The state of crypto - The only serious thread on the subforum

[GingerAle]

the most sensible thing to be stated in this thread is that BTC is a rube goldberg machine. bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

the blockchain idea leads to too much complications trying to plug its obvious flaws, leading to the biggest flaw of them all complication itself.


as i say its a currency not a mission to mars.

and the extant financial technology isn't a rube goldberg machine?

I mean, I'll give yah that, they are both rube goldberg machines - the difference is that with bitcoin everyone knows how it works (well, one can know how it works). The extant financial system..... not so much.

and, IMO, currency is much much more complicated than a mission to mars. That's merely getting from point A to point B. Currency is a monstrous technology in comparison - a device we use to store value, transfer time, exchange intangibles. We will, someday, get to mars. But we won't get there without currency providing a means to allow civilization to network.

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[hashtag101]

the most sensible thing to be stated in this thread is that BTC is a rube goldberg machine. bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

the blockchain idea leads to too much complications trying to plug its obvious flaws, leading to the biggest flaw of them all complication itself.


as i say its a currency not a mission to mars.

I agree with this, too.

Instead of using our brainpower to find a way to answer the question, "why crypto" to Joe Blow, we are making it harder for him to understand everyday.

Or let's spend our energy figuring out how to market a crypto, which seems to be a lot harder then we ever expected.

[americanpegasus]

Or let's spend our energy figuring out how to market a crypto, which seems to be a lot harder then we ever expected.

 
  
http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238  

 
 
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Revised-Edition/dp/006124189X 
 

[kelsey]

the most sensible thing to be stated in this thread is that BTC is a rube goldberg machine. bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

the blockchain idea leads to too much complications trying to plug its obvious flaws, leading to the biggest flaw of them all complication itself.


as i say its a currency not a mission to mars.

and the extant financial technology isn't a rube goldberg machine?

I mean, I'll give yah that, they are both rube goldberg machines - the difference is that with bitcoin everyone knows how it works (well, one can know how it works). The extant financial system..... not so much.

and, IMO, currency is much much more complicated than a mission to mars. That's merely getting from point A to point B. Currency is a monstrous technology in comparison - a device we use to store value, transfer time, exchange intangibles. We will, someday, get to mars. But we won't get there without currency providing a means to allow civilization to network.

yes but your comparing apples and oranges here on so many fronts, where to begin;

1) average joe's use fiat (without fully understanding it) because they have to, no one has to use bitcoin.

2) average joe's whether (unfounded or not) trust gov backed fiat (partly also because they have too), bitcoin your trusting yourself (well and also an anon dev with a billion $ stash), too trust bitcoin you kinda have to understand it, to trust fiat you can do it blindly (and again really have no choice).

[monsterer]

bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

And yet bitcoin still remains the most simple consensus design of all of them. This gives you some idea just what a hard problem distributed, trustless consensus is.

[r0ach]

bitcoin and everything todate related is simply an overkill in complication for a p2p currency.

And yet bitcoin still remains the most simple consensus design of all of them. This gives you some idea just what a hard problem distributed, trustless consensus is.

And why Ethereum is in such huge trouble that nobody seems to acknowledge.  It took Satoshi a long time to create the consensus mechanics of Bitcoin, now you have Vitalik trying to create one on the fly after the coin was already released.  They can't copy standard proof of stake due to all of it's negatives.  He's either going to have to beat Satoshi, copy DPoS, or a far more experimental method that might end in critical failure like a DAG chain.

As for Anonymint's coin, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's relying on people not being able to create an ASIC with more than 200% efficiency of a CPU or the entire model fails?  So even if this coin is theoretically perfect, nobody will even know if it's valuable or not until it's been on the market for several years, reach 100 million in market cap, then attract ASIC vendors to attempt to full scale commercialize the coin?

[smooth]

As for Anonymint's coin, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's relying on people not being able to create an ASIC with more than 200% efficiency of a CPU or the entire model fails?

1. He said order of magnitude. In normal English that usually means 10x, though binary order of magnitude -- 2x -- also means something occasionally. I'm not sure what 3x means.

2. I don't think he said the entire model would fail otherwise, so that may be your made up conclusion. I don't really remember though, he may have suggested that.

[r0ach]

As for Anonymint's coin, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's relying on people not being able to create an ASIC with more than 200% efficiency of a CPU or the entire model fails?

1. He said order of magnitude. In normal English that usually means 10x, though binary order of magnitude -- 2x -- also means something occasionally. I'm not sure what 3x means.

2. I don't think he said the entire model would fail otherwise, so that may be your made up conclusion. I don't really remember though, he may have suggested that.

