I will gladly buy solidcoins for Geist, at 1-to-1 ^__^

Well, in a connection sac of some kind, the interval of the blocks you're building with your pals (or with yourself, if you got really isolated totally "alone" and still continued mining somehow) should probably drop, not rise, since you start at higher (native net) difficulty and then adjust lower (which Geld does in less than a minute).

Anyways, very interesting blocks. Maybe we should invite theymos ? I heard he likes blockchains.

P.S.:
Oh, and miners on Geist definitely should open incommings and increase maxconnections=

Having more than 125 can hardly hurt if increased within reason.

Vanilla fiat money are harder to transfer via digital means without leaving a fairly fat paper trail, and cash is annoying in the requirement to physically exchange it which can get tricky in a setup like that.

Also, a large sum of fiat money tends to either occupy lots of space or attract unwanted scrutiny when moved around in digital representation.

Generally, bitcoin is very comfy in this regard and as our troll friend correctly points out, makes "dirty hands" type of action  exceedingly hard.

Ah, oky

Anyways, this is as good time as any to remind the interested parties that Geist is not burdened by any bizarre licenses so no need to ask me before seeking inspiration in its git ^__^

Is i0 even maintained anymore ?

Well, that's exactly why I brought up the issue of "how many nodes per a Big Pool" (I PMed Tycho of the deepbit fame, btw)

seems to me that Nodes That Matter in modern bitcoin are, quite frankly, a handful, and the rest could just send them tx "the lean way" and keep the blockchain just for the purpose of feeling themselves like Ye Olde Coin Archiviste.

As for those blocks, there was always in excess two minutes between them (intervals irregular, in one case in excess of 7 minutes), so it does not appear to be exactly a block streak.

That does not disprove the hypothesis that coblee and his peers got sequestered into a "low-diff" fork, but there are other explanations too, like some less than kind person mining on-and off, rushing in at minimum diff, mining till it adjusts, stopping to let it drop (usually missing the norm and going a mite below), then mining again, rinse-repeat.

P.S.:
Someone should write a goddaymn visual block explorer that would allow to visualize orphans and such in relation to main chain  In 3-D

If you (or anyone else) ever find another "bizzaro streak of blocks", please do a getinfo and see if you have connections, and if so, how many. Because if you have like 6-8 connections and get such a streak, then likely something more that just "connection loss" is afoot.

Having said that, if network issues start causing orphaning of large ammount of blocks, that could be detected when studying the blockchain. According to ArtForz, so far there is no indication that the amount of orphans "on whole" is higher that normal.

P.S.:
coblee, could you PM me the timestamps and txid  on those orphans (should be in listtransactions) ?

Um, why would people mine that master blockchain ?

If deepbit, BTCguild and slush switch to Version B, it's gameover for version A right there.

Just sayin'

Judging from the fact that at least one pool and who knows how many soloers have disagreed with Queen Bit of Solidcoin and refused to shut down, it's neither really a cult nor particularly solid.

Well, geist obviously is more network-sensitive and there obviously is a blockrate/decentralization tradeoff at work (I think I said that in post one), and point of Geist experiment is, in part, to see exactly how this tradeoff works out on a "live" network that experiences all the live influences.

Geist, however, is quite ready to trade decentralization for blockrates (up to a point of course ), which I also stated in my first post, and what concerns me most is that network effects that impede Geist decentralization will also impede pool operation, thus also impeding the partial centralization and thus making further increase in Geist hashrate problematic at best.


Well, "thin" clients don't download the blockchain proper anyways, so theoretically nothing keeps people from sending their tx to all the well-known "big miner" geist nodes first, then the "plebes", thus maximizing the likelihood of those ending up in a block quite soon, or some other, smarter optimization of the way the net handles transactions (I'm not quite smart enough to come up with those by myself, admittedly ).

Bitcoin will need many of those optimizations too if it grows "huge enough", and this is why it might be worthwhile for the community to play around with Geist, IMHO.

In the end, yes, it is quite possible that "audaciously fast blocks" will cause either insurmountable scaling issues or problems of sustaining a good enough connection to force your tx in even if some optimizations in transaction transmission by "lean" clients are in place.

