Hmm, depends if this growth is ephemeral or not. If it's cleared away somehow, PoW style, it could be tenable, though there might be trouble making the PoS mean anything to the miner; it would may necessitate everyone synchronising their mempools, to some degree at least, or including the PoS stuff in the block, though that would defeat the purpose. Hmm, indeed.

Last year I was working on a new sort of blockchain that would enable instant transactions. I'm dumping some info here so it's searchable and maybe inspires someone or w/e.

The basic idea is that each TX has a small PoW attached and is 'mined' instantly. Larger miners (who are in it for the money) mine TXs with *large* PoWs and point back to other 'work heavy' blocks but also link back to these 'lighter' txs from regular joes.

The blockchain is actually a DAG instead of a linked list.

One challenge was ordering txs, I think I've come up with a pretty good solution that's included in the source here: https://github.com/XertroV/quanta-test/blob/master/quanta.py#L204. Basically it recurses down the heaviest path until it reaches a common point between all paths, then it recurses down the second heaviest path till it hits a block in the first path, and so on down all paths. In this way it can operate as a DAG, has a deterministic ordering, and not worry about people inserting blocks into history or anything like that (though there might be a DoS angle here on computationally heavy re-orgs).

It relies on treating the pool of workers available as producing a *stream* of work, rather than the discrete blocks that we're used to. By treating it as a stream you get (nearly) infinite granularity, enabling near instant TXs. You still have to wait an hour for a good confirmation, though (like all networks).

One downside is all TXs have lots of metadata about links so they can be 500 bytes for a simple TX.

Source code is here: https://github.com/XertroV/quanta-test

I can't remember if it works or not when you run it.

Absolutely not.

I don't believe so. P2Pool doesn't synchronise individual transactions between peers; and only the coinbase has restrictions. This means peers organise their own transactions (from their own node).

Remember that chance-of-doublespend is probabilistic with time, not blocks, so simply producing more blocks doesn't provide more security, and if orphans can't be integrated into the chain then that PoW is wasted. This means that lower block time (and hence higher orphan rate) may actually decrease security of the chain if the orphan rate is significant enough.

Bitcoin Wiki P2Pool page

GHOST explanation from Ethereum Whitepaper

getblocktemplate just provides detailed information which can be used to create a block. It hides less relevant details (like transactions) but allows the miner to alter other things that matter, like the coinbase sigscript, the nonce, etc. This doesn't stop anyone changing parts of the block, but getblocktemplate doesn't give them all the information they'd need, and then they'd be solo mining anyway. When you submit shares to a pool, you're actually submitting the information used to create a valid block of a lower target. By validating where the coinbase spends to, the pool can check if you're mining for yourself or them. If you're mining for yourself they don't credit you with any shares, but if you mine according to their rules you are attributed shares. Occasionally someone submits a solution that also happens to be a valid block on mainnet, and then it is distributed.

P2Pool works in a similar manner. Instead of providing your solution to the centralised pool, you provide your solution to the whole P2Pool network. The P2Pool network is mined against a much smaller target than the mainnet, like centralised pools, and each potential block is valid on the Bitcoin network and P2Pool network, provided the PoW validates. You distribute your potential solutions to the rest of the network and show you're rewarding them according to the rules agreed upon. They then include you in their calculations, and when you receive their shares, you include them in your calculations. In this way, anyone who attempts to cheat is not able to convince others to reward them for their efforts, since their blocks don't validate against the pool's rule-set.

It's a little more complex than that in reality, since the blocks produced for P2Pool also form a share-chain and they have a low target time (seconds). This chain is used to calculate rewards, and a valid P2Pool block is added to the share chain (though could potentially be orphaned). Each of those blocks would be a valid Bitcoin block if they happened to validate against Bitcoin-mainnet's target (but they don't). There's more information about that on the wiki.

GHOST stands for Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree, which basically says the chain with the most PoW behind it. It's a theoretical modification to blockchain design that would protect against some attacks and also allow us to produce blocks much faster as all valid PoW can be incorporated into the chain. The paper can be found here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf

This is correct.

However, this presumes an attack is already happening, and does not speak directly to the security of the chain. By modifying our behaviour to be dependant on the cost of an attack over some period we can directly measure this security and compare chains. You actually acknowledge the solution when you point out Feathercoin's low hashrate.

The original statement:

This is true if we measure security as 'chance of a transaction of size X being reversed'.

The cost of an attack in some unit ($ for convenience) on some network (N) is dependent upon market_cap_in_$ and transaction_size_in_$ (normalising out conversion between units). It is also dependent on the supply_rate_in_$. The main competition is the supply rate, so for a transaction of size X_in_$ we need to use supply_rate_in_$ to calculate some t.. If we set t high enough we can ensure it's never profitable to attack provided we wait out that duration.

