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This is a great idea. Without jurisdiction I think it can at least operate similar to mutual funds. Anyone can invest money into the bitcoin address backing the shares, but spending any coin from the bitcoin address requires a voting procedure taken by all the share holders or from the board members. An alt-chain can be used to implement trading of shares, board election, voting, and liquidation before going bankrupt. The investment of the shareholders can be protected on the protocol level.
A fund can do alot more things than a single person holding bitcoins in a single bitcoin address.
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I suspect that gmaxwell started this discussion in order to let LTC fail. Changing hash algo is very dangerous and is the easiest way for a hard fork. Enough altcoins have dies because of hard fork.
I own both LTC and BTC. I sincerely hope that the BTC and LTC communities will work together. There will be alot more difficulties ahead along the way, for any currency to be finally successful.
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Potentially limiting mining to those with tens of thousands of dollars to spend in a pessimistic scenario. Going further, what if the ASIC producers refuse to sell? Self mining while protecting their ASIC designs in the courts.
There won't be only one ASIC designer. Don't worry about it. ASICs will drive the price of LTC much higher. The reason is simple: the initial few ASIC adopters will be very profitable since there rigs are faster, thus driving the price of ASICs high. As more people use ASICs, mining will become much less profitable. Miniers will then consider choosing between the following: a) spending 2000 dollars to buy ASICs to mine just 2 LTCs in 3 moths b) spending 2000 dollars to buy 4 LTCs LTC price thus goes much higher. This is what we've seen in BTCs history. By losing some miners, you will see more buyers of LTC. There need to be just enough miners in order to secure the network, not too many of them. But a successful currency needs more investors. LTC initially need to be GPU/ASIC proof in order to have enough miners to prove it is secure. But now I think there are more than enoughh miners. I'd rather not see a couple of data center type mining farms being the only ones hashing for litecoin.
If this would be a problem then BTC would encounter it first. LTC will then still have enough time to avoid it. Being a follower takes much less risk. |
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I'd suggest not to change it. Since BTC's success has proven that ASICs are good, LTC can follow the same trajectory: to take off further.
BTC is exploring on the moon where no one has been before. Being number one means BTC has to innovate in order to continue its success. LTC has been a successful follower so far. Being number two takes less market share but also less risk. In almost any market, there's always room for a number two, a follower, who doesn't need to be too innovative.
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nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer.
No. That is completely wrong and confused. You are not 100% sure to find a match. Unless the hash function is broken, every attempt is unrelated— there could be 5 matches in a row, or a whole nonce range which doesn't match. When it fails, it just increments the extranonce or timestamp and carries on. At the current difficulty the probability of any value being a match is around one in seven hundred million. Puncturing the nonce space does not reduce your probability of success in the slightest. Unless you also hash for the nonces in between but discard the results.. which is of course stupid. Under the assumption that profit is the motive No, under the assumption that there is no benefit at all, including profit, of calculating hashes you will not publish. Unless he was testing the randomness of the algorithm, but I doubt it. OffT: Why don't we just ask this guy? http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.45.1255&rep=rep1&type=pdfThe success of a currency relies heavily on attracting enough smart people to participate. The core competence is still people as a team, who have since worked together and have overcome all the difficulties and dangers along the way. Mining too many coins for oneself is short sighted and stupid. It encourages people to go the other way. That's probably why he didn't even spend the > 1Million bitcoins. The motivation has obviously been the success of bitcoin. |
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Is there some mechanism for preventing a single node storing a single copy of the data, and then spoofing multiple identities and claiming payment as-if the data were stored across multiple nodes?
That's impossible unfortunately - no amount of math can prevent a node from outsourcing the actual storage to a central location that is a single-point-of-failure. The best you'll ever be able to do is pay enough that there is incentive to do the job right, and/or use social/legal mechanisms to audit what node operators do and then arrange these transactions with specific operators. Not terribly exciting solutions unfortunately... The obvious solutions are proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but I can't see how proof-of-work alone would suffice.
Yeah, proof-of-work can only prove IO bandwidth, not where the data is located. However... interactive latency measurements can prove data within some sphere of radius t*c. With multiple trusted challenge servers around the world located in co-location centers one could easily prove that the data must be physically present in multiple locations. You can even do in a fully decentralized way with some extensions to the Bitcoin scripting language by creating a txout that can only be spent by proving you have some data fragment, where the fragment is chosen randomly based on the previous block hash. Because the fragment is based on the previous block hash, there is a time limit to how quickly the fragment must be retrieved, thereby proving (after sufficient trials) that the data is physically located within a sphere of radius 10minutes * the speed of light - currently this would prove the data may be physically located on Earth, the Moon and Venus, but no other planet. With a second proof-of-work blockchain established on, say, Pluto, we could then easily prove a similar result for data located on or nearby Pluto. (proving the Pluto proof-of-work blockchain is in fact located on Pluto is left as an exercise for the reader) I think it's much slower than the speed of light unless you are sending only 1 or a few bits. The higher bandwidth desired, the shorter distance is possible. And the costs increase exponentially with distance, surpassing the mining reward. So your method may be good enough, with random fragments calculated based on a previous hash. The miners may have to store all the data in a nearby storage in order to compete with other miners. I've been looking for something like this. What I recently read was PAST p2p storage developed in Microsoft Research a long time ago: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/antr/past/ It doesn't have currency implemented as incentives. Each file has K copies stored on the p2p network. The problem with this approach is that POW can only be done on the K nodes which contains a fragment. We seem to need every miner to have full access to all the data in order to calculate the hash of a random fragment. But that will bloat the block chain. How do we solve this problem? |
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That's not necessarily the way it works. No matter which nonce you try, in the end you're goingto have a similar mining success at the same speed.
