the act of discussing more something is about picking options more wisely.. and when a thread asks for more prominent people's opinion about something critical like BLOCKING-ASICS, this could observe the TRUST of people, more and more. and being permission-less doesn't mean you can begin coding and after 6 months of hard working, you suddenly understand that it was all about wasting of time.

so this is about modeling before implementation [1] that we rarely see in crypto-world. after having an idea we somehow used to jump in implementation and don't care about modeling. sometimes I ask myself, why don't we have a DFD [2] approach within BIP steps!? introducing a distributed modeling language may be the next improvement in decentralization efforts.


but in crypto-world, a coin carries a certain amount of value not a process. you can manipulate a process so you innovate, but what would we call it if we manipulate a value?

---------------------------------------

reading the history of Nokia could be useful for the future of Bitcoin. a shift in technology and user experience out of sights of Nokia simply lead them to bankruptcy. Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this "we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost" [3] and this thread is going to discuss it, if such a thing is going to happen for Bitcoin too, how we could prevent it.


[1] http://agilemodeling.com/essays/modelingApproaches.htm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_flow_diagram
[3] http://fun.putidea.info/2016/06/nidokidos-nokia-ceo-cries-during-his.html

good point. Renting a VPS with several IPs could be harmful.

--------------

I also like to ask another question from our friend: "excluding the ping/latency property of this idea, what are differences with this proof model (PoAS) and Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) [1]?"


[1] https://blockonomi.com/delegated-proof-of-stake/

I like this spirit.. just I am not sure how we could have a laboratory to have quicker transitions of ideas to running codes.. for example, having a fork and call it "bitcoin lab" as a real coin in market that changes itself quicker than usual may be another option for bitcoin community.

UPDATE:
what I really care about is the fact that ideas can't wait too much to be effective. all ideas that can bring an improvement have their own expire dates, and after that they will be useless, which means, such slow approach to upgrade just kills the active entities of any societies.

this regulation part is very important here and actually talking about an upgrade to an ANTI-ASIC algorithm is a kind of regulation_by_code.. which means being code_central wouldn't be a kind of centralization that everyone tries to stay far from it..

UPDATE: one good example of regulation_by_code that already exists in PoW is the procedure of difficulty setting among block creation..


with PoS please use the term pre-defined instead of pre-mined coins.

this would be a good practice to imagine a GRID of these 20 qubits is online out there and passing the calibration phase the begin mining..  

Mining never stops, but centralization happens.

the Moore's Law means: "the number of transistors on a chip doubles every year while the costs are halved."
now the death of Moore's Law means: "the number of transistors on a chip reaches the saturation point."

so at the saturation point, while people like miners only could have access to chips and regular processors, Quantum or Optic,... computer manufacturers (that do not follow the Moore's Law) could totally defeat them in a processing (and therefore mining) race and become the majority. even an ASIC manufacturer could utilize his new devices in a mining competition and after a complete ROI for his R&D costs, now send them to the market for sale. this means regular miners are always one step back. before ASICs involvement in mining process, a fairness existed over all miner entities. this fairness is important for the existence of hobby miners that constantly support their coins in good and bad days, not industrial miners that turn off their facilities with the first drop of price.

please see the future..


there is also another observation that shows while ASIC-friendly coin's hash rates get hurt by a decrease in prices (a downgrade from 60 to 30 TH/s - something around 50% of bitcoin processing power), ANTI-ASIC coin's hash rate like Monero remained untouched. this shows the absence of miners who equip themselves by higher performance devices (because of the bigger tolerance that they can provide), could jeopardize the whole network. your link was the most scary report that I have seen these days that shows how misbehaving of ETC ASIC miners could extend to BTC miners too. emerging of unknown miners with 23% of processing power is a threat.

the word "Greed" is just part of the problem and ends with something like ETC, my friend. please give us a solution with one word..

of course you are not paranoid. I personally support both approaches: 1- upgraded 2- brand new work flows, with different forks. each technology could best serve us in specific duration of their life cycle and R&D entities should provide better solutions anytime.


with this method you can't even explain why coins with PoS consensus model still exist and grow in the market. in the field of PoW, we could see how Monero constantly blocks ASICs and its price remains unchanged. We could also see how Electroneaum followed Monero and blocked ASICs, but after drop in market got back to ASIC-Friendly algorithm again and this time their price in market dropped even more. We could see how market responses to Ethereaum these days. in all these examples I could see ASICs are somehow out of equation of pricing - except the recent 51% attack on ETC that ASICs were actively involved and the whole market has taken effect from.

when price of a coin is high enough to reward ASIC miners, they mine properly, but when they do not benefit from regular mining, they decide to become the majority and attack the network and this time benefit based on double-spending and then extortion. this is another way to OPTIMIZE mining:


now to fill the gap of block rewards and stolen amount ($1 million), ETC is rewarding (/ higher fee amount) each block with something around 200 coins [1] per block!! I call this hostage situation as extortion-after-51%-attack. this is not security.

