This piece is more academic than popular, but worth sharing as it is the first formal mathematical rebuttal to the implicit criticism of Bitcoin made in the well-known 2011/2012 paper "On Bitcoin and Red Balloons". For those who haven't read that paper, it basically argued for the formal impossibility of creating a sybil-proof L1 routing network.

Worth noting for the that this question is about whether you can get nodes to share transactions without adding unnecessary hops (i.e. disincentivize "private mempools") and is a fundamentally different topic from the more-commonly discussed topic of whether block production is sybil-resistant and whether POW and POS have the same kinds of sybil-resistance, etc. The focus here is on whether it is possible to add payouts to P2P network nodes to incentivize the volunteers that run the network without creating a massive security problem that eats the network.

https://github.com/SaitoTech/papers/blob/main/sybil/A_Simple_Proof_of_Sybil_Proof_Lancashire-Parris_2023.pdf

Bitcoin does not currently have cryptographic routing signatures so it would need to be modified or upgraded, but it is an interesting approach. Thoughts and discussion very welcome.

> Couldn't something like this be implemented in Bitcoin?

Parts of Saito could be implemented in Bitcoin.

The network is much more likely to pick up the ATR / circular ledger mechanism than the routing work function discussed in this article.

A 20 year transient blockchain with a 100 MB blocksize cap would be an improvement, imo

lol @ BIP comment above.

Hey Barbara,

> You are wrong because to use an application one does not have to learn the language or the technology being used behind it.

Your comment is dead-on -- and the platforms are coming (Saito ftw -- https://saito.io/arcade). Exactly what you are talking about.

One issue is that most of the attention in "blockchain gaming" is on NFT tokens and ponzi games like "King of EOS". Those are basically all scams which pass themselves off as "fun" because it's a marketing angle. Maybe there is a small chance you won't lose your money, let's see! They target specific crypto communities as a marketing technique.

Know for a fact that almost all of the games that are getting real usage don't have NFTs or require in-app payments. Best guess is that 90 percent of the gameplay on Saito is from games that use the wallet keys to encrypt and sign messages and integrate that stuff into underlying gameplay (mental poker -- shuffling a deck or rolling a dice using encryption so things are provably fair). Payments can plug into the games, but the real advantage is replacing companies like Steam and the Apple Store that control the distribution of software and allowing people to run/own their own games instead of getting monetized by middlemen.

A bit surprised no-one has mentioned Saito:

https://saito.io/arcade

Already at 20k transactions daily and no 51 percent attack of any kind.

It's basically the next big thing.

This is one of the least understood things about blockchain. Can't count the number of times I've tried to talk to POS developers about their economic problems and they've replied that using validators adds "finality" and that they've solved the 51% attack because dishonest validators can be slashed:

"Ok, so how do you slash a dishonest validator who decides what goes on the longest chain?"

Silence.

As Dark points out above, the two-part mining puzzle doesn't change the expected payoff: miners will just switch from spending 100% of their CPU hashing to spending most of it generating privatekeys so they can "get lucky". It might be easier to get substantive feedback if you stopped talking about "luck" and just said "we're using a form of POW that requires miner signatures so people can't share work".

Which makes the real question why you need multiple puzzles? Why not do what Saito (https://org.saito.tech) does and have a mining puzzle where the POW output is a hash of a signed message? There are deeper problems with "privatekey mining" that Saito solves that you should look at too -- one issue with the existing setup is that you're basically paying people to generate keypairs that let them do brute-force attacks on user balances.

Hey Dark -- thx, Saito is awesome.

Personally, think the BCH problems are being caused by their own devs not the miners. No-one is forcing them to fund themselves out of the block reward - they just view it as free money that no-one will get pissed off about if they seize. The strange thing is the sense that getting majority support from the miners makes it OK for them to undermine the entire point of a cryptocurrency being an open system. Makes the entire system no different than the legacy financial infrastructure.

Thanks for coming and checking out Saito, Dark.

And -- yeah -- I'm really happy with the speed of the games. Especially for deals.

In the future it's going to seem totally absurd that anyone ever gambled significant money on casino websites where they couldn't prove that the deal was fair. Or that the other players were even human....

So the Saito Arcade (https://saito.io/arcade) is up to five or six playable, multi-player board games (chess, wordblocks, twilight struggle, thirteen days, scotland yard), all of which run directly in the browser. Sharing as if anyone here is bored in quarantine and unsure of why on-chain gaming is going to crush closed-source companies like Steam really encourage you guys to drop by and see what is happening. Feedback and suggestions on ways to improve are both very, very welcome.

For those who haven't heard of Saito, you'll see it is very different from most of the "gaming" projects in the blockchain space -- there is no shilling of digital assets or convincing people to purchase tokens: people actually mine tokens while playing the games (the network is rewarding fee-paying users on a diminishing curve). The blockchain is primarily a PKI network with cryptographic techniques like "mental poker" used to shuffle cards and ensure that gameplay is provably fair, while all moves are cryptographically-signed and sequentially posted on-chain so that it is impossible to cheat (third-party modules can auto-track player performance and generate provably fair competitive rankings or handle escrow situations).

For those interested in the more traditional blockchain metrics, Saito itself is up to about 15k daily transactions and growing quite rapidly -- looking like we will surpass BCH sometime later this summer. Hope to see some of you guys on the Arcade!

Always find it interesting to watch people deal with fundamental critiques of POW and POS economics. Most of the time this sort of critique triggers a reflexive back-and-forth from ideologies, which basically boils down to "POS / POW is not arguably worse than POW / POS." Not a lot of focus on trying to identify the underlying problems, although that is the first step in fixing them.

http://saito.tech/saito-whitepaper.pdf

Saito whitepaper is here for those who haven't read it yet. Bitcoin is probably compatible with the transient chain part of the solution.

I bought my first bitcoin paying someone using Paypal. Then Paypal closed their account -- totally ridiculous.