If you can't buy weapons and drugs with something, it's a terrible currency.
Every single currency known to men can buy weapons and drugs.
In fact, bitcoin is easier to trace than most currencies (if you don't pay with credit cards or digital transactions.
'terrorism' is just some buzz-word the governments use to get people to do what the government wants them to do, because oh no, 'terrorists' are bad.
Every government needs some invisible enemies they can 'fight' so they can unite their citizens against this invisible enemy and control them.
Amen. You got it. |
|
|
|
@dinofelis, I realized that no PoW blockchain can have a viable changeable blockchain size solution. Every possible solution is centralization (large blocks, small blocks, unlimited blocks), including Monero's automatic adjustment algorithm.
Even LN on Litecoin will eventually fail as a political clusterfuck when the block size needs to be increased again.
Satoshi's PoW only is really viable only for power broker money on small blocks.
Satoshi's PoW is diabolical. We must destroy it.
It will annihilate itself. Simply too costly. The huge costs of PoW for feeble security are now invisible because they are covered by an influx of greater fools (called "adoption"). This is similar to the invisible rise of socialism in Western countries during the booming years: everyone is getting richer, and you don't realise that they are running away with a big part of your wealth because you're still getting richer, but less fast than you should. Bitcoin security costs about $400 million a year, to secure some $20 billion. That is already quite risky: you allow for someone with $2 billions and a strong motive, to destroy bitcoin. Imagine it goes 100-fold. Then the cost will have to rise comparatively. $ 40 billions of waste a year to secure a 2 trillion ledger. When this becomes a whales-only club, and no greater-fools are paying for the bill, these whales will have to cough up $40 billion A YEAR on waste. While the competition does it at essentially no waste cost. Electricity: today: 500 MW. 100-fold: 50 GW. That's France's nuclear power. What whales can permit themselves to waste that while there are alternatives that don't need it ? While you can achieve the same with a few laptops. ENIAC against core-i7. PoW is horrible cryptographic security. It is 1-1 between good guys and enemies. That said, I don't believe that Satoshi had something diabolical in mind. You mustn't put on the account of conspiracy, what can be explained by ignorance. PoW simply has a natural ceiling of value, because it becomes too costly to maintain. It is not competitive. EDIT: I saw another comparision: in 2016, the bitcoin mining consumed 10 times more energy than CERN, the biggest particle lab in the world. In a certain way, the results were similar: nothing  Or another one: a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much electricity as almost 2 days of a typical American home. Not sustainable. Too wasteful. Not competitive. |
|
|
|
I know that dpos is a centralized solution but I don't think its possible to get high tps without having some centralization.
It is not possible in block chain centered crypto, because block chain centered crypto is requiring a much too much severe form of consensus, needing EVERYONE to agree *perfectly* on the *single* *totally* ordered list of transactions ever done ; on top of it, with a time-spaced unique seigniorage mechanism included. This is not needed to keep the accounts of owners of coins. Of course, it is (largely) sufficient, but this strict ordering and time spacing is making that the thing can not scale. For instance, whether the transaction from Joe to Jack came BEFORE the transaction from Alice to Claire, or after it, *doesn't matter*. Whether you got a confirmation of the transaction from Joe to Jack in block A, and you got another confirmation in block B, doesn't matter. The fact of having to chose between block A and block B is, concerning these transactions, not necessary. It is only necessary to indicate a winner of the reward. I'd agree that the solution is probably to take the blockchain out of crypto. Then transactions can be instant without waiting for confirms. If Joe pays Jack, Alice and Claire, it doesn't matter what order they are processed in as long as Jack has the balance to send the transactions. Blockchains are doubling the amount of traffic, firstly we have the broadcasting of transactions, and secondly we get the transaction included in a block. A PoW blockchain coin generation distribution scheme would be a very small blockchain only needed by mining nodes. So all that is needed is a mechanism where people cannot forge their own coins and double spend. Indeed. I'm trying to find a scheme where it is the owner of coins himself that is to prove that he didn't double spend, rather than having the global system showing that he didn't. That means that there mustn't be global consensus on much ; in fact only on "provided signatures for peer balances" or something of the kind. Everyone is supposed to keep his OWN transaction history to be able to prove validity of his current status. In fact, you only need to have sufficient peers keeping your transactions sufficient long times in order to be able to verify that your actual balance is correct since your last "certified" balance ; if you don't bother keeping a past certified balance that is recent enough, then your problem that you cannot provide proof any more of right to spend. |
|
|
|
Ive read any statement like this, bitcoin can be used by crimes & terrorism. But, its stillbe traceable, the people who uses bitcoin can do such things like this. Bitcoin purpose is not to do things such acts like this, its more uses on mining and sending a transactions through online.
