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Local / India / IndiaBits - Join India's biggest crypto community
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on: May 19, 2017, 08:40:33 AM
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Quality discussions happen over on www.indiabits.org and there are people from all aspects of crypto like miners, developers, entrepreneurs, teachers, officials etc. (I am not affiliated with the site in any manner. Just a good forum. Also there is a t-shirt giveaway happening right now so..  ) |
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Local / India / Private keys need to be revealed to the govt! - New Indian Encryption policy
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on: September 19, 2015, 01:06:55 PM
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The Dept of Electronics & IT has issued a draft policy doc on encryption calling for inputs by Oct 16. http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/draft%20Encryption%20Policyv1.pdf"On demand, the user shall reproduce the same Plain text and encrypted text pairs using the software / hardware used to produce the encrypted text from the given plain text. All information shall be stored by the concerned B / C entity for 90 days from the date of transaction and made available to Law Enforcement Agencies as and when demanded in line with the provisions of the laws of the country.""Algorithms and key sizes for Encryption as notified under the provisions in this Policy only will be used by all categories of users."- This could directly mean bitcoin becoming illegal since it's encryption is not registered and prescribed by Indian govt. - You would become obligated by law to reveal your private keys. You become a criminal if you don't. We need to speak up against this. At the very least, let the govt know your opinion my mailing them on the address given in the document. |
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Local / India / the blocksize debate
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on: August 16, 2015, 05:42:40 PM
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The way bitcoin works is that there are people running 'nodes' which is a copy of all the transactions that have happened in entire bitcoin history, also relaying them to other nodes and there are people running 'miners' which do some energy consuming work to get the right to write to the ledger maintain by nodes for which they produce new bitcoins. So whenever you do a bitcoin transaction, the fact that your address actually holds the right to so many bitcoins is verified by going through that ledger held by the nodes.
Say your address is A which holds some bitcoins. The fact that A holds those coins can be verified by checking all the transactions that led to A holding those coins right back to the transaction block where they were generated. And this verification alone is the guarantee to the value of your bitcoins.
The algorithm looks all fine, but in reality, practical considerations kick in. There is a practical limit to how much data we can transfer among ourselves imposed by the bandwidth and space limitations of our current state of technology.
When bitcoin started there was no limit to the block sizes that miners could produce. But many services produced huge number of tiny transactions and that kinda swamped the network. But there was an another, much bigger, issue than this.
In the mining race, where miners are all racing to find the next block, the one who finds it first wins, and then everyone around the world give up and start racing for the next block. But how does everyone know that someone worked a successful block? The winner announces it to everybody. The one who successfully solved the block sends it over to the network for everyone to see for themselves that the winner indeed did the work required and hence they come to know they should give up the race for this block and start working on the next.
But what happens if the block solved was of a huge size?
It has two effects. Due to the practical limits, a big block takes a lot of time of propagate in the network. During this time maybe another miner also successfully solves the block only to realize after a while that he isn't the first one. The second effect, and a very important effect, is that the winner gets a headstart. He starts working on the next block while the rest of the world is still working on the previous one while waiting to download the successful solution. As mining has now gone big, the effect of this headstart is huge and increases with more mining power a miner or a pool of miners have.
The bitcoin protocol is anti-fragile. By that it means that whenever any factor of the system tries to rise, there is some other inbuilt factor that kicks in to keep it in check.
When a miner starts getting headstarts and thus economically more successful, the other miners would go at a loss since they are spending energy and would eventually close shop. This further makes the headstarter more powerful and so on until they start own the majority of mining power and that means they can do various kinds of attacks on the system, spending their own money twice easily, is one of them. And that would mean the death of bitcoin goose.
So huge block sizes are clearly a big problem. But what if we keep the block sizes small?
It would mean that each block, limited in its size, can only accommodate a limited number of transactions. This again has its own effects.
A limited number of transaction going through would mean that either a transaction would have to wait a long time for its turn to be included or that it would have to pay high fees to get preference over others. This means scalabilty problems because only a number of people would be able to use bitcoin. This clearly goes against the vision of a worldwide currency that we all have.
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This is bitcoin blocksize debate & the community is divided into two.
There are 5 people in the world who have the commit rights to the original software program called 'Bitcoin core'. But since it is open-source anyone can copy the software and start their own version. The bitcoin core developers want to keep the block sizes small but other renowned people in the bitcoin community, namely Mike and Gavin, want to increase it to 8 mb from the current 1 mb and so on over the years. As expected, the big miners also want this increase since that would eliminate the small miners giving them more power. They have started another copy of bitcoin with this change called 'Bitcoin XT'.
