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iCEBREAKER, you are wasting my time. If you can get anyone credible here to explain to your side, I might respond further.
That you think the impacts of mining is modeled by Nash equilibrium is hilarious to me. I guess you haven't even figured out yet that your chart isn't addressing the question that was posed about impacts of centralization. You have a category error. You are merely modeling the percentage of the hashrate by some ill-defined metric called IP address or DNS name. That doesn't tell us if the impacts of mining are centralized. It is inconclusive. That we consistently have 2 - 3 pools as organized by that ill-defined metric with > 50% of the hashrate (51% attack threat), and 1 - 2 pools with > 25% of the hashrate (selfish mining threat), hints at the potential for centralization of impacts if the opportunity cost of not doing so is greater than every opportunity cost of doing so.
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For example, no one has solved the mining centralization dilemma yet.
Very sorry for the off-topic question, but there have been talks in Darkcoin forums about making all mining go through masternodes, i.e. every masternode would be a p2pool node. Those would be the only blocks that would be accepted. In your opinion, would this decrease the mining centralization and the 51% risk? Currently there are ~1000 masternodes, and the goal as I understand it is to get that number to 2000-3000 eventually. What is the economic incentive for running a masternode? Currently 20% of the block reward goes to masternodes, and the percentage is going up 5% every month until equilibrium for target number of masternodes is found. Eventually probably 50% of the block reward goes to masternodes and 50% to the miners (just my guesstimate). And will there be other services that generate value for the masternode owners, is not clear yet what ideas people can come up with. GHash.io charges no fees to miners because it is subsidized by an ASIC miner which mines on it, that is why it consistently gets near or over 50% of the network hashrate. If you charge for something, the fiat overlords can always use transfer pricing and debt to take control of that resource. As I told rpietila in his thread, I am in the unique position of having both technical and macro economics expertise. Smooth is also very astute, as you can see. With the proposition there would be no 3rd party pools, or incentive for people to go through GHash.io or any other mining proxy, because they'd have to mine on masternodes anyway which enforce (or don't enforce) the fee. There would probably be no use for a fee anyway because the percentage of the block reward is issued to masternodes already by the protocol. Do you think this has any merit at all compared to 2-3 pools having > 50% combined? Miners who can use a pool which doesn't take some of their block reward, will have an economic advantage, thus masternodes will become unfunded and be centralized (offered for free) by whomever can gain from stealing the anonymity (or what ever value they can extract from centralizing masternodes). Blocks that don't issue masternode reward are rejected, so why would people start mining on a pool whose all blocks become orphaned? Masternodes can refund this to miners. There is an extra incentive because masternodes have all the anonymity information. You can't stop the rich and the government from aggregating resources. They always find a way. The only way to stop them long-term is to make the resources incompatible with aggregation, e.g. the government would have a very difficult time owning all the human actions we do as they are inherently diverse. |
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Nash equilibrium is not considering externalities in this case.
That's just like, your assertion, man. The distribution of hashrate among pools demonstrates that whatever unspecified externalities hide under your bed have not been able to disrupt the equilibrium. And the birds think their food will always be handed to them. Humans are not good at seeing externalities, until it is too late. That is why crashes are like waterfalls. Taleb points out that humans make judgements with incomplete information and assume they have all the information. One example of an externality is the government can make it very costly to run a pool, unless you give them certain powers over its operation. Suddenly you can have a Nash equilibrium of compliant pools, all of which act as one. Looking at your chart, you would still think you have only a Nash equilibrium. |
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I think my time is better spent on productive matters than dealing with iCEBREAKER's ego.
Does anyone not understand why I think he is full of shit? Because I would rather focus on other things than deal with his simpleton shoehorn of one game strategy model into a macro economic board that is of wider scope. Nash equilibrium is not considering externalities in this case.
The Nash equilibrium doesn't factor opportunity costs of the externalities. One person's conspiracy is another person's huge pay day or downfall. Why else do people cozy up with the government?
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For example, no one has solved the mining centralization dilemma yet.