True, but it is anonymous. This is a myth. Bitcoin is way way more traceable than fiat bank accounts in off-shore banks. |
|
|
|
For the case of terrorism, terrorist can easily purchase weaponry from other country. With the use of transaction using bitcoin, authorities will have a hard time tracing that transaction thus, will give advantage to the side of terrorists.
This is not an impossible scenario. People can now use bitcoin in any way they want to. It's inevitable.
If bitcoin was to have any significant utility - which it hasn't - it would be to allow the financial aspects of what you call terrorism and crime. After all, that's what economic freedom is about: being able to spend/finance whatever you want with what is yours. If you want to finance terrorism, this is your good right, and a good permissionless currency should allow you to do so. If it doesn't, it means that it is not the free, permissionless currency you thought it was. In fact, the ultimate test of whether a payment system is truly decentralized and permissionless, is: can I finance terrorism and crime with it ? If I can't, it means the system isn't truly decentralized and permissionless. It is the ultimate test of a freedom currency. |
|
|
|
No because Bitcoin whales are the most hard-core anti-debt fanatics on the planet. The fiat system is a house of cards propped up by $trillions of leverage.
Well, I used to think that too. And there are serious problems in the fiat system, but it is *not* the fact that it is debt based. It is the fact that there are self-referential backings in the system (the derivative bubble). But I used to think totally "Austrian school" about money too. However, there are two source texts that opened my mind on monetary systems. These are: "Debt, the first 5000 years" by David Graeber. I don't fully agree with all of what he says, but it is a eye-opener on certain aspects. But the most important piece of writing is a course that is called "Evil is the root of all money", where the relationship between debt and money is explained. Essentially, money is nothing else but a fluidized promise, so that it becomes fungible and transmissible. If we all trusted one another, we wouldn't need money. Money didn't find its origin in gold or any other "near-perfect medium of exchange" like the Austrians saw it - although it CAN be such a system. Money is nothing else but a deal-maker between people that don't need to trust one another, and transfer the lack of trust in 2-2 relations in the mutual belief that they trust the money. Money is NOT a market signalling instrument (although it can transmit market information). It is not a unit of account (although it can be used that way). It is simply a "trust vector" in deal making. This is why "debt-backed money" is not as hollow as it seems, and as I used to think. After all, a debt is also a deal-maker. A debt is half of a deal (my part). One little pin prick from Bitcoin, and the FED's bubble goes Minsky Moment poof. In other words, the FED is not even a tail, it is more like a whisker trying to haul an elephant or a battalion of junkies with 10 grams of cocaine that they keep cutting with some super potent by toxic amplifier that eventually will kill all of them when the cutting ratio exceeds some theshold.
No. The derivatives bubble, maybe. But not a fiat system as a whole. Money is nothing else but the oil in the engine of the economy, and from the moment that it allows the engine to run, it is good enough. Fiat money does that quite well, and the central banking system isn't so bad as it seems. It seems a horror when looked upon from a "hard money" view, but when looked upon as a "deal maker tool", it works marvellously well. The idea that "solid debt" can be fluidized into money is exactly what money was meant to be. As such, money can be created upon demand, by giving a backing of some solid debt, and destroyed, when the backing is removed (taken back). And the market price of money is simply related to how much solid debt people want to fluidize at a given point. The principle is quite sound. This is why I'm absolutely not convinced of any nearby world breakdown of the fiat system. The derivative stuff, on the other hand, is an extremely dangerous self-referential bubble. What goes wrong in the fiat system is the monopoly positions of some, which they abuse to get privileges of reaping in fractions of money flows where no value is produced of significance. Essentially, the unfairness of the different quality of "solid debt" that is needed to obtain money for it. In the first line: states. |
|
|
|
(first part)
Interesting concept. It has some similarities with TaPoS but also with Ethereum's proposed Casper algorithm, although they continue to use the "chain" paradigm. There, the PoS validators "bet" on a set of transactions (or block) if there is a fork. So the fork on which most PoS validators agree is selected. But at difference to your concept Casper has rewards (and punishments if nodes misbehave). From the moment you give out rewards and punishments, the system becomes a strategically complicated rule set of which it is very difficult to show that no strategy can be thought off so as to game the system. For instance, if you can inflict punishments on your rivals by tricking them into signing off a chain that is to be orphaned before they realize etc... If there are no rewards, things become much simpler, because the only incentives are directly "wanting to maintain the system" or "wanting to game the system", and there are no "proxies of being honest" (getting rewards and not getting punished). Do you think miners would accept to destroy their source of income for only ten times their daily earnings? I think it would be much more you must give to them.
