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301  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 22, 2015, 02:08:49 AM

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Your whitepaper says roughly 2% of influential nodes can game the system.
Yep, so if of the same scale of bitcoin network(8000 nodes), it will need 150 top nodes to collude.

Your statistic counts nodes irrespective on their relative influence? I doubt it. If not, then the number of nodes could be much less if their relative influence is much higher?

I think you are obfuscating here. The point is that in Bitcoin the influence is much more concentrated in a few pools. You apparently assume the influence will be less concentrated in your algorithm, thus you claim it will take more nodes to collude.

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You are asserting that there is no disincentive to not participate in aggregating influence in your algorithm. Prove it.
I believe an influential node can offer to pay those who will participate in gaming the system. Which is what PoW implicitly does.

aggreating is inevitable, that's the reason why there are top influential nodes.
actually in our test dataset, each of the most several top nodes has about 30% followees.

a node can follow MANY nodes, so the power it gives out is decentralizated.
If a node is paid to only follow exact ONE node, then the followee is highly suspicious.

Bitcoin pools are highly suspicious but nodes get paid more, so they mine there. That is the reality of life. Profit talks, ideology walks. As you pointed out, GHash could hide its influence so that the ideology surely walks and miners get on with maximizing their profit.

I don't see how it will be any different for your algorithm. The nodes will maximize their profit and the influence can hidden with Sybil attack (as it is for Ghash hiding that it is really multiple pools or what ever technique they use to create obfuscation).

>One could pool hop for reasons of wanting to spread their voting power around not for gaming the payout algorithm. There is a variance disincentive to dilute your mining shares across many pools though. But I also am not convinced your algorithm has a disincentive to not participate in aggregatingconcentrating influence.

They could concentrate influence all they want. In fact, we could give control of the network to Bank of America, the FED and Goldman Sachs and it would not matter.

They are unable to 51% attack. What is the worse they could do? The worse thing they could do, would be to black list transactions or slow down network consensus. If they abused their power, people would modify the network topology and kick them off the network.

So there is
- a set of consensus nodes and you probably dont care who runs these. Ideally should be someone you trust.
- a piece of software to ensure the consensus nodes are not fucking up. If they fuck up, it detects them and removes them and any other sane peer will automatically do the same.

If Goldman Sachs, the FED and Bank of America were running the network, they can follow the rules OR they can violate and get their asses kicked off the network. They might be able to get their transactions executed slightly faster than other people, with network control, so there might be a slight benefit. However, any brazen abuse just gets their asses kicked off the network.

That is why this system is perfect. It is perfect, not because it stops people from attacking, but because it just doesnt care.



Once consensus is secure, the most vulnerable part is the communications network. Transmission of blocks, transactions and consensus information. This is same vulnerability that can destroy Bitcoin, without even going after the miners. That is why Skywire was developed.

After communications is locked down, the most vulnerable part becomes the operating system and hardware. We are moving down the stack until its bullet proof from the software down to the bare metal.
302  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 11:50:39 AM
Another big advantage is that when some node is suspicious, honest nodes can just unfollow it and then it loose the power.
But in PoW, top nodes can do anything and you have no measure to reject them.

Honest nodes can move which pool they send their shares too. Unfortunately the larger the pool, the more consistent the revenue for the honest nodes. However, I suspect a similar game theory disincentive will arise in your model also, because influence = power = money.

I had become to get depressed about this and was thinking that decentralization is hopeless. Collective decentralization is not the natural order of how nature organizes. Rather what happens in nature is a plurality of centralized options (which is in effect decentralization), i.e. nature decentralizes through creative destruction. I've been trying to think about how to apply that to money systems, which is difficult because we need fungibility and volatility is eliminated through a common unit-of-account (a plurality of currencies is unnatural).

At this point, I am thinking that collective decentralized currency is a lie. It can't exist. It will always come down to trusting some parties, whether it be the developers or the pools or the influential nodes, etc.. This is the dirty little secret that all the experts know but don't want to admit publicly.

Thus I've started to think more about how the trusted parties can't be coerced by the government, i.e. anonymity. And less about the perfect decentralized consensus, which I coming to the realization that collective decentralized currency is a lie and an enormous waste of time.

I expended a lot of effort to design a hash function which can't be monopolized by ASICs (note it can be accelerated by an ASIC, but in theory can't be monopolized and that is a deeper explanation revolving around making PoW unprofitable for large economies-of-scale by leveraging the fact the home electricity is already budgeted!). I was trying to think of clever ways to decentralize the pools. But when I forced myself to think brutally realistically, I started to come the realization that I was fighting against nature and I would lose.

This is why I say I would like to do something more direct to the point of what is provable and less "pie in the sky".

Research is nice and fun, but reality is where the rubber meets the road.

P.S. If I realize I will no longer use my PoW hash, I will open source it so that everyone can see what I created. If I use it, it will be open sourced after launch (no current work on this, this is all shelved as I am working on other projects). Thus it will eventually be open sourced.

What you want is not "decentralization", it is "federation". You trust a number of servers, but each individual chooses the set of servers they trust. Email is federated. It is not a centralized system and there are multiple domains and anyone can run their own email server if they want to and do not want to use a third party domain.
303  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 11:36:52 AM
From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.

I had read that. Isn't that much less % than a 51% attack?

I understand we can't precisely compare the two, since your model is a different structure from PoW. The complexity here is beyond my comprehension at this moment.

Yes. It is less than 51% attack. This is key.

There is a trade off, as you mentioned before. We allow a smaller number of nodes to dominate the network, to avoid the double spending attack. So the colluding nodes can determine future blocks, but they cannot double spend or rewrite history!

So we allow a DDoS attack, but prevent double spending! That is the trade off. You cannot have both in any algorithm. Any algorithm that prevents DDoS makes the double spending easier and anything that prevents double spending makes DDoS easier. You cannot have both.

If the nodes are very corrupt, if they start holding network hostage or colluding, then people can identify those nodes and begin pruning them from the network. That is important. So Skycoin tolerates DDoS, but disallows double spending. DDoS is merely annoying, with someone refusing to put your transactions into a block, but double spending means reverting transactions that have been executed and spending the outputs to new addresses.

304  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 08:51:41 AM
Research Note:

This is a paper on Ryan Fugger's Ripple payment protocol. This was the original Ripple and was a decentralized, peer-to-peer currency which pushed the money creation process from the central bank down to individual users. Ripple Labs bought the Ripple name and is unrelated.

http://is.muni.cz/th/139865/fi_m/dp_139865.pdf

Generation 0:
- eGold
- Hashcash (PoW)
- webmoney, paypal
- RipplePay

Generation 1:
- Bitcoin. First working decentralized digital asset.
- Alts Forked from Bitcoin. Copy/pasted, no original code base. Dogecoin, Litecoin. Name and logo change on Bitcoin but separate user communities.

Generation 2:
- NXT (Proof of Stake, Java code base. New methods for securing blockchain. Speculative 3rd gen projects)
- Ethereum (Scripting, contract execution)
- Ripple (digital asset designed to run on a network of bank computers. Currency pair trading)
- Skycoin (post-PoW, post-mining, focused on making "Bitcoin 1.0" solving remaining problems in usability and security, infrastructure/tool chain. Service revenue, Speculative 3rd gen projects)
305  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 07:09:53 AM
Afaics you haven't thoroughly analyzed the ways to game your system economically.
Yep, I only work on the technical aspect. The other guy who often wrote long posts is more proficient at high vision, economical and strategic aspect.
Maybe he will have a in depth discussion on this with you later.

But I still want to emphasize the vote power paradigm difference again:
- In PoW, you voting power is given by yourself.
- In our alg, you voting power is give by others.

It's something like the difference between emperor regime and democrtic regime.
306  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 07:00:40 AM
For how long are we doing to delude ourselves? We (idealistic Westerners) can pontificate and do research experiments until 2032, but the reality is decentralized currency won't exist except as a figment of our imagination and delusion. Meanwhile the Asians are busy building real capital.