If I made transactions of equal value on both the Bitcoin and Litecoin network, the incentive for someone to attack the network is far greater on the Litecoin side, since the cost of an attack is far less for the same X. This presumes a perfect market where the profitability of mining is the same on both networks and competitive hardware is accessible.

If we want to measure t in blocks we have to convert using the block interval.

Going back to blockchain decentralisation:

The security of the network measured against the above strategy is determined by the hashrate and not directly by number of blocks. Mining pools were invented to decrease variance in reward. Since this variance is somewhat dependent on the size of the reward blocks (constant stream = no variance, target time of 1yr = lots of variance) by increasing frequency of blocks (and decreasing variance) we increase mining decentralisation as long as some miners are okay moving to smaller pools or going solo (or moving to P2Pool). _{This is actually essentially what P2Pool does, and is immune to the orphan problem since a) it effects the whole network equally (though there is potential for a greedy miner attack) and b) any valid Bitcoin block is immediately distributed.} Sadly without using GHOST there is a strong practical limit due to orphans produced by propagation time.

[RFC] Marketcoin - A web of distributed markets with a common unit



Abstract

Decentralised currencies have become a recently realised reality; e.g. Bitcoin, Peercoin, Mastercoin, and Nxt. However, despite their variety in both design and philosophy, there does not yet exist a decentralised market in which these can be traded effectively. Just as Bitcoin should enable new economic structures because it significantly improves over the previous best system, a market with similar properties (say virtually zero fee) may provide new insights into price finding and market dynamics. We present such a market in this paper, along with an experimental method of evaluation with novel properties that may help mitigate sticky prices and thus enable smoother price finding and dampen the intensity of corrections. As a benchmark, a successful decentralised cryptocoin market is required to be able to replace an exchange such as cryptsy (in the case of crypto-crypto pairs).

Full RFC / White paper work-in-progress: https://github.com/marketcoin/marketcoin/wiki/RFC

Please feel free to quote parts of the document here if you wish to discuss them specifically.

You docs directory doesn't shed much light on how coinsy is meant to work.

As far as I can tell it's a way for buyers and sellers to exchange and accept each other's offers.


Once an order is matched, are users expected to communicate and figure out payment details?

How are users prevented from reneging on trades? How are users prevented placing bogus orders at ridiculous prices?

There's a lot of technical information missing from /docs.

Ahh, I see what you mean. I was originally exclusively talking about mining new blocks - essentially chasing the idea of a blockchain without a power-hungry mining backend.

Proof of burn probably translates to a 'cost' the best, so for identity extensions it makes sense (either that or use PoW). PoS or PoD probably are more suited to 'renting' type situations where you need to show intent for some period but want your funds to remain exclusively yours. (Or voting as you mention).

Instead of repurposing an opcode you could write a meta-network (like Mastercoin) that searches for commands after OP_RETURNs and if it finds a network identifier proceeds to interpret the trailing data by some other ruleset. Either way the argument stands.

Why? Because I want to see what happens. If it's insecure then an attack should be possible, but there are some conditions where an attack is much harder, so there are different properties to each form of currency, and neither is universally inferior to the other.

Yes, that's probably a better way to do it. INHEIGHT and OUTHEIGHT

My understanding was that a tx is checked to be not-malformed when included in a block but the scriptPubKey is only evaluated when the tx is spent. We can send to arbitrary P2SH addresses so I don't see why the scriptPubKey would be an issue.


The only way I could think of adding PoX into Bitcoin without a hardfork is to keep PoW as it is and add PoX as an extra constraint which is stored in the coinbase scriptsig perhaps. If the majority of clients are new then the blockchain will be validated according to these new rules but the small proportion of older clients will still validate PoW as usual. However, if the difficulty decreases due to the extra constraints then there's the potential for an attack on old clients by ignoring the new constraint and just mining PoW.

That said, I don't think that is an elegant way to do it. Have there been other suggestions?

INHEIGHT is the block the tx was included in (say #4). At that point in time HEIGHT and INHEIGHT both return 4.
100 blocks later HEIGHT will return 104 and INHEIGHT will return 4.

Introducing a new Proof of X system would require a hardfork to Bitcoin anyway - and is a prohibited change. I'm more suggesting this for the theoretical implications.

It occurred to me that Proof of X realistically only requires a sacrifice that anyone can make (or at least a large enough subset of users). For example, PoW uses energy, PoS uses coindays, and PoB uses coins.