You can say the same about the people lending out their stake. If you rent hash rate, the seller of hash rate doesn't really know what you are going to do with it. With cloud mining, I think this would be more doable. Let's do the math: hashflare.io is charging 1,20$ per 10 Ghash/s. The bitcoin network currently has 3,5 Exahash/s (3.500.000.000 GH/s). So you would need 350.000.000 * 1,20 $ = ~420 million USD to buy enough hashrate for an 51% attack. So ok, you are right ... that's ~400.000 BTC and much less than for a PoS 51% attack. That surprised me. I never did that math. If that's true, PoW is really more insecure than I thought. Are these cloud mining prices per month or per day or what? --> they say: lifetime contract as long as it is profitable ! But there's a daily fee of $0.0035 which is the real price. Grossly, the EARNINGS of bitcoin miners are supposed to finance the PoW. That's BY DEFINITION (much) less than the whole market cap ! Otherwise, you'd burn the whole market cap each year or so just to, eh, keep the value of the market cap. That's about like paying 3 times the price of your car a year to insure it against theft. PoW is a VERY BAD cryptographic security. I knew that but I also only realized the last few months HOW bad. You have to waste HUGE amounts of resources for very WEAK security ; in fact, the security is simply that your enemy will not waste as much as you are doing ! My point is that by the time that you can do things that make the system already an economic failure, the technical security doesn't matter any more.
Yes, I agree - these attacks are possible, but highly impractical. Nevertheless I wouldn't ignore them for a PoS design that really could replace Bitcoin's PoW. In fact, I even think it is positive that a coin whose economic system has become totally corrupted, becomes also cryptographically insecure and will most probably fail. This is a kind of self-destruction poison pill for when the thing goes economically wrong, in order not to keep a Frankenstein's monster alive. Another problem if we really want to replace Bitcoin's PoW by PoS and not creating another coin: A big item in Bitcoin's social agreement is the limitation to 21 million coins. If there is no reward, what to do with the remaining coins?
Well, there is one thing that PoW is good for: seigniorage. Creating coins with PoW is not a bad thing ; but the error in bitcoin and many other PoW coins, is that this PoW that serves to make people fight to make new coins, is also used as a cryptographic security mechanism for the consensus. That's silly. One could have PoW coin creation *independent* of block chain security. On the other hand, I would think that limiting bitcoin to LESS than the planned 21 million coins is not a problem. The problem was rather not to make more of them. And finally, if you REALLY want to end up with 21 million coins, you could pseudo-RANDOMLY distribute coins over past addresses. You could say that Bitcoiners should be happy if the supply stops at - let's say - 17 million, as the share of every Bitcoin holder with respect to the total amount would grow. But it would nevertheless be perceived as an attack to Bitcoin's fundamentals by some, I think. Well, you could redistribute the 4 resting millions to all shareholders but that would be pointless.
In any case, it is a fundamental change to the protocol, and hence it destroys immutability. So strictly speaking, it is not "bitcoin". Bitcoin is what it is now. The guy that bought for half a million dollars ASICS to mine will think he got screwed, and he'd be right. |
|
|
|
The highest perspective, as I understand, is to see that society is looking for a stable metric for value. This would be optimal to have, its a great technology.
That is really not difficult. The prostitute fuck is a stable metric of value. You can express all market value as an amount of "one good prostitute half hour". Something that is not going to be modified a lot by technology, that has millennia-long tradition, of which demand and offer has always been more or less stable over the ages. I think that this is a very stable measure of value. Disagree. That could be manipulated with mass media, forced deprivation, "education", etc.. Nah. Has been tried for millennia. The oldest profession. Older than gold ! I also think that you give way, way too much value to knowledge (technical/scientific that is). It is stuff in over-production, and it is less and less needed. The markets are held by those that possess resources (minerals, water, sunshine, clean air, land, ...) and certification rights without which you cannot bring anything legally to the market. Imposed certification is a way to keep small competitors out of the market, have permissioned markets limited to an oligarchy in agreement with lawmakers. Knowledge is not much needed in this domain. Somewhat, still, but less and less. But for every needed idea, there are 50 starving engineers waiting to sell their services for a sandwich. This was totally different 30 years ago. The lack of need of good knowledge in the economy is visible in the total degradation of scientific education, without any economic impact. In other words, 30 years ago, we still needed engineers and scientists - now we don't. Or almost not. The only industry where this doesn't seem to be the case is entertainment, but that's a very meme-controlled industry which serves as a vector for crowd manipulation. Panis et circenses. |
|
|
|
... punch cards need SSD storage...  |
|
|
|
I would think that, even though some optimisation happens, yes. Because essentially, it is fungible, relatively uneducated labour (life time of people, doesn't change much over time) and a relatively constant demand (you won't eat 20 times more Big Macs because they become 20 times cheaper). So I would think that the fraction of life time sacrificed to make a big mac over the pleasure to eat a big mac keeps its "true market value" more or less constant.
