6 BTC received! Thank you very much. Cheers!
Do let me know if you are able to have the coins produced in the future.
Great, will do. I plan on doing it someday. Although this contest went poorly, there has not been one report of my physical Litecoins being compromised (that has been brought to my attention.) So, in between that and me (hopefully) rectifying this situation to everyone's satisfaction will hopefully allow for everyone trust me enough to make the huge investment it takes to order a lot of coins to bring prices down to a reasonable cost. I won't even have the money to do so for some time, so I'm just going to wait and see. I have no plans on minting them at this time. Super cool of you, man. Really good design as well. Congrats, acorn.  1ywLprS23hCvjWrUuEzEkWsD2gqReoFdq Thanks, nice to see you here Zinodaur! You bring back some good CryptoVest memories and remind me of a better time... lol (Zinodaur made the design for the CryptoVest physical Litecoin.)  |
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As I said shortly after submitting my design my drive failed and I lost the .svg file so keep the 0.4 btc you never know it might be worth many times more in a few years and help you recover lost funds from this whole project. If you feel like I missed you then please PM me.
PM sent. Adding SISAR to the .4 BTC list after proving via PM that he submitted a design, and taking Mjbmoneyarymetals off as per his request ITT. Coins will be here in a few days. Cheers |
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Zero. Due diligence, research, and logical reasoning is your friend. |
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Here is my address: 17QJERuY6RVjAEPbpsCaHD8jCdJpHVPfhd Thank you! I do like the winning design, congrats acorn! Is it going to be solid silver or silver plated? And good luck! It's really good to see you pull through! Thanks Honestly I am not sure if or when the coin will be minted. If I am able it will likely not be for another year or so, as I have other debt to take care of in real life. I am not sure of details about how it will be minted at this point.. sorry. As I said shortly after submitting my design my drive failed and I lost the .svg file so keep the 0.4 btc you never know it might be worth many times more in a few years and help you recover lost funds from this whole project. That's very kind of you sir. Thanks and take care.  |
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Thank you likehiro my man... long time no talk. Good to hear from you. Take care |
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Thank you, CoinHoarder. It's noble of you to offer these rewards to every participant after so long. I'm glad I could contribute.
My address: 16cuSLuR3qfK4d3hkbvHzBfadJLEEgZvAJ
No problem. I'll have it sent in around 4 or 5 days. Don't spend it all in one place! Thanks and sorry again, Will |
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Hi Tekke,
I believe I cleared this up with you a long time ago. If I did not, then please get in contact with me. I have sent you a PM as well.
Thanks
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Cross-posted for reference: First of all, my apologies that it has taken me way too long to settle this debt. I was put in a very tough spot financially about a couple years ago, and have been struggling ever since then to get my feet back under me financially. I have been working very hard this year to get back on my feet, that along with the help of my family to provide me a place to live, has finally allowed me to finally be in a position to be able to pay this bounty. I stopped responding here a long time ago because at the time there was nothing I could do to fix the situation, and nothing good would have come of it other than a good show of poo slinging for the spectators (which was all this thread was good for the last few pages.) I decided to let the naysayers continue talking without refuting their ignorant claims of me being a scammer, as most of them were people I've butted heads with in the past and they were just using this as a prime opportunity to pounce and drag my name through the mud. None of them know me personally, knew of my future intentions regarding making this debt whole whenever I was able to, or the full story of my personal financial situation as I have not shared everything here publicly on the forums. Some things are too personal to put out there on the internet and are quite frankly no one's business. I had the option to take the easy way out. A friend of mine that submitted a design in the competition offered around December of 2013 to send me 5 Bitcoins, me declare him the winner, and then me send the 5 Bitcoins back to him. Despite the trolling and scammer accusations I was receiving, I decided that I would not take him up on this offer. I decided that I would keep my integrity and would judge the contest fairly, awarding the bounty to the design I like best whenever I was able to actually pay the bounty. I knew in my heart I was not a scammer. I knew that I was a honest person with good intentions that simply fell into a tough situation, and knowing that was all that mattered to me at the time. "Shit happens" as they say. Along with that extreme act of kindness, I offer my sincere gratitude to those of you that had my back and offered kind words and support during this predicament via PMs and other communication methods. It was you guys that helped me through this hard time, when I could of easily walked away and truly been the scammer that all of the "haters" were accusing me of being. That would have been so easy to do honestly as nothing but a negative reputation on a Bitcoin forum, that hardly anyone knows or cares about in the real world, would have been the only thing that came of it. However, I am a man with integrity and that was never really an option that I considered at any point throughout all of this. Two years later I am finally able to pay this debt. I