The American majority is backing Bitcoin XT because they want to see widespread adoption but I am not aware how do they plan to contain the miners becoming powerful over time. The core developers want to keep it working correctly even if it means its usefulness to a smaller population. Hence bitcoin is forking.
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What does this mean for the users?
As explained earlier the value of bitcoin is guaranteed by its verifiability in the ledger. But with the fork there will be two versions of the ledger. This means that anyone excepting bitcoin will have to decide which ledger they prefer - the one used by bitcoin core or the one by Bitcoin XT.
I don't know how this would play out and can only see confusion in the future. Effectively this means there is now a bitcoin core coin, earlier called bitcoin, and a Bitcoin XT coin also earlier known as bitcoin. The major forum moderators are siding with bitcoin core and have begun treating BitcoinXT as an altcoin. The english speaking majority it seems will move to Bitcoin XT and will treat Bitcoin core as an altcoin.
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Local / India / What is the 7th Richest Indian afraid of?
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on: May 30, 2015, 03:37:16 AM
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The founder and executive vice chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank said technological innovation does offer huge business opportunities for India's banking sector. But it could also change the face of the industry. "I am excited, but very challenged. I keep wondering at night, will I have a bank the next morning, or will some technology company be doing banking without needing a bank?" he told CNBC. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102677283 |
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Local / Alt Coins (India) / Critical problems with Trestor - Read before use
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on: May 11, 2015, 01:21:47 PM
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Edit: Problems that Trestor admitted in the thread:1. Proof-of-work is not required, a consensus is enough. (Thus trestor validators' consensus is needed to be trusted & they can change anyone's trests.) 2. Value of a cryptocurrency is whatever people exchange it for. Treats however have fixed rate (No other cryptocurrency "sells" their currency.) 3. Trests are 100% pre-mined 4. When you buy trests, its not a purchase but a donation, so there is no legal protection for you. Problems that Trestor's developers said they did not understand:1. Trests only get sent from one app to another if they are validated by validators. The right to become a validator is by "buying" it from trestor but there is no return as profit! So why would someone become a validator? Either to earn from fees or to earn by selling trests. Thus it becomes a pyramid scheme where investors who will continue to recruit other investors for an incentive that is presented as an investment opportunity - the right to sell a particular product or to earn fees from them. 2. If there is a dispute, there is no history and resolving it is purely a matter of Trestor's discretion. 3. Even if trestor starts saving the history, there is no proof of it's correctness since they do not use proof-of-work or anything. thus every new participant in the network needs to trust the pre-existing validators. Thus also vulnerable to mitm. 4. If a majority decides that a transaction is valid, that transaction is validated, irrespective of any algorithm preventing trests to be created out of thin air; not even Trestor, because again, they have no proof-of-work. 5. In case of a double spend the transaction gets stuck, since validators can't vote against themselves. To resolve this they have implemented time-bound validity of nodes. This doesn't solve it. Consider a scenario where first 50% validated A->B and second half validated A->C at the same time. The transaction gets stuck. Votes expire after time t and now the first half votes for A->C & the transaction gets stuck again & so on.. All of this is apart from the problems in legality & code. Is it legal to send any centralised form of money from a foreign country to India?Old Content: I recently traveled to chandigarh and came across a very active cryptocurrency community here to my surprise!
On further investigation, see for yourself : https://trestor.org/
http://www.meetup.com/Trestor-Connect-Chandigarh-Chapter/ supposedly going all over India!
Spread the word please, save people. |
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Local / India / Edited: Transparent Business Analysis of a blockchain-based business
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on: March 26, 2015, 03:09:21 AM
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We are a bunch of programmer folks starting a bitcoin based business. If anybody would be interested, we can post our day-to-day experiences with starting a cryptocurrency business here in India. All excited Edit[4/16/15]: Part 1Albeit a few, but people have shown interest, so here it goes! The brainstorming on the initial idea is over and to validate the idea we need a prototype. We set out designing/studying/coding 50 hours ago and have more than half the prototype ready. Please pardon the informality of post as we do not have time to work on formal business plans. Not that stage yet. Current Business Plan (for near future) + Minimal Prototype but 100% working and releasable but no features, just the core demonstrable idea + Announce a little + Until (not out of money*, do){ + Validate initial critical mass of users and take feedback. } *money = this is the initial seed we are starting out with and it is very little (like not even an expensive dinner worth). We wanna start from almost zero and build organically(so will keep a close eye on level of advertising). Prototype release target : 4/20/15 After this we search for initial users just to validate the idea, which I am sure this forum would be a good place for. Also a cross post at hackernews would do. Target : 1000 users If not, we add one feature and go into loop 2. If yes, we raise a little money to add one feature. In both the above cases, however, we will open source all of the code. To setup the website and blog : 4/24/2015 |
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