Which Altcoin has the highest number of full nodes? Which is most decentralized?

[freshman777]

In essence you can't explain why rolling decentralized checkpoints are evil. You know, money is a serious business, fun experiments belong to other fields of life. I think you do a disservice to the OP advising to go all in with one less than ideal technology. Since a perfectly ideal one has yet to be invented, PoW+PoS is a way to hedge bets if one of them goes belly up, from an investing point of view.

I was hoping you'd give me the obvious answer as to why you don't want rolling checkpoints on every block so we could explore the entire reason any kind of rolling checkpoint is bad.

The answer is simple: rolling checkpoints on every block is analogous to having 1 central server giving out the consensus results, which is the same as having no consensus at all. That is the total opposite of decentralisation.

Network latency makes rolling checkpoints going one block deep a nonsense. There is a range of reasonable numbers to pick from for using as a rolling checkpoint depth. A well designed PoS system achieves consensus and doesn't compromise on decentralization with one of these sensible numbers. Discussing ridiculous magic numbers is a waste of time. It's like choosing block time. You wouldn't choose 1 second for block time because it makes no technical sense and can't work. A reasonably safe block time is 1 minute and longer.

[monsterer]

Network latency makes rolling checkpoints going one block deep a nonsense. There is a range of reasonable numbers to pick from for using as a rolling checkpoint depth. A well designed PoS system achieves consensus and doesn't compromise on decentralization with one of these sensible numbers. Discussing ridiculous magic numbers is a waste of time. It's like choosing block time. You wouldn't choose 1 second for block time because it makes no technical sense and can't work. A reasonably safe block time is 1 minute and longer.

It was a thought experiment, not implementation advice. Rolling checkpoints of any interval cause inter block reorgs in order to fit in with the accepted history; this accepted history comes from a central location. How is that decentralised in any way?

[freshman777]

Network latency makes rolling checkpoints going one block deep a nonsense. There is a range of reasonable numbers to pick from for using as a rolling checkpoint depth. A well designed PoS system achieves consensus and doesn't compromise on decentralization with one of these sensible numbers. Discussing ridiculous magic numbers is a waste of time. It's like choosing block time. You wouldn't choose 1 second for block time because it makes no technical sense and can't work. A reasonably safe block time is 1 minute and longer.

It was a thought experiment, not implementation advice. Rolling checkpoints of any interval cause inter block reorgs in order to fit in with the accepted history; this accepted history comes from a central location. How is that decentralised in any way?

What central location do new reorganized blocks come from? Chain reorgs are result of the longest chain rule implementation, picked on the basis of the highest cumulative difficulty.

[monsterer]

What central location do new reorganized blocks come from? Chain reorgs are result of the longest chain rule implementation, picked on the basis of the highest cumulative difficulty.

Not reorganised blocks, the checkpoints themselves come from centralised locations, e.g: https://peercoin.net/faq

[freshman777]

What central location do new reorganized blocks come from? Chain reorgs are result of the longest chain rule implementation, picked on the basis of the highest cumulative difficulty.

Not reorganised blocks, the checkpoints themselves come from centralised locations, e.g: https://peercoin.net/faq

Peercoin has centralized checkpoints and is not worthy of mention.

I thought we were discussing PoS with rolling checkpoints. There is a reason I said properly designed PoS.

[monsterer]

What central location do new reorganized blocks come from? Chain reorgs are result of the longest chain rule implementation, picked on the basis of the highest cumulative difficulty.

Not reorganised blocks, the checkpoints themselves come from centralised locations, e.g: https://peercoin.net/faq

Peercoin has centralized checkpoints and is not worthy of mention.

I thought we were discussing PoS with rolling checkpoints.

What are you referring to, give an example?

[freshman777]

What central location do new reorganized blocks come from? Chain reorgs are result of the longest chain rule implementation, picked on the basis of the highest cumulative difficulty.

Not reorganised blocks, the checkpoints themselves come from centralised locations, e.g: https://peercoin.net/faq

Peercoin has centralized checkpoints and is not worthy of mention.

I thought we were discussing PoS with rolling checkpoints.

What are you referring to, give an example?

