulating? Stored capital or knowledge capital. He just hasn't quite had the epiphany yet on how the relative value of stored capital can plummet.
Oil is food, Oil is materials, Oil is Energy, Oil is what backs USD
Oil is what you can't print. Oil is your Tax.
You can't seem to agree that knowledge will 1000X more valuable than those raw materials. You have entirely missed the point of my post here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6065144#msg6065144So I think we will stop the discussion now. I don't have more time. Let them raise the price of oil to $1 million per liter. Our knowledge value will rise proportionally. Then I (and others) will be earning $1 trillion per day. It is the value-added to raw inputs that is relevant. With mass production, the value-added of knowledge was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of xerox copies. Now the creations will change 1000s of variants per day or minute. The value-added is unfathomable. It is the speed of the propagation of creation of product innovation that destroys (devalues) their control. I am happy to inform that Eric says I am not banned as long as I can remain respectful and has allowed my input to be considered. I posted another summary of my idea. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479608Thanks. A refutation would be more helpful.
The point is about the relative value of the autonomous knowledge (capital) economy versus the vertically integrated (monetary) capital economy. As the autonomy of creation increases in both granularity and speed-to-market (Linus principle of "publish often"), the number of nodes of sharing increases and the value of that knowledge sharing network increases by the nodes squared. We have chart confirmation of that law with the history of the Bitcoin price.
Specific example would be sharing a 3D printing design, and others autonomously iterating on that design. The design is open source. Music compositions, medical art, etc.
Thus the vertically integrated economy falls in relative value. How can you reason that we will pay the same or significantly for something produced by the economy that will be worth relatively much less than it had been?
With mass production, the value-added of the knowledge input was amortized over the capital cost of the factory and millions of produced copies. Thus the knowledge networking value was insignificant. Whereas, when knowledge can directly create with near real-time publishing, the knowledge networking value increases by the square and outstrips any startup costs. Moreover, incremental edits amortize the startup costs over many knowledge networking connections, and the value is the square of the connections.
The key is that open source knowledge is always changing and the knowledge workers benefit from autonomously iterating each other's designs, because the value of the network increases by the square of the participants who share. Metcalfe's (or Reed's) Law is at the heart of why sharing creates more value for all participants. That is not saying all nodes connect with all other nodes, rather the value scales proportional to the square. Discussion continues over at the blog of the creator of "open source". http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-479716There is very limited ‘knowledge networking value’ for carrots. Extrapolate from there. What does agriculture have to do with network value of knowledge creation? Do carrots have anything to do with open source business models? Carrots will continue their downward spiral of relative value. Iron used to be a precious metal. Commodities have trended downward in price for millennia. If knowledge can be unleashed from vertical integration gridlock, those trends should accelerate. The refutation I expect is that there are many contributors to Linux and to aggregate value and then distribute it to the contributors requires business models such as corporate sponsorship. I agree a dearth of modularity is a barrier, but it doesn't apply to all types of creations. And I was working on higher-kinded semantics computer language to hopefully improve modularity. Even for Linux we could ponder a pay-per-download micro payment with a new crypto-currency, then have a list of contributors ranked by LOC and distribute to them. Not sure if that works, but I am not going to try to pretend I'm as omniscient as you and know all the limitations of ingenuity of mankind. Performers and analysts are earning tips from their YouTube videos. These seed creative thought, which spawn other creations.
We will be able to produce all the food, raw materials, and energy we need with robots. There is no reason the price shouldn't trend towards zero, once the robots can build more robots.
The activity that can't be automated is creativity and knowledge creation. Thus it should rise in relative value. Eric presented his refutation and I replied. This pretty much cements it for me. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480217> For Rifkin’s predictions to come true it would not suffice for knowledge creation to rise in value. For his predictions to come true, material goods would have to fall to zero marginal cost. That will not happen, because atoms are heavy. Mea culpa I haven't read the book. I indicated in my linked refutation, that I wouldn't agree with any Communist basis and agree with Eric's critique on that aspect. For the conceptual idea to scale, there must be symbiosis between individual gain and collective gain, per the Eric's Inverse Commons in the Magic Cauldron.