Imagine buying lottery tickets, and the tickets only having one number to match. Let's say you start buying a ticket each second. No matter how you select these tickets you're going to have the same chance, whether 1, 2,3,4,5..., 2,4,6,8,... 1,2,3,5,8,13,... assuming the same speed.
No number is inherently "more random" or "better".
nonce in this case is different from lottery in that it can increment to cover the entire range (from 0 until overflow) so it's 100% sure to be able to find a match. It's like you buy every possible number in lottery. Say if the answer is distributed equally within 0 ~ 255, if you intentionally restrict your coverage within 0 ~ 58, then in (255-58)/255 = 77% of the time you can never find the answer. |
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I think it's simple. Satoshi was using a standard PC plus a custom FPGA (just doing SHA256), so the nonce incremented not very fast. He knew his rig was too fast, he needed to reduce his chance of finding a block, so that other miners could also mine bitcoins. So he left some holes in the LSB of his nonce to reduce his chance of finding blocks.
In summary, Satoshi was clever enough that he mined enough coins without being noticed that he had a powerful rig.
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So a currency can both inflate and deflate at the same time?
inflationary in short term (# coins is still increasing thru mining), and deflationary in long term (after reaching the 21M limit the # coins will start to decrease). But this 21M hard limit has a very strong psychological effect even in short term, so people have been trying to save as many bitcoins as they can, knowing that the bitcoin supply will eventually decrease. Thus even though the total number of bitcoins is still increasing in short term, the bitcoins truely in circulation (being spent daily buying goods) are already decreasing. (It's increasing in terms of USD value, but descreasing in bitcoins number). Not very long ago there must have been someone who spent thousands of bitcoins buying a hamburger. That was circulation. But now how many bitcoins can be earned by selling a hamburger? So over all it is a deflationary currency. But bitcoin's deflationary nature won't cause an economic recession simply because it is not the only currency. Don't worry about it. The world economy will move on happily because we still have other currencies like the fiat. In ancient times, we had the gold standard. Gold did not cause economic recession also because it was not the only currency. The nobel class uses gold, while at the same time they minted coins and printed paper notes, which were very inflationary, for the poor people to use. |
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Any entity can emit BTC shorts for people to buy.
I could offer you a BTC short if we were in a trustful enough relationship.
Yes but not any entity can sell bitcoins that don't possess. The guy is talking about naked short selling. I think those who own a big exchange can do short selling. If the trades only happen within the exchange, they don't go to the blockchain. It can be used to manipulate the market price, just like in any fiat or stock exchange. |
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If I deposit some Bitcoins with a trader like Kraken shouldn't I be earning interest on my bits?
Banks pay interest because they lend your deposit to people at a higher rate. It also protects you against inflation. Bitcoins are more like gold. Interest isn't paid when you store your gold somewhere. both gold and bitcoins are hard to lend. Bitcoins even have deflation. There are gold loan interest rates. Any valuable asset can be loaned for a rate in return. Gold is hard to loan because it can be forged. Bitcoin does not have this shortcoming. Gold is also indivisable, hard to spend for daily use, thus not suitable for use a money nowadays. But Bitcoin is a combination of gold and money. Anything you do with money can be done with Bitcoin. In theory bitcon can be deposited in a bitcoin-bank with an interest rate. People may ask where does that interest come from since it's a deflationary currency. The answer is: as long as there's business going on, as long as there's investment and return going on, there can be bitcoin interest rate. In short the interest rate comes from the risk the invester takes (the bank being default, company going bankrupt...). In other words it comes from a successful business that is financed by the bitcoins lent. It comes from the bitcoins (or dollars or any other currencies) that the cusotmers spent on buying that services from THAT business. The only thing preventing interest rate from happening is that bitcoin is not yet acknowledged by law as an asset, so it is hard to sue anyone if he doesn't return your bitcoin. Once it becomes a legal asset, I don't see why interest rate won't happen. Looking into the future, there will be bitcoin bankers, and bitcoin-backed fiat. I can imagine that the technically versed may be able to manage their bitcoin asset on their one and potentially able to manage bitcoin assets for other people, and thus become bitcoin bankers. While the non-technical people who don't understand the technology enough thus cannot take the risk, will have to use bitcoin-backed fiat. This is similar to the ancient times, when the nobel class use gold, and the poor use coins minted by the king. |
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If I deposit some Bitcoins with a trader like Kraken shouldn't I be earning interest on my bits?
Banks pay interest because they lend your deposit to people at a higher rate. It also protects you against inflation. Bitcoins are more like gold. Interest isn't paid when you store your gold somewhere. both gold and bitcoins are hard to lend. Bitcoins even have deflation. There are gold loan interest rates. Any valuable asset can be loaned for a rate in return. Gold is hard to loan because it can be forged. Bitcoin does not have this shortcoming. Gold is also indivisable, hard to spend for daily use, thus not suitable for use a money nowadays. But Bitcoin is a combination of gold and money. Anything you do with money can be done with Bitcoin. In theory bitcon can be deposited in a bitcoin-bank with an interest rate. People may ask where does that interest come from since it's a deflationary currency. The answer is: as long as there's business going on, as long as there's investment and return going on, there can be bitcoin interest rate. In short the interest rate comes from the risk the invester takes (the bank being default, company going bankrupt...). In other words it comes from a successful business that is financed by the bitcoins lent. It comes from the bitcoins (or dollars or any other currencies) that the cusotmers spent on buying that services from THAT business. |
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Does anybody know when there will be p2p distributed exchanges available? With the multi-sig feature and the Nash equilibrium implemented it'll be easy to solve this problem.
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