Risto, this week has been amazing for me:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1049048.msg12140971#msg12140971

That is concerning:

• Instant 0-conf transactions that can't be double-spent with any of the typical attacks on Bitcoin.
• Holy grail of on chain anonymity (superior to Cryptonote).
• No more 51% attack possible.

Those claims are so incredible, I doubt anyone will believe me until they see white papers. And they should not until they do.

Let them FUD Satoshi's white paper. That is how difficult it will be to FUD math proofs and clear and complete explanations covering every possible attack.

Well if you can offer peer review maybe that can be arranged. I will get back with  you when I am prepared.

Btw, I tried to sleep and suddenly I solved the last remaining snag in my consensus design. I suddenly realized I indeed solved it. And yes mine will be fully proved in a white paper.

Just a few days ago, I solved the holy grail of anonymity:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1049048.msg12127776#msg12127776

It is all over for Bitcoin. Seriously. I will go silent. Next you hear from me will be via white papers.

Good luck.

He is fooling you too. I rather fancy letting him continue to do that to you. Because you called me a troll. And because I have absolutely nothing to gain from expending my time on this. I do hope you call me chickenshit and put your entire networth in VNL.

I will have one parting shot though...in the next post...

If he absolutely doesn't want to post here, why don't you ask him to write up a response and post it here on his behalf? You realize that all these people criticizing aren't just some random newbies but people who are all very knowledgeable about cryptocurrency in general and have been involved in it for many years now, right?

Hmm, this Vanilla coin is getting more and more interesting by the day.  I obviously hold gmaxwell's position in crypto history as high.  I also hold John's 20 years of P2P and crypto history as high.  It seems to me these two are in a little beef, but I would guess they know each other or have worked on a project together long ago.  In either case you've got two brilliant people debating bitcoin and vanillacoin with each other. That's all I need to know.  Kind of reminds me of the war between Bill Gates and Steven Jobs. You can guess who is who, lol.

I too have looked at the the paper in more detail as it seems to be a hot topic and I concur TPTB's statements.

It's wide open to various gaming and DoS attack vectors as stated by him.  Mainly due to there being no cost penalty at all for an attacker to perform these malicious activities.  

Some kind of burn would be the simplest fix as suggested in this thread, with compensation of some kind for the nodes whose votes are accepted.

Apologies to harp on this thread, but it would be sneaky if I added this as an edit to a prior post.

Zerotime is a very significant claim. When you make bold claims that have the potential to seriously challenge Bitcoin, you will be held to a higher standard of scholarly proof.

Indeed the necessary proofs can be explained with math, computer science, and networking research.

Einstein said you don't really know something until you can explain it to a n00b.

The only ways I know of to squelch DoS and Sybil attacks are:

• Participant expends resources.
• Participant must have a reputation.
• Participant performance can be measured.

I already stated that I don't know how to do #3 for his proposed lock protocol, because there is no verified correct vote on a lock. Disagreement isn't a verified crime in this protocol.

I already stated that I don't know how to do #1 for his protocol, because transaction fees can't be taken in the lock stalemate case where Sybil attack applies. Others suggested burning resources (I assume the voting nodes) and I responded saying which nodes would participate in voting if they must burn resources? If instead you require every transaction to burn or include a proof-of-work hash or fee, then the innocent spender is penalized by any lock stalemate.

So that leaves us with reputation. But again how do we measure performance in order to assign reputation? And then there are other problems with reputation.

There is a reason that solving the Byzantine Generals Problem remained unsolved until Satoshi invented proof-of-work. The problem is essentially that there is no reference point, because either value is correct and incorrect at the same time (e.g. lock or not lock) because we can't prove the network is reliable.

It is as if John isn't aware of how significant Satoshi's accomplishment was. Or somehow John thinks he has a clever improvement, but hasn't yet proven it to us.

Btw, I think I have a solution of how to achieve zerotime. But I do it an entirely different way and my solution doesn't require all peers to see all transactions, so even if John fixes his, I've still got him beat (assuming my white paper comes together which is not finished yet).

Perhaps because JC's 'white paper' is severely lacking in any content which would suitably rebut the points being raised?

Your post history concerning this developer and his coin is becoming shillier by the day and your tactic of repeatedly calling people 'Troll' or their assertions 'FUD', are tiresome. We get it, you want people to idolise JC the way you do, but it isn't going to happen unless and until he can actually satisfy the technical issues related to his claims towards having solved 'zero confirmation' transaction vulnerabilities.

I suggest not scoffing at what he wrote. I'm not a good programmer, so I had to "learn as I go" about the framework of cryptocurrency design by soaking up the posts here. I don't know much, but I do know that failing to take account of Sybil attacks and DDOS attacks means "back to the drawing board." Unlike li'l ol' me, TPTB_need_war really does know what he's doing.

At a very minimum, the flaws he saw demand a detailed rebuttal from john_connor: the more technical, the better. I'm only at the amateur-dabbler level programming-wise, but I've been around the echo-chambers block enough times to no longer believe in the "Galileo trope" - namely:

- Galileo was an innovative genius who was attacked and persecuted by the Establishment.
- X is being attacked and persecuted by the Establishment for his "innovations."
- Therefore, X is a world-changing innovative genius like Galileo!

Formally, this bit-o'-flattery is an instantiation of the fallacy of the undistributed middle.

Myself, I'm taking TPTB_need_war's criticism quite seriously.

Okay I've digested the white paper. I appreciate john-conner providing more details. That was the honorable and helpful action.

Unfortunately afaics, there are elementary attack vectors that he has not addressed in this white paper:

• No cost to being a peer, thus a Sybil attack on nodes in general. The adversary could insert a unlimited nodes if he wants to in order to dominate voting.
• How to squelch DoS attacks on the vote? A node which always votes against consensus can't be distinguished from one voting honestly since lock conflicts result in an indeterminate vote.
• He employs a Bellagio Algorithm to avoid gaming the selection of which nodes to poll for votes, so this removes the reputation weights of Skycoin's consensus, but it doesn't address the spamming of total node count nor the spamming of the lock conflict.
• Nodes are not paid for voting. If they receive bribes from the double-spender, the algorithm has no defense other than it hopes that 50% of the nodes in the network are not on-the-dole.
• Lock request spamming or DoS attacks. Are transaction fees hardcoded for the entire network?? Preset constants are anti-decentralization.

Also this algorithm requires the entire network to see all the transactions which of course won't scale without centralization, so if he is trying to enable real-time microtransactions (1 second confirmations) which could explode transaction volumes up to the 100,000s or more per second then he has a problem. Refer to the GavinCoin fork debate.

With the amount of hash power the BTC network has, just a single confirmation is enough for most transactions, if you are sending a large amount to an untrusted 3rd party, then 2-3 is plenty.  The effort required at that point to undo that work is pretty insane.

I've always had a small issue with the confirmation time of BTC, it could be a little faster IMO, but considering at the time BTC was released all this was a bit of an unknown, 10 minutes is a safe amount of time and isn't too inconvenient.  That 10 min confirm certainly isn't a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination for me, nor for most other people.

I guess that the solution presented here solves potential Finney attacks to some degree, but its not a major issue and certainly isn't going to result in people en-mass leaving BTC for VNC just because a "problem" that isn't widespread has been solved.

You need much more than that to dethrone the current king.

But.. It's not a problem..

The idea one thinks it's a problem points to they do not understand consensus algorithms..

9am today? or tomorrow? his tweet was early this morning so ...