For example, one could argue that any initial start-up cost for a creation couldn't be offset by the knowledge network value of incremental edits because the initial creator is not directly receiving the return on investment. My counter logic is there may be business models dealing with modularity or diminishing trail of appreciation (citation) that when combined with micro payments can route remuneration backtracked to the creators. Moreover the non-monetary square law scaling of the Inverse Commons applies in that participants gain the return of the creations and incremental improvements of their brethren. It is a mesh topology N-highway of sharing. My belief is that according to gift culture Eric outlined, the community is aligned towards acknowledging sources especially when the act of doing so is only an insignificant (automated) micro payment or other remuneration models the ingenious may develop. Insignificant micro payments then aggregate to the creators at the rate of the participants squared. The squared law seems to be so powerful and at the heart of why the Inverse Commons is the "only known positive scaling law of software engineering" as so eloquently and astutely noted by Eric. That audio of Eric is permanently imprinted in my primary consciousness. I can never forget random "monkeys beating on the code" can outperform the cathedral of closed source (which I want to extend to vertical integration in general).
Also I noticed in the Bitcoin and now especially in the Dogecoin community, there is much more tipping and donations than I know about in the fiat world. The participants understand that to make their ecosystem grow, they need to reward participation. That is not Communism because it is an individual decision, no Max Weber central authority is holding a gun to each of our heads. You can see in my linked discussion thread, the participants are rallying the concepts and refining them perhaps better than I could, or at least differently and scaling requires diversity.
Atoms are heavy but that is lacking information. How heavy? Relativity is all the matters here. I never wrote zero, I wrote relative value is trending asymptotically towards zero.> You are just as wrong as anyone who around 1900, observing the steep fall in marginal cost of manufactured goods, predicted that food would become effectively free. In fact food declined from say a third or half of someone's income to something on the order of a tenth now in the developed world. The third world didn't industrialize so was devalued. The industrial economy was more valuable than the agricultural economy, and to survive the agricultural economy had to move to higher economies-of-scale and automation, thus significantly lowering relative prices.
And now the Knowledge Age economy is devaluing the Industrial and Agricultural age economies. Food is maybe a hundredth of my income and that is the future.http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-480286> We’re still a long way from solving the shortage of skilled labor, as anyone who has ever needed a plumber can attest. I am in the Lazarus Long camp that says there is nothing the government can't unimprove if it can touch it. Plumbing is not an extremely highly skilled activity, at least without the kafkaesque, labyrinth of building codes that must be navigated in some jurisdictions. Of course I am not arguing that building best practices aren't a good idea if done in the free market. I strongly suspect the supply of plumbers is restricted by the onerous licensing requirements which mismatch the education level of someone who wouldn't be bored out their freakin' mind to pursue that career. I was an autodidact plumber when I was 5 years old. Currently it is difficult to find a plumber in the post-BRICs NICs portion of the developing world, because the debt was driven sky-high by the Fed's ZIRP carry trade and uneconomic construction is going full tilt (to implode globally 2016 in a massive conflagrapocalypse).
I expect the discussion will likely digress to the usual pissing politics, so I won't participate further unless there is a solid refutation of my salient point about knowledge networking scaling faster than vertical integration. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558&cpage=1#comment-481122Decreased transactional friction leads directly to elimination of the opportunities for arbitrage. I can buy plenty of products and services directly from Shenzhen, and there’s no profit for a new middleman. I assume your implied point is that as knowledge moves more freely then no one can build a Buffet-esque moat to defend profit. Your correct use of the term "middleman" goes to the heart of my counter-logic. Remember I wrote upthread that knowledge creation isn't fungible. So when you need something created based on an existing body of work, you need an expert. Let me distill that for you. As the transactional costs of knowledge sharing decreases, the profit moves closer to the producer of knowledge and away from the rent-seeking middlemen. Diversity of creation and the maximum division-of-labor guarantee that moat but where it is rightfully deserved personal property. People will finally own their expertise and creative energy.Eric I continue to honor you. Peace. Generally speaking, the point of life (at lower levels) is to make more life. This is someways is explained well in The Selfish Gene. It will do this by any means necessary and those means often mean creating gradients. So life doesn't reduce gradients, it creates them.