There's a fourth option I'll call Proof of Deposit. Basically you just lock your coins up for some particular length of time (like 20 weeks) and you're paid a bit for it. Technically this is similar to PoS/PoB (all three have almost the same economic implications) but provides more information to users at the expense of impulsive (but costly) attacks.

PoS destroys coindays, PoB destroys coins, PoD removes control of disbursement for some time.
Economically in all three cases coins are removed from the supply for some time and then reintroduced at a later time. In the interim all other coins should appreciate slightly in value. After that time has elapsed the miner is given a little reward and her coins back as thanks for making everyone a little wealthier for a bit.

The easiest way to manage this (from my perspective) would be to require each coinbase tx to have the following:


I think it's important to stress that PoS/PoB/PoD have the same economic implications but different psychological implications.

For a blockchain to internally fuel itself there must be some internal resource which is sacrificed. Ultimately the only internal resources we have to sacrifice are the coins themselves, so it should come as no surprise that PoS/PoB/PoD look the same from a macroscopic perspective.

That's also a nice way to put it. (And concordia is a great sounding word).

On the other hand, there is the negative connotation with the ship. As one user notes: "That was the first thing I thought about too. Concordia currency, where the ship sinks and the captain runs away."

Note: I've left some comments at the bottom.

---

Introducing Factum Money

Bitcoin is a disruptive technology, and since time immemorial disruptive technologies have challenged our existing theories and demanded improvement. I’m not going to beat around the bush trying to make Bitcoin conform to our existing schemas. We need to rethink what makes types of money that particular type; not look into why Bitcoin can function as a currency – that is already well understood. I’ll outline what I think are the important constituents of money that help differentiate them today. We’ll then look into how Bitcoin fits in, hopefully in such a way that convinces you Bitcoin is truly novel.

Broadly, the three well understood forms of money are as follows: fiat money, commodity money (CM), and commodity-backed money (CBM). People will often separate the former with the latter two based on the notion of ‘intrinsic value’. While we can agree that all three have value, we also know that the property of non-zero value fiat money holds is derived from legislation: not an intrinsic property.

While this categorisation schema works for the above, I believe there is a more pertinent distinction to be made: that of non-monetary use-value; i.e. the money type in question has some primary purpose other than to simply exchange value between parties. The primary use of fiat money is to exchange value, we can therefore see that not only does fiat not have any non-monetary use-value, but that the use-value of fiat money is fundamentally bound to the exchange-value. On the other hand, we see that CM and CBM derive their use value not just from exchange, but also from the intrinsic properties of the commodity itself. Therefore we can categorise these three forms of money as before, but with the determinant being non-monetary use-value.

The second property I’d like to introduce is the concept of ‘deferred value’, and ‘direct value’. Ultimately you can think of these as ‘an IOU’, or ‘not an IOU’ respectively.

Deferred value is seen in both commodity-backed money, and fiat money. Both are not so much valuable because of what they are, but because of what they entitle the user to. This is easy to see in the case of commodity-backed money, such as a gold certificate, as it is redeemable for a commodity (in this case, gold). However, in the case of fiat money, it is not directly redeemable for any particular commodity, but is legislated that it has value (though not the magnitude of value). Put in another way: fiat money entitles the user to some value. We should consider that if the legislatorial environment surrounding either of the above were to collapse, they would respectively become useless. Commodity money can never truly reach zero value, but both CBM and fiat can, and so participating in such systems is like passing a hot potato; it’s okay as long as you’re not the one to get burnt. This is part of the nature of deferred value.

On the other hand, direct value implies that the received value is intrinsically tied to the received object. In the case of commodity money – say, rice – it is trivial to see that the use value of rice (that you can eat it) is bestowed to the recipient immediately upon receipt.

By viewing the property of non-monetary use-value in light of deferred or direct value, we can see that while a gold certificate may have no particular non-monetary uses in and of itself, by acting as a method of deferred value it can inherit non-monetary use value from the commodity it is tied to.

As a visual summary, here is what we’ve talked about so far:



Enter Bitcoin: the rule breaker, the status quo usurper. You might have noticed there is one particular combination of the above properties that has not been covered by traditional monetary systems. It’s tempting to fill in the blank with Bitcoin; but we should remember that Bitcoin is merely an example of this missing puzzle piece, just as the US Dollar is just an example of fiat currency.