Nxt and its 720 blocks deep rolling decentralized checkpoints.
http://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Whitepaper:Nxt

History Attack

In a history attack, someone acquires a large number of tokens, sells them, and then attempts to create a successful fork from just before the time when their tokens were sold or traded. If the attack fails, the attempt costs nothing because the tokens have already been sold or traded; if the attack succeeds, the attacker gets their tokens back. Extreme forms of this attack involve obtaining the private keys from old accounts and using them to build a successful chain right from the genesis block.

In Nxt, the basic history attack generally fails because all stake must be stationary for 1440 blocks before it can be used for forging; moreover, the effective balance of the account that generates each block is verified as part of block validation. The extreme form of this attack generally fails because the Nxt blockchain cannot be re-organized more than 720 blocks behind the current block height. This limits the time frame in which a bad actor could mount this form of attack.

[monsterer]

Nxt and its 720 blocks deep rolling decentralized checkpoints.
http://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Whitepaper:Nxt

Those are not checkpoints at all, thats a maximum reorg depth and it doesn't solve the problem:

1. I buy 33% of historical stake private keys together somehow, which are worthless 'now' so should be cheap
2. I generate a longer cumulative difficulty chain starting from just before the private keys funds moved*
3. All nodes accept it as the canonical chain
4. End of coin

*) I can do this first time with 100% success rate, no need to permute, since I have 100% chance of generating every block at 33% of historical stake.

[freshman777]

Nxt and its 720 blocks deep rolling decentralized checkpoints.
http://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Whitepaper:Nxt

Those are not checkpoints at all, thats a maximum reorg depth and it doesn't solve the problem:

1. I buy 33% of historical stake private keys together somehow, which are worthless 'now' so should be cheap
2. I generate a longer cumulative difficulty chain starting from before the private keys funds moved*
3. All nodes accept it as the canonical chain
4. End of coin

*) I can do this first time with 100% success rate, no need to permute, since I have 100% chance of generating every block at 33% of historical stake.

If you go by the definition that a checkpoint is something devs code into the software, sure. Nxt calls these rolling checkpoints.

Hear hear, you make all users download your client with no HF checkpoints and obtain a lot of private keys, and generate a heavier chain in 12 hours ramming through the block generation slow-down protections. You're unstoppable.

[Quantum_Mechanics]

It probably doesn't have the highest number of full nodes yet but NEM have a supernode program supernodes.nem.io (currently in testing phase) with already 80 nodes part of it and according to http://chain.nem.ninja/#/nodes/ there is 97 nodes total.

[monsterer]

If you go by the definition that a checkpoint is something devs code into the software, sure. Nxt calls these rolling checkpoints.

No, they don't. They are not checkpoints. A checkpoint is a block hash, of a particular block which must be located at a given block height. Maximum reorg depth is just that, the maximum sequence of blocks which can be re-organised, which says nothing about block hashes at all.

Hear hear, you make all users download your client with no HF checkpoints and obtain a lot of private keys, and generate a heavier chain in 12 hours ramming through the block generation slow-down protections. You're unstoppable.

You don't understand the problem at all. Hard fork checkpoints are totally different to rolling checkpoints and have no effect at all on this attack, because I don't want to regenerate all history back to the genesis, all I want to do is generate an alternate history from just before the point when the funds from the private keys moved away, which can easily be less than 720 blocks long.

edit: even if the length is greater than 720 blocks, it doesn't matter - all syncing nodes will be vulnerable to accepting my fake history, and since the cost of impersonating a general node is ~0, I can impersonate a majority of all nodes, such than any syncing node will have a greater than 50% chance of querying my fake nodes supplying my fake history. Given enough time, my history becomes dominant no matter the length.

[stoat]

Ethereum has the most amount of full nodes in byzantine consensus after bitcoin.

It will overtake bitcoin very soon, because bitcoin mining is massively centralised

[freshman777]

You don't understand the problem at all.

Discussion has moved to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1382241.0

[qwizzie]

Dash has between 3500 and 3600 full nodes currently (these are called masternodes and run on servers all over the world, 24 hours per day)





See my signature for up to date info, current ATH of active masternodes is 3581
Dash is also setup in very decentralised way, making Dash the first decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) : https://www.youtube.com/embed/eEJKZjTx9Bg  

For questions about Dash check this site https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOC/Official+Documentation
or post in our bitcointalk forum at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.0

[stoat]

Every ethereum wallet runs a full node currently. 

Making Ethereum the most decentralised cryptocurrency by a very large margin