I don't remember his exact language used to describe what was needed to prevent the system from failing, which is why I said "correct me if I'm wrong".  I thought I remember seeing the 200% specification somewhere.  I doubt it's 1000% (order of magnitude) since this would just give you the same centralized pool structure as Bitcoin now.

[monsterer]

And why Ethereum is in such huge trouble that nobody seems to acknowledge.  It took Satoshi a long time to create the consensus mechanics of Bitcoin, now you have Vitalik trying to create one on the fly after the coin was already released.  They can't copy standard proof of stake due to all of it's negatives.  He's either going to have to beat Satoshi, copy DPoS, or a far more experimental method that might end in critical failure like a DAG chain.

It would be absolutely insane for Etherium to actually go through with changing the core consensus mechanism of the chain. Like it or not, there really is no viable alternative to POW at the moment.

edit: only POW provably solves the byzantine generals problem in the face of sybil attack

[smooth]

would just give you the same centralized pool structure as Bitcoin now.

Unlikely if other aspects of the system are radically different which seems likely from how he described it. You could possibly get some other failure, but it wouldn't likely be the same as Bitcoin at all.

[smooth]

And why Ethereum is in such huge trouble that nobody seems to acknowledge.  It took Satoshi a long time to create the consensus mechanics of Bitcoin, now you have Vitalik trying to create one on the fly after the coin was already released.  They can't copy standard proof of stake due to all of it's negatives.  He's either going to have to beat Satoshi, copy DPoS, or a far more experimental method that might end in critical failure like a DAG chain.

It would be absolutely insane for Etherium to actually go through with changing the core consensus mechanism of the chain. Like it or not, there really is no viable alternative to POW at the moment.

edit: only POW provably solves the byzantine generals problem in the face of sybil attack

I actually think it is possible that Ethereum will just stick with PoW (or maybe a hybrid PoS+PoW). They've always couched the discussion of PoS in terms of "if it can be made to work". Obviously Vitalik is a fan of PoS and he criticizes PoW based on what he calls its devastating environmental impact but I also think he is at times intellectually honest enough to just admit that it can't be made to work and conclude "we tried our best, but ultimately we decided to stick with PoW."

This would be a bruising political battle given the obvious desire by existing Etherium stakeholders to cut the coin supply from infinite to premine+18 month of mining or whatever, but I don't view it as impossible (nor am I predicting it).

[smooth]

I don't remember his exact language used to describe what was needed to prevent the system from failing, which is why I said "correct me if I'm wrong".  I thought I remember seeing the 200% specification somewhere.  I doubt it's 1000% (order of magnitude) since this would just give you the same centralized pool structure as Bitcoin now.

Here it is:

Did you just reveal that mining has a proof of burn involved because I don't see any other way for that statement to work otherwise.

I already told you that if users are required send PoW with each transaction and they don't care about their insignificant electrical cost then PoW will be unprofitable, especially if the CPU-only hash has been well designed to be within an order-of-magnitude of the potential ASIC optimization. In my recent archives (July?), smooth and I estimated this order-of-magnitude for Cryptonite at between 1 and 2, and I believe mine may be slightly better than Cryptonite.

There is your first example of me doing something technical you formerly thought is impossible. And there will be many more such cases. Stay tuned...

[r0ach]

edit: only POW provably solves the byzantine generals problem in the face of sybil attack

Delegated proof of work, which Bitcoin is, doesn't.  If 70% of the hash rate is in china owned by three pools, you have no way of knowing these pools aren't owned by the same person (sybil).  The only way is to audit them yourself, which is the purpose of the voting mechanism in DPoS, to audit the block validators for sybil.  The only difference is, the audit mechanism is built into the protocol of DPoS and excluded entirely from DPoW (delegated proof of work).

Seriously, read my first and second post in this thread, I'm not bullshitting here, it's painfully obvious this is the case:

The Bitcoin consensus mechanism is incorrectly labeled Proof of Work

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1176835.0

[Blawpaw]

Great thread!

Pretty informative and it reveals a new forward thinking about cryptos and its impact. I really enjoyed your appreciation.

[myagui]

Thank you r0ach & others for comments, this thread is a really good read.

If I understand correctly, in Bitcoin/PoW, any miner can opt for not delegating his hashing power, and yet remain an active participant. I know most people do delegate their hashing power, for various practical and economical reasons, but still, it is not a mandatory position. The miner has full authority over its own hashing/voting power, and unilaterally decides (if he delegates to a pool or not).

Is DPoS comparable, in that the holder/staker has authority over the decision to delegate or not delegate his hashing/voting power, and remains a participant in equal standing regardless of his position towards delegation? I'm definitely not familiar enough with DPoS, would appreciate any pointer to a meaningful intro on the subject.