In fact I(the guy who wrote the paper) am NOT a westerner, I am Asian, LOL.
Thanks to the internet, the world is now a village and we can collabrate together from all over the world.
307  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 06:50:38 AM
Incorrect. Google "pool hopping". Miners can surely mine (follow) for many pools.
Pool-hopping is the practice of mining in a pool only during the good times, and leaving during the bad times; by so doing, a pool-hopper can get more out of the pool than the value he contributes to it, increasing his rewards at the expense of other miners. Pool-hopping gets its name from the act of constantly hopping into and out of the pool (to either other pools or solo mining).

Pool hopping does not make sense for counting voting power. The power of the miner is still the same.

Your whitepaper says roughly 2% of influential nodes can game the system.
Yep, so if of the same scale of bitcoin network(8000 nodes), it will need 150 top nodes to collude.

You are asserting that there is no disincentive to not participate in aggregating influence in your algorithm. Prove it.
I believe an influential node can offer to pay those who will participate in gaming the system. Which is what PoW implicitly does.
aggreating is inevitable, that's the reason why there are top influential nodes.
actually in our test dataset, each of the most several top nodes has about 30% followees.

a node can follow MANY nodes, so the power it gives out is decentralizated.
If a node is paid to only follow exact ONE node, then the followee is highly suspicious.
308  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 06:05:45 AM
Honest nodes can move which pool they send their shares too. Unfortunately the larger the pool, the more consistent the revenue for the honest nodes. However, I suspect a similar game theory disincentive will arise in your model also, because influence = power = money.

Nope. If you are a miner of PoW, then if you join a mining pool, you voting power goes there.
But if you a node in our algorithm, then you can follow MANY nodes,
as a result, for a network with N nodes, if a node is followed by all the other N-1 nodes, it still can't control the consensus.
But....if in the PoW case, the pool will have 100% computing power.

Not considering other factors here, just for voting power, the paradigm is apparently different:
- If you a miner, you voting power is given by your investment, you can split your power into different pools, but the result is your power is weaken by yourself.
- But in our case, you give other nodes voting powers, meanwhile, your voting power is also given by other nodes.


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At this point, I am thinking that decentralized currency is a lie. It can't exist. It will always come down to trusting some parties, whether it be the developers or the pools or the influential nodes, etc.. This is the dirty little secret that all the experts know but don't want to admit publicly.

The pionts are:
- *how many* top influential nodes can control the network. If the number is not small, then it is decentralization.
- If they do evil, can we resist them.

Considering an extreme case, if US gvmnt develop a super miner, then it can beat all of the other mining power.
And so it can control the bitcoin network without even collude with other miners, and we can do thing against it even we know it.

But in our algorithm, US gvmnt will fail on both of the two aspects.

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I expended a lot of effort to design a hash function which can't be monopolized by ASICs (note it can be accelerated by an ASIC, but in theory can't be monopolized and that is a deeper explanation revolving around making PoW unprofitable for large economies-of-scale by leveraging the fact the home electricity is already budgeted!). I was trying to think of clever ways to decentralize the pools. But when I forced myself to think brutally realistically, I started to come the realization that I was fighting against nature and I would lose.

This is why I say I would like to do something more direct to the point of what is provable and less "pie in the sky".

Research is nice and fun, but reality is where the rubber meets the road.

P.S. If I realize I will no longer use my PoW hash, I will open source it so that everyone can see what I created. If I use it, it will be open sourced after launch (no current work on this, this is all shelved as I am working on other projects). Thus it will eventually be open sourced.

Whatever PoW algorithm is, it's always a paradigm of voting power by invest.
So anytime US gvmnt step it, the decentralization is over.
309  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 02:14:05 AM
From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.

I had read that. Isn't that much less % than a 51% attack?

I understand we can't precisely compare the two, since your model is a different structure from PoW. The complexity here is beyond my comprehension at this moment.

For bitcoin, its performance is actually considerabley poorer than our algorithm.
Top mining pool is parallel to top influential node in our algorithm.
So for the currently bitcoin network with 8000 nodes, it can't tolerant collude by 4 top pools(actually, many ppls suspect that GHASH put its computing power in the shadow to hide the fact it controlls over 50% of the total computing power), the fault tolerant is 0.05%.

Another big advantage is that when some node is suspicious, honest nodes can just unfollow it and then it loose the power.
But in PoW, top nodes can do anything and you have no measure to reject them.
So even after a successful attack, they can attack again and again.
310  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 21, 2015, 01:45:58 AM
Does the model allow a minority opinion to be overruled such that the minority adopts the majority opinion?
Exactly. But there is a detail you might did not noticed previously, for each node the algorithm works like this: round #1: deciding-->round #2: deciding-->....-->round #50: **decided**.

A node only makes its finial decision after enough rounds, and before that, they are just deciding and decding and deciding, called "opinion synchronization".

Counting votes won't work, because that could be subject to Sybil attack.
Thus we need the trust relationships. Sybil nodes has no honest nodes following them and thus has no impact to the opinion synchronization process.

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are the peers allowed to change their opinion?
It's YES, during the *deciding* rounds, but each node has exact one chance in its last round to give its *final* decision.

311  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 20, 2015, 03:47:14 PM
I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).

Note in page 5 of the paper: Note here even we follow the same naming convention with traditional mathematical optimization techniques, the meaning is totally different, instead, it’s only the driving force to producing emergent phenomena of a complex network.

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If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge.
Did you check the mathematical model? Actually, our final algorithm is a *compound* algorithm consists of the greedy and they simulated annealing algorithm.
(note we just use the same naming convention)

And even with *pure* simulated annealing alone, your assumpution is still incorrect. Mathematical model(also confirmed by simulation) tells that "oscillate indefinitely and never converge" will only happen when indegree/outdegree is not small e.g. degree>30. If degree=10, then it will still converge rapidly.
312  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 20, 2015, 03:31:24 PM
OTOH I will grant the possibility that you've some how obfuscated such that political organization and gaming the voting is impossible. But I would need to see how. I doubt it.

It's possible, of course. We assume a byzantine failure model thus any behavior is possible.
Nodes can even collude to commit attacks to mislead the consensus or prevent the whole network to reach consensus.
From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.
313  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 20, 2015, 05:20:24 AM
Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science.
No, no game theory or political science are involved, in fact, the core algorithm is deadly easy that you can describe it within 15 lines of pseudo codes.
The heart of the algorithm is the *emergent phenomenon*, maybe it's a little difficult for one without background of physics or system science.
But if you coincidentally read one popular book called "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World"[1], you may have better idea of such a bottom-up, self-orgainized style.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408

And you didn't answer as to whether it depends on a delegated timestamp server?
No, no global clock/timestamp server is needed. Any dependency on global server will break the decentralization.
The logical time is called *round*, each message has a round number, and round can be determined to be timeout *locally*, that's all.

And that is much more complex than I have time to analyze now.
Until you read the paper, but...it's long and need patience.
I think you might begin to read it **ONLY** if you REALLY have interest on it.
314  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 19, 2015, 08:00:18 PM
P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus.

The account of "skycoin" is actually shared by more than one core developers.
I am another guy who wrote the consensus paper.

The consensus algorithm is cross discipline in some sense, the key words are "naming gaming", "opinion dynamics", "social consensus", "complex network" etc. and the topic is actively studied in the fields of statistics physics and system science. Most of the related papers are published in journals like "Physical Review E", "science", "nature" rather than ACM transactions.

here is one related paper: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140704/srep05568/full/srep05568.html
another one(considering attack): http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130

The basic principle is to drive the **immergent phenomena** of a complex network by *only local* information(no global clock or any other global information are needed).
315  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 19, 2015, 04:12:17 AM
Security Update:

If you are running BSD and generated any Bitcoin privatekeys in the last 4 months, they are going to get stolen. SSH private keys too. Good luck. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2015-February/054580.html

Also if you random number generator is not good, you are leaking private key data with every ECDSA signature. Bug affected Debian.
 https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/06/15/suddendeathentropy.html

Why Bitcoin will be Banned in America:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/the-taxman-cometh/

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Governments wrongly assume that the banks are the cornerstone of the economy rather than the participants. They routinely sacrifice the people for the banks because they are themselves the greatest debtors within society.
316  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 19, 2015, 02:23:25 AM

If we are serious, we need to stop all this nonsense of criticizing Bitcoin as a way to gain zealot speculation marketshare (tempting because they are so eager to part with their money). Embrace Bitcoin, add to it, while also driving massive demand for the altcoin. I have that idea. I have even written about it publicly on this forum, but (luckily?) afaik nobody is paying attention.

