I've read your's and Cunicula's work on Proof of Stake.  It's not a solution to anything.  It's a security hazard.  As I've mentioned in those threads many times, and which tends to be ignored, is that PoS creates nodes with special 'trusted' status based on a prior proof of stake.  This moves the greatest of security risks from that of a 51% brute force attack in the case of PoW, to whatever security models are being used by the most trusted nodes.  Thus, the security of the blockchain is dependent upon the security of several different groups, any one of which could have a security flaw in their own systems that permits an attacker to gain access to their node, and thus turn a trusted node (with much PoS to be had) into a malicious node in an instant.  Furthermore, such trusted nodes cannot be audited for their own security by others.  PoW does not have such a problem, as it never elevates particular nodes into any form of trusted status, regardless of their past history.

While PoS has a long history in meatspace, it has nearly zero useful application in cyberspace.  Bitcoin's security model does not depend upon the security models of others.

You cannot hope to do this, for that is what Bitcoin already is.  Bitcoin's current exchange instability has zero to do with it's deflationary nature, because that won't occur until about 2130.  Bitcoin is still hugely inflationary, and will be more inflationary than the US $ and the Euro for another four years or more; unless something dramatic happens to one of those other currencies.  Bitcoin's current instability is most related to the very tiny size of the market for which it serves.  Even in 2130, Bitcoin will not be particularly deflationary.  The monetary base will simply be very stable, which is not the same as deflationary.  Those who assume that Bitcoin will prove to be deflationary because of lost addresses taking bitcoins out of circulation are still assuming that to be so.  Bitcoin is based upon Austrian Economic Theory, and there is no more 'sound' basis for a currency.  If you want to start a perpetually inflating version, go right ahead, but it's already been done several times, and every time it has faded away in mere months.  Bitcoin was designed to mimic gold, and it does this very well.

I've got a novel one, that I think I'll call 'Proof of Work'.  Of course, it's not really new, and happens to be the only one that has any kind of track record.  It's also the only one that has a theoretical history that extends back to the 1990's.  But I'm sure all these other 'Proof of Whatever' methods will work just as well!

I was wondering how long it would take before someone decided to mock all this 'Proof of X" bs.

It would work, but it's unnecessary.  It's extremely improbable that the crypto algo currently in use for creating address keypairs will remain secure for that entire time period.  Bitcoin includes an upgrade path to a more secure algo, without exposing any security issues in the meantime, should it start to look like the algo is at risk.  The leading 1 at the beginning of current bitcoin addresses is what denotes the version of bitcoin address.  Bitcoin doesn't presently recognize any other, but it eventually shall.  At some point, it's going to become apparent that the current algo is at risk of breakdown, for whatever reason, and the community is going to transition to another algo.  Any unclaimed transactions that have not been moved to addresses using this new algo will ultimately become salvage to whomever can brute force a collision first.  Thus, lost bitcoins are not really lost permanently, just not likely to be recovered within the lifetime of anyone here.

EDIT: Actually, Bitcoin does recognize a special address version for the "testnet", but those are not usable addresses in the live bitcoin network.

I have a few problems with this proposal

1)  I'm not convinced that producing a script that is always false, that hashes out to a previously used address, qualifies as proof that said address doesn't also have an honest private key.  What is to prevent any miner who has successfully mined a block in the past, to brute force a false script that produces the same hash address?  This would certainly be easier than trying to force a key-pair collision, as the script doesn't have to fit into a pre-determined key length, and just about any false script should qualify, would it not?  Brute forcing all the txout's in the block that you have already found, and finding even one match, gives that miner unearned advantages while not preventing said txout from being respent anyway.

2)  Assuming this does work as well as intended, the net result is that the block reward is simply lower, so isn't it just an auction for the cheapest miner willing to do the work?

3)  The precise number of coins in present circulation cannot be determined, but this might also be true with PoW if we consider the unknown number of lost private keys.

4)  The very real expenditure of resources prohibits the attacker who is otherwise willing to deliberately accumulate coins in order to destroy the currency.  Basicly, methods such as PoS and PoB create a potential attack vector that PoW doesn't suffer from; the case of a long trustworthy node turning to the dark side, for whatever reason.  A 51% brute force attack is just as costly for any attacker, no matter who, when or why they choose to attack.  The other methods elevate certain players into a 'trusted node' status, by different methods, and could provide an attacker leverage by only compromising the security model of a major trusted node first.

Yes.  What other purpose do you own your concealable guns?

I wonder if having a choice in the automatic selection methods would be beneficial as well.  Consider this scenario.