will announce the winner when I have the coins available (EDIT: I was wrong about how long it will take the payment to clear) in about a week. To avoid the conspiracy theorists and more trolling, I will provide proof it is actually me buying the Bitcoins for the bounty. Along with the screenshot I will be sending the transaction with a comment referencing this contest and my name to whichever Bitcoin address the winner posts here ITT. I will not be able to fulfill all of the terms in the OP, or at least not immediately. I am honestly not sure I will ever mint another physical crypto currency in my lifetime as I'm not sure anyone truly trusts me to do so after this silly debacle. Among other things, such as losing my original domain name and some domain sniper wanting to charge me $2k+ to buy my old domain back. I will be adding 1 Bitcoin to the bounty and my word that if I am ever to mint a physical Bitcoin that I will do my best to fulfill all of the other terms of the original competition that remain unedited in the OP to this day. I am looking forward to putting this behind me and becoming a contributing member to the crypto community, as my passion for decentralized technology has never wavered and am excited for what the future holds. Without further ado, here is the proof the bounty is on its way, and I look forward to announcing the winner soon.  |
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First of all, my apologies that it has taken me way too long to settle this debt. I was put in a very tough spot financially about a couple years ago, and have been struggling ever since then to get my feet back under me financially. I have been working very hard this year to get back on my feet, that along with the help of my family to provide me a place to live, has finally allowed me to finally be in a position to be able to pay this bounty. I stopped responding here a long time ago because at the time there was nothing I could do to fix the situation, and nothing good would have come of it other than a good show of poo slinging for the spectators (which was all this thread was good for the last few pages.) I decided to let the naysayers continue talking without refuting their ignorant claims of me being a scammer, as most of them were people I've butted heads with in the past and they were just using this as a prime opportunity to pounce and drag my name through the mud. None of them know me personally, knew of my future intentions regarding making this debt whole whenever I was able to, or the full story of my personal financial situation as I have not shared everything here publicly on the forums. Some things are too personal to put out there on the internet and are quite frankly no one's business. I had the option to take the easy way out. A friend of mine that submitted a design in the competition offered around December of 2013 to send me 5 Bitcoins, me declare him the winner, and then me send the 5 Bitcoins back to him. Despite the trolling and scammer accusations I was receiving, I decided that I would not take him up on this offer. I decided that I would keep my integrity and would judge the contest fairly, awarding the bounty to the design I like best whenever I was able to actually pay the bounty. I knew in my heart I was not a scammer. I knew that I was a honest person with good intentions that simply fell into a tough situation, and knowing that was all that mattered to me at the time. "Shit happens" as they say. Along with that extreme act of kindness, I offer my sincere gratitude to those of you that had my back and offered kind words and support during this predicament via PMs and other communication methods. It was you guys that helped me through this hard time, when I could of easily walked away and truly been the scammer that all of the "haters" were accusing me of being. That would have been so easy to do honestly as nothing but a negative reputation on a Bitcoin forum, that hardly anyone knows or cares about in the real world, would have been the only thing that came of it. However, I am a man with integrity and that was never really an option that I considered at any point throughout all of this. Two years later I am finally able to pay this debt. I will announce the winner when I have the coins available (EDIT: I was wrong about how long it will take the payment to clear) in about a week. To avoid the conspiracy theorists and more trolling, I will provide proof it is actually me buying the Bitcoins for the bounty. Along with the screenshot I will be sending the transaction with a comment referencing this contest and my name to whichever Bitcoin address the winner posts here ITT. I will not be able to fulfill all of the terms in the OP, or at least not immediately. I am honestly not sure I will ever mint another physical crypto currency in my lifetime as I'm not sure anyone truly trusts me to do so after this silly debacle. Among other things, such as losing my original domain name and some domain sniper wanting to charge me $2k+ to buy my old domain back. I will be adding 1 Bitcoin to the bounty and my word that if I am ever to mint a physical Bitcoin that I will do my best to fulfill all of the other terms of the original competition that remain unedited in the OP to this day. I am looking forward to putting this behind me and becoming a contributing member to the crypto community, as my passion for decentralized technology has never wavered and am excited for what the future holds. Without further ado, here is the proof the bounty is on its way, and I look forward to announcing the winner soon. |
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- Ongoing Zencoin generation, similar to mining, is not planned for Zennet. Upon the launch of the genesis block, all coins will be distributed to their owners, except for 8 percent of the Zencoins that will be retained for the Zennet Team, and another 8 percent of the Zencoins that will be retained for community applications and bounties.