Maximizing entropy (disorder) is the maximization of the number of equiprobable outcomes, i.e. maximizing degrees-of-freedom. Btw, degrees-of-freedom is potential energy. Creating more unique (every human is!) instances life increases diversity, granularity, and degrees-of-freedom. Procreation is breaking down the concentrated gradient (order a.k.a. kinetic energy) incoming from the Sun into maximum entropy or potential energy.
I got into this in the Information Is Alive! and The Universe essays at my blog (see my signature).
Schneider is semantically incomplete though on one point. jabo38 is correct, the goal of life is to maximize the instances life, yet life goes hand-in-hand with death because if nothing dies then procreation rate has to diminish. So in that sense Schneider is correct as quoted.
That was appreciated but let's not discuss that philosophical tangent further in this thread, so we don't bury the main point of this thread. We've already built a sufficient case for the point w.r.t. to stated goals for crypto-currency. I strongly urge to move further discussion on that to the Dark Enlightenment or Economic Devastation thread. I will copy this post there. You can click "Quote" then copy+paste into a Reply at any thread. |
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Damn it is becoming a feely goodly reunion party. I thought I was going to have this place all to my disgruntled, derangulated self.  . |
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I have often written a concept analogous to, “ if the speed-of-light were not finite, the past would be undifferentiated from the future, space-time would collapse into an infinitesimal point, and we could not exist”. Today I realized that statement is incorrect. A differentiated past and future only mathematically requires that the maximum velocity of any observer can't exceed the speed-of-light, but it doesn't require that the speed-of-light be any particular value. Rather it only requires that the speed-of-light be numerable, so that we can write it into the fundamental Physics equations as some quantity other than infinity. Mathematically any numerable value selected doesn't place a bound on the speed-of-light that could be selected by some other form of existence in the universe of unbounded possibilities. In fact, we can pick the speed-of-light to be any value we want it to be, as it only depends on the units of measure we choose: https://www.quora.com/If-the-Planck-constant-was-different-would-the-speed-of-light-change/answer/Barak-Shoshanyhttp://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/116439/is-there-any-relation-between-planck-constant-and-gravitational-constant#answer-116441Studying more about how the speed-of-light is measured and confirmed and our concept of what a vacuum actually is (not totally empty space), the thought occurs (to me at least) that we can only measure the speed-of-light up the maximum resolution of our measuring devices. That doesn't mean that what we are measuring is the maximum speed-of-light but rather confirming that our arbitrary theories and concepts are confirmed by the restrictions they place on our understanding of how and what to measure! This ties in perfectly to the concept of aliasing error that I outlined in my prior comment in this thread today. Einstein is quoted, “ Theory determines what we observe.”. He may have also once quipped, “ If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.” but what he really meant is ‘ data’ where he uses ‘ facts’. So our (perception of our) existence and the speed-of-light is entirely arbitrary and is derived from the collective theories we choose to adopt. Groupthink is a powerful phenomenon, because without it we would not perceive the existence of each other. We have to resonate on some shared theory of measurement and observation, else we would all have relative records of history which are entirely independent and lonely. Past is relative to every observer thus does not absolutely exist, i.e. for everyone ( e.g. your reality does not exist for a person who never has any knowledge of your reality), the present is always gone, and the future doesn't exist now and by the former logic can't absolutely exist once it arrives. Meaning existence is never absolute, ever, rather just a concept in the minds of those who choose to agree on some memory. Note congruently that the present is an infinitesimal point on the light cone diagram. Damn it is becoming a feely goodly reunion party. I thought I was going to have this place all to my disgruntled, derangulated self. P.S. could someone please inform Michael Jordan that the number 23 is first prime number which is the sum of three other, consecutive, prime numbers; 5, 7 and 11. |
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You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.