Say I have a full desktop client, as well as a thin hardware client (think bitcoincard) that syncs with the desktop client on a regular basis.  So I want my desktop client to automaticly create simple transactions that the thin hardware client can use easily, and preferablely in combinations that don't have a change address at all.  (Thin hardware clients most likely would have only one, or only a few, addresses to work with, change addresses would be trivial to identify if they go back to the sending address)

So what I would want my desktop client to do is to regularly produce transactions wherein I have two change transactions; one for the thin client, in the useful denominations, and one with the true change back to the desktop client.  One time, the thin client might get a .01 transaction, another time it might get .02, and another .05; up through .1|.2|.5|1|2|5 so that it would have a selction of transactions that would permit it to combine a spending transaction to any exact amount, or almost any exact amount.  A full client could also use this same technique to, occasionally, produce a changeless transaction as well.  I'm not sure if this would be useful or not, but I would guess that it might complicate 'taint' tracking systems.

You really are incapable of recognizing your own faults, aren't you Myrkul?

Better yet, how about I actually highlight your errors, rather than respond to your attempt to pretend that you actually interpreted the discourse correctly the first time....


Please note, if you will, that you highlighted the correct part of the original post that I was responding to.  However, you then completely misinterpreted it to mean something entirely differnet....

You appear to conclude that he, and presumedly I, were talking about replacing 100% of CO2 with oxygen in the atmostphere.  That wouldn't be dangerous at all. Duh. No one was talking about replacing less than  a percentage point of anything with anything else.  And then you folow up with this...


Which was almost exactly my argument.  So what do you do?



The reason that you "don't see it" is because that link was just a reference for oxygen toxicity syndrome, but it even does have a loose reference in there that you filtered out with your cognative disonance...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity#Pulmonary_toxicity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity#Mechanism

As noted elsewhere, CO2 is used as a method to detect when the body needs to breath, but the system has delays; thus a pure oxygen environment leads to slower breathing cycles than even a 99.6% oxygen to 0.4% CO2 ratio would, permitting more time for oxygen to proceed through the reduction process before being expleled and replaced with fresh oxygen.  This doesn't prevent toxicity, but does delay it as more of the oxygen ions are expelled with the rest of the breath.

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque

Nonsense.  I wasn't making any comment about whatever topic he was referring to, other than to point out that he was factually incorrect in his use of it.  I do not, and have not, made an judgement about the topic at hand.


You didn't actually read either his post, nor all of my response, did you?  Read what you quoted, from him above, and all of what you didn't quote from my response, and you'll discover that your not even arguing in the same room.

I should point out, that since this thread has started, someone edited that page to revert to June 10th, 2012, and Bitcoin is not represented at all.

This is factually inaccurate.  Pure oxygen, particularly at the partial pressures that would occur anywhere near Earth atmostpheric (~14.5 pounds per square inch) is poisonous, very dangerous, and potentially fatal.  Particularly for someone who might pass out.  We humans (not all animals can do this, BTW, most actually cannot) have a great deal of mental control over out own breathing, but only while awake.  CO2 is used by the body to determine when to actually cycle breath, but the presence of pure oxygen in the lungs, and the lack of CO2 of some small percentage, tricks the system into waiting to breath until the CO2 that is coming back from the bloodstream is high enough to trigger a breath.  The problem is that the detection of CO2 is delayed for many reasons, so while the lungs aren't really running low on oxygen, the stagnation of the oxygen in the lungs, combined with it's elevated concentration in the bloodstream, contributes to oxygen toxicity syndrome.

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

While I know that this is off-topic, I can't stand to see falsehoods go unchallenged.  Please return to your regularly scheduled topic thread.

We're not discussing logic, and you should know that.  We're discussing human relationships.  Logic is a minor factor for some, and not a factor at all for most.  Never is logic a major factor in human relations, or your worldview might have more resemblance to the real world.  You guys really are deeply indoctrinated.  I suppose that it's good that it's just into a philosophy that does not encourage conflict, or you might be the fourth reich.

  It most certainly does not.  Reality looks much more like what we have than what you imagine we should have.

You keep using those words as if you know what they mean.  Perhaps your should step back from yourself for a bit and consider the possibility that you do not know what they mean.

Oh, no.  The first version was actually attached to bitcoin.org, and couldn't handle the kind of volume that it was getting eventually.  Now it sits on a separate server, and I was just wondering if not all of the archives made the transition.

Huh, the search function produces nothing.  Maybe that whole incident predates this version of the forum? OR perhaps I'm jsut thinking of the wrong website.  Could there be another internet forum with a name similar to 4chan?

Wow, after all the crap we got from 4chan a couple of years ago?  This is quite a change in position.

I honestly hate to agree with you, Cunicula; but that is a plausible analysis.