I did not see this when I made my last post. This is another reason to lean towards DPoS. If there is no inflation, how will you be able to pay PoW miners to secure the block chain? All coins currently do this in the form of inflation as a block reward. I will repeat huntercrafterminers wishes not to turn this into a Dpos vs PoW debate, although I disagree with him on a few things. A NaS attack is pretty much impossible on DPoS among other things, but I digress.. I hope you are still considering some form of PoS. Here is a really good write up describing possible attack vectors of DPoS and comparing it to PoW.. I will just leave the link here. https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6638.0 |
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You are missing the point of PoS. The point of PoS is not to be better at achieving decentralized consensus than Proof Of Waste. The point of PoS is to achieve sufficiently decentralized consensus without wasting a ton of electricity, therefore harming the environment, and/or wasting a ton of processing power that could be used to benefit society in one way or another. If you insist on PoW, then make the PoW beneficial to society like Primecoin or curing cancer... otherwise it is a waste of energy and processing power.
PoW coins can not use computations that are otherwise useful. If the computation is otherwise usedful, it can be pre-computed: weakening the security PoW is supposed to provide. 1. The creation of money. Anyone can create money by broadcasting the
solution to a previously unsolved computational problem. The only
conditions are that it must be easy to determine how much computing effort
it took to solve the problem and the solution must otherwise have no
value, either practical or intellectual. The number of monetary units
created is equal to the cost of the computing effort in terms of a
standard basket of commodities. ... Edit: Interesting to note that Bitcoin does not follow this algorithm long-term because, as CoinHoarder points out, money creation eventually ceases. I understand it is not an easy thing to do as it must be hard to figure out but easy to verify. However, I think Primecoin has proven that PoW processing can benefit society in some way by advancing mathematical research by finding long chains of prime numbers. I have faith that a "better" use case will pop up sooner or later.. surely finding chains of prime numbers is not the only use case of useful PoW. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Proof Of Waste will work once the block reward halvings stop and no more currency will be printed. Currently PoW coins are diluting their shareholders to pay for miners to secure their block chains.
This dilution helps spread coins around to new users. I agree, however PoS coins can be diluted as well via interest with serves a similar purpose. The only truly deflationary coins I have seen are PoS, as with PoW the miners need to be paid. Personally for a store of value, I would prefer a truly deflationary coin. It lowers the barriers to entry if some organization manages to take control of the majority of the coins/hash-power for some reason.
I'm not sure I agree with this. It is possibly a deterrent from those thing happening, but it would not affect someone that was determined enough to do so and had deep pockets. Put another way, scarcity will make the price rise, which will encourage somebody, somewhere to plug in a miner.
Not necessarily. That's why it's called supply and demand, and not simply supply. In a PoS coin, I am not sure why anyone would sell enough stake to lose control over the "forging". The whole point is that stake costs almost nothing to maintain.
In some versions of PoS I agree with this point.. when stake is generated proportional to the amount of coins you own. However, in DPoS (and possibly others) this is a non issue. All stakeholders benefit equally from securing the block chain as no interest is paid. Fees are destroyed in the PoS process, thus increasing everyone's buying power equally. It is one of the few truly deflationary coins I have seen. Bitshares just implemented dilution.. but it is so the block chain can hire employees and improve upon itself through funding development, marketing, etc.. otherwise DPoS has the potential to be truly deflationary as it has been since its launch. I agree the question of miner fees for securing the network is an open one. As somebody in another thread pointed out: we can switch to PoS if it becomes clear that fees are not sufficient to secure the network. That won't happen for decades.
Yes, it may not even happen in our lifetimes if at all, but I see it as being a possibiliy. There are some ALT coins that have quicker emission curves, so we will see how they are able to deal with it. We all know how Dogecoin went.. Monero is another one with a fast emission curve. If the crypto markets crashed really hard it could happen sooner than you'd think. I realize a PoW coin can switch later, but I think it is important that PoS be tweaked and improved upon now rather than later. That way if Bitcoin does have to switch it can switch to the best possible solution that has been "battle tested". Edit: Ideally, once coin creation ceases, mining fees will settle on an amount sufficient to secure the network. It is not clear that there is any stable feed-back mechanism to ensure this. Limited block-size may have to act as an approximation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I think it depends on the value of the PoW coin on the free market and the amount of transactions that are occurring on its block chain. If the value isn't high enough and there aren't enough transactions then the network will possibly not be very secure as people will shut down their equipment. Someone could probably buy up that equipment for pennies on the dollar and mount a 51% attack on the less secure network. There are a lot of entities that would have incentive to do this.. banks, central banks, competing cryptocoins, governments pissed at dark markets and tax evaders, etc.. |
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So I've torn open bizarre apart, and it's good stuff. Pretty well written. Code is pretty solid, for what it is. Better than you usually find in crypto space, which coming from me says a lot.
What I'm not so confident in is the way it's distributed. I think that when this thing goes live, and they work out the feature set, that there will be targeted attacks against their embedded SQLite databases, probably in the form of rogue stores. You download a rogue store, which may have some tweaks in the way it's built, and bingo bango, you've made open bizarre do something it wasn't intended to. How dangerous something like that might be remains to be seen. Maybe I'll reserve comment for when the rest of the must have features are finished.