Not sure i understand, are you including robots and or food printing machines in this? At McDonalds, burgers are not printed, and not served by robots. They are essentially fungible labour. |
|
|
|
is that a suggestion that big macs don't get cheaper to produce over time?
I would think that, even though some optimisation happens, yes. Because essentially, it is fungible, relatively uneducated labour (life time of people, doesn't change much over time) and a relatively constant demand (you won't eat 20 times more Big Macs because they become 20 times cheaper). So I would think that the fraction of life time sacrificed to make a big mac over the pleasure to eat a big mac keeps its "true market value" more or less constant. |
|
|
|
My understanding of Nash's mathematical theory of ideal money is that if we have unit-of-account and store-of-value for reserves (but not necessarily a unit-of-exchange!) which has a non-manipulable and predictable rate of change of its supply, then that money can form the basis of sound financial systems which correctly value the activities in the economy and thus don't create distortions which lead to for example the failure of private fractional reserve banking, depressions, and misallocation of economic resources and capital. So this is why the primary value of Bitcoin is the inability to change its protocol. If Bitcoin's protocol can be changed by anyone, then it is no longer a reliable metric in Nash's mathematical scheme. So Satoshi tried to design a monetary system which would meet the requirements of Nash's ideal money scheme. Because in theory this can bring great benefits to society, such as destroying all the fiat systems, corrupt governments and destroying the inherently correct concept of socialism and democracy. These justifications have been explained in more detail upthread (and in extensive detail in my archives on BCT), so I won't repeat that information. But as I already explained upthread, the immutability of PoW only exists for the token (blockchain) which has the greatest value, because the finance tail doesn't wag the dog. I explained upthread that whales on a higher valued blockchain can potentially manipulate a lowered valued altcoin as is the case ongoing now with Litecoin wherein they are able to change the protocol. I also explained upthread how (using MPEx as an example) finance always accumulates to the one with the most reserves, i.e. finance is inherently a winner-take-all construct. It is a gravitational system that sucks everything into itself until it is the entire economy and then it self-destructs. Thus Nash's ideal money can't exist in reality with finance. Nash wanted an asymptotic solution wherein the number of stable currencies could be unbounded and thus no one could ever gain sufficient omniscient information in order to winner-take-all the financial system. Unfortunately Bitcoin as the center of the financial universe as the only stable currency is of course an abomination and not at all what Nash would have wanted. (Note altcoins are not stable currencies because they are not immutable.) Because of course I explained already upthread how over time there will end up with one whale who has monopolized the Bitcoin economy and thus can change the protocol at-will. This is why I say Bitcoin is the NWO system and was probably created by a think tank funded by an elite globalist such as Rothschild. Nash required two incongruent things. He wanted a metric to be stable so the (rest of the) financial system could be measured against it, yet he also needed that metric to be absolute (as in its veracity/protocol not being relative to anything which could be controlled or gamed). There are no absolutes in our universe. We live in a relativistic universe which is only constructed from relative perspectives. None of us can even communicate our present to everyone and we can't even communicate our histories incontrovertibly because there is no way to prove an event happened other than by the corroboration of the memories of others who witnessed it (which is not a total ordering thus isn't incontrovertible). For example (but this is by no means the main point of what I am trying to explain here), this weakness in fungible money is why money requires a total ordering consensus so as to order the transactions globally to insure a double-spend wasn't attempted some where else in the universe. I wrote as @anonymous: O/T assigned a descriptive model where nodes or their connections are assumed to have unequal value without any model for why they do. Eric posited a generative model wherein communication has a space-time frictional cost. Subsequent commentary has pointed out that the more generalized generative model is that networking (in the generalized conceptualization of communication and/or group formation) has a myriad of genres of opportunity cost (e.g. even political opportunity cost in cooperative games theory), so this can account for preferences in group formation which may in some cases be independent of physical transport costs. Something else occurred to me while reading the O/T paper before reading Robert Willis's thoughts, and I think combining the opportunity cost generalization with the following insight might model his point. Note that if the possible connections between nodes are limited by opportunity cost weighted compatibility of groups of nodes, then we can approximate a model of the network as connections between groups (aka clusters) of nodes. In this case, the equations for relative value of network mergers changes such that it is possible for the value proposition to invert between small and larger networks, if the larger network has fewer groupings (on an opportunity cost potential connections weighted basis). O/T mentioned clusters but in the context of their descriptive model of assumed unequal value. The key point of opportunity cost is that value is relativistic to the observer. The highly relativistic model is capable of higher-order effects such as those described by Robert Willis. Demographics matter. I want to investigate whether Verlinde's entropic force emergent information based gravitation model is applicable and