At this point, I can only give high confidence that the whitepaper is sound, although it needs more peer view, I am confident in the design. It is a culmination of 3.5 years of R&D and study and it incorporates facets of just about everything that has been produced in various proposals and altcoins. It isn't just one thing, such as DPoS, sharding, etc.. It is everything combined. For example, proof-of-non-existence was a concept I independently thought of (in the context of my design), but then I recently discovered that it had been invented in 2013 in the PoW context. Note proof-of-non-existence isn't the most significant innovation of my design. I am just throwing out a term that I don't feel too secretive about, to cause those some skeptical eyebrows to become perhaps a little bit more pliable.
But what I can NOT state with confidence is that I will actually be good in reaching implementation. But I can only state honestly that other than wasting 3-4 hours a day posting on these forums and taking several more hours a week for more exercise, I am using all my other waking hours to work. Whitepaper is basically done and trying to get myself back into coding mode again (had set aside coding to write the whitepaper because it was time to get it all written down, which ended up being a more monumental task than I had thought when I started to write it 4 weeks ago).
It appears to probably be good time to be holding some BTC. Perhaps a new ATH make be upon us within months.
Although are you are hinting POW could be used with ICO for the initial distribution which I think could work even better
I am not hinting that. There is no PoW in my design in any facet. Not even for DDoS resistance.
Adam Back's hashcash invention may end up being much less relevant than we thought. As for Satoshi, the relevance of the "blockchain" concept remains, although there is an aspect of a DAG in my design also.
One might think that by making it more complex, I had obfuscated a flaw and fooled myself. I don't think so! I been around this bush a zillion times already.
A little history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoinJoinRe: CoinJoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world...
Two orthogonal issues.
First, an adversary could make a 1 Satoshi input and DOS on the (3) step. You ban that address but adversary has billions more at neglible cost.
I suppose you could set a minimum input amount to avoid this. But still no problem for the adversary, he passes his BTC through a mixer can comes to hit you again and again.
I am sorry to bring you bad news Gregory but with a non-atomic operation you can always be DOS-attacked. Zerocoin may be the solution?
Transaction fees and confirmation times should slow down the attacker.
As for slowing down, the adversary can have many parallel addresses in play so I don't think so.
Transaction fees might work if they are significant enough. I haven't studied how much the tx fees are in Bitcoin much. I think I read that certain txs can be 0 for some cases?
If the adversary is mixing through CoinJoin transactions (hehe, uses what he also DOS-attacks against itself), then the blockchain tx fee is going to be shared between all parties of the CoinJoin transaction, so could it be insignificant?
Edit: I've just realized the adversary can eliminate the transaction fees too, by spending those banned amounts as he normally would (e.g. day trading), thus he doesn't incur any extra cost.
Edit#2: unless all decentralized CoinJoins share their ban lists (which is quite impractical to achieve as it is the antithesis of decentralization), adversary can just round-robin through them.
So I've won the argument. Checkmate.