Indeed, this 'Walmart' scenario was one of those that I brought up in many previous threads.  If Wal-Mart wanted to provide their customers with a fee-less payment option, while still granting themselves relatively quick access to those funds, they are going to have to sponsor a mining operation that favors transactions into and out of their own address set.  Any major retailer that competes with Walmart would have the exact same motivations, while also desiring to exclude the fee-less transactions of their competitors.  While this is a form of competition for those retailers, each of those mining operations still contribute to the security of the blockchain as a whole, and their support for their chosen mining operations would not (primarily) be connected to the amount of fees that could be collected by the act of mining itself.  This is not a tragedy-of-the-commons scenario.  However, time will tell whether or not this kind of external competition is a significant portion of mining or not.  I imagine that bank-like institutions would also form mining cartels in order to offer fee-less transaction processing to their members; as well as international trade institutions would sponsor mining contracts to protect the value of their 'letters-of-credit' operations using bitcoins, much like a bank invests & maintains a physical bank vault at a loss.

The long point is, PoW is working and we can see that it does work.  There is no evidence, at the present, that it would not continue to work well.  Whereas there is a lack of evidence that PoX methods offered can actually live up to their promises.  Don't fix what ain't broke.

Wait, there is a pre-order signup?  Where is this?

I understand these things, but you're still overlooking much.  First, that the issues that block rewards & fees pay for are inseperable.  Second, that the fees that are included in the actual blocks are simply one motivation among several for certain miners to mine.  There are a number of external motivations, that would (in a successful bitcoin future) motivate various economic players to continue to mine even at a loss.  I've covered this issue in depth in many past threads.  Feel free to engage the search function, or simply review all of my past posts.  I'm sure that would save you some time.

Mockery is a valid form of criticism, and the original point of this thread.  If your idea cannot suffer a little good mockery, it's probably not a good idea anyway.

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/mockability_test/

No we don't.  Your view of the reality is false.  You have an obligation to prove otherwise, and you cannot, because you don't understand it as well as you believe you do.  I'm not motivated to educate you, either.


Nope.  I'm not the one who is confused.


Also not the issue.  You don't even understand the system as well as I thought you did.  You entirely missed the point, and are so far off the path I don't even see the point in trying to lead you back.


Very well, still doesn't likely change my point.  Even minimum fees (unlikley under competition for blockspace) would pay as much in bitcoin towards a block as the current block reward.


Go do your valid research, then.  But do it elsewhere.  I say that I don't need such research to predict the outcome, if you say otherwise make it happen.  If you're right, you'll at least be famous, and likely wealthy enough have justified the efforts.  Don't ask us to contribute, though, and move your intentions to alt-chains section.  This does not belong in bitcoin>development & tech discussions.

Yes, I've seen it. The architect of the garden and grounds is the same guy that designed several public parks in my city, and the similarities are notable.  Again, his bedroom was wallpapered in gold.  Actual gold, not gold colored paper; but actually gilded paper.  The gold in that room was worth about  a million dollars alone.  To attempt to build something like Biltmore today would destroy America's most richest men today, even considering that many of the construction techniques used in Biltmore were invented there, and that he literally founded an air conditioning company that still exists. (the name of which escapes me at the moment).

That's more than enough, Rudd-O.

It always has, and that is the primary reason that nations that surged during and after the industrial revolution and information age are rich societies today.  It matters very little that the lowest paying job in America is poverty level, if your poverty level is still (in many ways) better than middle class for the bottom third of the world.  The greatest wealth disparity that this country has ever faced, however, was during the Industrial Revolution, and we managed to do just fine throughout that.  The largest single family home in the US was built during this time period, by a child of one of the greatest industrial minds in history; for himself, his wife, his only daughter and roughly 50 of his house help.  His bedroom was literally wallpapered in gold.  Only a few generations later and most of that wealth had dispersed across many decendents, pushing most of them back into the middle class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate

The Block reward is simply a special transaction with no inputs, using an address supplied by the miner.  The variable that is bitshifted is the actual 64 bit integer of that address.  The block reward would drop to zero in 2130 only because it would bitshift off of the 64 bit integer of the provided addresses.  If a bit-sifted address is developed and recognized by the protocol, the block reward would be able to continue to bit-shift the block reward for another 24+ bits.