perhaps a generative mathematical foundation. So I believe what Nash worked out in his mind mathematically was that in some hypothetical asymptotic case wherein there are an unbounded number of stable, non-manipulable currencies, then it would not be possible for any player in the system to always win just because he/she held the most reserves, because that player would lack information about whether he/she held the most powerful basket of reserves, so it would thus not be a power vacuum winner-take-all outcome in the theoretical asymptotic case. So Nash was correct that in the asymptotic case, his ideal money is stable, but the problem is that such an asymptotic case isn't known to exist nor does anyone know how to make it come into existence. Even Satoshi's design requires Bitcoin to be the stable currency with the highest value otherwise as I had explained, its immutability is not assured by the game theory. Precisely four years ago, I wrote Bitcoin : The Digital Kill Switch, and I see now that I was entirely correct. Bitcoin is an abomination of Nash's ideal money scheme. Its end game is one globalist who controls everything. One omnipotent whale who stomps on all life. The NWO-666 outcome. Sorry I can't stand by idle and let that happen! Four years ago, I set out to try to figure out how to fix this problem. I've been working incessantly ever since on this in spite of my disseminated Tuberculosis illness (which I am now undergoing treatment to cure hopefully). But along my journey of thinking about money every since I got interested in gold in 2006 because by late 2005 I could already see in my mind that a global crisis of debt and socialism was ahead in the real world, I ended up making a discovery and writing it down some time in the period between 2011 and 2013. That essay was Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance. The generative essence of that discovery was that knowledge can't be financed, because unlike manual labor, knowledge production is not fungible. Read the essay I wrote for more explanation. Also Eric S. Raymond had discovered Linus' Law " given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" when he wrote the seminal The Cathedral and the Bazaar which launched the open source revolution and Eric had invented the term "open source" preferring it over Richard Stallman's "free software". Eric followed that up with the explanation of open source economics models in the Magic Cauldron wherein he explained the opposite of a Tragedy-of-the-Commons is an Inverse Commons which is what open source is. (I am still writing this post, please reload again after some minutes) @iamnotback, simply a brilliant analysis. You put crisp arguments and logic on points I vaguely felt without always knowing exactly why. However, two things bug me, if you think in bitcoin as gold for the elite, and litecoin as the silver for the plebs, with the market cap of bitcoin so dominant over LTC, that it can manipulate it at will. Like the tail doesn't wag the dog, the flea on the tail doesn't wag the tail either. The principle you illustrate is exactly what the FED has been doing with most fungible stores of value, including gold: the market cap of $$ being much larger than anything else, the FED having unlimited supply of it, can dictate the price and flow of gold, silver, foreign currencies etc... (that is being challenged now by the $$ not being so hugely more important than other stores of value in the world). So two questions remain: 1) bitcoin is maybe the dog as compared to alts, but it is the tail as compared to the FED. Bitcoin can be wagged by the FED from the moment that it gets a more official status and the FED can buy it and sell it as an asset. $20 billion is peanuts 2) If LTC is the LN activated system, what would keep up the market price of bitcoin ? Right now, that market price is kept up by greater-fool theory and the belief in moon. Bitcoin's economic value at this moment must be less than $10,- per coin (that is, if the only demand for it were given by the need to obtain them to buy goods and services for it - Fisher's formula). Most gullible people plunk down $1000 or so of their hard-earned money for a bitcoin, because they think that one day it will be worth $100 000 and they will retire ; that is, one day they will find a fool who will plunk down $100 000,- for their coin. Like they plunked down $1000,- to someone who bought it maybe for $10,- some years ago. The whales, full of bitcoin when it was less than $10,- dump some of their coins on these gullible to rip them off their $1000,-. But in order for these armies of gullible to keep coming (called "adoption"), the dream needs to be sustained that they too, will find even bigger armies of even more gullible that will plunk down $100 000,- for their coins. Telling everybody that bitcoin is going to become the world currency and that there are only 21 million of them, is keeping up that dream. But if LTC is going to be the payment system with LN on top of it, what story are you going to tell about the gullible, and how one day people will beg them to sell their coin for $100 000,- ? While you need litecoin to buy stuff at Wallmart ? Given that LTC is only a few $$ right now, what idiot would plunk down $1000,- for something you can't buy anything at Wallmart with, while he can get much more LTC for that amount of money ? He can get a much larger share of "the stuff that will become world money" with his $1000,- than of BTC ? Yes, I know, gold and silver. But gold was universally accepted by all in power, from kings to temples. Bitcoin only has value because it "was going to be the unique world currency and all the rest are shit coins". LN activation on LTC will be very dangerous for bitcoin. Once bitcoin loses its leading market cap, bitcoin is nothing any more. Bitcoin is the thing that was the first mover, the highest market cap, and "all the rest are shit coins". If bitcoin needs a shitcoin to do the real payments at Wallmart, what good is bitcoin ? |
|
|
|
The highest perspective, as I understand, is to see that society is looking for a stable metric for value. This would be optimal to have, its a great technology.