Right now, all you really have with it is a promising looking, semi functional mockup with some core account features down. I'm glad they're getting press coverage, but the program is nowhere near ready for prime time just yet. Even going so far as to call it alpha quality code is a stretch.
Also, installing the thing is one of the most brutal software install experiences on Ubuntu that I've had in a very long time.
Thanks for the review. I am waiting for a more polished product. How anonymous or not is Freemarket vs OpenBazaar? I think soon a lot of coins will have decentralized market places.. I could name a few that aren't being discussed in this thread. Same with Turing complete scripting. Crypto 2.0s are moving quickly. |
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What I wrote about Bitshares was obviously not some security analysis. I was demonstrating the clear overwhelming complexity that PoS brings in order to "solve" a problem that is solved very well and very simply with PoW. Basically, I have no idea what's going on here, it sounds pretty unworkable. You are missing the point of PoS. The point of PoS is not to be better at achieving decentralized consensus than Proof Of Waste. The point of PoS is to achieve sufficiently decentralized consensus without wasting a ton of electricity, therefore harming the environment, and/or wasting a ton of processing power that could be used to benefit society in one way or another. If you insist on PoW, then make the PoW beneficial to society like Primecoin or curing cancer... otherwise it is a waste of energy and processing power. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Proof Of Waste will work once the block reward halvings stop and no more currency will be printed. Currently PoW coins are diluting their shareholders to pay for miners to secure their block chains. The only coin that is far enough along in its emission curve (Dogecoin) needed to switch to a merge mine coin because no one was mining it. If it is not profitable to secure the block chain then no one will and it leaves the coin wide open for attacks. If the biggest PoW coin's values don't rise enough so that the transaction fees alone will pay for miners to secure the block chains, then they will need to eventually change their consensus algorithms or be left wide open to attacks. In other words, it may be inevitable that all coins eventually have to switch from Proof Of Waste, so that is another reason why it is important that PoS exists and people are altering and improving upon it. |
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I have been touting Myriadcoin as one of the biggest innovations in the PoW cryptocurrency world. It is definitely a step forward. Unfortunately, it still doesn't change the fact that a lot of electricity and processing power is wasted in the process.
 PoW or not, it doesn't use that much electricity now, it's basically useless... You can relax knowing that less than 200 USD worth of electricity is wasted daily to sustain this coin. Millions of dollars in electricity is wasted every day to support all PoW coins. The main culprits being Bitcoin and Litecoin, obviously smaller chains use less energy and processing power. If all PoW coins were to switch to a Myriadcoin-like approach to PoW, it would not change this fact and the problem still exists. BTW- although I have touted Myriadcoin as being an improvement to PoW in general, I have never touted it as a good investment. There are a lot more dynamics than simply what consensus algorithm it uses as to the price realization of a cryptocurrency which is traded on a free market. Features, inflation, community, developers, development goals, innovations, marketing, security, adoption, etc... all plays into price discovery. All factors need to be considered when deciding which coins to invest in. |
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Let's consider Proof Of Waste for a second. 51% of Bitcoin's hash power is on 2 to 3 mining pools. The paid NOTHING to obtain it. You are entrusting them directly (or indirectly when they get "hacked") to not fork your coin. By the way... this statement I can back up with facts and readily available data.  First, it's not "waste". It's a highly specific impossible to forge or reuse effort to ensure security while also fairly converting value (energy) into tokens, bridging the outside and indise economy seamlessly. The pools and their costs argument is only temporarily valid. The pools paid nothing, but they have nothing long-term. If they fuck up, miners will move quickly, miners paid A LOT of money for their power and have not usually recouped. I am entrusting the miners that need to collaborate and play fairly to profit. You see the difference now? It is waste in that it wastes electricity and processing power unnecessarily as has been proven by PoS. This is something Bytemaster (Bitshares main dev) came up with, for the Bitshares community to refer to PoW as Proof Of Waste to point out the fact that it is unnecessary to expend these resources simply to secure a block chain, as is proven by PoS and all of its variants. I will concede you have a point as to the pools only being able to mount an attack temporarily before everyone switches pools. However, I stick to the fact that you simply made up "as it happens for many coins an exchange owns more than 51% of the supply", and you have no proof of this and it is not true. The point was that there are different attack vectors for PoW that exist other than achieving 51% of the hash power. Both PoW and PoS variants have vulnerabilities and different pros and cons. There is no perfect solution, and I believe that PoW is often touted on these forums as being a perfect solution when in actuality it is not. I disagree again. It is not waste, it is a conversion of energy value into coin value. PoS coins (various types as you mentioned) also use a method to get value into the coin itself: - PoW stage: it's the same as a fully PoW coin, just that coin emission ends very quickly and is unfairly distributed with regards to future investors. - gib muny: just "devs" ripping off investors and collecting pots of bitcoin (the irony) to give price decaying coins to them There can be only one instance of proof when an exchange owns 51% of the supply, when all depositors account for all deposits in various known addresses and reach a 51% sum, otherwise it's not ensured that you can detect a 51% ownership. Again, PoW attack vectors are valid for mere HOURS, while a PoS attack vector can be used FOREVER once it opens up. This is a very HUGE difference in the security model which reduces the effect of the attack. This is not accurate. All decentralized consensus algos are vulnerable to 51% attacks whether it be PoS or PoW. Someone with enough hash power to 51% a PoW network can do so forever, or until the PoW network forks and changes PoW algos. Someone with 51% stake of a PoS coin can 51% the coin forever, or until the PoS network forks and burns the attacker's stake. Going back to the PoW "waste" which you pretty headed PoS supporters don't seem to understand not even 6 years after Bitcoin was invented. This is not "waste", it is a cost that is converted into new coins (scheduled or fees) from block rewards. The approximate cost to generate a block is found in the value of new tokens. This cost is real and significant, this gives value to Bitcoin.