P.S. I agree that raising money via an IPO is exciting. And there are many exciting features to work on. But if someone builds my idea, they will race right by you in terms of adoption. NXT did many exciting things but it was also as argued by some raided by scammers and subject to political infighting (hey I was in close contact with one or two of the NXT's key players, so I was hearing about the stuff going on behind the scenes). And where is it today in terms of actual adoption? Insignificant.

I am not trying to hype Skycoin or sell it or market it.

I am trying to describe what it is. Thinking in terms of absolutes like "Bitcoin bad", "Skycoin good" is surface reading. I am trying to contrast and make clear the differences. How can you even compare or describe Bitcoin to a person, when nothing like it has ever existed before?

IPO

The Skycoin IPO has been ready since last January. It has been almost 14 months now. I should just start the IPO. I do not understand why I do not feel motivated.

I think you are 100% correct. I should get excited and get it done.

I am going to read The Fountainhead for a bit and try to get juiced up about the moral virtue of making tons of money.

Money is important, but for me personally, I feel more motivated by the concrete objectives the software accomplishes in the world than what the particular price or market cap is. The impact and consequence is substance, where as Enron or Ripple can have a large market cap but it is just accounting fraud and mirrors.

All wealth, income, assets are grounded in power relationships and control of resources, assets and capacities. Bitcoin believes that the price itself is success, but in reality it is just accounting fluff. Relations of credit evaporate as soon as someone with a bigger stick shows up. Wealth and property rights are meaningless they cannot be defended.

You only own Bitcoin to the extent that you can stop someone from stealing your private keys and that is beyond ability of 99% of people and even Bitcoin exchanges with 20 million dollars in funding, full time security staff and dedicated hardware.

People who want a pump and dump, dont care about security. They dont care if the property is secure. It doesnt matter to them, they cant market it. They think deterministic builds and a new C compiler is reinventing the wheel.

Survivalability was another design criteria for Skycoin. In Skycoin the consensus wraps the blockchain. If the network is attacked, destroyed, infiltrated, taken over. You just swap out the consensus module and its running again. It cannot be killed. The ledger cannot be shutdown. It does not relay upon DNS, or even IPv4/IPv6. It is more survivable than the Piratebay.

If Bitcoin is attacked at the level of PoW, the network is dead. It cannot recover. Its just dead.
317  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 19, 2015, 01:11:42 AM
This Article on Ethereum is very exciting.  http://motherboard.vice.com/read/smart-contracts-sound-boring-but-theyre-more-disruptive-than-bitcoin

I dont believe ETH has everything worked out or that it will be final form of the technology. I do not believe ETH will be able to capture most of the value being created either. However, this is a definitely a major step forward and it is very exciting.

A programmable blockchain is of course very exciting for any programmer. But as I wrote in a prior post of your thread, Ethereum has a fundamental error in their design—every node in the consensus network recomputes the script to verify it. That is the antithesis of decentralization. They will need centralized censorship and a script whitelist, or a cap on script computation bandwidth. No peers can opt out of that computation, so the network computation bandwidth is limited to the weakest CPU peer. SNARKs technology is a potential solution, but it is not yet a realizable solution and may never be.

IMO, that is just dumb.

Vitalik has produced other dumb designs too (I guess we all have at one time or another). Originally Charles asked me before he started to work Vitalik about Vitalik's original whitepaper (before Ethereum) PoW algorithm and I blew holes in it, which have hence been publicly admitted by Vitalik. Vitalik is math smart (smarter than myself), but appears to be common sense dumb. Typical geek trade-off.

I had proposed months ago that a more decentralized solution for a programmable block chain is to let each script be an orthogonal merge mined block chain. So then consensus network peers can opt in and out. This also allows more competition on the design of the scripting language. The disadvantage is you just can't inject your script and have it run (need to convince peers to run it) unless that chain runs a scripting language that has a cap on script computation bandwidth (i.e. just like Ethereum with the advantage of competing merge mined block chains). In my proposal the maximum cap could be specified per block chain, so only peers with sufficient CPU power would mine it.


>Vitalik has produced other dumb designs too

Yes. He needs another ten years of experience. You learn over time to simplify things and not do as much as you are able to. Perspective in software architecture and design takes decades until you start producing iPhone level elegance in design.

The decision to implement the coin in twenty different programming languages is just waste of resources.

Bitcoin and Skycoin has its own organizational problems, so expecting ETH to be perfect is unreasonable. I think they are doing good  good job.

Organizational issues are however, easier to fix than design issues. Organization can be fixed by bringing people on, but design relies on perspective, inspiration and experience. Organization is more fungible than design knowledge, which cannot even be bought but must be learned through self-investment and is painstaking.

>I had proposed months ago that a more decentralized solution for a programmable block chain...

Each person has their own personal blockchain. They sign the blocks with their private key. Other peers record the blocks peer-to-peer so everyone knows if there are two blocks at depth-N and if someone tries to backdate a block. You dont need mining or even consensus.

Code:
- setting up personal blockchain, writing data to it
-- https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/blob/master/src/aether/example/chain/main.go
-- https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/blob/master/src/aether/hashchain/chain.go

That is a full personally blockchain implementation in 160 lines of code. You can put ETH script or anything you want that can be serialized as byte, into your blocks. We will have peer-to-peer, blockchain replication in six lines of code, after the new merkle-dag libraries are done.

>turing complete

Choose a virtual machine. Take a program, the program hashes to H1. Take data, which hashes to H2.

H1(H2), H1 (function applied to data, producing output data H3). Programs are hashes. Data is hashes. The output of a function is data described by a hash.

You do not need a total ordering of transactions. You only need a partial ordering. This means that peers can actually discard the transactions/computations thay are irrelevant to them. They would only grab them when they needed them.

You do not need consensus on the whole transaction set. Bitcoin's consensus mechanism is very coarse, a total ordering. Distributed computation does not require a scarce, finite asset like Bitcoin.

Scarce finite asset, is just asset with rule "cant use same input twice". So you have to know if an input has been used previous in computation in network (requiring whole transaction history or set of the global state of the distributed computer). The distributed computer only becomes tractable and scales over millions of CPU nodes and makes sense mathematically if it is "local" and not "global". That means each node has a subset of the directed acyclic graph of computations.

There is a bipartite directed acylic graph.
- "Outputs" created and consumed by computations are square nodes.
- Computations or transactions are circle nodes.
- If a computation consumes an output, there is an arrow from the square node to the circle node.
- If an output is created by a transaction/computation there is an arrow from the transaction to the outputs it creates.

In Bitcoin there is a ledger and Bitcoin is based upon a deed system of real estate. Skycoin is based upon a triple entry accounting Torrens title or deed registration system.

In Bitcoin, you have to go back to go prove the whole chain of transactions going back to genesis, proving ownership and that the block

Every single problem with Bitcoin ownership, double spending consensus, was already solved hundreds of years ago in the development of real estate property law
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel_by_deed
- what prevents double spending of real estate? What prevents me from selling the same piece of land to two different people

The bridge between local and global is time stamping. You do not actually need a block chain at all. You only need to determine consensus on
- whether an output has been spent in the past
- if two or more computations have spent an output, then determine which one came first (the valid one)

You dont need mining at all. For instance, you and the receiver can designate a mutually agreed about merkle-hash/hash-chain timestamping authority and require a time stamp for the transaction. You include the time stamp from the authority with the transaction. Anyone can go back to beginning of asset and independently verify property claim chain. If there are two claims for transfer the one with the ealiest time stamp is valid.

Deed registration is time stamping. It is creating a total ordering on transaction existence (transfer of assets).

If you are deal with transaction across different causal regions at a space-like separation, then you end up with vector clocks. There is a partial ordering, not a total ordering over events/transactions/deed registrations/timestamps.