To gain an intuitive understanding of what this really means, let us diverge from the topic for a moment to discuss aliens. (Bear with me!) It’s an assumed property of the universe that no matter where you are spatiotemporally the number pi will be constant. You can express this in various ways; but the simplest is that the ratio between the radius and circumference of a perfect circle is always constant. I suggest that Factum Money has a similar property: that regardless of position in space and time, society, culture, species, or any other physical differences, true Factum Money is able to transfer value. Doubtless each instance of factum money can have local environmental factors that prohibit its use; Bitcoin is known to lack quantum computing resistance, and would fail if SHA256 is broken, just as Litecoin relies on Scrypt. However, due to the particular conditions of today, Bitcoin is able to transfer value, and holds the mantle of ‘Factum Money’.

Filling in the blank, we now we have a table that looks like this:



There’s a great deal left to explore within this idea; of particular interest (which I’ll explore in a follow up post) is what this actually means for Bitcoiners, and how we can predict and take advantage of this model. Cryptocurrency has many facets that have so far only been theoretically explored, in particular perfect money laundering, and distributed exchanges. I’ll largely be exploring distributed exchanges in my next post.

---

I originally wrote this in August and am looking for feedback. I've written most of the next section that discusses exchange and distributed exchange (and going into some pretty significant detail about cross-chain trade and how to structure it technically and economically).

This was originally posted here.

From the 'Australian Foundation' thread:


I'd like to make a proper [ANN] thread about BAA instead of hijacking an older thread where the original posts have no relevance to what we're discussing now.


Cheers, it's been quite the ordeal getting everything set up - it's taken a few months. Nice to be up and running now


Member rights/benefits are everything from the BF + some stuff from us. We're expanding the list now, but wiki editing rights, access to an as-yet not set up forum, voting rights, if we have grants then access to that (if things work out this is a matter of time I suspect), etc. There's some more stuff we might add down the line that I won't mention here, but it'd be cool if it works out.

Governance: our constitution is based on the template from fair trading NSW. Similar governance structure: board with no less than 5 and no more than 9 members; only 4 positions are president, vice, treasurer, and secretary. It's very loose: we've started working with an 'area-of-control' type model, not really needing approval for things you want to do within the area. This ranges from anything like the website or social media to an organiser of local events and the like. There's a lot of flexibility there.


As do I, we took a slightly different approach to the Alliance, though. Firstly we were a fairly well connected group - I knew half the board before we began. This might be taken as more 'exclusive' but we were put in contact with each other through the foundation and none of us knew any of the others had talked to the foundation about setting up an aussie assn. So we didn't collude to get together, it just sort of happened.

We decided to go with more of a closed setup phase because none of us could dedicate enough resources to opening it up. If one of us had no or few obligations through the week then it'd be far easier, but given we all have full time jobs it was simpler to coordinate by not opening it up till we launched. We (or at least I) want to have an AGM shortly after the 6 month mark to transition into a properly democratic assn. At the moment if you join up you get a 'founding member' flag (till the end of Jan) that will hopefully help the idea of community ownership.


Not sure what you mean when you say 'australian foundation'; I'll presume you're talking about BAA.

We were negotiating the affiliate agreement, which is what allows us to share members and resources.

We were always going to sign it at some point; we're (the board) all members of the Foundation and they're a good organisation. I've met many of them personally and I don't believe they mean any harm to Bitcoin. Furthermore, there are many advantages; cross-org membership being one of them - it will substantially aid accessibility for Australians; both to our organisation and the Foundation.

Since all members are shared being a member of BAA implies you're a member of the BF and you receive voting rights for both organisations.

Technically, BAA receives a proportion of membership funds from the Foundation when members from Australia sign up. The sign-up process for the Foundation and BAA is identical (or close enough to make no odds).


Our goals are the same as the foundation: protection, promotion, standardisation.

We plan to use our funding on endeavours related to the above. Community events, educational videos or events, grants, development (I'm building a multisig wallet for BAA atm so we can distribute funds safely amongst the board members; there will be three 2-of-3 wallets.)

What we specifically use funding for is still up in the air. If you've got something you think needs doing let us know!

Oh, and there's expenses like website, email, fair trading fees, etc.


Using 'Foundation' in your trading name in Aust comes with strings. There's a great framework for Associations and ultimately it's just a legal framework.


Well we can't insist on something like that; we'd need to go through the process set out in the bylaws - IE getting elected.

In addition, without some sort of organisation backing such a request, how would you decide who that is and why would anyone listen?

We'll keep in regular contact with the Foundation and if any members would like the Foundation board to discuss something they should add it to the agenda.

Hi All,

Bitcointalk lacked an ANN thread for the Bitcoin Association of Australia, so this is it.

You can find more information at https://bitcoin.asn.au

We're affiliates of the Foundation and so share membership. Australian members of the Foundation are members of the Bitcoin Association of Australian and vice versa.

We're establishing ourself currently, and are actively looking for those who are interested in getting involved.

If you've any questions, feel free to ask!