That is really not difficult. The prostitute fuck is a stable metric of value. You can express all market value as an amount of "one good prostitute half hour". Something that is not going to be modified a lot by technology, that has millennia-long tradition, of which demand and offer has always been more or less stable over the ages. I think that this is a very stable measure of value. The other one is the Big Mac, but it has no historical perspective. |
|
|
|
To all BU shills, for the last time, there'll be a balance with LN and litecoin transaction fees there. Wake up.
If the litecoin fees are too low, it likely won't make sense to keep large LN channels open as that also means there's very little to be gained from routing fees. You do need a secure computer online to route LN payments through your channels, even if keeping the channels open doesn't require an online computer all the time.
When litecoin fees are high, there's a large incentive to optimize your channels and make sure they're open and active (that is routing payments) so that you can profit from offering people cheaper payments than litecoin itself. This means more and more people will pay through LN and transaction pressure on litecoin blocks will drop, causing the fee to drop too.
Between these two, there'll be a point of balance that'll be the actual fee level in litecoin. This is the natural market balance that will form.
The problem with that is that it doesn't allow miners to squeeze all transactions in a small block, and have users fight for the little room there is to be able to move their funds. Unlimited blocks give you the same problem, but then, unlimited blocks is just a lure to get very limited blocks and no segwit. We all know, that something with a hard limit on its supply (like the 21 million coins in bitcoin) can give rise to very high prices. A hard limit on the amount of transactions will lead also to very high prices (fees). But then, there shouldn't be any other way to transact like off-chain. To the ideal to rip off users, are: 1) small blocks 2) LN We then have two types of industrials that get the money the users are paying: miners and LN banks. LN banks, most probably, will be exchanges, which have big wallets and can keep open a lot of channels to their customers and between them. They are the natural LN hubs. Exchanges, under LN, are going to become the new Citybank. They are already in the process of becoming regularized as a genuine bank. The small blocks make that there are huge fees for on-chain transactions and settlements of LN channels. LN makes that nobody complains, until most are locked up in channels to a few banking hubs. Then, these banking hubs can increase their LN fees almost to the level of the (very high) settlement fees on chain. You are locked in, in any case, so you better pay, because otherwise you have to pay the settlement fee, if ever your settlement transaction can get through. Miners can determine the amount of spam needed to squeeze the on-chain blocks and fees to significant heights, and then the users are at the merci of the LN banks. So, essentially, you open a LN link to your exchange/bank like you open a bank account, you sign a contract and all that, and then you can use it. The settlement would also most probably happen with a lot of paperwork. Like with a normal bank. Miners are keeping off LN for the moment, because they don't see why they should share the lucrative squeezing of the fee market with newcomers in the field, that *don't need so much investment in ASICS*. Miners are put on the losing side of control, because LN banks can swiftly become banks, or leave the space by simply selling off their stash. Miners are invested longer term in the coin with their hardware. They don't know how the distribution key of the money they suck off users will be distributed between them and the LN banks/exchanges. |
|
|
|
they are still have high inflation?
nope! there are only 100 billion of them and will no longer have any extra AFAIK. there are no certain inflation ripple will suffer. you need to notice the available supply, however. As Far As You Know. Because the central decider only knows for real. |
|
|
|
Governance = centralization. A central authority that can change the rules any moment. |
|
|
|
Well, my idea is that if 99% of humanity could drop dead by tomorrow, except my friends and family, and those that do useful things for me, that would be a positive thing for me, because the 70 million people remaining would have much more resources at their disposal than the 7 billion idiots running around on this earth.
Life on earth would be a dream again, with 70 million of us.