Bitcoin is actually incompatible with the physics of our universe. It only works because earth is small compared to the speed of light. 0.2 light seconds distance across the surface of the sphere. This time is small enough compared to the consensus time to create the illusion of a total ordering of events in time. If you had Bitcoin miners on Mars and Jupiter or another star system, then proof-of-work cannot enforce digital property rights. If the separation between the miners if more than 5 light minutes, then the orphan rate hits the maximum. Consensus is not achieved. If Earth has more hashing power than Jupiter, then 100% of every blocked mined on Jupiter gets orphaned because of light propagation speed/latency.

Skycoin consensus is currently using a total ordering (for now) and consensus time actually increase with the latency of signal propagation across the causal region containing the consensus nodes.

To be compatible with space-like separation between the consensus nodes, you need to define a partial ordering over transaction (vector clocks) instead of a total ordering like Bitcoin. If Elon colonizes mars, the Martian Bitcoin miners are going to drive up the Bitcoin orphan rate or the blocktimes will need to be increased even higher. 0

Bitcoin is not the only model for decentralized systems of ownership and transfer digital property. It is not the final system. It is not the best system. It is a prototype first gen system.

Once you start doing consensus on the partial ordering on the transactions you begin to see that the bipartite directed acylic graph of transactions (consume outputs, create outputs) and outputs is the fundamental structure, not the blockchain. You begin to see that the blockchain is just a very special case of a more powerful and general mathematical structure.

People are still obsessed with the blockchain. It took them five years to even understand the blockchain and see its other applications, but what comes after the blockchain is something so powerful and general, that it will take decades for the full impact on civilization to be felt. The mathematical structure that generalizes the blockchain consensus to consensus on partial orderings, to me personally appears to be on the magnitude of the laser, invention of fire or the internet itself. This is the god tier for distributed computation.

The direction of time is enforced, because of  time stamping/registration and because you cannot go back and change transactions without a private key used in the inputs for the transactions. This is weak condition. There is a stronger "compression" function type system, that takes N inputs, destroys them and creates new outputs. It allows pruning of trees of transactions leading to inputs consumed in the compression function. This is a "checkpoint system".

These "Compression functions" destroy history or allow you forget state. They compress in the sense of destroying bits from the state or history set , to prevent it from growing infinitely. In Bitcoin these types of compression functions would allow duplicate coinbase outputs, unless constructed correctly. A system for data and distributed computation, looks different than the bitcoin system, which is designed to enforce property claims on finite resource tokens.

Feynman has something about this, in ASICs, about increase in entropy and heat creation when you clear bits or set them to zero in an ASIC circuit vs reversible computations. I dont know if there is a thermodynamic analogy. There are certain operations that "wipe bits" and allow you forgot transaction history. There are operations that increase the size of dataset and create data that must be remembered and operations that allow you wipe out old history and just forget it.

This means tracing outputs back to the last "compression function" event they were passed through, instead of needing to go back and trace the dead of the output, back to genesis.

The "compression functions" correspond to a bitcoin like, total ordering of consensus. However, the system still allows the partial ordering systems (these are roughly side chains). The bitcoin community has a path dependency and is redeveloping the same technology, but from a sidechains/colorcoins angle, instead of looking at the underlying mathematics.

There is no "intersection" operator between blockchain forks. There is an intersection operator on the bipartite transaction/output graph and partial ordering on the transaction set. This means that two nodes can disagree and not have global consensus but they can still achieve consensus on non-contentious sub-graphs of the bipartite transaction/output graph.

Global consensus is much more difficult than local consensus. Some forms of local consensus lead to global consensus naturally.
318  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 18, 2015, 05:27:08 PM

We also have a prototype for a new scripting language that was inspired by Peter Thiel's fully functional operating system project he funded.


What is that, could you push a link about that? I can't find any references to that Peter Thiel related operating system.

Urbit. Peter Thiel didnt develop it. He just paid someone to drop out of college and do this instead.
319  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 18, 2015, 09:01:36 AM
we are doomed, iamback got ignored

Please.

It took him over a year to even acknowledge that he was aware of skycoin, let alone have in-depth conversations and possibly working together all of a sudden now.

I'd have brushed him off too.ning pools and thieves

You've got that backasswards. I didn't need to come here. I was asked to.

And now I am leaving. Not because Skycoin didn't say "how hi" when I said "jump" but because he is already invested in his current design. And I would be doing something different if I did an altcoin.

I think we would waste each other's time talking. I am don't want people pressuring Skycoin. That is not how working relationships are formed.

Again my best wishes to everyone. You have every right to proceed and I wish you well in your endeavors.

For proof of work, you will like Skycoin. You can swap out consensus algorithm. The consensus wraps the blockchain!

There are two currencies, there is "coins" and "hours". You receive a coin hour for every hour you hold the coin. So for PoS, you can choose the chain that has the largest coinhour burn since the beginning. Whenever there is a transaction, you have to spend half of the input coin hours across the outputs, but you can choose which outputs the coinhours go to.

If you have a checkpoint system to prevent forks older than a few blocks and you use coinhour burn for PoS, then Skycoin is 100% secure without doing any consensus network! The consensus network goes on top that that potentially. So network control is split between the consensus network and the owners of the coins.

So there is a balance of power and the consensus network people cannot do socialism. However, the consensus network itself is very important. It can be used to secure multiple ledgers, not just Skycoin!

The consensus network is like PGP signing party. It says "I exist" and that other people believe you exist. It is just a pubkey and you may have different identities in different communities. You may have four identities. So it is not anonymous, but pseudo-antonymous. Groups of people may even share a common identity, two different people may have the same identity, or each person may have multiple identities.  This is important for credit. Reputation and history has value. By stealing or defaulting or acting poorly, you consume or destroy reputational equity.

Reputation is very important for systems where there is only voluntary enforcement and courts cannot compel people to pay bills or settle debts. When you borrow money or write an option or contract that can only be voluntarily enforced, then the credit is extended against your reputation as collateral.

Eventually, this will allow people to take idle fiat and make loans. People have credit cards and are paying 20% APR to bank. Instead, you will take your idle fiat and do a peer to peer loan and the 10% or 15% interest will go to your pocket and users pockets instead of the bank. The interest rate you earn will be much higher than money sitting in bank idly, with a central bank setting interest rates at 0%.

If you need cash immediately, you can sell your loan portfolio or fractions of it (it is better to keep it concentrated and make loans to friends or friends of a friend, to make collection and settlement easier). So the loans are liquid. If you collatorized the loan with a third part against Bitcoin or Skycoin, then you can get interest free or 2% interest loans (secured loans). You get your full bitcoin back if you pay and the person is not taking any risk and still makes more money than having it sit in the bank.

You can do repo transactions. You sell Bitcoin to someone, get $500 and agree to buy back the Bitcoin at 2% interest at fixed price in future. You borrow against the asset and can be held by the person or by a mutually trusted third party. This gives people an incentive to save and to create fungible things that have value in commerce (services or claims for future goods), so that they can use these assets to secure risk free loans, for larger amounts than they can get peer-to-peer from local contacts.

That is why the consensus/trust network is important. It gives each person an identity and a web of trust. It gives them a transaction history and allows tracking of reputation. It lays the foundation for credit markets. This is more powerful and devastating than either Skycoin or Bitcoin as a token system. This is the death blow to the existing financial system, credit cards and taxes. This is what will drive four billion people who have cell phones but do not have access to bank accounts, into the crypto ecosystem.

The Skycoin Project is building that (it is actually almost completely implemented for over a year now), but we have no intention or ability or monetize it or try to centralize it in a way that we can control it. It would not make any sense to try to shove everything onto a single blockchain so that we can monetize it, instead of allowing a naturally decentralized, federated system.

This is also why you will not see venture capital investment here. There is no revenue or fees unless you can put yourself in a middle of the system, unless you can create gatekeepers like Bitpay and Coinbase. Bitpay and Coinbase have done a great service to Bitcoin and have helped it grow, but are only transitional. They are gatekeepers that will be eliminated

Bank Ledgers:

A bank may want to run a ledger and put their accounts on the ledger, so you can trade USD the bank issues or holds on the ledger. However, you do not want the bank to be allowed to control its own ledger. The bank does not want to control the ledger either because of regulatory issues. The bank enforces KYC on entry/exit (like Ripple gateways) but the community would control the ledger, or a network of other banks or 3rd parties that can be trusted.