Very sorry for the off-topic question, but there have been talks in Darkcoin forums about making all mining go through masternodes, i.e. every masternode would be a p2pool node. Those would be the only blocks that would be accepted. In your opinion, would this decrease the mining centralization and the 51% risk? Currently there are ~1000 masternodes, and the goal as I understand it is to get that number to 2000-3000 eventually. What is the economic incentive for running a masternode? Currently 20% of the block reward goes to masternodes, and the percentage is going up 5% every month until equilibrium for target number of masternodes is found. Eventually probably 50% of the block reward goes to masternodes and 50% to the miners (just my guesstimate). And will there be other services that generate value for the masternode owners, is not clear yet what ideas people can come up with. GHash.io charges no fees to miners because it is subsidized by an ASIC miner which mines on it, that is why it consistently gets near or over 50% of the network hashrate. If you charge for something, the fiat overlords can always use transfer pricing and debt to take control of that resource. As I told rpietila in his thread, I am in the unique position of having both technical and macro economics expertise. Smooth is also very astute, as you can see. With the proposition there would be no 3rd party pools, or incentive for people to go through GHash.io or any other mining proxy, because they'd have to mine on masternodes anyway which enforce (or don't enforce) the fee. There would probably be no use for a fee anyway because the percentage of the block reward is issued to masternodes already by the protocol. Do you think this has any merit at all compared to 2-3 pools having > 50% combined? Miners who can use a pool which doesn't take some of their block reward, will have an economic advantage, thus masternodes will become unfunded and be centralized (offered for free) by whomever can gain from stealing the anonymity (or what ever value they can extract from centralizing masternodes). Now I bet you wish you hadn't asked me. Apologies. |
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the Nash Equilibrium continues to equilibrate:  Collusion and cartel must not yet be in your vocabulary or study of economics. Also perhaps you've forgotten the selfish mining attack only requires 25%. |
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For example, no one has solved the mining centralization dilemma yet.
Very sorry for the off-topic question, but there have been talks in Darkcoin forums about making all mining go through masternodes, i.e. every masternode would be a p2pool node. Those would be the only blocks that would be accepted. In your opinion, would this decrease the mining centralization and the 51% risk? Currently there are ~1000 masternodes, and the goal as I understand it is to get that number to 2000-3000 eventually. What is the economic incentive for running a masternode? Currently 20% of the block reward goes to masternodes, and the percentage is going up 5% every month until equilibrium for target number of masternodes is found. Eventually probably 50% of the block reward goes to masternodes and 50% to the miners (just my guesstimate). And will there be other services that generate value for the masternode owners, is not clear yet what ideas people can come up with. GHash.io charges no fees to miners because it is subsidized by an ASIC miner which mines on it, that is why it consistently gets near or over 50% of the network hashrate. If you charge for something, the fiat overlords can always use transfer pricing and debt to take control of that resource. As I told rpietila in his thread, I am in the unique position of having both technical and macro economics expertise. Smooth is also very astute, as you can see. I am just beginning to get familiar with NewLiberty. |
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To set the record straight, I must correct myself. The solution I have devised for selfish mining and rented hardware attacks is compatible Cryptonote, because can set a minimum age on tx outputs that can be mixed. Afaics, it is incompatible with Zerocash because everything is always mixed on every block.
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If one views "winning" a philosophical exchange as a thing at all, wouldn't the winner would be the one that is learning something new?
Engaging in philosophy for one's ego gratification from being right, would be playing that game with a significant handicap.
Fortunately there are many "correct" answers. |
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I think Bitcoiners are especially delusional with regards to what they beleive is actual decentralisation. At least with most altcoin people we can see that true decentralisation is something that's being worked towards.
Bitcoiners started in 2010-2012 selling people on this "anonymous" cryptocurrency. Then over time that faded away and "trustless" became the sales point. Now we're left with "decentralised" being the primary feature, and we all know how "decentralised" Bitcoin really is.
It just might not be possible to reach that holy grail. People are trying though, so we'll see. But even so, doesn't mean that we can't build interesting things and come up with interesting uses on top of our pseudo-decentralised currencies. They still might offer an effective alternative to some other forms of commerce in certain situations.
