I don't disagree with your calculations. In fact, they accomplish just what I want. We don't want the same things (you prefer work; I prefer stake; you think energy use is okay; I think it is a big waste).

Edit: However, I thought about it a bit more and decided it is not worth making a fuss over. Here are approximate percentages on attack resistance (this is for permanent 51% attacks, not lucky streaks from minority attackers; majority voting performs better against lucky streaks).

4 out of 7 majority voting: (99.95% work 5% stake; 99.5% work 10% stake ; 94.4% work 20% stake)
3 out of 5 majority voting: (99.90% work 5% stake; 99.1% work 10% stake ; 94.1% work 20% stake)

3 out of 3 unanimous voting: (99.985% work 5 % stake; 99.86% work 10% stake; 98.46% work 20% stake)
5 out of 5 unanimous voting: (99.99996% work 5% stake; 99.998% work 10% stake; 99.9% work 20% stake)

3 out of 5 majority voting is adequate when paired with a nonnegligible PoW block reward. I was fanatic for PoW protection because I wanted minimal energy use. I forgot about your big PoW rewards.

There is another issue I forgot, the waiting issue. To me it is no big deal, but I expect a huge fuss  from others. You should remove this weakness to avoid future problems.

You can always hoard coin-age by waiting (see numerous rants by killerstorm). To attack, you need 5% of stake-days, not 5% of stake. (e.g. so if you have x% of stake and bide your time for y voting cycles, then you can attack just like someone with xy% stake)


How about you buy most tickets with straight coins rather than coin-time? Coins are escrowed up until the tickets win or get invalidated. This approach sidesteps the waiting issue.

Sadly, it also excludes small holders from direct participation, though they could still use lottery pools, banks, etc. You have what ~ 60000 tickets. That is 160 coins a ticket if there are 10 million coins. A bit steep. To let small holders participate directly, perhaps allocate 10% of tickets based on coin-age and 90% based on straight coins. That would allow for some token grassroots participation. Honestly there will be a bulky blockchain to store. Smallholders would end up PoS mining via a banking system anyway. No point in designing a system that allows for infeasible use cases.

Question: When you purchase a ticket, could you then send the ticket key to a pool to manage for you (in exchange for a cut)? Or does transferring your ticket impose some risk? In my opinion, it would be good to attach some risk to letting other people mine for you (e.g. allow the ticket holder to steal the winnings). It would be bad to attack a huge risk to letting other people mine for you, (the principal used to purchase the ticket should be safe from theft).  This strikes a balance between discouraging centralization and encouraging participation in PoS mining.

No. If you have 20% of tickets, then you will have one or more votes on 1-0.8^5 = 67% of blocks. You can make 2/3 of blocks empty, but the other 1/3 will go through. That is money burning fail, not a credible DDOS. Perhaps you meant something else?

Invalidation of draws that lack unanimity increases PoW attack resistance. By a lot. I will show you the math if it helps. As a comprimise, how about 4 yay's or more, instead of 3 or more? That would still help.

Alternatively, You can also strengthen the system by increasing the number of voters. Say 6 out of 10 instead of 3 out of 5. Again, I will show you the math if this helps. This would not be my first choice, but I think it would be fine.

Anyways, these are still parameter choices. Easily  forked. It is still the core algorithm that matters. 
 
Good idea. This works if you are not requiring unanimity. it accomplishes the same thing. I think you should incorporate it.

I couldn't agree more. I am an economics professor. Please seek out multiple opinions on voting from other economists.

With appropriate parameter choices, the propsed design would be much more secure than PPC (even if PoW were given a very low weighting).

@brenzi

don't sweat the small stuff. The whole thing can be forked with a) very low PoW weighting b) no transition to voting at all c) a different long term inflation target. These are parameters. If this system works you will see copycat forks with other parameter choices.

The most important issues are the security of the protocol AND the currency's feature set. I'm not saying PoB can't work, but it is a) not as well fleshed out as this idea b) doesn't offer benefits beyond what is obtainable via parameter tweaks.

Hello, had to stop posting in these forums to ration my time and brainpower. However, I'm impressed and excited by your paper. I'm believe you can accomplish something here.


COMMENTS:

The ticketing system seems basically solid. I like it.  But ...

1) Let's Review Yay/Nay voting?

If I vote Nay and the block is accepted, then my stake gets used and the reward is confiscated. If I vote Yea and the block is accepted, I get a stake reward.
If I vote Nay and the block is rejected, then my stake gets used and the reward is confiscated. If I vote Yea and the block is rejected, then my stake gets used and the reward is confiscated.