I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint. The Rise of KnowledgeUnderstand Everything Fundamentally Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read. If the author is right and I think he is we are all in the midst of a tragedy of epic proportions... I (AnonyMint aka Shelby Moore III) want to again thank CoinCube for appreciating my original essays. I haven't been able to write and think at that level lately due to illness and chaotic unraveling of my life (finances, etc) as a result. Today I wrote something which I think explains some of the frustration I have had in my life in terms trying to communicate on forums. I am responding to Eric S Raymond, who claims he has a 166 IQ. Unsurprising. I too can only perceive one undifferentiated stratum above the one I’m in Could that be an aliasing phenomenon? Analogous to your example of constructing more complex generative models matching subsets while playing the game Zendo, isn’t it possible that a higher capacity thinker may construct more complex relationships which are invisible to someone who can’t sample the model space at the Nyquist limit of the frequency of model instantiation of the higher genius stratum. You’ll agree on the conclusion (subset) with the higher genius stratum, but this doesn’t detect whether the higher genius employed a more complex model to arrive at the same conclusion. To test this hypothesis, I considered the scenario when the higher genius’ model generates an answer contrary to your conclusion. I’ve experienced this where my conclusions are labeled wrong because the others are unable to load the model that is in my head, and I am unable to communicate the model to them. The only way I am able to get them to acquiesce is where I can show an example failure scenario for their conclusions. Invariably in a group politics setting, they will dismiss this case as insignificant, because they can’t understand its frequency of occurrence in my more complex model. So I am again unable to convince them and they learn only by failure in the market; and by then they blame the failure on other incidental issues because again they could not model the phenomenon in the higher complexity model. The only instances where I succeed to win the argument is when I can convey a slamdunk failure mode of their conclusions (a point sample in the Shannon-Nyquist space) which was illuminated to me by my model. Yet they still haven’t grasped the model so they go flailing around looking for other conclusions than the one I provided. That is indeed aliasing error. So the higher genius is likely to say nothing instead, because he knows it is useless to speak. Note I doubt I am even a Fowler class genius, because of my underdeveloped language capabilities. Go figure? Listening to Freeman Dyson he seems mostly undifferentiated to me. And interestingly (noted in the Charlie Rose interview) he is somewhat reserved when he speaks as if I can sense he is carefully choosing what the audience could appreciate. Except for example I can detect he is thinking about much more complex relationships, when he says, “ I don’t have much faith in predictions. Science is organized on predictability…scientists arrange things in an experiment to be unpredictable as possible and then do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable, then it is not science”. Note the logical implication of the long-tail undecidability of science in the juxtaposition of his opening phrase with the ending one. Whoever didn’t detect that, is likely not a genius.  Btw, I had another example of the above described phenomenon this week. And make sure you read the "Meta" verbiage at the end of my comment immediately above the linked one.  P.S. I posted the above quoted comment at ESR's blog under the pseudonymous author name ‘vacuous’ and with the email address submitted as, “gobbledygook@ethereal.unbounded”. |
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On the 3 months $ chart, the rate of decline of STEEM is decelerating (employ a straight edge on your screen to convince yourself): http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/Thus it looks like it will find a bottom or the rate of decrease will become largely irrelevant. |
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I believe perhaps this latest idea may be the most practical for privacy system that can scale to the masses and fits their meager expectations for privacy.