I agree we've been stonewalled. That is why I rise up against the concept of a slow-moving, groupthink herding MEW coin (not naming or asserting such precisely exists, just conceptually against being stifled). |
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For example, no one has solved the mining centralization dilemma yet.
Very sorry for the off-topic question, but there have been talks in Darkcoin forums about making all mining go through masternodes, i.e. every masternode would be a p2pool node. Those would be the only blocks that would be accepted. In your opinion, would this decrease the mining centralization and the 51% risk? Currently there are ~1000 masternodes, and the goal as I understand it is to get that number to 2000-3000 eventually. What is the economic incentive for running a masternode? |
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This is one reason why I say that cryptocurrencies simply may not work. Ever. If there are people, there is politics. Possibly math can be made to serve as a partial substitute, but we certainly aren't there yet.
For wide adoption, general trust is needed. If trust comes through understanding the math, general population should be acquainted with the math, which is not likely to happen. Therefore, if cryptocurrency gets adopted widely, it is likely to happen by trusting some authority that issues the currency. Say hello to our new crypto-fiat overlords. It is an important point. Users want freedom to spend. But the overlords can't give them that, otherwise they lose control. I think we can win, if the technology is not fundamentally centralizing. Users don't need to trust the technology, they just need for it to work all the time as expected. For now Bitcoin sucks. I use Bitpay and sometimes the damn invoice times out because of the Poisson distribution of block solutions perhaps or the tx fee crap. And who the fuck knows what to do the first time they see a Bitpay invoice? The stuff is far from user friendly. Come on...surely we can beat the pants off of Suckerberg and Thail. |
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Should new users coming here invest in Monero or NOT ?
I'd like a definitive answer not necessarily a short one per say but one that does in fact answer the question one way or the other.
To invest or not invest is not the question that concerns users of a currency. |
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I am not impartial enough to comment on the first part. But if he thinks that university research is "top-down directed", he must not know much about universities. My guess is he isn't saying no original thought and research originates there, but was probably cordoning off some portion of the ivory tower influence from research grants, tenure, etc.. I was reading the story of Emmy Noether and thought of the pseudonym for the Monero cryptographer. But Göttingen had no faculty posts for women. Hilbert fought for her. "After all," he said angrily, "the [faculty] is not a bath house!" She was finally put on an irregular appointment at a modest salary in 1922 -- when she was 40. |
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Thanks for teaching me why I now hate checkpoints. They could be an insidious vulnerability for the fiat politics to take over the PoW decentralization!
This is one reason why I say that cryptocurrencies simply may not work. Ever. If there are people, there is politics. Possibly math can be made to serve as a partial substitute, but we certainly aren't there yet. As we know giving all the power to the miners is not the way, especially when no demonstrated mechanism for decentralizing them. There are ideas, as we know, so we will see. Robinwilliams is correct we don't have the demonstrated conclusion yet, but visible evidence thus far is to the negative outcome. I will offer one evidence that we might have a chance to succeed. Since the dawn of recorded human history, currency was never fully centralized. There was always a blackmarket. Yet now the State is gaining the technology to eliminate physical blackmarkets (e.g. drones, ubiquitous communication, satelittes that can read the VIN # on your dashboard, night vision, etc.). So if they can also lock up digital markets, then it means the end of the human race. We will descend into a Dark Age as the collectivism is a cancer. History has shown that collectivism can't be aborted before megadeath if there is no leakage to frontiers. |
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Short version of how the Monero VIRUS works.. ... These Monero Shills are crypto-offenders and should have to go door to door in their neighborhoods and tell the communities all over crypto they are convicted offenders and are guilty of grooming their victims for the long-con ! Beware new users you don't want to be sitting in a shrinks office pointing to a doll showing what naughty parts of your wallet they violated  You actually wrote something that made laugh.  Maybe if you keep your posts short... (not agreeing to the criticism about lon-con, etc.. I just think it is normal human groupthink, not premeditated) |
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How come there are no fortunes in fortune cookies?