Voting Yay is the dominant strategy. Therefore, why have Yay/Nay voting at all? Why not just require unanimous Yay's or reject the block?

2) Have you have specified what happens when winning ticket holder(s) abstain?

Does this mean no block is mined? That's what should happen I think.

3) Ticket extensions

You also do not want afk tickets to accumulate, so the extension thing worries me a bit. Accumulation of afk tickets eventually converges to a breakdown of the blockchain. To avoid this you need to purge afk ticket holders from the voting rolls. Perhaps you plan to have predictable auditing of afk ticket holders via the extension process? That's a good start, but random auditing provides stronger incentives and saves blockchain space. My suggestion is to add one optional signature to each valid block. If you provide it, then the subsequent block gets a PoW difficulty subsidy. If you fail to provide it, the block is still valid, but the afk ticket gets invalidated.  (The difficulty subsidy provides an incentive for PoW miners to recognize his signature if it appears.)

4) Inflation voting for the distant future
 
PoW voting does not have a precedent and worries me. Why wouldn't PoW voters continuously vote to up the PoW rewards, redistributing all the wealth to themselves. This could be a huge problem.

PoS voting has a precedent in corporations and I am comfortable with it. PoS voters benefit by voting down PoW issuance below the optimal level (market cap maximizing). You are not letting them mess with the PoW/PoS issuance ratio much, so they will do this by voting against inflation. This a very minor issue. PoS voters wouldn't do anything that threatens the currency. Therefore, I think PoS voting will work well even if the incentives are not quite perfect.  

If you mix the two voting types, let PoS voters have a majority of votes (say two-thirds or more).

5) Lightweight blockchain.

http://www.bitfreak.info/files/pp2p-ccmbc-rev1.pdf seemed like a good, well-organized idea. Maybe this could influence your lightweight client in some way. Have no expertise here.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120816170400.htm

Does a viral infection count as illness or injury?

(Note the numbers are very significant here: 10-20% of people carry the T. Gondii infection. People with T. Gondii infection are 7 times more likely to attempt suicide. -> 60% or more of suicide attempts could be T. Gondii-related).

Alternatively, perhaps the axioms of natural law dictate that T. Gondii is either (a) caused by child abuse or (b) imaginary. Ask the cult leader for the correct answer. Interpretations of natural law at this level are quite subtle.

Or perhaps cat ownership is child abuse?
http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/03/are-cat-ladies-more-likely-to-attempt-suicide/

(In the mouse, infection causes a loss of cat aversion. Maybe a strong infection could turn you into a upstanding Statist? Keep your girls clear of the cat litter Myrkul.)

+1
I'm willing to admit this is equally important. More important considering other issues as well.

That is a good question. Automobiles impose costs on society and therefore should be taxed at a punitive rate to discourage excessive use. Here in Singapore the costs of purchasing a Honda Civic are in the neighborhood of USD$150,000. Part of this is tax. All cars are taxed at 200%. There is also purchase of entitlement to own an automobile (~$30,000).  There is also purchase of the entitlement to drive which is about $20,000 per year if you want to be able to drive during peak hours (much cheaper for an off peak license).

These are excellent moves. Cars cause external harm and therefore call for punitive taxation.

Guns should also be heavily taxed (e.g. there is one paper which suggests that $600/gun is an appropriate tax rate).

The Japanese attitude towards suicide is different from the Judeo-Christian attitude. Suicide can be honourable in Japanese culture.

As far as healthy goes, the simplest definition is life expectancy at birth. By this measure, Japan is the healthiest country in the world (despite all the suicide). Among developed countries, the United States is the least healthy. The US is unique among wealthy countries in that it lacks a strong State health care system. Thus, the exceptionally poor health of the average US citizen.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=life%20expectancy#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA:JPN:AUS:SGP:HKG:FIN:FRA:DNK:BEL:AUT:DEU:LUX:IRL:SWE:ESP:GBR:NLD:ITA:GRC:KOR:CHE&ifdim=region&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false

The following article about mining rights during the California Gold Rush is topical.

http://www.stanford.edu/~write/papers/Order%20Without%20Law.pdf

Interesting facts:
1) Rights were developed through community consensus in the absence of state authority.
2) The community elected to legitimate the seizure of claims (claim-jumping). (i.e. if you leave you are not continuously working your claim, then it is up for grabs)
3) The community defined different classes of rights for different social groups (i.e. better to be English than French, better to be French than Mexican, and god help the Chinese miner).
4) The community chose a rights sytsem that was relatively egalitarian and wasteful of resources (encouraging frenetic, labor-intensive, small-scale mining; rather than large-scale mining of private land that would almost surely have been more efficient).