I would think that MimbleWimble holds the most promise for a scalable anonymous design... First time I heard of that (my head has been buried on Steem and curing my illness, not anonymity tech lately) and I am reading now, and already it helped me: I had requested that @smooth provide me a link to a "knapsack" algorithm that Monero was originally contemplating (which may have been similar in some facets), but I never received a reply to that request.
So here I found the knapsack paper (see link I inserted into the quote): OWAS had the good idea to combine the transactions in blocks. Edit: I will not go off on the MimbleWimble (and OWAS) tangent right now to compare to my idea. I will do so when I have the incentive to do so. Right now my priorities are on other work. |
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My goal is to not just provide anonymity and untraceability to transactions, but to be just as private (usernames, addresses, and amounts) or even more private than Dash, Monero and zcash.
I know that sounds like a lot, but after reading your ZKT stuff, my interest is obviously peaked and would love your guidance on the mixing and ring choices that we go with
Z(ero)cash is arguably the best technology for private transactions, because the anonymity (mix) set is every transaction that will ever be done (i.e. all the possible Zerocash zerocoins are mixed, but not be confused with Zerocoin technology which is unrelated). This not only provides an assurance that Sybil attack can't unmask (unlike with a smaller mix set where the Sybil attacker could populate enough of the mix to increase probabilities), it also eliminates a flaw in ring mixing called "combinatorial unmasking", which @anonymint first communicated to @smooth during the BCX incident in 2014. It may also provide greater resistance against "metadata correlation" unmasking (even without Tor/I2P which may themselves be unreliable or even honeypots), e.g. correlating the IP address of the spend and subsequent spend transaction when change is spent to self (and other metadata correlation such as accessing the website of the vendor which is the payee who is correlated with other metadata). Zcash may also be the most compact and computationally efficient for verification of the on-chain mixing systems (ring sigs may have faster proving/signing, at least without homomorphic value hiding). Zcash of course has the one big disadvantage that the master key setup must be trusted, and if compromised it can enable the attacker to mint unlimited numbers of coins without being detected, although it can't impact the privacy (one assumes spending even within orders-of-magnitude of all the zerocoins would be both intractable and detectable due to blockchain bloat). The combinatorial unmasking of ring signatures is due to intersection of overlapping mixes which can isolate which UTXO in the mix are redundant and not the spent output in the ring. This can be avoided by forcing all UTXO into deterministic mix sets which can't overlap with each other (and for greater mix set size, just mix more than once). This also aids in pruning the block chain when all the UTXO in the mix set have been spent (which becomes deterministically knowable). I don't know if Monero ever implemented this suggestion, as the last time @anonymint tried to have a discussion at Reddit with the anonymous @shen-noether (who frankly at that time seemed like a condescending jerk), he thought he had proved it wasn't an issue and there was a slightly acrimonious exchange with him and @smooth to clarify my point. I am unaware the resolution on their end, as I don't track Monero developments closely. Monero (Cryptonote) ring signatures did not include any homomorphic value hiding, so this required much more complicated wallets (and multiple on-chain transactions per logical transaction to aggregate the value sent) that kept balances in powers-of-2 (or other choice) increments, because mix sets had to all have the same denomination in order to be mixed without being trivially unmasked by the value transferred. It also meant that the on-chain publicly visible transfer of value could be potentially correlated with other metadata. Blockstream invented Confidential Transactions (CT) for homomorphic value hiding and @shen-noether combined this with Cryptonote ring signatures to create Confidential Ring Signatures (CRS), which I believe may now (or soon to) be implemented in Monero (and may be one of the reasons for XMR's recent price rise). But CT (and thus also CRS) is very inefficient compared to Bitcoin transactions (and Cryptonote ring signatures). Around the same time that CT was invented, Compact Confidental Transactions (CCT) was invented and announced. It had roughly an order-of-magnitude size and computational efficiency advantages over CT until it was discovered that original algorithm was broken and it had to add a Proof-of-Square which significantly reduced the efficiency (still somewhat better than CT in some aspects but not all) because