The cost of generating PoS blocks is basically zero (5$ a month for electricity on donated hardware or a VPS bill). The value of the block rewards is thus zero, this gives no value to new PoS coins, the market cap remains the same, but new coins are added. Price per existing coin will be lower.
What does this mean? Let me show you:
PoW
Bitcoin: 0.7% price growth every day for 6 years, 5,678,828,589 USD market cap
Litecoin: oscilating but stable parity with Bitcoin for 3 years, 138,439,389 USD market cap
Namecoin: oscilating but stable parity with Bitcoin for 3 years, 10,064,647 USD market cap
Hybrid
Peercoin: oscilating but stable parity with Bitcoin for 2 years, 18,474,609 USD market cap
Novacoin: down the shitter in 2 years, 640,582 USD market cap
YACoin: down the shitter in 2 years, 37,320 USD market cap
PoS
I'll let you pick the best examples older than one year
It is waste though in that it wastes electricity and processing power unnecessarily to achieve decentralized consensus. As to your price examples... purely PoS coins havent even been out a full year so it is too early to make those comparisons, but I speculate that it will be no different than PoW coins. Bitshares for instance has increased in value this year, whereas Bitcoin has gone down in value. You can cherry pick data points that support your argument, but it doesn't necessarily mean what you are saying is true. |
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Myriadcoin's multi-PoW framework helps with the decentralization of mining that some of you may be concerned about. More than you think, actually.
I agree. I have been touting Myriadcoin as one of the biggest innovations in the PoW cryptocurrency world. It is definitely a step forward. Unfortunately, it still doesn't change the fact that a lot of electricity and processing power is wasted in the process. Pretty much all scientists agree global warming is real and PoW only accelerates that. I see PoS or a variant of it as being the ideal solution for consensus mainly for this reason. Why increase emissions unnecessarily simply to reach decentralized consensus when it is not needed because PoS is sufficient at performing the same job? Also.. all of the processing power could actually be used to do something useful to society instead of simply securing a block chain, such as solving cancer or assisting other scientific research. Primecoin is a good example of a PoW algo that is actually useful to society. These are my biggest concerns about PoW, not the centralization of it. All systems.. PoS and PoW.. inevitably tend towards centralization eventually. PoW tends towards centralization in mining pools and large farms setup with cheap power which utilize the economies of scale ASICs provide. PoS tends towards centralization with the need for check points to prevent certain attacks (or at least in the current variants of PoS.) DPoS works on the realization that all systems inevitably tend towards centralization, ad it gives you a way for stake holders to control that centralization. Stake holders choose who becomes a delegate, with PoW you cannot choose who secures the block chain.. whoever buys mining power can do it. This helps keep nefarious actors out. Also, you can vote in developers and people creating important core services for the coin as delegates to compensate them for doing so. Therefore, a DPoS coin can hire employees that work for the cryptocurrency... PoW can obviously only do this via donations. The use of only 101 delegates allows block times to be reduced to a little as 10 seconds and process many transactions a second.. something that is very hard to achieve (maybe impossible) with PoW. There are many benefits of DPoS over PoW in my mind which far outweigh the highly unlikely attack vectors, and that is why I support it over PoW alternatives. |
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From what I have deduced over the past couple years, it works generally the opposite of what the thread title claims. When Bitcoin goes up the big alts go up as well, and when Bitcoin goes down the main alts go down. I think this is because most people think if Bitcoin fails then all ALT coins will fail too, as confidence from the general public about cryptocurrencies would be shattered.