This is Ripple, but with the bank controlling their own chain and able to offer any product it wants on the chain. There is no coin and no way for Skycoin to monetize this. We are giving banks a turnkey personal ledger for free and API standard. They can run this and then shutdown their SQL backups and move all their assets to a public facing chain.  They can cutout SWIFT and 3rd parties and go straight to interbank settlement with Skycoin (1 second settlement times) or Bitcoin or any other asset.

Foreign banks will no longer be hostage to being cut off from SWIFT. This is inevitable, but in geopolitical terms this is the kind of thing that will gets developers killed with something even more exotic than Polonium isotopes (which is why we are not working on it directly or becoming involved, in addition to our inability to monetize that capacity directly). It is five years out. There are already VC backed companies working on it. They already have working code. This is fucking happening. There are five teams on it, two VC teams and three secret darknet groups and it cannot be stopped.

The historical significance of this moment, will be equivalent to the detonation of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The global balance of power will have shifted in an instant. Everyone will need to adapt to the new reality.

The Skycoin Project is based upon a common networking infrastructure, common libraries, common crypto. This means we "reinvent the wheel" but we end up with a common platform of very powerful, general, reusable libraries that can be used in multiple applications. You can also just pull in IPFS, ETH scripting language, Conformal's node implementation and cobble together a decentralized SWIFT and Ripple replacement in less than a month. Skycoin's infrastructure when it is done, will let you cobble together a bank offering four type of products to customers on a public facing blockchain , with peer-to-peer settlement without SWIFT in a weekend or in a four hour hackathon if you are good.

Currently, banks are a series of SQL tables. The settlement accounts between two parties are in one table in double entry format. Settlement accounts between banks for different currencies, are held by a trusted third bank. This means that three banks together, can collude and perform accounting fraud. They can sell Ruples they dont own or dont exist. They can fix exchange rates. They can maintain currency pegs through accounting fraud. This makes all the books public, eliminates the hierarchy, eliminates the third party ledger for interbank settlement between forex pairs. Eliminates SWIFT.

It actually makes banks obsolete and replaces them with a program like Bitorrent. Instead of trading EU or USD, you create an asset that is backed by Bitcoin and convertible to an amount in USD of USD at the current exchange rate and the remaining collateral is returned to person the asset. This is a synthetic USD or synthetic Euro that will track the price of fiat as long as the Bitcoin collateral is sufficient and the party holding the contract is trustworthy. This is what will kill fiat.

Ethereum is the only currency, that can do that without using a trusted third party. Ethereum has a token and can do enforcement on the blockchain without a third party. If Ethereum does this and gets away with it, it will exceed Bitcoin in capitalization rapidly. If it does this however, it will be attacked by the nation state, destroyed, shutdown, eliminated, discredited and there is a real risk the rest of the cryptocoin developers will be hunted to the ends of the earth and cremated. This is not an exaggeration, for reasons that follow.

Skycoin chose not to do this and chose to remove the scripting language for various reasons, including the above.

Ethereum does not control the blockchain or ledger so the above situation is likely to happen rapidly. When Satoshi released Bitcoin, the threat alerts were set off by libertarian, anti-statist hype mongering. Then they examined the Bitcoin technology and the policy response has mild and Bitcoin is allowed to exist.

Why Ethereum and other technological developments will get Bitcoin banned

Imagine there are two type of EUR dollars.
- One EUR is a 100 EUR bill issued by the government and is paper
- One EUR is backed by gold and is privately issued. It is a contract backed by a fixed amount of gold as collateral and that converts to 100 EUR in gold at the current gold to EUR price. A synthetic EUR bill. It may have a floor for convertibility.

The synthetic Euro substitutes for the real euro. It expands the monetary base in the EUR but was not created by and is not controlled by the government. It is superior to the real Euro and may have a price floor for convertibility.

If the backing asset is sound, the inflation rate of the synthetic Euro will be higher than backing asset. The peg only fails if the Euro appreciates against the peg asset significantly. For an inflating asset, it will always be replaced by a synthetic asset, backed by a sound asset.

We show
- how money can be created out of thin air using synthetic finance
- that money creation is no longer in control of the central bank
- how legal definitions and voluntary agreements affect what money "is"
- the government fiat Euro will be destroyed, both as a store of value and as a unit of account if this system is permitted, in the context of Bitcoin
- "money" or prices are just a system of relationships between capital flows between assets. There is a network of capital flows, not a hierarchy of assets. The ideology of money, the idea that "government fiat" is money, that government defines or creates money, is false or that government fiat is more special than any other commodity, is false. The idea that gold is special is also false. The idea that Bitcoin is different than fiat is religious belief, and mathematical false. Only the capital flows matter, not the properties of the asset, who issues it or anything else. If gold receives capital flows before or after a crisis, it is a matter of human psychology, not economics.

If gold is at 200 EUR/oz. If you issue 100 Synthetic EU against 1 oz of gold, then
- as long a gold price remains about 100 EUR/oz the SYN EUR will be worth approximately 100 EUR
- as gold price declines below 100 EUR/oz the contract will trade at below face value but never goes to zero
- there may be a price floor on convertibility (1/4th an oz of gold), limiting loss from EU quantitative easing and devaluation

The gold SYN EUR is mathematically equivalent to holding 100 EUR and the sale of a put option on 1 oz of gold with a strike price of 100 EUR. The put option sale, means you agree to buy 1 oz of gold at 100 EUR/oz, so your maximum loss is 100 EUR.

The SYN EUR plus the purchase of a gold put option for 1oz at 100 EUR/oz is mathematically equivalent to holding 100 EUR!

The assets are however not equivalent
- holding 100 EUR bill
- holding 100 SYN EUR and selling a put option for 1 oz at 100 EUR/oz

The price of the two asset portfolios are mathematically equivalent. However, the first asset has no counter party risk. The second asset assumes
- the gold collatoralizing the 100 SYN EUR exists, is not stolen, the party is not illiquid and has not rehypothecated the assets
- creates counterparty risk for the person buying the put option you sold. If you are insolvent you cannot meet the obligation if the contract is

If we could eliminate counterparty risk, we could take a stock or gold or anything else and produce one of these synthetic assets that was perfect.

What banks have done, is that they are trading 700 trillion in derivatives between each other. Global assets are 200 Trillion, including all real estate, every factory, every power plant, every publicly traded company, all gold, all Bitcoin, all commercial and residential property, every oil well, all ore mines. Every real asset that exists or can be owned.

Each bank in the cartel has a voluntary agreement and an international enforced agreement, that if one bank is insolvent or bankrupt (and therefore unable to meet its obligations as a counterparty in the derivative contracts it issued), that all the banks will treat the derivatives at face value, as if the counter-party were liquid and not bankrupt. For accounting purposes and legally. Even if the other bank has net value of negative three trillion dollars, if you looked at the debts it owns and the income and assets it has to pay those debts.

So the banks have created a perfect counterparty, with no risk of default by fiat. By fiat, the banks all have perfectly covered positions with no counterparty risk.



If one bank goes, every bank holding their debt  is now exposed to uncovered positions because they are effectively unable to exercise the options issued by the counterparty in default.

Using this strategy, the banks have been able to show balance sheet profits. No one understands how, or what they are doing. I do not pretend to know, or have any insight.

This becomes complicated, because each bank belongs to a particular government and the governments have different interests and internal politics. If a large player can get a large collation of these banks together and dump the German bank's options and use backing of gov or better players, they can rearrange the game, force particular countries into default. Force Germany to come up with 70 trillion in Euros to bail out the bank while keeping remaining collation standing.

All of the bank's positions are secret. It becomes a very complicated game of posturing, geopolitical alliances and threats.

Financial Posturing:
- threatening to cut countries off from SWIFT
- currency wars, devaluations
- hitting government oil revenues

Military Posturing:
- Nuclear subs invading territorial waters
- anti-satellite missile tests, "we can knock out the satellite you need to control your predator drones"
- joint military exercises "Germany may ally with Russia and China and form a super-bloc"
- hyper sonic intercontinental ballistic missile tests
- overthrowing governments and threatening to cut off oil pipelines
- invading territory to threaten to cut off access to ocean and naval power
- threatening to put a missile shield next door
- anti-aircraft carrier missiles
- submarines playing "peak-a-boo" with carrier fleets to say "We can sink you if we need to".