Cheers,
Max

NOTE: I'm making a new topic now. Please use that one instead of this topic for Bitcoin Association of Australia discussion. LINK


I'd like to make a proper [ANN] thread about BAA instead of hijacking an older thread where the original posts have no relevance to what we're discussing now.


Cheers, it's been quite the ordeal getting everything set up - it's taken a few months. Nice to be up and running now


Member rights/benefits are everything from the BF + some stuff from us. We're expanding the list now, but wiki editing rights, access to an as-yet not set up forum, voting rights, if we have grants then access to that (if things work out this is a matter of time I suspect), etc. There's some more stuff we might add down the line that I won't mention here, but it'd be cool if it works out.

Governance: our constitution is based on the template from fair trading NSW. Similar governance structure: board with no less than 5 and no more than 9 members; only 4 positions are president, vice, treasurer, and secretary. It's very loose: we've started working with an 'area-of-control' type model, not really needing approval for things you want to do within the area. This ranges from anything like the website or social media to an organiser of local events and the like. There's a lot of flexibility there.


As do I, we took a slightly different approach to the Alliance, though. Firstly we were a fairly well connected group - I knew half the board before we began. This might be taken as more 'exclusive' but we were put in contact with each other through the foundation and none of us knew any of the others had talked to the foundation about setting up an aussie assn. So we didn't collude to get together, it just sort of happened.

We decided to go with more of a closed setup phase because none of us could dedicate enough resources to opening it up. If one of us had no or few obligations through the week then it'd be far easier, but given we all have full time jobs it was simpler to coordinate by not opening it up till we launched. We (or at least I) want to have an AGM shortly after the 6 month mark to transition into a properly democratic assn. At the moment if you join up you get a 'founding member' flag (till the end of Jan) that will hopefully help the idea of community ownership.


Not sure what you mean when you say 'australian foundation'; I'll presume you're talking about BAA.

We were negotiating the affiliate agreement, which is what allows us to share members and resources.

We were always going to sign it at some point; we're (the board) all members of the Foundation and they're a good organisation. I've met many of them personally and I don't believe they mean any harm to Bitcoin. Furthermore, there are many advantages; cross-org membership being one of them - it will substantially aid accessibility for Australians; both to our organisation and the Foundation.

Since all members are shared being a member of BAA implies you're a member of the BF and you receive voting rights for both organisations.

Technically, BAA receives a proportion of membership funds from the Foundation when members from Australia sign up. The sign-up process for the Foundation and BAA is identical (or close enough to make no odds).


Our goals are the same as the foundation: protection, promotion, standardisation.

We plan to use our funding on endeavours related to the above. Community events, educational videos or events, grants, development (I'm building a multisig wallet for BAA atm so we can distribute funds safely amongst the board members; there will be three 2-of-3 wallets.)

What we specifically use funding for is still up in the air. If you've got something you think needs doing let us know!

Oh, and there's expenses like website, email, fair trading fees, etc.


Using 'Foundation' in your trading name in Aust comes with strings. There's a great framework for Associations and ultimately it's just a legal framework.


Well we can't insist on something like that; we'd need to go through the process set out in the bylaws - IE getting elected.

In addition, without some sort of organisation backing such a request, how would you decide who that is and why would anyone listen?

We'll keep in regular contact with the Foundation and if any members would like the Foundation board to discuss something they should add it to the agenda.

Cheers everyone,
Max

BitcoinAutoNode.sh is a script designed for fresh, cheap Ubuntu VPSs to change your root password, and then automatically enable a firewall, update the OS, include ppa:bitcoin, install bitcoind, set bitcoind to start on reboot, and then reboot.

I'm posting it here with the hope that someone finds some use for it.

https://github.com/XertroV/BitcoinAutoNode

Hi all,

On the note of Australian Bitcoin not-for-profits, myself and 6 other Australians have just launched the Bitcoin Association of Australia.

My name's Max, and I'm currently the treasurer.

A little prepared statement: (we'll do a proper ANN soon)

-----
Please find below details of The Bitcoin Association of Australia - https://bitcoin.asn.au/

Preliminary announcement was done here: (we're working on more press currently)
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7862/the-bitcoin-association-of-australia/

We are a not-for-profit incorporated association (registered in NSW, but able to act Australia wide without issue).

We've been talking with the US Foundation for the 3 months or so about forming an official relationship.
However, further to that we have also just started our preliminary membership drive.

Our President is Jason Williams of Beers 4 Bitcoin and the Sydney Bitcoin meet-up crew.
Feel free to liase with him or Max Kaye for further details regarding membership.
Contact details available on request.
-----

Cheers,
Max