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So.. you are going to cherry pick the version of PoS that best fits your argument? DPoS is PoS, it is just a variant of PoS.
There should be no confusion here. Please don't claim PoS has some features that are present only in DPoS as a supporting argument for PoS. When the title shows DPoS I will consider it fair to use those features as part of the discussion. I don't think PoS is the same as DPoS. What do you think? A lot of people (me including) use the term PoS as more of a broad term that includes all consensus algorithms that are not based on PoW. This includes many different variants of PoS... PoS as in Peercoin, transparent forging as in Nxt, DPoS as in Bitshares, etc, etc... Many people would refer to Bitshares and Nxt as being PoS even though they are actually a variant of it. I agree it is confusing, but a term was needed to differentiate PoW coins from non-PoW coins and I think PoS is a natural choice since it was the first non-PoW consensus algo. As long as people realize that there are different variants of PoS, each functioning differently and with their own sets of pros and cons, then I don't see any issues with the terminology. Let's consider Proof Of Waste for a second. 51% of Bitcoin's hash power is on 2 to 3 mining pools. The paid NOTHING to obtain it. You are entrusting them directly (or indirectly when they get "hacked") to not fork your coin. By the way... this statement I can back up with facts and readily available data. First, it's not "waste". It's a highly specific impossible to forge or reuse effort to ensure security while also fairly converting value (energy) into tokens, bridging the outside and indise economy seamlessly. The pools and their costs argument is only temporarily valid. The pools paid nothing, but they have nothing long-term. If they fuck up, miners will move quickly, miners paid A LOT of money for their power and have not usually recouped. I am entrusting the miners that need to collaborate and play fairly to profit. You see the difference now? It is waste in that it wastes electricity and processing power unnecessarily as has been proven by PoS. This is something Bytemaster (Bitshares main dev) came up with, for the Bitshares community to refer to PoW as Proof Of Waste to point out the fact that it is unnecessary to expend these resources simply to secure a block chain, as is proven by PoS and all of its variants. I will concede you have a point as to the pools only being able to mount an attack temporarily before everyone switches pools. However, I stick to the fact that you simply made up "as it happens for many coins an exchange owns more than 51% of the supply", and you have no proof of this and it is not true. The point was that there are different attack vectors for PoW that exist other than achieving 51% of the hash power. Both PoW and PoS variants have vulnerabilities and different pros and cons. There is no perfect solution, and I believe that PoW is often touted on these forums as being a perfect solution when in actuality it is not. |
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"Short fork" differences; POW systems resolve the forks by agreeing to build on the chain with the most work done (the sum of the difficulty values at each block up to current head block in the blockchain). If everyone follows this rule, eventually all the nodes will come to a consensus on one particular chain, thus resolving the fork.
Peercoin-like POS systems can resolve the fork by building on a chain with the most amount of some other metric, like the total amount of coin-age consumed. Again, as long as everyone follows the same rule, the network will eventually naturally converge to just one of the forks.
Although, DPOS is able to randomize the order of delegates within a round, the order of the delegates in a given round is known prior to any of the delegates producing blocks in that round. For this reason, block production order can be considered deterministic. Nevertheless, very small forks could be possible because of network issues. For example, if block N is delayed by the network for too long, the producer of block N+1 might assume that the producer of block N was not available to produce his block at his designated time slot, so instead will chain off block N-1. The producer of block N+2 may have seen block N and/or block N+1. If he saw both, he always chooses the one that is supposed to come later in time, on the other hand if he sees only one or the other, he builds off of the one he saw. Thus, the chain is built with either block N or block N+1 considered missing, but the network is able to quickly get back to a consensus on the true chain because of the deterministic ordering of block producers. Since "if he saw both, he always chooses the one that is supposed to come later in time", stakeholder 101 could choose not to include any of the previous 100 blocks because they were "too late". There are only 101 stakeholders that matter in bitshares, I suppose the rest can all suck on a salty sausage? In which case, you really don't need anywhere near 51% of the stake, you only need enough so that you are wealthier than the next 50 wealthiest combined stakers. (Or had it within six months in the past.) Basically, I have no idea what's going on here, it sounds pretty unworkable. As to the bolded, yes it is obvious you have no idea how DPoS works and thus you cannot comprehend its vulnerabilities accurately. People that write about the subject as if they have some understanding of how everything works (but in reality they don't), is the main reason for all of the misinformation about PoS. Stuff like that leads people like the OP to conclude that "PoS is far inferior to PoW" by making that deduction on misinformation. Do everyone a favor and try to understand something before claiming it is insecure or that it won't work. 1. There are likely many more than 101 stakeholders as anyone that owns a fraction of a coin has a vote which decides who the 101 elected delegates will be. That vote is directly proportional to the amount of tokens they own. Technically (assuming all stakeholders vote) you need 51% of the currency supply to have total control of which delegates get elected. 2. A "round" is only applicable to predetermining the order that the delegates will produce a block in each "round" of 101 blocks. Thus, Arhag's reasoning still applies in the example you give of the last delegate in a round acting in a nefarious manner... the 102nd delegate (or N+1 as in Arhag's post) would submit two blocks, their block and a replacement for block 101, and the network would choose the last block provided as the valid one. What you proposed as being a vulnerability is simply not. "Long fork" differences; POW resolves this issue by using the same method used to resolve short forks: pick the chain with the most work done. Attackers have no way of faking the block acceptance criteria. They need to put in the work necessary to match the difficulty requirements at that point in the blockchain. Attackers can create a fake blockchain history by putting in the necessary work, but if they have less than <50% hashing power, their accumulated amount of work will be less than the accumulated work of the true chain. As long as the true chain is made visible to the resyncing user, he can easily pick it over the fake chains.