The point of Geist is 1) try to find that out in a "live" setting 2) try to seek amendments to overcome those issues 3) see if some of those optimizations are also worth implementing in Bitcoin

If worst comes to worst, there's nothing in the nature of Geist that would prevent gearing down the blockrate while adjusting the subsidy and retarget to leave economics intact (or maybe even give folks some temporal single-issue of pseudo deflation if they shall so demand, though I refuse on general principle to set a hard upper limit on number of Geists in existence. "Coin regeneration" FTW ), however such course of events will be a huge blow to Geist's stance and appeal, even despite all the knowledge gained when assessing the causes which could lead to such an unfortunate and radical solution.


Interesting things will happen when pools will start to get deployed.

P.S.:



I am a bit iffy on the deeper intricacies of the "how does pool form" theory, so,  how many pool nodes connected to the bicoin network (as opposed to miners connected to pool, which as far as I understand have no particular reason to even be aware of the blockchain since they only deal with the pool's share anyways) does on average each of the "big fishes" of pool business represent ?

I think I see what you're getting at.

In case of maintaining control (the "gambler's ruin" scenario, as outlined in Satoshi's paper), the lower complexity of a block is offset by  much narrower timeframe you have to solve them and feed them to the net.

In case of overwriting historical blocks, the "timeframe consideration" works differently since the block is, well, historical, is that correct interpretation of what you are saying ?

P.S.:
Isn't "replacing historical blocks" exclusively a 51-er thing since you need to be able to at least match the production rate of the "good nodes" in order to be able to take a stab at replacing the previous block and not having your rewrite overrun by the output of "good nodes" ?

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die" (in case you wonder, that's H.P. Lovecraft, a wonderful horror writer)

Alt chains pretty much can not really die (the fact that RS failed to "consensually shutdown" SC illustrates that nicely)

As for i0, it has about 30 Ghashes on it. Makes perfect sense someone tried to overwrite it for sheer evulz.

That is entirely plausible.

Also, anonymous vote systems, even ones with complex mathematical magics securing a reliable crypto-pseudonym, are very hard to get right.

For a really obvious one, you can not (should not) neglect time a node spends online when assigning "voting power", otherwise, on the voting day, you will find yourself flooded with strange "noob nodes" that never transacted and never mined, and just arrived to cast votes and disappear.

Well, as far as "investment vehicle" is concerned, in my very humble Belorussian opinion, any thing people are ready to pay for can be an investment vehicle, irrespective of whether it is remotely sane (in the sense that it does not have to pass giggle test) or technologically sound.

Gold price is quite apparently so huge only due to a very long-lived "glitch" in human perception of value. If a fairly unspectacular element (that isn't even fissionable   or something, lol) can have absurdly huge price just because market is full of agents with a kind of weird response to the very notion of "gold", so can abstract  digital thingamabobbles made of some kind of eldritch mathemagics, if the market just accumulates enough agents with a peculiar response to the notion of abstract    thingamabobbles born   out of weird math

As far as I understand, the splits are managed (and the "boss" chain is selected) based upon how much work went into a chain, with the most "laborious" chain "winning" and overtaking the other.


Well, the issue under discussion was somewhat different, but I find your post fascinating.

However, first and foremost my initial assumption was "hey, wouldn't it be nice to make a chain with really, really fast blocks and see if it dies screaming" (which it so far did not, and is taking it like a trooper so far  ). Now that this is out of the way, I find the issue of low-level protocol effects on Geist fascinating (though somewhat saddening because it's quite above my ability to investigate without significant outside help)

I am, however, somewhat perplexed by the idea that BGP flaps can be smooth and regular enough to repeatedly oscilate poor   Geist between two versions of the chain...

As far as I understand, BGP flap is basically a route dying and un-dying fairly rapidly due to something cute happening in a given ISP's network, which suggests that normally they should be fairly irregular and territorially contained... but the issue is absolutely worth looking into, since it makes Geist a fascinating subject of study irrespective of various "plainly pragmatic" considerations.

I'd give you a research grant but I can only pay an impressive sum either in Belorussian Roubles or in Geists, and I'm reasonably certain that Geist is a more viable form of "sorta-money" (not intended as a claim of monetary viability of Geist Geld )

So, basically, in terms of "confirmation values", confirmations that are longer are more valuable in situations where an attacker has exceeded 51% (The "match the network" part) and is about to retroactively edit past blocks ?