it required huge bit security elliptic curves. Simultaneously to all that during the summer of 2015, @anonymint figured out how to combine CCT with ring signatures and eliminate the need to do the Proof-of-Square, thus regaining all the efficiency advantages of CCT and the homomorphic data hiding. But he never released this into the public domain nor shared it with anyone, so @anonymint's invention has no peer review. He didn't release it originally because he was trying to maximize the value he could get from his discovery and later he didn't release it because he realized he needed to tweak it, his white paper, and never found the time (nor incentive) to complete that work. Last year, he offered ZKT to Boolberry for free, but cryptozoid never replied. Since then, I think I may have discovered a way to make off-chain masternode mixing more robust, although I haven't fully spec'ed this concept yet (mostly just floating in my head and some discussions I had with @jl777 about it). Specifically I don't have to trust the masternodes with the value of my transaction, I don't have the jamming problem of interactive CoinJoin, and I can control which masternodes must onion route my transaction (to provide the meta-data masking that the other systems depend on Tor/I2P for). And the mixings become ordinary efficient transactions on the blockchain (not rings, possibly no homomorphic values, and not Zerocash snarks). It might work really well with @anonymint's improvement to CCT[1] without the ZKT integration with Cryptonote rings. Or just CCT to hide values without hiding identity[1]. I had requested that @smooth provide me a link to a "knapsack" algorithm that Monero was originally contemplating (which may have been similar in some facets), but I never received a reply to that request. Months ago I offered to discuss this with Evan, but afaik he never replied to my email. I believe perhaps this latest idea may be the most practical for privacy system that can scale to the masses and fits their meager expectations for privacy. There is one more issue significant note, which is a view key. It is argued these will be very important for compliance (with authorities, etc) and last time I checked it was not clear if Zcash has one. Cryptonote and I believe the CRS and ZKT variants do. [1] I am surprised that no one has pointed out that hiding values, e.g. Blockstreams Confidential Transactions, is immune to IP address meta-data correlation, because hiding value doesn't require hiding identity. Thus RingCT is retrogressive (and even bloats the block chain). Now if we talk about the most optimized implementation of homomorphic data hiding, then I fixed and improved Compact Confidential Transactions as part of my work on my Zero Knowledge Transactions. So if that will be the new area of provable privacy, then I can still kick ass on Monero/Aeon. Hmmm. I didn't realize I was still holding a superior asset. This gives another thing to add to my coin to kick ass on you fuckers. Right on! |
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FYI, the untruncated history is here, which can also be employed for any Github user. Although it is not as real-time as the quoted link. |
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It is something much more than qora. If Synereo succeeded it will mean that need for servers will be eliminated. And that will bring limitless uses to Synereo.
Social networking is just one use of that 'no servers' technology. The only slight problem is that we will have to wait for Q4 of 2017 to see full release.
Add Synereo to the list of those who have tried to decentralize hosting in varying degrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networkingDiaspora was one of the first and is still actively developed and also is more or less intended to be server-less, but the problem is that users can't stand-up their own client 24x7, so in essense all these end up being hosted any way, which will be the same for Synereo. Problem with hosted nodes is that the data isn't backed up on a blockchain, so if your choice of hosts fails you, then you are screwed. Whereas with all the data backed up on the blockchain (e.g. Steem), then you have decentralized backup of the data. Thus, I concluded that Synereo's distributed model of content is incorrect.As usual, Synereo is a lot of buzzword bullshit, but the reality will hit the metal on the bottom line economics and onboarding realities. And I have already analyzed that in my posts archive. As for Casper's blockchain design (e.g. RChain), go review TPTB_need_war's posts in the Ethereum Paradox thread. Any way, most of you are just investing for the hype and pump, and then dump. So my comments shouldn't concern you. |
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Next phase is constructing a STEEM Craigslist. But obviously they have more work to do on their security so I would not expect STEEM BAZAAR to debut anytime soon. Currently the most useful thing you can buy with STEEM DOLLARS is BTC at Bittrex.