POS tries to resolve this issue by also making it difficult for attackers to fake the block acceptance criteria. In the case of Peercoin-like POS systems, it needs to be difficult for attackers to get coin-age (which is ultimately dependent on the amount of stake in the attacker's control). In the case of DPOS, it needs to be difficult for the attacker to get control of the delegates. Because of the way delegates work, the attacker would actually need to control nearly all of the 101 delegates to fake the blockchain history (see here and here for details). However, if the attacker controlled more than 50% of the stake, he could vote in all of his own delegates. So all POS systems are ultimately vulnerable if the attacker is able to get the majority of the stake. For a POS system to be secure from fake blockchain history attacks, the majority of the stake in the system needs to be kept away from the control of an attacker during the time a user is offline. However, if an attacker was able to capture only a small minority of the stake while the user was offline, the attacker cannot create a fake blockchain that the user would accept as valid.
POW supporters like to point out that the attacker does not need to control >50% on a live system; as long as an attacker controls >50% of the stake at any point in time t on the blockchain, that attacker could easily build a fake blockchain from that point forward that would fool a user's client if its last resync point was before time t. For a completely new user synchronizing from the genesis block, this means the attacker only needs to control >50% of the stake at any point in time in the history of the blockchain. This is the meaning behind the Nothing-at-Stake name. The users who owned >50% of the stake in the system in the past, may no longer own any stake in the system in the present. While it would be foolish for a present-day >50% stake holder to harm the network, someone who held >50% of the stake in the past but holds nothing at stake in the present has nothing to lose with an attack attempt.
As bad as this may look for POS systems, with more careful analysis, it is clear it is not actually a problem. A user in a POS system will always have a checkpoint in the not-too-distant past. This checkpoint either comes from the last block of the locally-saved, trusted blockchain (or perhaps just the locally-saved hash of the last seen block), or it can be hardcoded into the particular version of the wallet. As long as that checkpoint is in the not-too-distant past, users would not be vulnerable to fake blockchain history attacks in realistic scenarios. If the checkpoint is older than some threshold, then other measures are needed. This threshold can vary depending on the circumstances of the network and the paranoia of the user, but I think a threshold of 6 months is sufficient in most realistic scenarios.
Resyncing after being offline for less than 6 months should not be a cause for concern of fake blockchain history attacks. The only way such an attack can successfully work is if the attacker obtains ownership of >50% of the stake existing at some point during that 6 month period. The attacker would like to buy old private keys at very low cost from users who had stake in the system in the 6 month period but now no longer do. They have to no longer have stake in the system otherwise they would be foolish to sell old private keys to someone whose only purpose for buying old keys is clearly to attack the system and thus reduce the value of the seller's existing stake. But the attacker will not be able to find enough private key sellers that match that criteria, because it is extremely unlikely for stakeholders with >50% of the stake to completely exit out of the system within a 6 month period. The attacker is forced to legitimately buy into the system at a high cost if he wants to attack the network. But an attacker who grows his stake over some period of time until it reaches >50% would likely not attack the network while still holding the stake, otherwise they would cause the most damage to themselves. If the attacker is able to begin and finish selling their >50% of stake during that 6 month period, then the attacker has the opportunity to carry out a fake blockchain history attack against the victim who was offline for 6 months. However, the price one pays trading assets depends on how quickly they need to finish the trade. The attacker can take his time building up the stake to not have to overpay in order to incentivize stake holders to sell, but he is forced to sell at a discount to incentivize enough people to buy to quickly sell off his stake before the 6 month deadline. Pulling off this kind of buy-sell cycle is going to cost the attacker a lot of money. It is only rational to do this if this one buy-sell cycle provides him with enough opportunity to recover his costs through double-spend attacks. But the only people he can attack are people who were offline for about 6 months. Most people would be resyncing at much higher frequencies than that, which would be really hard to attack. Trying to sell >50% of stake in one week would cause a flash crash of the price of the coin (hurting the attacker the most). Also, from a practical manner, the attacker doesn't have any good way of knowing who has been offline during the same time period they set up the buy-sell cycle to actually target these individuals. So, even if there are a decent number of people out there that the attacker could target to make his money back, it isn't trivial to identify them.