I think this is a reasonable depiction of AnCap in practice. The interesting thing is that there is no convergence to strong private property rights as Myrkul would suggest (based on crazed fanaticism I think). The community picks a system that everybody can agree on. This consensus system will likely be relatively egalitarian and consequently inefficient with respect to resource use. It will also likely disenfranchise minority groups present in the community.

But then you are back to communicating the public key privately, right?

Question: Are the "simulated GPUs permanent?", i.e. once I create one and wait the two months can it continue mining bitcoins forever (with hashing power proportional to its initial burn)?

If not, then I think this proposal is going to be extremely insecure relative to PoS and/or PoW. If the burn is transient, then the security device is equivalent to GPUs that self-destruct after a certain amount of time has gone by. That is bad. If the lifespan of the simulated rigs is short, then double-spending attacks will be exceptionally cheap.

If the burn is permanent, then you are essentially selling something like dilutable shares in the discounted present value of all future txn fees. To attack this, you would need to burn more than the sum total of all past burns. That would like be a significant proportion of all total coins. There is also the nice property here that attack costs increase monotonically over time (ignoring careless loss of simulated rigs by participants). I don't think this will be as secure as PoS, but it seems secure enough and there appear to be general benefits in terms of accelerated deflation. The permanent burn seems like a good approach to me.

I am not happy with your solution to the randomness problem. I don't think there should be any external dependencies. Just ask anyone who mines a block to submit 1 byte of randomness. I think that will work fine. It is impossible to manipulate the future any meaningful degree with just one byte of randomness. However, block sequences generate a very large amount of randomness, so future behavior over a time scale longer than a few hours is completely unpredictable.

Couldn't you then decrypt this by testing all known public keys against each message?

The proposed method seems stronger to me.

Haven't had a TV in about 10 years either.

Interesting. Txns recorded in the blockchain would then have a unique addresses for each sender-recipient pair. Is that correct?

Instead of putting in lottery data, why not ask the miner's to submit the randomness, i.e. the miners submit a 0 or 1 with each block? The aggregation of these 0s and 1s is a source of "randomness". I don't think you could do much to help yourself with just a 0 or a 1. On the other hand, the aggregation of a long series of 0s and 1s will be unpredictable unless the chain is already under the control of a single agent.

Some advice:
a) Data for developing countries is really unreliable unless you collect it yourself. Do you believe those numbers for Haiti, Somalia, and North Korea? Who the hell measures homicide in these countries.
b) There are too many other differences between the units of observation for country-level comparisons to be meaningful. Ideally, you should pick units that are as similar as possible except for differences in gun ownership. Thus the study which looks at Guns & Ammo subscriptions and compares neighboring US counties. If the country next door experiences an increase in Guns & Ammo subscriptions, then, relative to neighboring counties, that county also experience sa significant increase in gun-mediated homicides. Other types of crimes are only slightly affected. This suggest that wide gun ownership increases the homicide rate.

Another type of study looks at means of suicide. Examining counties with similar total suicide rates, US counties where people use guns to commit suicide have higher homicide rates than US counties where people choose other means to commit suicide. This difference in homicide rates is entirely due to differences in gun-mediated homicides, not other types of homicide.

(As you can see, I liked the picture)

Yes, have you heard of the free cities project? It is a libertarian experiment. It proposes establishing a charter city in a chaotic country such as Honduras. One possibility under discussion was the contracting of the Singaporean State as sole provider law and enforcement services. The idea is that a bunch of investors hire the Singaporean military to police the place and try to attract settlers. The investors expect the land to appreciate and thus earn money off the deal.

The whole notion seems confused to me. Hire a semi-fascist state to implement law and order for a 'libertarian state.' Would that be a triumph of libertarianism or a triumph of statism?

You're too stupid to tell the difference, but those researchers are incompetent.

Much higher quality research is here:
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf

Yeah, I'm sure the average criminal is quite internationally mobile. The typical US ghetto dweller is a world traveler. Regardless, encouraging criminals to 'carry on elsewhere' is one of the intentions of the law.