So you have
- a financial conflict
- a political conflict
- a national conflict
- a military conflict

Currencies and credit relations are social fictions. They are agreements on paper. Military force determines and renegotiates the structure of credit relationships. Without military force, claims that can be enforced only voluntarily are meaningless and cannot be enforced on a counterparty.

This is a transnational conflict. The conflict is not between states. People think in terms of Russia or China or countries, but outside of Russia/China nation states do not really exist. This is some kind of transnational conflict and does not have a good explanation in terms of national borders or regional elites. There is not a dominant interest group. There are international interest groups.

If the teams cannot decide it peacefully, then the last resort is physical force. Traditionally, the debt of the winning bloc gets wiped out and the citizens of the loser will suffer high taxes and austerity. This is what would happen in a world where power is controlled by a national elite representing each country and the interests of industry in that country. All economic production, finance, power is now transnational so picture is more complicated.

At the end of WWII, the US led Germany off the hook and built Germany back up industrially, instead of extracting capital from Germany like a colony, because US needed Germany to maintain the balance of power against Stalin. Similarly, the US conquered Japan, nuked two cities, interned the Japanese on the homeland and then after the war built Japan up as an industrial power, into one of the richest countries on earth.

Colonialism was a direct, hierarchical, system for the national interest of a particular nation. Today it is more complicated because the interest and power groups are now transnational and transcend borders or nation states. They do not care about the people within the borders of the nation they were born in. You see a trend towards open immigration, between borders being dissolved. Nationalism is no longer relevant as a concept.

Similarly, war is no longer relevant as a concept. War is just the use of force. Most of the wars are against groups or against economic interests, not other nation states. The line between nation states, private security forces and terrorist/insurgency groups is gone. There is no clean line. War no longer has enemies, is no longer against countries, no longer has military objectives and is no longer confined to borders.

The national interests of citizens in any particular territory, do not matter, even through "voting" is still along national boundaries, it has increasingly become vestigial and irreverent.  The EU rulings override the national congress the constitution of the member states and the body is not elected by the citizens of the EU member states. The EU has the ability to remove the democratically elected president in member states and replace them by an EU appointee. So even the rituals maintaining the illusion of "democracy" is being dropped.

 There are power blocs and they are transnational. There are new emerging power blocks and "the empire" is trying to bring them under control. The empire is not the US, but was centered on US or began there. All of history is a rationalization. It is a narrative, but the reality is in the network and mathematics and diffuse groups with competing interests.

With the emergence of super-national elites, you now have super-national state building. State building is the process of creating a hierarchy of subjugation. A socialist collective, that is powerful enough to dominate any individual or group in the society. You tax farm people and resources (extraction), you use the extracted resources give rewards to those that reinforce the hierarchy (carrot) and you create punitive measures to beat those who resist (stick).
- ability to imprison
- ability to harass
- ability to seize assets (bank accounts, property)
- ability to tax
- dependence on the hierarchy for protection
- dependence on the hierarchy for enforcing property rights
- dependence on the hierarchy in any form

In a federal system, if Texas rebels and tries to extract itself from the hierarchy, then federal troops come in and reimpose themselves. If a bloc of the southern states breaks off because it is between off economically outside of the hierarchy, the hierarchy comes in, masses and reasserts dominance.

A transnational elite, means that if a country rebels from the hierarchy, Yugoslavia or something, then a transnational force comes in. The UN comes in. A hundred years from now, if the western United States breaks off, then it is occupied by Russian and German troops.

Basels is a transnational elite and they are trying to broker a new deal. A world currency or a super bank or transnational agreements that bind and lock up the banks. Banks are no longer part of countries, but are now part of a transnational super entity. Banks cannot survive anymore independent of the super entity. Part of the struggle, is that Brazil, China and Russia do not want to be assimilated into the super entity, because assimilation is against their national interests. They may need to be assimilated by war if negotiations fail.

Communism, lost to capitalism because capitalism was more effective at looting and acquiring resources to reinforce the hierarchy. Capitalism let people keep their property, but extracted the income generated by the property. A larger share of wealth and labor was siphoned off to fund hierarchical subjugation and achieve buy in to the system, under capitalism than communism. More people were invested in the system and had an incentive to keep it going, even if everyone was collectively worse off.

In the beginning, typically, there are groups of elites and they have their own armies, their own militia. They enforce their own property rights and the property rights in their domain. They have gold and you cant take it because they have an army. They have land and you cannot take it, because they have an army. They collected their own taxes. First a dominant elite disarms the other elites. Then everyone else becomes dependent on the dominant elite for protection (they might disarm everyone and then pay some bandits to loot or invite some violent immigrants or terrorists into the country to reinforce people's demand for government and protection). The dominant elite, then centralizes tax collection and it collects from each individual. It levels the aristocracy and nobility to the same level of slavery as the serfs. All are equal before the socialist collective of massed centralized power.

Ideologies and jingles are created that rationalize the legitimacy of the centralization of power. People are told that the government represents them and they they elect the government, but citizens are not allowed to participate in government and do not have any control over government
- people "vote" but dont choose who the candidates are
- people are not involved in choosing the laws. The bills are not even posted to public for days after they are passed or signed.
- the political parties choose the voters in each election through gerrymandering. Districts are dynamically rearranged to fix elections regardless of what politicians do.
- the vast majority of voters are public unions and people who benefit and depend on the state
- citizens dont participate in budgeting and have no control over what government spends money on
- in the EU a committee of people no one elected, override the constitutions of the member countries
- the "elected" "representatives" of the voters, are not allowed to read the bills they are voting on (Patriot Act, Obamacare, Bailout)
- the government lies to the public, controls the media narrative and has 9000 pages surveillance files on even non-political reporters at vice. The media is owned by four corporations and journalist who do not represent the views of power are removed. Every dead journalist is a "suicide" and the numbers do not match up to countries we have accurate data for.
- The media alliance with government against the public can turn "CIA anal rehydration" and murdering prisoners into a debate about waterboarding. Torture is "waterboarding" and media does not even mention "anal rehydration", torturing prisoners by making them roll around in feces until they develop sepsis, rape or boiling prisoners alive and mailing the body to their family.
- you do not have a right to bring charges against the government for violating the law
- members of the government are above the law and have qualified immunity and cannot be prosecuted. Even a lowly police officer can taser someone to the ground, flip them over face down, stand up, pull out a gun and execute them. Imagine what politicians, banks or the CIA/FBI can do. The law only applies to citizens. It does not exist to restrain power. It cannot restrain power.

There is no center, no edge anymore. It is just a blob of groups fighting for power and creating new means to extract, centralize, punish, rewards. New technologies of control.

The police used to protect citizens and were under control of a sheriff. If the police shot someone, the sheriff had to respond and was accountable to the community. The police existed to protect the community. Now police exist to tax farm citizens with $500 traffic tickets and go into minority neighborhoods with arrest quotas to fill prisons, to create supply of prison labor for defense contractors and the Fortune 500.

The public is the enemy.
- the media emphasizes that police are murdering people. That the police are the enemy of the people.
- the media emphasizes that people are the enemy of the police. That every citizen is a potential cop killer and its us or them.
- in rural communities, where the police and people communicate they have a common interest in opposition to tyranny. That interest must be broken and replaced with antagonism
- if the alliance of two groups and their common interest can stand against power, the two groups must be driven into a false conscientious of antagonism. All opposing power centers against increasing centralized power must be destroyed.
- when a TSA agent is killed, the public cheer
- the police are dressed up as an occupying force, act like an occupying force and people treat them as an occupying force
- the power over the police is shifted from the local community to the federal level.