This is entierely false. Level of life and energy available / head grow exponentially with global population growth, steady. Place with high density of population always have more manufactured ressource at there disposal. That is first of all only true as long as economic activity is not resource limited ; and secondly, this is mostly also the case because the concentrated areas (the city) are applying extortion on the less dense areas (the countryside), that is, there is a structural flux of wealth from less dense areas to provide dense areas with the stolen wealth ; mainly because the top layers of hierarchy are in the denser areas. On the other hand, you are right, that structural investments are much more efficient in *sufficiently* dense areas (a road is optimally efficient for a given traffic ; too much traffic jams it, but too low a traffic makes it too expensive per amount of traffic), and costs that scale with distance are also lower in denser areas. However, I wasn't talking about "putting a human every 20 km" or something like that. You can very well have a few cities with 70 million people. But now we have very, very high environmental costs that orient a huge amount of our production value into being energy efficient, low-polution etc... In fact, we can't sustain that, which is why we have to have most of our industrial production in India and China where the environmental costs are still lower. This is a cost that is entirely gone when we divide humanity by 100. We can drive cars that consume 50 l / 100 km, without a problem, and we have petrol for the coming 500 years or more. We don't have to get nervous about climate change. We can have large forests and still have all the (mechanised) agriculture we'd like. Our economy is being hurt by resource limits since about 20-30 years and it won't improve. South America and Africa are being urbanized at the cost of huge parts of nature, in a totally non-sustainable way. Until not so long ago, labour was a resource and the more people there were, the more labour offer there was ; it is fading away. We are now hitting a resource limitation which is strangling us in the same way bitcoin's 1MB block size is strangling it. This has never happened before, because when it happened in western countries, we could colonize, and afterwards, we could delocalize industrial production. We can't any more. This is normal. Every population is limited by resources if it grows. We could push limits some time. We still can a bit. |
|
|
|
Nope Wasting Energy is Bullshit, while the asics miners are starting to drive up the rates for people in residential areas.
ASICS are to wasteful to succeed in the long run. Time will prove this to you.
I am with you on this one. PoW is a crazy cryptographic "security" : "I waste more, so I am right" is about the biggest silliness one can think of. That said, PoW was a good idea to start crypto. What we will keep of it is that we now have a lot of secret-public key pairs distributed over a lot of people, which is bitcoin's great contribution. |
|
|
|
To me, the N@S problem can be formulated as follows:
"there are an unlimited amount of different, correct block chains under a PoS rule that can fork off from a given common point using a relatively small amount of stake, and given a finite set of transactions signed by the other stake holders"
I think that's reasonably correct. I would only add that the amount cannot be infinitely small but still must be high enough to ensure that you could trick others to think it is the "longest chain". There is a difference in the required stake size between "secretly mined alternative chains" like those used in the infamous "History Attack" and "publicly mined alternative chains". Secretly mined chains require much more stake to become the "longest chain" as they can't trick other users to sign them with their stake while minting, but if they win they are more dangerous, because they also can use "double-spent stake" (emptied addresses that at a moment had large balances). The trick is to define an ordering over that amount of block chains such that the chain including most transactions of the other stake holders wins with high probability unless the amount of stake that has to collude becomes significant (at which point, the coin is essentially in the hands of a colluding set of cheaters, at which point, it doesn't matter any more that it fails technically, because it failed already economically). Yes, I think that is very similar to the "Economic Clustering" feature NXT wanted to implement at some point and was first released as a part of the " TaPoS" proposal by Daniel Larimer. Bitshares, I think, had implemented it but then switched to DPOS. The trick in this system is that the payer has to add a signed hash of a recent block to all transactions. So you could see exactly on which chain every actor is - e.g. if you are on the same chain like the largest exchanges or payment providers. An attacker then couldn't fake a secret chain anymore, because in the case of a reorg all nodes would see that no important actors were active in the attack chain. What he could to instead is to try to create a "public" double spending chain and lure the network into a reorg to this chain after the victim has confirmed payment. That is what kushti considered the most dangerous N@S variant (and suggested to increase the amount of required confirmations in PoS currencies). But without rewards it's pretty difficult to attack this way if you haven't a LOT of stake because the attacker on most blocks would have to use his own stake to mint it and not many others would "help" him. This goes a long way in the right direction. This is also what I tend to conclude: that many attacks lose their potential or their incentive if there are no rewards, because most stake holders have no incentive to cooperate with any "chain reorg" of significance. I would even go further, and say that we have to go away from the "chain" concept as a whole, and go to a "bag" concept (mathematically, a set instead of a sequence). The only sets that are disallowed, are sets with forbidden transactions (double