So what about resyncing after being offline for more than 6 months? With the exception of resyncing from a genesis block on a new computer, it would be a very unusual circumstance to be doing this. The vast majority of people would be resyncing on a much more frequent basis. Nevertheless, in these rare cases, users would follow the same procedure that users who are resyncing from a genesis block on a new computer would follow. First, if the user already has an up-to-date blockchain on one computer and they just want to set up their wallet on a new computer, the clients could provide an easy method for the existing trusted client to communicate a hash of a recent block to the new client. Since a user obviously trusts himself and the client he has already been using, he can carry over that trust to the new device. What about a completely new user who has never been part of this network before? Or someone who lost their hard drive (but still has a backup of their private keys) and wants to reinstall the client from scratch on their computer? In these cases, the users would rely on the snapshot hardcoded in the latest version of the client software (which would be <6 months old). A new user needs to download the client software anyway; and, they need to have some way of trusting the software they download. If the attacker was able to provide a fake client with a fake snapshot, they would again be vulnerable to the fake blockchain history attack. But if the attacker was able to provide a fake client, the user would be compromised in so many ways. The fake client could just steal the user's private keys! Or if they are using a hardware wallet, the fake client could present a false view of the blockchain to make the user think he got paid when he didn't. Bolded favorite parts. Not-too-distant-past = 6 months. All the delegates in a given cycle = 101. I think this is a great illustration of how much simpler and easier it is to reason about the security of Bitcoin, and how all the complexity of PoS gives the illusion of security (Bitshares in this case). I look forward to casting off the yolk of Congress and the Fed in favor of my 101 overlords. /sarcasm Again, you don't seem to comprehend DPoS or its vulnerabilities. I suggest you re-read the DPoS white paper and Arhag's posts explaining possible attack vectors before commenting on them further. You seem to think that the check points are put in every 6 months. This is incorrect as checkpoints are written into the block chain every 10 seconds with every block containing a hash of the previous block, and also with every software update. This type of long range NaS attack is unreasonably possible due to the necessary set of conditions that need to exist for one to use this attack vector. Anyone with an updated client would be invulnerable to the NaS attack. It would only be possible if ALL of the following conditions are met: 1. Someone obtains the private keys to addresses which owned 51% of the money supply at some point in the chain's history. 2. The victim(s) has not updated their client and there has not been any client updates since that certain point in time. 3. The attacker is able to identify victims that have not updated their client since that certain point in time. FYI- there is no easy way to do this short of infecting the whole internet with trojans or something similar. IE... there is no easy way for the attacker to identify who has a recently updated block chain and who doesn't. Optionally, the attacker could create a fake client that does all of the above (they would still need 51% of the money supply at some point) to perform this attack. This risk can be mitigated by users taking proper security procedures such as verifying the signature of updates and only downloading them from trusted sources (IE. the Bitshares website). Also, as Arhag mentioned, if someone created a fake client they could simply steal the victim's private keys instead of doing an elaborate attack that would require 51% of the money supply at some point in the chain. So in this case the NaS attack would be silly to perform as it is in the attackers best interest not to go through all that trouble. By the way, I am not going to act like I am an expert because I am not. I realize it is hard to understand exactly how consensus algos work and the possible attack vectors, as I myself have a hard time comprehending everything. I do know and comprehend enough of DPoS though to be able to tell when someone is blatantly wrong in their assessment of it. This goes for anyone... if you see I have some error in my reasoning or understanding then please feel free to point it out. I learn something new every time I visit cryptocurrency forums and that is exactly why I am here... to learn. I believe I have a general understanding of DPoS and possible attack vectors though... at least a better understanding of it than you (at the moment.)  If everyone could achieve a basic understanding of how the different PoS algos function and possible attack vectors BEFORE TALKING ABOUT THEM, the spread of misinformation on these forums would not be as bad as it is today. These forums act like an echo chamber.. what one person reads from someone respectable, they take it as being true if and then repeat it to others on other threads. It is very dangerous to talk about something as if you understand it when in reality you don't. Most of the people I debate about PoS on here, I eventually find out sooner or later that they have some sort of misunderstanding of how it works and thus how "insecure" it is. |
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