We are transitioning from a nation power hierarchy to a transnational order. The nation state must be destroyed
- the common language, common culture, ethnic homogeneity that created the nation state must be destroyed through immigration
- the borders must fall
- national pride, symbols of the nation state, religion, history must be eliminated
- citizens must be disarmed. They must not be able to protect themselves against threats. They must be dependent upon the state for protection. They must not be able to form community groups to provision protection of life or property. Crime should publicized to drive demand for a larger, more powerful central hierarchy to "protect", even as police become even more corrupt and are indoctrinated to perceive the public as enemies.
- the family must be destroyed

I have no idea what the objective of some of these things are. Media agenda is very clear. Not clear if it is an organic process or driven by an agenda. We are seeing increasing backlash as control of media is lost, suggesting this is top down.

Groups must be divided in antagonism and false consciousnesses to divide and segment. Each group must perceive their own interests as being in conflict and antagonism with every group they share common interests with
- the wife must be pitted against the huspand
- the police must be pitted against the public
- the public must be pitted against the government (who they supposedly control, in ideology but not in reality)
- the benefactors of economic production must be pitted against the productive class of society

The largest threats to the power structure are the institutions that enforce the rule of law. Police or military control the use of force in a territory and can shutdown the power structure and sever its ability for extraction.

The military must be weakened, demoralized. They must be given absurd hats against their will, they must accept transsexuals, drunk men should be severely punished for "sexual harassment" while homosexuals may rape without consequence. Everyone but the most ineffective and corrupt must be weeded out. There will be a constantly shifting series of absurd and contradictory ideologies, whose only purpose is to weed out sane people and test for ability to obey and conform to irrational ideologies. There will be an increasing series of absurdities designed to drive sane people out "If you see an insurgent about to fire an RPG at your helicopter, you may not fire at them, until they have launched the RPG at the helicopter". Corruption will be glorified, torture will be accepted and justice will be punished. Truth and morality stand in opposition to power.

Foreign troops and mercenaries are effective for a domestic occupation. At some level of corruption, an effective domestic military and police force become the largest threat to the growing abuse of power.

The most important institution keeping the power structure in place,
- the banking system, especially the regional FED banks, which are required for interbank clearance
- ability to print money
- the taxes collected from the automatic income tax withholding on the Fortune 500 employees.

The system cannot be dismantled without the consent of a transnational and highly redundant group of financial institutions who are also the primarily beneficiaries of money printing.

I think that people will flee and that any hope of reform or a successful confrontation, does not exist.

Repo Markets

Companies are no longer using dollars. That is why the money velocity has dropped. Interest rates are zero but banks are no longer making loans. Dollars are the unit of account but are no longer the store of value.

To obtain funds, a corporation
- holds stocks or bonds
- gives someone $100 in stock, for $100 with an agreement to buy back the stock at a fixed interest rate later

Corporations are using the dollar as a unit of account, but no longer use the dollar as a store of value. This has already happened. That is one reason money velocity is dropping.

If you have two asset pairs, you can create a synthetic asset. Gold, Microsoft Stock, Pogs, Bitcoin, USD. Its the same.

I can take USD and create paper gold. The asset is
- SYN(GOLD, USD, $400, 200 USD/oz)

The synthetic asset is a 4-tuple of
- the asset unit being created
- the asset it is being backed or collateralized with
- the total amount in the collateral at originating exchange rate (or current exchange rate)
- the conversion rate or strike price for the contract (current rate)

This means that is I have dollars, then I can print synthetic paper gold. This substitutes for gold and allows gold supply to expand with fiat. Therefore gold price will not reflect "real gold" but real gold, plus synthetic gold.

However, if Gold goes up in price too much, then the synthetic gold caps out. There is a spread between the synthetic gold and the real gold. In this case, I put up a fixed collateral, so it is difficult to keep SYN(GOLD,USD) tracking GOLD if GOLD increases too much. In the actual market, the backing is by an institution, not a fixed pool of assets. This mean that loses are unlimited to institution, but it also means that manipulation is easier and government can be used to keep spreads closed. Paper gold would be expected to expand with monetary inflation in fiat and substitute 1 for 1 for physical gold.

You can do
- SYN(GOLD, USD, $400, 200 USD/oz)
- buy a call option on 1 oz of gold at $200

If the backing (the dollar) gets wiped out, then the monetary base of gold will contract to physical gold. Suggesting price could increase.

Synthetic Finance: Fiat Currency Death Spiral

So if I am a bank, I can
- take collateral such as gold or other collateral grade assets
- mark the assets to market
- create synthetic stocks, synthetic gold (paper gold), synthetic Euroes

The death of fiat is Synthetic Fiat

The government Euro
- is controllable. It goes through banks that meet KYC requirements
- it can be taxed and tracked
- can be controlled at borders
- takes days for transfers
- government controls the monetary base

The synthetic Bitcoin/Skycoin/Ethereum backed EUR
- does not go through banks
- cannot be taxed
- cannot be controlled at borders
- takes seconds or minutes for transfers
- drives up demand for Bitcoin/Skycoin/Ethererum as collateral while reducing the demand for fiat (which is being dumped)
- this is a death spiral for fiat currencies

This is exactly what companies are doing in the repo market right now, but with stocks instead of Bitcoin. This is why countries keep falling back to a gold standard throughout history for hard money. It is only through force of law and empire that fiat keeps being re-established.

This is also what bank are doing right now with their 700 trillion in options.

"Good money" does not "Drive out bad money", good money collateralizes and creates synthetic bad money (through options, synthetic assets and repo transactions). The Fortune 500 has already done this. The governments are creating regulations on the "shadow banking" system to drive companies back to holding cash. The government has had to come in and undercut the interest rates in the repo market, by offering repo transactions through the central bank directly.

People who have excess capital, pile that capital into better assets. Then they use those assets as collateral for the shittier, inflating, government currency. They do repo transactions, where they borrow the asset to someone for cash, with an agreement to buy it back at interest later.

Technology and the great powers: DARPA Coin

Bitcoin, Skycoin, meshnets, twitters. These are just pieces on the chessboard in a larger struggle for power. Technology, resources, public opinion, territories, non-state actors, NGOs. Everything that exists is a pawn in the game between the great powers.

When Satoshi created Bitcoin, as soon as it came on the radar he nominated Gavin Andresen and had him go to the CIA and explain it. They are always interested in new technologies and whether they are useful for their operations and whether they pose a threat.

Instead of being on the defensive and having to explain, how they can stop Bitcoin from being used to fund insurgency, they should be pushing Bitcoin and explaining how Bitcoin can be used to fund the correct insurgencies.