transactions or transactions without valid inputs). As such, if you have to consider two sets A and B, and you have to come to consensus over them, you try to come to consensus over their union. If their union is a valid set, then that's the best consensus, but A and B are not anti-consensus, they are partial consensus. That is, one doesn't REJECT A and B individually, but one considers their union, and hence also all the valid subsets of their union. The only place where consensus cannot happen is if A is a valid set, B is a valid set, but A U B isn't. That is simply because A and B contain a double spend. In that case, there must be a deterministic way to prune A U B of the double spends, and the most logical way is to keep the spend which has most PoS to it. If A has a certain amount of PoS to it, and B another, which is smaller, then A U B will be pruned by leaving out the conflicting B spends (and ONLY the conflicting B spends). Note that if there is no reward for staking, many stakers can stake in parallel, so that you get the same transaction in different blocks signed by different stakers, which adds to the total stake of those transactions. If I receive a block A from Joe, with stake 0.2% and I receive a block B from Mary with stake 0.3%, then for the transactions that are in both, I consider that they have a weight of 0.5%, as a receiving node. In the end, the time stamp on a transaction becomes the most important one. You cannot accept a transaction that is "back-dated" for more than a small multiple than the maximal propagation delay on the network (say, half a day). You don't consider re-organizing transactions that are 2 days old, say. So you don't even need to keep their history ! After all, if you are new to the network, you *don't care* about its transaction history. You want to know the "current state". And if you aren't new to the network, you have the last old history you consider correct ; but you only care about 2 things: 1) that your old balance is still valid 2) that there hasn't been any non-legit coin creation You don't care about what happened to the other coins in between. You don't have to decide upon the past transactions of coins that were transacted when you weren't on-line: if the total amount of coins is OK, and YOUR coins are OK, then that's all you need to know and you care about. You can of course only "stake" when you are "up and running and online" for a certain while. There is one problem with this assumption: the attacker could lend stake. If there is a Bitfinex-like market so big that he would be able to lend - let's say - 20% of the total stake, then it becomes dangerous. He could try to attack and fork the currency, trying to crash the market because of the "malfunctioning" currency and then give the coins back to the original holders for a small fraction of its price.
This is in fact a universal attack that can work against just any system. PoW included: you can lend hash power, you can lend nodes, you can lend about anything. If your only goal is to DESTROY a system and you are willing to spend value on it, you can always succeed if you can lend a large part of the system. Suppose that I lend 200000 bitcoin, then I pay the 5 most important mining pools 10 times their daily earnings if I can lend their hash power for half a day, then I do a 51% attack on bitcoin, I buy now 200 500 coins on the market for a few dollars, now that bitcoin has crashed, and I pay back the unlucky bag holders their 200 500 coins with interest. I need to lend much much less to obtain potentially a majority of PoW than I need PoS: I would have to lend 3 million BTC to do what you propose, and with 200 000 coins I can do my PoW lending attack. If you can lend an important fraction of the stake, honestly, the system is just as economically insecure as it is technically insecure, because when I lend 20% of the stash, I can DUMP IT in the morning, buy back the coins at noon when the price crashed to hell, and make a lot of benefit ; much better than trying to do a double spend. This attack has also been called the "Pirate attack" because it could also be accomplished running a HYIP scheme like "Pirateat40" and secretly selling the coins on exchanges before you have to return them to their owners. It is also a very unlikely attack, but it is not impossible, like most of the N@S variants, and it could be devastating to the currency.
My point is that by the time that you can do things that make the system already an economic failure, the technical security doesn't matter any more. If you can lend easily 20% of the stash, that would mean that I can lend easily 3 million BTC. You imagine the damage I can do with 3 million LENDED BTC on the market ? I dump them all at once and I buy back more when the price has crashed (with the fiat I made when dumping them) and when all the weak hands are selling too. I give back the 3 million BTC + interest, and what I have more is in my pocket. If you can lend 20% of the stash, the system is already economically dead. |
|
|
|
I know that dpos is a centralized solution but I don't think its possible to get high tps without having some centralization.
It is not possible in block chain centered crypto, because block chain centered crypto is requiring a much too much severe form of consensus, needing EVERYONE to agree *perfectly* on the *single* *totally* ordered list of transactions ever done ; on top of it, with a time-spaced unique seigniorage mechanism included. This is not needed to keep the accounts of owners of coins. Of course, it is (largely) sufficient, but this strict ordering and time spacing is making that the thing can not scale. For instance, whether the transaction from Joe to Jack came BEFORE the transaction from Alice to Claire, or after it, *doesn't matter*. Whether you got a confirmation of the transaction from Joe to Jack in block A, and you got another confirmation in block B, doesn't matter. The fact of having to chose between block A and block B is, concerning these transactions, not necessary. It is only necessary to indicate a winner of the reward. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
