Let me say this publicly.
PPC is an AWESOME idea...
It's what many here have been advocating, for a very long time.
(name could be much better though),
forum on PPC site should also be put up asap... Let me know if you guys need any help hosting a good forum..
Thanks for the compliment. Although we don't plan maintaining our own forum in the foreseeable future. I will point the forum link to bitcointalk alt subforum at least for the first 3 months of ppcoin network, most likely a lot longer. In the future if we survive and demand is really high I would certainly appreciate users like you maintaining an independent forum but right now I think it's kinda wasting resources. You can certainly help in other ways such as reading more about our design, help answering questions to new users and reporting problems/attacks. Best Regards, |
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Why must the code be read to understand the coin distribution system and possibly whatever "proof-of-excellence" is?
There is nothing in the paper nor the wiki detailing these things. At least nowhere near satisfactorily. 16x cuts the reward in half, so does 8x cut it by 25%? Is this increase permanent, even if difficulty lowers? Does the starting difficulty make sense in this scenario?
You talk about "consumed coin age" in the paper, but why is proof-of-stake even necessary with this mechanic? I've talked about it in several other threads, and really all you're accomplishing is giving an incentive for people with wealth to make transactions and consume their coin age to create a proof-of-stake block. But with consumed coin age as you call it, it already does this. What additional protection does the stake really offer? It seems possible that at certain points no one will be able to create proof-of-stake blocks (or choose not to) if no one can consume enough coin age, so proof-of-work will have to take over or everyone will have to wait a potentially long time before a new block. If PoW is your backup anyway, you may as well just stick with consumed coin age and leave it at that.
- proof-of-excellence is a system concept we discovered as an alternative to proof-of-stake. but it is not implemented in ppcoin - proof-of-work mint formula is: difficulty == (9999 / (mint per block)) ** 4 - purpose of proof-of-stake is to replace proof-of-work functions. first it's generation is made hard like proof-of-work, with the hashing scheme, taking the block generation function of proof-of-work. this is core part of the protocol, and it's called kernel for good reasons. target is adjusted similar to proof-of-work so this alleviates your concern about depletion of coin age as proof-of-stake difficulty would be lowered in that situation. then in our v0.2 reorganization is switching to a scoring based on proof-of-stake difficulty which closely resembles Satoshi's formula and providing strong protection to the network. in summary proof-of-stake has completely replaced all functions of proof-of-work except for minting. |
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NothinG PM'ed me asking about cap. So I will also make a public reply here.
There is no hard cap other than a 2 billion coin max I have put into the code for now. But that should not be interpreted as an approachable cap, as it might never get anywhere close to that. Due the nature of the mint rate design it's not possible to predict a final limit as it depends heavily on market participation, as well as the influences between proof-of-stake minting and fee destruction (there may not even be a mathematical limit if proof-of-stake minting continues to outpace fee destruction). One thing I do know is that the proof-of-work generation would slow down exponentially according to Moore's Law. So generally speaking it is still a very low future-inflation design comparable to Bitcoin.
In 0.2 release I am including a 'moneysupply' stat in the getinfo output so everyone can see how many coins are in the market.
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Hi NothinG, please note there is 1 cent per kilobyte required transaction fee for ppcoind, in case you encounter any problems. Let me know if your payout transaction is confirmed, and which block it was included. Appreciate the hard work!
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I had a strange dream this morning.
I am a fairly spiritual guy and do meditations sometimes. I don't often have this type of vivid dreams where I can remember some details. And I don't believe in coincidences, so I would love to share with all of you my dream.
I went to the street and there was perhaps some sort of checkpoints. Agents are there maybe to check people's ID's.
I printed out some random guy's photo from the Internet and bring it to the agent, he rejected it and ask me to go back.
I was feeling a bit frustrated and wanted to get out. Then with a bit surprise I received a mail with a passport in it. I tried to remember how I did apply for this passport and what my name should be with this passport. I had a hard time recalling it still before I get to see the agent. Then with a bit relief I finally saw the passport is from Sweden and my new name is Korean. I was filled with joy and my hand almost shook when signing it with a pen.
Then I woke up.
I don't really fully understand the meaning of this dream. But that's not important. I wanted to share this dream with all of you because I think, given our differences, maybe we didn't fully understand our purpose, maybe we were meant to be a bigger team doing something truly great. I used to tell folks that I thought Bitcoin was the single most important event in the entire financial history of humanity, bigger than gold, bigger than fiat. Because I think it changes the foundational fabric of our society known as private property.