Hm, that's not verily nice, but at least if you're right, that 6 confirmations in Bitcoin and 6 confirmations in say Solidcoin or Geist confer the same "amount of security" (I know it's a poor choice of words) as long as attacker has not matched/exceeded the network (which was the scenario presented).



Oh, holly-molly, now we have two competing forum threads of different lengths

Anyways, this particular question pertains to the issue of whether two networks with different block rates (including two networks with different block rates that are well within the "known safe" window", as in my hypothetical scenario above)

Methinks it would be best if this thread was left to the discussion of statistic peculiarities pertaining to "two networks with different blockrate in a vacuum, which has "more security per validation" against attacker with less-than-51% of network", and continue the fascinating discussion of possible effects of time-sensitive aspects of low-level internet protocols and associated research grants (which I sadly can only pay in GeistGeld or Belorussian Roubles, and I strongly advise taking any cryptocoin over Belorussian Rouble ) in the main GG thread (everyone is invited, BTW)

Hello!

As it is widely (maybe ) known, there are numerous alt blockchains now, with different target block  rate.

Since yours truly has given "life" to a blockchain with a particularly short block rate (a block per 15 seconds, doing remarkably nice so far), a discussion has started as to how exactly, from mathematical perspective, does security of a "single confirmation" compare between two blockchains with different target block rate.

Assume two blockchains with exactly same total network performance  
Assume that one of them (A) has a "target" block generation rate of one block per ten minutes, and another (B) has a target block generation rate of one block per 100 minutes (for ease of calculation)

Assume each chain has an attacker with 30% of overall total hashrate  of attacker's respective network.

Each attacker is trying to pull a double-spend against a transaction per classic "gambler's ruin" scenario in his respective network.

Which attacker would have an easier time ? (or, to put it differently, which network has "more security" to its single confirmation and how does one go about comparing it?)

Thank you very much.

Hm,  at this point I think additional expert opinion is worth inviting, since is seems to me that time can not directly factor into the gambler's ruin like that.
Hm, so basically the issue is that the split chains might get longer... but doesn't the BTC algo define "canonicity" in terms of which has most work, and not most "block count" ?

BTW, studying Geist's (hypothetical?) propensity for growing "longer" side-chains is an interesting prospect in itself...

P.S.:
Started a thread in technical about comparing security of a single validation in different alt chains.

Um, I am no actuarian coblee, but it seems to me that the original bitcoin paper does not state that probability of attacker success is a function of time.

Instead, it says that "Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks the attacker has to catch up with increases"

Again, I might be missing an elephant in the room of theses arcane mathematications, but it appears that probability of attacker's success is claimed to drop off with the number of blocks, not the time spent making them, which would mean that "6 valid blocks" are still "6 valid blocks".

Um, I am no actuarian coblee, but it seems to me that the original bitcoin paper does not state that probability of attacker success is a function of time.

Instead, it says that "Given our assumption that p > q, the probability drops exponentially as the number of blocks the attacker has to catch up with increases"

Again, I might be missing an elephant in the room of these arcane mathematications, but it appears that probability of attacker's success is claimed to drop off with the number of blocks, not the time spent making them, which would mean that "6 valid blocks in a net running at block per 15 secs" are as hard to overpower as  "6 valid blocks in a net running at 1 block per 10 minutes" (assuming hashrate distributions for attacker and good guys match in both of them, of course).


Hm, so basically, it will always lag behind the chain because full hidden server is so damn slow. Quite plausible a problem (I guess Bitcoin would always lag behind on, I dunno, GPRS then).

But as long as Geist can stand its ground on "vanilla nets", that strikes me as a fairly remote problem that might be solved by clever lean client design (whether it really can is another matter)


Hm, well, one might hypothetically try to have the laundry proper run "lean" and only have the "consumer-facing front" and associated proxy wallets to run G propper.... Hm. Not a bad idea it seems, I'll run it by a certain someone later...


Again, I might be failing to note an elephant here, but it seems quite explicitly stated in the Satoshi paper that attack success probability drops off with number of blocks, not time spent making them.

As for poor little i0, for the love of everything good, there are currently merely 29.811 Ghashes on i0coin.

If all people mining Geist right now conspired to overrun i0coin, it is not entirely unlikely that we could   do it (not intended to actually incite anyone towards harming the poor little coin)