For all intents a purposes, energy and money are the same thing with regard to PoW.  This does not change my argument.


We don't need a technical way to collect this money, we only need a technical way to require the expenditure of resources in exchange for security of the blockchain. This is exactly what we have.


Mining is not a tragedy of the commons scenerio.  It's not even a commons, it's a competition.  As for users (I presume you mean transaction fees), it's arguablely a commons, but not necessarily a tragedy of the commons scenerio.  There are very real limits upon bitcoin transaction volumes, and these limts will create a market rate fee for timely transaction confirmations.  I've mentioned this many times in many threads in the past, but it's not reasonable to assume that in the future all or most bitcoin transactions will continue to utilize the blockchain.  This is almost certainly not going to be the case, any more than most fiat finacial transactions use the ACH or Swift banking networks.  Real & practical limits upon the transaction volumes will put upward pressure on the transaction fees, whileusers and groups of users will devise alternative networks to limit the number of their daily transactions that must use the blockchain.  Whole markets will spring up that share a Paypal-like wallet service.  Silk Road already does this to some degree.  Other markets will use networks more like MPesa, or Google Wallet.  Yet these alternativeswill olly occur if the fees grow too high.  Even teh current cost of a paid transaction, being roughly five cents, would total to well over the current block reward at any transaction volume approaching Paypal's transaction rate.


I've seen numbers to back them up, but I'm not going to go looking for them. Why should I?  I've never seen any credible logic to say that PoS is necessary.


You believe it should work, and I believe that you believe that.  However, I don't believe that, and furthermore I don't believe it's necessary in any case.  You guys are making recommendations for changes that could undermine or destroy bitcoin.  If you really want to try it, do it on an alt-coin.  I want to see evidence that it's superior to bitcoin before I would even consider joining your efforts to alter bitcoin itself.


Well, thank you for that, but I don't believe that you can iron them out, because your intentions to reduce resource consumption is what introduces the need for persistant forms of trust/authority that can be used by attackers to harm the system.  Sure, in most cases you would have the security of a PoW system at a fraction of the cost, but there are cases that will always exist that permit an attacker a much privilaged attack position, simply by identifying and compromising the right node with a 'trusted' status.  There is no way around this issue that PoW doesn't also do just as well for the same cost.

Yeah, we are starting to see the beginning of all that with devices such as the Makerbot Repicator and the RepRap.  The company that I work for is a major, international manufacturer, and they own a highly advanced 3D printer that the engineers use.  I'd love to have access to it, myself, but they won't even tell me where it is.  One thing is certain though, they are honestly scared about the quality of the self-replicating hobby 3D printers.  Some have estimated that, at the current rate, most of the products that we make on assembly lines these days will have comparable competition from a printable design.  The old guys are shooting for retirement, and the young guys are simply worried.  Studying to become a manufacturing process engineer, and then discover that a robot is about to make your job obsolete, is certainly disturbing.

I've told more than one that he might want to consider designing some of those competing devices for themselves, and sell the designs for a dollar or two apiece per costumer when the time comes.  Sometimes progress is harsh.  The buggy whip manufactures never did recover.

It's not a great answer because you don't really know what the right answer is.  


So say it.  That won't occur till about 2130, and only if the bitcoin protocol isn't updated to use a coin variable greater than 64 bits.  And it could happen even if 64 bits is all that is ever used.  Some of the bits are not used to store teh coin value at all, and it has been proposed years ago that greater division can be achieved with the 64 bit interger variable by using those unsued bits as a 'flag' to tell the clients that this value is "bit shifted" into an extremely small range.  For example, bit shifted addresses might not be able to hold more than .99_ BTC, but then would be able to divide down to the 16th decimal place or more.  So while a normal address would be able to hold up to the whole volume of the Bitcoin monetary base (21 M BTC) without risk of a buffer overflow, a bit shifted address would max out at just shy of 1 full bitcoin.  One of each type might be required for some transactions in the future, but the vast majority of addresses would be of the bit-shifted type anyway.