[monsterer]

Delegated proof of work, which Bitcoin is, doesn't.  It's no more fault tolerant than DPoS.

Hashcash POW is subject to sybil due to ASICs, this is clearly something that satoshi did not foresee, I agree. However, that does not rule out all other types of POW - there exists a near idealised POW in which one CPU really is one vote.

DPOS has no white paper and has not been proven to solve the byzantine problem, much like most other consensus designs.

[smooth]

Delegated proof of work, which Bitcoin is, doesn't.  It's no more fault tolerant than DPoS.

Hashcash POW is subject to sybil due to ASICs, this is clearly something that satoshi did not foresee, I agree. However, that does not rule out all other types of POW - there exists a near idealised POW in which one CPU really is one vote.

DPOS has no white paper and has not been proven to solve the byzantine problem, much like most other consensus designs.

PoW doesn't require 1C1V. It only requires that (or more precisely requires that no actor have disproportionate voting power) to converge in the manner stated in the paper. Nevertheless it will still eventually converge with weaker assumptions on rate.

Even if you can sybil at the level of miners or pools, you still can't sybil at the level of hashes.

So the pools in China could fork the chain starting 20 or 30 blocks back and double spend. But it would cost them 20-30 blocks worth of hashes to do it. Trying to do this say a year back, while theoretically possible since they have 50+% of the hash rate, would not be feasible. Even if it were, and they did it, they certainly couldn't keep doing that repeatedly because it would cost infinite energy. Eventually they will run out of money and need to let the chain progress forward.

Thus there will still eventually (and remember, even if the ideal 1C1V case PoW doesn't observe a deadline) be an unambiguous longest chain, and therefore a consensus, although it may be a slow and messy one.

By contrast, in PoS with a sufficient portion of old stake, you can create as many versions of the chain as you want without incurring this kind of cost. DPoS doesn't matter here because you can create new chains with different election results, and the proceed as above. (You can infer a cost if you view PoS as a form of PoW where creating chains is the PoW, but this doesn't help the argument.)

The only defense is "everybody knows which is the right chain" which is not a system reaching consensus, it is people forming it.

[r0ach]

If I understand correctly, in Bitcoin/PoW, any miner can opt for not delegating his hashing power, and yet remain an active participant.

Yes, assuming the miner has enough hash power to solo mine, and since neither energy price or climate is a constant, is willing to travel anywhere in the universe where it's cheapest from China, to Antarctica, to possibly outer space to remain profitable.  The system is currently designed to create a constantly diminishing working set, and anyone who has ever mined before (me), knows the succesful miners are the people who constantly parlay their profit into the next mining hardware over and over to infinity (designed to force a small number of monopoly players or complete monopoly).

Assuming transaction fees provided the incentive, the end game mining market would eventually become so asinine, people will say, "awesome, I can build an unregulated nuclear power plant in outer space and utilize the 2.7 kelvin temperatures to lower my cooling costs at the same time forming the perfect monopoly". 

Then we can have space colonies whose only purpose is to tend to the mining equipment where 90% of the hash comes from one miner and the other 10% is some guy that sees Bitcoin PoW as a religous movement.

I have a feeling that since delegated proof of work doesn't provide any decentralization benefit over DPoS, PoW will most likely be abandoned before the first Bitcoin space station is constructed.

[smooth]

Assuming transaction fees provided the incentive

Well that's a stupid assumption and is the biggest and most challenging to fix design flaw in Bitcoin that I know about.

Space station mining doesn't really make a lot of sense given latency issues. Possibly low earth orbit would work. High earth orbit is probably okay for transactions but not mining. Anything beyond that will probably be separate blockchains. I don't know how Bitcoin maximalists cope with that inevitability.

Dumping heat in space is not easy or cheap either. Space is "cold" but without conduction you are limited to radiative cooling. This is a non-trivial design issue for spacecraft. Under the ocean is likely a better exotic outcome to propose.

[myagui]

The dreamer in me thinks that before either of those exotic scenarios, we'd have free & universal access to electricity, 'cos you know, Sun ... and non-destructive, non-pollutant energy storage methods ...  Anyhow ...

I do agree that PoW has flaws, in my limited understanding of the matter.
My question however, was to how DPoS compares, specifically:

Is DPoS comparable, in that the holder/staker has authority over the decision to delegate or not delegate his hashing/voting power, and remains a participant in equal standing regardless of his position towards delegation? I'm definitely not familiar enough with DPoS, would appreciate any pointer to a meaningful intro on the subject.

I noticed that the earlier link points to an interesting discussion about DPoS, will read up on it.
Cheers gents!