There is if you have the vision to see it. ~BCX~ An 11 year old pointed out to me that what is in fortune cookies are actually statements. I was slightly surprised to see the BCX won that philosophical exchange handily IMO. Impressed. On the face of it, yes they are only statements and quite cheap to produce. But this ignores how knowledge is formed. BCX's reply eloquently captured Taleb's and my theories about the formulation of value (via knowledge). It is the (long-tail) chance meeting of information that causes symbiosis and genesis. http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_EntropyHowever, the speed of the computing hardware and the sophistication of the software has no relevance because creativity can't be expressed in an algorithm. Every possible model of the brain will lack the fundamental cause of human creativity— every human brain is unique. Thus each of billions of brains is able to contemplate possibilities and scenarios differently enough so that it is more likely at least one brain will contemplate some unique idea that fits each set of possibilities at each point in time.
An algorithm or model can describe what and how to do and even be generalized to respond to unknown future scenarios by observing patterns and deducing rules about its environment, but it can't vary its imperfections nondeterministically, because the input entropy (to the algorithm) is known a priori and is finite. Whereas, for the collection of all human brains, the entropy is unbounded and thus the future can't be predetermined, i.e. isn't deterministic.
Imagine if life was perfect and without chance. Life would be deterministic and could be modeled with an algorithm, then failure couldn't exist, everything would be known in advance, and thus there could be no change that wasn't predictable, i.e. real change wouldn't exist and the universe would be static. Life requires imperfection and unbounded diversity, else life doesn't exist and isn't alive. Equality and perfection are the ambition of the insane who probably don't realize they must destroy life to reach their goal.
To make the computers as creative as the humans would require inputting the entropy from all the human brains. Yet there is no plausible way to extract the future uniqueness of human brains other than to allow them interact with the environment over unbounded time, because the occurrence of creativity is probablistic (by chance) as the dynamic diversity of human minds interact with the changing environment. The term unbounded means there is no way to observe or capture that uniqueness a priori other than through the future of life as it unfolds.
Inmates can be forced to do manual labor because it is possible to observe the performance of the menial tasks. However, it is impossible (or at least very inefficient and imprecise) to determine whether a human is feigning inability or giving best effort at a knowledge task. Manual labor is fungible, i.e. nearly any person with average IQ and dexterous limbs can be substituted to do the task. Whereas, knowledge production such as programming the computer, authoring content or developing marketing plans, requires diversity of thought.
Unsophisticated thinkers have an incorrect understanding of knowledge creation, idolizing a well-structured top-down sparkling academic cathedral of vastly superior theoretical minds. Rather knowledge primary spawns from accretive learning due to unexpected random chaotic fitness created from multitudes of random path dependencies that can only exist in the bottom-up free market. Top-down systems are inherently fragile because they overcommit to egregious error (link to Taleb's simplest summary of the math). P.S. Taleb responded in email affirmatively to what I wrote in the last paragraph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#Philosophical_theoriesRelatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research. |
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Keep in mind that checkpoints become useful when the majority may not even be the preferred/approved chain. It is an unusual case, and we hope never needed.
There is a very good reason for this. The longest chain rule only creates a consensus of miners. But cryptocurrency is actually a consensus of all participants as discussed, somewhat, here: http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/19/bitcoin-and-voting-power/In addition to addressing some technical issues of efficiency, checkpoints are also a way for the non-mining participants to exercise some of their voting power as economic participants. Usually this is done by proxy through the developers, but as NewLiberty explains, that is not necessary or inevitable. Thanks for teaching me why I now hate checkpoints. They could be an insidious vulnerability for the fiat politics to take over the PoW decentralization! |
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I want to stop arguing this.
I feel there is too much inertia in XMR for it to quickly morph into the currency for the masses which is not fiat and doesn't have a centralized mining future.
Too much investment and political discussions, not enough geeky technology discussions.
I went on the XMR developer channel, and I didn't see any interest in discussing deep theoretical issues. All I saw was fluffypony and others going over nitty details about code.
I understand you've got to work on those details. I think that is where your focus is now and also on managing the investment and political side.
Looks like that should keep you guys occupied for a while.
Paradigm shifts require focus. Yeah code has to be written and tested. Life is a bitch.
Over and out.
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