That is good enough for people who view it as an investment. You don't really need any innovative uses on the demand side for an alt to become a hit. You neophytes need to get a grip on reality. 2 months later, STEEM devs are keeping their word by releasing phase 2: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=steemit+escorow+14&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=tHow's your phase 1 coming along? Phase 1 of mine and Phase 2 of Steem is roughly analogous to comparing Michael Jordan in his senior of high school to Gary Coleman at the pinnacle of his career in athletics. |
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I knew all of that already and none of those details change my opinion that Synereo offers nothing. Search for my posts archive for "Synereo" for my prior analysis. And end of 2017 for release will very likely be too late. |
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Sorry but how does Greg Maxwell troll?
As a Hitler moderator of Development & Technical Discussion. Entire threads disappear and even posts within threads, that raise any threat to Blockstream's hegemony over Bitcoin. Maybe he has turned down the dial recently. I dunno and I don't fucking care. He doesn't exist in my world any more (i.e. he and I have no need to interact). |
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Still coding. My new code is of course in a private repository. Medium's stats support my belief that vast majority of readers do not want to write blogs. And the vast majority of social networking users don't even want to read blogs!
I don't think the censorship issue is even in the consciousness of most readers and even bloggers.
Thus I conclude Steem has not found any low-hanging viral fruit.
I would not prefer to be blogging on Steem (as compared to a replacement for Steem that wasn't reliant on whales and note I am coding such now), because I am totally dependent on the whales, both for my reward, visibility and also for the security of the blockchain.
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Interesting blog about Google's new RankBrain SEO algorithm: Correct but still isn't really monetizing traffic from Google for the blog author, because really only the whales can impart any significant rewards. And 4 weeks is nothing. The content may be relevant and generating Google traffic for years.
Your blog post is interesting to contemplate. And it could help drive traffic to Steem(it), which one might presume would drive more usership. But readers aren't users. They have to actually signup to become useful in terms of onboarding crypto-currency to the masses. And they have to actually find it rewarding to do something with their registered account other than just read.
I still think the reward dynamics of Steem aren't viral.
In terms of Google's new RankBrain, it will also send more readers to Medium, which already has 25 million reader and 20,000 weekly active bloggers. What does Steem offer that is an advantage? A smaller audience?
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This article confirms my viewpoint that all digital currencies will follow the Ted Kaczynski model of technology always being a detriment to human liberty and freedom: http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-01/on-digital-currencies-central-banks-should-leadThey're spelling it out now in non-ambiguous terms that digital currency is just going to be gateway for things like a ban on cash, increased Keynesianism, NIRP, more taxation, etc. In other words, no matter how it starts out, and might be beneficial in the near term, in the end game you will always be receiving a net loss. Even with things like Monero, they will just force you to use a fixed address alias system for transactions to bypass the Monero mixer, otherwise you'll be considered a money launderer. There is really no such thing as "fungible" digital currency as long as governments exist. Disagree. That article exemplifies to me how little the PBOC understands about this phenomenon. It shows they are far behind and are likely to get their butts kicked by crypto-currency and blockchains. They can't take the lead and control, because it is a global phenomenon and they only control their own nation, and with VPNs, Tor, etc, they don't even control their own nation. Providing a stable value and control over the money supply are not the point of crypto-currencies and blockchains. They entirely don't understand the phenomenon. I told you all upthread that the store-of-value function is not the killer app. We are only waiting on the blockchain which onboards the masses with popular activities. It will be very difficult to ban a popular activity which is deemed by the mainstream to be harmless and advancing technology, and to enforce taxation+KYC on zillions of microtransactions. Edit: I continue to maintain my belief that Bitcoin was primarily driven by tinfoil hats and thus Bitcoin is not the killer app of blockchains: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@michaelmatthews/how-i-got-into-bitcoin |
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