[1] https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/01/13/etc-block-rewards-go-crazy


UPDATE:

please read this carefully. the problem with ASICs is they can't go anywhere else to mine. once they can not gain enough benefit, they decide to attack for ROI. but if we only get GPUs in the ecosystem, they could simply switch to other coins for more benefit. this changes the way miners proceed for optimize mining.

You know, I am working on a new consensus model "PoCo" that works with PoW in its first layer but is also neutral against processing power. What we are doing here in this post is about sharing our latest knowledge and forecasts about the future of crypto and bitcoin, then everybody could make the best decision that better suits them. nothing weird is going to happen.


Bitmain company is not my problem. ASICs (or any other processing devices that can do nothing but calculate one thing in one way) are my problem.


True. I prefer to read more about these consequences. as I said above, these all are about sharing forecast to better understand the upcoming trends in crypto-world.


these analogies are necessary for "SYSTEM DESIGN", but the most close machinery example here could come from inverted pendulum.. systems behind inverted pendulums are dramatically similar to consensus algorithms of cryptos. and please don't worry about using the word "parasites" here. I already have a plenty of these hardwares in my lab. this is a scientific chat.

I don't understand why you guys see the crypto-world with the eyes of an ASIC miner. please try to see the crypto-world from a crypto's point of view. this topic never says "lets do something to block evolution of processing power out there", it is about "lets evolve bitcoin in a way that doesn't get hurt by evolution of processing power out there"..


no, no, this is where you do mistake. look, in the aspect of a crypto-world the bitcoin seats at the top of food-web. in the terms of biology, ASICs just enroll as parasites and leeches in this ecosystem. so this is very legitimate that species (cryptos) try to get rid of parasites that try to attach them and this can't consider as a devolution for cryptos.



or you could buy them in half of the price (or less) and statistics show that the most problem with GPUs that has been in a mining rig is their MOSFET component that could get repaired with something around 30 USD.

we could consider self-driven cars as an evolution for man-driven cars. vehicle detector cameras could also consider as an evolution for classic speed cameras. but my friend, how could we consider vehicle detector cameras as an evolution of cars at all? a camera is an environmental threat (or opportunity) that is growing out there - out of control of car manufacturers.. now if you drive faster than declared speed limit in a road (do not regulate yourself and improve your driving algorithms), then you will penalize by the speed camera (a consensus fork happens).

ASIC technology always exists and grows out there - out of control of bitcoin. if you want to talk about the evolution of bitcoin, you need to bring a new idea as a BIP. bitcoin is just an algorithm. BTW, evolution is not only about survival, it is also about perish and letting others survive..

Reminder:

"it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself -- Professor Darwin"

UPDATE:

it is alright. this is enough for everybody to know the truth that the PoW will die when Moore's law dies. accepting a problem is the first step for providing a solution.

No. look my friend, there are many reports that show us the speed of providing processing power now is more than Moore's Law [1] and the processing power that is available is at the level of a mouse brain. this is also expected that after 2020 we will enter the age of processing by optical, quantum and DNA computing that will lead us to the singularity point. I am not going to elaborate the technological aspect of singularity here (this is obviously off topic) but I personally believe that cryptocurrencies could survive economies within age of singularity and PoW is vulnerable here. this is one of the most clear visions from the future that shows us how machine could overcome the human kind.

this is very simple to see that PoW rewards the density of processing power and who provides denser processing power than 51%, the whole network will move under his control (in ETC case, better say extortion [2]). really, what happens if we sleep and tomorrow morning when we wake up, see top 3 pools of bitcoin are joined together and have the majority of processing power!? then we just ASK them to divide their power and we pray in silent they do that?! till now the crypto world was in its earliest stages, but in the beginning of 2019 how we ever could call it a consensus model [3]:


byzantine generals problem never been based on "thanks to good relation among our generals (pools) a traitor could not threaten the consensus model.."




[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law


[2] https://www.trustnodes.com/2019/01/13/etc-block-rewards-go-crazy
[3] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184427-one-bitcoin-group-now-controls-51-of-total-mining-power-threatening-entire-currencys-safety

I think I could explain it in other words.

each threat must assess in 2 different ways: "1- severity 2- expanse". the problem with ASICs is because of its severity in a possible threat, but this could not prevent the expanse of a threat that you mentioned it very well - and in fact this is what I try to express. Disabling ASICs is necessary, but not enough. an example for the arrangements that we could take for controlling the EXPANSE factor of a thread, would be flash-back-pinning:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5089384.0

what about the second voting in your proposal? are they protected against sibyl attack?

and I need you guys change this point of view [1] - especially when you try to disable ASICs in a crypto network. in the field of decision making, scientist follow new patterns that match better to human mind that first came with Behavioral Economics:

"Behavioral economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions and how those decisions vary from those implied by classical theory"  [2]