So yes I really cherish what I did with the ppcoin project, this is probably the best work I have ever produced. Yes I have limitations, maybe lot's of them. I thought about quitting the project several times. But I persisted. Now here we are, I hope we can understand our differences, and truly help out each other to fulfill our destiny.
Peace and Love
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The design principles must be fully validated to a high degree of confidence in the near-term. People won't wait years for a clear validation of the design. The pump & dump, ponzi issues are irrelevant and should be of far lower priority.
I suggest that you radically modify the rules, aiming to achieve energy efficient operation within a few months of launch. Even if this fails due to lack of interest, it will be quite valuable to know whether the underlying protocol works as advertised.
If you learn enough details from the paper I believe you should be able to understand that the proof-of-work mint rate curve is pretty irrelevant in evaluating whether the design solves energy efficiency. Proof-of-work is not used in any meaningful manner in the protection of the network, it mainly provides minting. |
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Why is it comparable? PoW is costly, PoS is costless.
Are you saying that your protocol is less secure than pure-PoW, and that's the price to pay for energy-efficiency?
I'm still throwing darts randomly, pending detailed description of your protocol.
PoW is costly in energy and capital investment, but PoS is costly too to the attackers as they will lose the value of their currency holdings as Market loses confidence in the currency. If someone actually accumulated such vast wealth and be crazy enough to mount the attack, I suspect that he would not be able to remain anonymous, and folks would find out about him and mobs probably would lynch him. So I doubt any reasonably rational rich people would attempt to do that, other than some established institution. Which bring it back to the point, it is comparable to a 51% attack on proof-of-work. |
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Proof-of-work mint rate is a function of difficulty (every 16x in difficulty mint rate is halved) Is this the correct interpretation of this statement? Difficulty Mint Rate x y 16x y/2 256x y/4 4096x y/8 65536x y/16 1048576x y/32 16777216x y/64 268435456x y/128 Seems like a timespan somewhere between many years and never will elapse before proof-of-work rewards become minimal and the currency becomes energy efficient. This seems like a bad idea to me. It does not inspire confidence in the protocol's ability to deliver its promised features. I think demonstrating successful, checkpointless, and energy efficient operation should be a near-term goal. Perhaps showstopping problems will come up. Fine, once we know about them, they can likely be solved (and checkpoints can be used as a stopgap measure). Well points taken. Yes it'll take many years but if I had picked a more drastic curve folks would complain even louder about pump & dump, ponzi, etc. whatnot. So this was picked to better match the 4 year halving schedule of Satoshi's. As for long term energy efficiency, I don't think it's too much of an issue as once the design principles are validated as sound and Moore's Law slows down, the mint rate slow down can be switched to a time based decay with proper long term planning. |
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Merged mining. The energy is already spent, it is not going to stop being spent, so it makes more sense to do more with it than to come up with more ways to use more energy.
In our opinion it is by no means clear that energy will not going to stop being spent on Bitcoin. It's a concious choice by us to not support merge mining as it introduces additional long term risks. Let's just settle at that. |
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Update: FAQ page is now available on wiki
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I don't know if this is some sort of bug or attack or someone testing stuff. There has been 3 user transactions so far on the block chain. If anyone has more info about this let me know.
Did you change 'pchMessageStart'? If not someone who accidentally connects to the bitcoin network with ppcoin will bridge them and IP addresses will be shared. Could this result in bitcoin transactions being sent (and rejected) to ppcoin? Hmm you are right I didn't change that. That's why I guess I saw some 17k new addresses in the log. If it's needed I guess we can change this in a future release with a network protocol upgrade. Hopefully it doesn't cause too many problems at the moment. It is very important to change pchMessageStart. This will cause all manner of software confusion, because peers with the same pchMessageStart will exchange addresses and otherwise think they are talking with peers of the same network and block chain. A hard fork is not required to change pchMessageStart, just a tiny bit of bootstrapping. Blockchain integrity is not impacted. Thanks for the tips. I will look into changing it for next release. Best Regards, |
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This probably indicates that a transaction message of incompatible format was received. Remember ppcoin's transaction has an extra timestamp field than bitcoin's.
I don't know if this is some sort of bug or attack or someone testing stuff. There has been 3 user transactions so far on the block chain. If anyone has more info about this let me know.
Did you test this coin before release? Why did you change the difficulty calculation? I think you played with too much, without considering the consequences and drawbacks. Actually I think I did a not too shabby job with the difficulty as you can see we went from 256 to 3000 in less than 3 days and block generation adjusted beautifully. Otherwise you'd been seeing lots of blocks coming in seconds apart. |
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I don't know if this is some sort of bug or attack or someone testing stuff. There has been 3 user transactions so far on the block chain. If anyone has more info about this let me know.