Skycoin has to work with the CIA, State Department, Department of Defense and other stakeholders, to avoid polonium poisoning.
- The government funded Tor. The lead developer on Tor hates the government, would run NSA agents over in parking lot if he saw them, is on a terror watch list and his salary is paid for the by Navy.
-- Tor lets US diplomats overseas securely check their emails without interception by hostile governments. However, there are so many highjacking, man in middle attacks, injecting trojans into PDF files on the wire that a new second generation tor is needed, now that the security problems are coming to light.  This is basically Skywire.
- The State Department funded the commotion wireless meshnet project and tested it in the Occupy Protests.  They want to use meshnets over seas to "spread freedom and democracy".
-- By creating protester groups, they can collect intelligence on the ground and can put pressure on foreign governments
--  They need to be able to communicate with people in countries that are firewalled, have balkanized networks and where government may shutdown Facebook/Twitter and text messaging during a protest.
-- Facebook/Twitter are not just blocked, are are covertly monitored and used by governments to identify and intern the protest leaders. Dictatorship can more easily control dissent, not by blocking social media but by using it to identify and neutralize leadership of opposition. A second generation social media infrastructure needs to be developed, that protect protesters against government, while enabling operational capacities of social media to organize and inflame dissent.
-- They want to do open source information gathering and get intel on the ground in countries whose networks are firewalled.
-- They want to develop "swarming" capacity and be able to feed information to protesters, crowd source information gathering and direct protesters on the ground like an RTS game to evade or distract police.
-- Swarming allows crowds of hundreds of highly organized people to materialize from a crowd in seconds, achieve an objective and then disperse before any reaction or response is possible. In a crowd of 5000 people, 250 random people may be carrying Molotovs, may all be positioned to targets and synchronized by cell phone to throw them at the same time over four block area, torching 250 police cars in five seconds for a photo event and then disappear into the crowd. There is no way to identify the protesters and it is impossible to respond or even close off area to contain flight. The State Department is developing netwar capacity on ground.
-- They want plug and play mesh networks with satellite uplinks in a suitcase, they can quickly drop in the country to coordinate assets on ground, in hostile territory.
-- They funded Lantern, to allow communication in firewalled countries. Without a free internet, it is impossible to get the ground intelligence and organize opposition groups. Lantern is the first piece of software that breaches the Great Firewall that cannot be blocked. It operates peer-to-peer and in response, the Chinese government has ordered ISPs to put all users behind a NAT firewall so they cannot communicate peer-to-peer and are forced to go through government registered servers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_(software)
- The Department of Defence spent eight billion dollars for the SDR technology Skywire hardware is based on.
-- They are very interested in multihoming , multipath routing and radios that can change frequencies based upon conditions because networking conditions on the battlefield are very choppy and unreliable, even without active jamming. If a satellite is shot down or jammed, then they lose control of drone. Without a human pilot, a drone with a communication link cutoff and cannot make decisions or respond to changing battlefield conditions. They need multiple network paths, redundancy and ability to rapidly configure connectivity in the "battlespace" on a second by second level that is not possible with existing networking protocols.
-- For redundancy a drone may have a satellite uplink, a line of sight communication link to another drone, communication links to vehicles on the ground and may have a hardware package to hack wifi routers to gain internet access. Existing networking protocols cannot effectively utilize drone mesh connectivity.
- DARPA wants a duel use emergency/civilian/military network. For their flying space cars.
-- DARPA developed project ARA, originally as a modular hardware system for military, allowing soldiers to swap out sensor packages, radios, equipment on the fly. Now it was taken over by Google and is a mass market civilian cell phone.
- CIA is upset at Bitcoin because it does not meet any of their operational needs. If they actually intended to use this in the field, the bitcoind API would have been changed and not be in its current form, which is horrible. Bitcoin was not designed to be used.
-- SDRs do not have the tracking and location identifiers of wifi and cellular devices, which otherwise allow identification and movement tracking. They offer encrypted, deniable communication in a civilian device. Software can be hidden in firmware so that it cannot be detected by imaging phone.
-- Google glass and augmented reality, allows you to set way points and move insurgents around on a satellite map like an RTS game.
-- peer-to-peer market places and augmented reality allow you to rent protesters by the minute for Bitcoin and move them using GPS way points like an RTS game where you smuggle cocaine for Bitcoin to buy crowds of protesters to topple communist governments.

Technology is "neutral" and part of the field. If Bitcoin is not in news liberating world from axis of evil, then no one is using it. I have been waiting for Bitcoin to leave the "toy" and proof of concept stage for years and I have not seen it move any closer.

>Projects:

NXT had less than 10 people in the IPO. There was a huge and "unfair" concentration of wealth. This is both "unfair" but it is also why NXT is so successful. It allowed the NXT project to fund a large number of high risk, speculative and R&D projects and make significant advances. NXT took a painting, split the ownership share of the painting into a million pieces and began trading it on the blockchain. It was the first publicly traded painting.

We need to make sure that massive amount of Skycoin money goes into these types of projects and open source infrastructure. We need to maximize the rate of capital good investment and knowledge investment. Bitcoin failed to go singularity because all the money in Bitcoin's increase was extracted by the miners, speculators, mining pools and thieves. Every dollar from Bitcoin went to consumption, instead of investment.

If Bitcoin had taken even 300 million dollars of its 8 billion dollar peak market cap and dumped it into crypto projects and infrastructure, the positive feedback on the valuation of the whole crypto space would easily offset the money spent by ten or a hundred times invested capital. None of the money from Bitcoin's rise, ended up going back to prime positive feedback loops for crypto adaption.

Projects such as darkwallet and SX, which had fiscal multipliers (dollar increase in market cap per dollar invested) is at least 200 and yet the team was unable to raise even $20,000. Bitcoin is a failure as a social experiment. It created the wrong incentives and became an example of the free rider problem. Everyone has hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin and people are buying whole housing development projects, but projects that could increase Bitcoin market cap by billions of dollars, cannot even raise $10,000.

The more I think about this, the more upsetting it is.

We have personal blockchains and you can run ETH scripting language inside of it. So it lets everyone have their own Ethereum blockchain. We also have a prototype for a new scripting language that was inspired by Peter Thiel's fully functional operating system project he funded. There are a large number of projects we want to fund, for pure R&D.

>And now I am leaving. Not because Skycoin didn't say "how hi" when I said "jump" but because he is already invested in his current design. And I would be doing something different if I did an altcoin.

I want to talk to you more, but IPO was supposed to be three weeks ago. I have to get this out of way. I want to start on the fun stuff and hiring people.

I want your feedback, especially on technological issues, economic issues and design. You are one of the only people in the world who knows what is going on or has a valid opinion.

Instead of being "right or wrong" you have to understand why people believe things. There are multiple systems of belief and they are correct in their own way. So the truth is not "Hyper inflation or no hyperinflation" but there are multiple systems of belief. You have a consistent system of belief and are able to reason using different systems at the same time. You are able to articulate the system explicitly, so that I cannot disagree or agree, but it is true internally. It is a facet of reality.

People who are about to do that and use meta-systematic reasoning are rare and very valuable.
- The majority of humans are animals, ruled by impulse, violence.
- Some humans can follow rules and copy others and use tools. They can be taught to perform and action over and over again, like operate a cash register. They are controlled by impulses, myth and indoctrination.  They are unable to even have a model and reason through it and hold consistent beliefs
- The top 10% of humans can hold a belief system and reason within that belief system. They can construct rules, apply the rules to scenarios and predict what will happen. They can set goals, reason about actions and predict how actions will work in the world. This is level of an economist with a particular ideology (even if it is wrong)
- the top 1% or 0.1% can hold multiple systems of thought with different rules, can reason using different systems, can examine the properties of systems of thought, can contrast and compare the systems, can discover and reason about the properties of sets of rules as a whole (metasystematic reasoning) and evaluate and choose between systems of thought based upon data.  Everything you write is at this level at-least.  You can see straight through propaganda as just another system of thought, that benefits one power group over another. That is why you are so cynical. You can see that systems of thought are being created and imposed. That there is not a single correct system. Your writing is over head of vast majority of humanity.
- There may be a higher level, where new systems, new systems of thought are synthesized. This comes from experience with thought systems and combining different systems of thought from different domains. Your synthesis of the "knowledge-production" and "interest rate-debt" system is novel. This level is the level where all new systems of thought are produced, which then become adapted through social processes and get pushed down to lower levels on the masses. This is top 0.0001% and at level that changes course of history.

So
- Level 0: Sensorimotor stage /  Preoperational stage
- Level 1: Concrete operational stage
- Level 2: Formal operational stage
- Level 3: Meta-systematic stage
- Level 4: System Synthesis, Transcendence, Genius

Your writing is at level 2,3,4. You are reifying systems of thought and turning them into objects, with properties and operations that can act upon the system of beliefs itself. You are synthesizing new systems by combining existing systems ("knowledge-production" and
"interest-debt").

New York times is at level 0,1 and sometimes 2 but rarely. Politicians do not even reach level 3. Socialist and rallying a group to fight against an enemy or warning a group about a threat that requires collective action is an appeal to level 1 and level 2. Leaders do not need to use higher levels and leadership at the higher level in effective, because it goes right over the herd's 6th grade reading level.
320  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: February 18, 2015, 03:39:13 AM
we are doomed, iamback got ignored

I messaged him. My hard disc on my bitmessage computer is full from that spam attack. I had to reformat and get old private keys ported over to the new computer.

>this post will get ignored...as with 90% of the posts here in attempt to reach skycoin.

I am not ignoring anyone. I am locking computers down for the IPO.

I just got through twenty hour of AnonyMint posts and I should get some work done today Smiley

---

This Article on Ethereum is very exciting.  http://motherboard.vice.com/read/smart-contracts-sound-boring-but-theyre-more-disruptive-than-bitcoin

I dont believe ETH has everything worked out or that it will be final form of the technology. I do not believe ETH will be able to capture most of the value being created either. However, this is a definitely a major step forward and it is very exciting.
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