"conventional economics assumes that people are highly-rational—super-rational—and unemotional. They can calculate like a computer and have no self-control problems."  "People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!" "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." [3]

if cryptocurrency is going to be a competitor of monetary, banking or payment system, needs to include a wide range of irrational behaviors (misbehaving [4]) in the equation.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5072301.msg48113411#msg48113411
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Thaler (He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2017)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misbehaving_(book)

I totally get your point, but I also could remember how two things happened after second bailout for banking system in 2009. 1st, the bitcoin. 2nd, a phrase about climate change with this message: "we can't eat money" [1]. both targeting the need of tighter regulation in banking and climate areas. if we all just think about money, there will be a day that we all lose hope and trust in a moment. bitcoin is important because it is going to be an answer for the broken trust of people about their future, now the same problem (everybody just look for money) is going to break it down.

and also look at these calculations and the inversion of incentives for miners of ETC:

block interval= 10 second
block reward= 4 ETC (20$)
blocks (last 24h)= 6,108

block reward (last 24h) = 24,432+24.45+34.13+34.13 ETC ($105,506.96 USD) [2]
stolen amount (less than 24h) = $1.1 million worth of the currency [3]

and put them all behind the tweet of ETC team:

"We are working with Slow Mist and many others in the crypto community. We recommend exchanges and pools significantly increase confirmation times (400-4000+)"

you see? if I be a dishonest pool and have 51% of the process, then I could gain 10 times more benefit that being an honest pool at the same time. I call it the inversion of incentives. who and how could guaranty such an inversion of incentives never happens to bitcoin?


being mathematically broken is not the only matter of security, being available is also important in the context of security. ASIC devices sometimes could bring a kind of denial-of-service to the network (51% attack). nobody is happy with this situation, but this is a bitter fact that we should face it.


misunderstood. I agree that equipping by ProgPoW would not be that hard, but getting the desired result is another issue here. you know, when we have ASICs for sha256 and some other ASICs for ethash, none of their owners could perform an attack against the other group. but, if we all destroy our ASICs and get back to GPUs then we have a large army of multi-purpose processors that have no loyalty and just look for a coin that bring more profit for them within an specific period of time. then imagine a guy (proof-of-keys [4]) that suddenly appears in youtube and asks all miners to join his pool that is planning to attack bitcoin, just for fun or any reasons else.. this is where we need the REQUIREMENTS and CONSIDERATIONS part..


[1] https://me.me/i/when-all-the-trees-are-cut-down-when-a-the-3803512
[2] https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum%20classic/
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612728/hackers-just-stole-1-million-from-the-ethereum-classic-blockchain-in-a-rare-51/
[4] https://www.proofofkeys.com/

if we follow the recent 51% attack (5-Jan-2019) on Ethereaum Classic (ETC) [1] we could say now this is even late for such upgrade. ASIC devices were always harmful to the PoW, and like many others, I have explained it in several threads too [2]. there is also detailed information about ProgPoW in link bellow:

https://medium.com/@ifdefelse/understanding-progpow-performance-and-tuning-d72713898db3

but this would not be enough to upgrade into a ANTI-ASIC algorithm. for example, using the RSA alone as public key infrastructure is not enough to provide security. there are lots of REQUIREMENTS and CONSIDERATIONS [3] that we should take during implementation to provide the security.. generally decentralized projects need to design new data structures and work flows that are more focused on opportunity cost factor of providing 51% attacks. I could see how users of ETC are in trouble these days.

[1] https://medium.com/@TokenHash/why-i-am-still-optimistic-about-ethereum-classic-etc-ef1ebe13c44b
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5072301.msg48111338#msg48111338
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3447

UPDATE: hope someday soon we see that there is a PRIORITY TAG added to the tasks that bitcoin should take ahead and people in community vote on them. this would be a good idea for better decision making.

the BFT has nothing to do here. the BFT is about a commander node that initiates a command to other nodes (a miner claims that has solved the difficulty of a block and propagates it to other nodes). when you try to begin the proof model from block level to the transaction level, you need to follow the Chinese General Problem, that each node has its own value/command to propagate to the entire network. read about "PoCo" here in bitcointalk.


I afraid this parameter could fabricate easily. would you please elaborate this mechanism?


while your voting model doesn't fit in opportunity cost context, your model still suffers from N@S. this save point in your proposal just works as same as checksum in bitcoin. checksum doesn't solve anything. for new possible solutions, read about "flash-back-pinning" here in bitcointalk.


would you please give more information about it?

True. the amazing part of your first reference about heartbleed vulnerability is this quote that asks for more information for understanding what may have occurred before discovering the vulnerability:


anyways this exploit reminds me the principles of protecting from supply chain attacks by NIST [1][2] and now the question is how much the software supply chain in bitcoin follows it? (in other words, does this exploit fit in the concept of supply chain attack?)

[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/projects/supply-chain-risk-management/documents/ssca/2017-winter/ncsc_placemat.pdf
[2] mirror of [1]: http://www.mixoftix.net/knowledge_base/security/nist_suppy_chain_attack_.pdf