Did you change 'pchMessageStart'? If not someone who accidentally connects to the bitcoin network with ppcoin will bridge them and IP addresses will be shared. Could this result in bitcoin transactions being sent (and rejected) to ppcoin? Hmm you are right I didn't change that. That's why I guess I saw some 17k new addresses in the log. If it's needed I guess we can change this in a future release with a network protocol upgrade. Hopefully it doesn't cause too many problems at the moment. Thanks for solving this mystery for me  |
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I see this in the ppcoin debug log a lot: ******* exception encountered *******
ProcessMessages(tx, 225 bytes) : Exception 'CDataStream::read() : end of data' caught, normally caused by a message being shorter than its stated length
ProcessMessage(tx, 225 bytes) FAILED
I am seeing a lot of similiar messages like the above too This probably indicates that a transaction message of incompatible format was received. Remember ppcoin's transaction has an extra timestamp field than bitcoin's. I don't know if this is some sort of bug or attack or someone testing stuff. There has been 3 user transactions so far on the block chain. If anyone has more info about this let me know. |
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Is this mean the blockchain will be restarted ?
No. This change has no effect on block format and only affects the decision of when to do reorganization. So block chain does not need to be restarted. |
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Yeah but the weighted sum of both work and stake on each block means to doublespend you need lots of work and lots of stake, having just one or the other is way less likely to succed? Maybe Meni and Cunicula can weigh in on this, though likely they figure it was all thoroughly explained in their wiki entries and all the many many threads that argued it all out back and forth to lead ultimately to the wiki entries?
Where were your weird out of the blue approaches during all those months of deep work on how it can be done right?
-MarkM-
Oh well I think that's fairly enough as far as I am concerned if their competing designs are so nice and thorough why don't they bring out the implementation and prove it to the Market. They could even fork and reuse some of our code if they want and I would be glad of being some help. I'd like to hear more constructive opinions instead. Please keep in mind our goal is to solve energy efficiency instead of implementing someone else's ideas. |
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Some random notes from a quick look at the source code: (I might have missed something though) - I can't find any code path that actually mines proof of stake blocks. The code seems to be implemented, but nothing seems to be calling it yet. Proof of stake blocks definitely aren't mined through getwork, but rather through (currently inactive, or maybe I'm just blind) CPU mining.
- The difficulty for work and stake blocks seems to be (mostly?) the same, but it's divided by the number of accumulated coin days for stake blocks.
- The block reward for a work block is sqrt(sqrt(9999^4 / difficulty)), rounded down to the next cent boundary.
- The block reward for a stake block is the number of coin years put into it divided by 100.
- The number of "bruteforce attempts" for stake blocks is limited to once per second (up to 2 hours into the past), per transaction used as stake input, per block found on the network.
- Proof of stake blocks can include stake from multiple transactions, as long as it's on the same address (IIUC).
- Minimum age for coins used in a stake block is 30 days.
Sunny might want to confirm if the above is correct... 1) It's shared codepath with BitcoinMiner() and it's created in a separate thread and is active 2) The two difficulties starts the same at 256 but will adjust fairly independently from each other 3) About right 4) 1 cent per coin-year consumed in coinstake only (other transactions coin age do not count) 5) It's just the built-in minter's behavior, not an enforcement 6) There is only one output allowed, but inputs can be from multiple addresses. The built-in default minter does not combine from different addresses though to avoid compromising anonymity. 7) Right |
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You're quite economic with providing exact details of how your protocol behaves, I have to make guesses.
If I understand correctly, you now say the proof-of-work will be used just to bring new coins into existence, and protection from double-spending will be done just via proof-of-stake?
What makes you think that large stakeholders couldn't easily prepare a secret forked branch when they wish to double-spend? Isn't it true that generating a proof-of-stake block on demand is easier if you're a large stakeholder?
That's basically comparable to a 51% attack on proof-of-work. They would stand to lose a lot more than they gain. |
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Hi NothingG
If you encountered any problem with accepting blocks please let me know. Transaction format is changed in ppcoin with a new timestamp field and I am not sure if this will cause any problem with existing mining API.
Newmint = amount you mined but not yet matured
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Double spending will be hard exactly the same way as in Bitcoin, because generating one proof-of-stake block on demand is already hard, generating multiple of them to force reorg is way way harder.
Energy-efficiency is still preserved if proof-of-work blocks get scored 0.
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