Thisis just one simple solution that fits within the current protocol, and wouldn't break anythin, and it doesn't even have to be decided for another 100+ years.   Let our grandchildren worry about this, should the need arise.

Time to break out the sledgehammers and bust up some looms?

Do you have a photo gallery of the work?

It's not so much about the spammers as it is about the spam-bots.

It doesn't have a remote chance of ever being adopted, either.

Somewhat resilient, in theory.  You make the assumption that compromising a majority of stakeholders would be difficult, but you cannot know if that is true.  I know exactly how difficult it is to defeat PoW, at any given point in time.  Knowledge of the issue is, in it's own way, a form of security.


Harder, perhaps.  Impossible, no.  Impossible for a third party cryptocurrency user to audit that difficulty, yes.  What if Bitcoin were to use PoS?  How would, say, the US federal government go about attacking or undermining the system?  I can think of several methods that a well helled and well organized group, such as a soverign government who doesn't like Bitcoin, or a group like Anonymous, might be able to employ to take over the blockchain that could not be employed against PoW, period.  PoW is a simple & elegant solution, your pet issue with it is that it requires energy to work.  The current financial system uses an order of magnitude more energy, but so what?  It's that very resource cost that makes a 51% attack not worth the effort.  If there is leverage employed int hte proof system, that same leverage can be used against the ssytem.  There is no way to avoid this possibility except to not employ leverage.


This isn't relevant.  Compromising a pool does not imply that said pool can do more than it already could, and is very likley to signal to the pool users to move to another pool.  While a PoS 'pool' retains the advantage simply by possession of the correct keypairs.  If I were to compromise your PoS miner, and take your keypairs, I might simply choose to wait to attack. i can wait for as long as you remain unaware that your keys have been compromised, and attack at will using your keys as well as those stolen from other major miners.  When the attack comes, it would be swift and without warning.  Another reason that the PoW system is not related to the account system.


Nonsense, because Trust in this context is persistant.  PoW has no persistant condition.  PoS most certainly does.  The leverage that such persistant trust modes present the trusted users with also presents an attack vector.

You can't.  And in a future wherein Bitcoin is hugely successful, and forms the 'backing' for more local currencies or other cryptocurrencies, it can be expected that there will be entire sets of bitcoins that don't move for decades or longer in exactly the same way that the gold in major reserve vaults have changed ownership without changing their physical location for decades.

There is no need to be certain, either.  Lost coins do not pose a threat, even if they are never recovered.  However, introducing a method that permits the re-introduction of lost coins does potentially introduce a flaw; that may or may not be exploited to counterfit or steal bitcoins via the blockchain itself.  The very possibility that this could happen is reason enough to not pursue this path, since the problem that you are trying to fix certainly won't be a problem within the next 100 years, and may not be a problem at all.  Bitcoin is not broken.  It's an elegant and highly interconnected system.  No one is going to consider tampering with it because you and a few others see the potential for a systemic problem decades in the future.  You are not the first to bring this up.  Hell, even I brought up demurage some years ago, but there is no way to fix these minor issues without possibly introducing much bigger problems.  Even if lost coins are never recovered, an unlikley scenario in the long term, the market will adjust.  It's simply not a critical issue.

Well, I took your sarcasm as an argument, and you ignored my prior point that re-introduction of lost coin sets was unnecessary.  As with gold lost to the sea, future advancements in crypto and hardware will once again make those lost coin sets accessible as salvage.  Bitcoin already has the code set up so that crypto algos are modular, and new ones can be introduced without harming the function of the running system.  This is expected, and was expected by Satoshi.  No cryptologist expects any algo to remain secure indefinately.