I am perfectly willing to engage in discussions however to my disappointment only cunicula among the self-proclaimed proof-of-stake experts seems to be capable of civil discussions.
Civil or not, my formula is the ONLY estimate of cost of double-spend attack for PPCoin (as far as I know). Ironically, I demonstrated that attacking PPCoin's PoS is somewhat hard and thus it might be secure.
Without this estimate it's just faith-based currency. Like, Sunny King's intuition says that this code is secure, then it must be it! All praise Sunny King!
I don't see much merit in your so-called security analysis.
People try to find holes in crypto constructs all the time. For example, best known preimage attack on SHA-256 is: "41-round SHA-256 out of 64 rounds with time complexity of 2^253.5 and space complexity of 216". It is completely theoretical since it doesn't even attack full SHA-256 and 2^253 time complexity is absolutely impractical.
But these kind of theoretic attacks are very important since they show that even very clever people cannot find ways to attack SHA-256. We were able to get some confidence in this crypto function only after years of analysis.
But Sunny King wants people to simply trust him...
I understand your criticism, but coblee also thinks the type of attacks you are concerned with are not practical when you presented the same argument to his litecoin proposal.
Litecoin proposal is PoS+PoW, you have pure PoS. It is a completely different thing.
Also, bribery isn't the only way to attack PPCoin, one having access to considerable amounts of "stake" can try to do that. Practical double-spend attacks require much less than 50% of coins.
If Sunny King has no trust in theories, perhaps we can show it in practice? We can organize a fund which would purchase as much ppcoin as possible. Then it will try to perform double-spend attacks... Alternatively, fund can bribe people to use their stake.
The problem I see with your camp is that you guys have too much ego and think only your proof-of-stake design is good. The so-called critics (except for cunicula) did not give even a tiny credit to ppcoin team and me.
1. I don't have my own proof-of-stake design.
2. I think that PPCoin is interesting and Sunny King is likely a smart guy.
3. However Sunny King has too much ego which likely hurts his currency.
I only hear regurgitation of how your design is more legitimate and superior blah blah plus a lot of dirty words thrown on ppcoin.
Yeah I guess those people who try to attack SHA-256 all have too much ego, they simply should have trusted SHA-256 designers.
I am sorry I cannot acknowledge this type of 'criticism' as constructive.
Sure, you can just dismiss formula which estimates costs of attack simply because a guy who wrote that formula doesn't sing you praises. That's how it works among mature people.
No you didn't contribute to ppcoin, with or without your 'harsh criticism' I was going to introduce the v0.2 improvement to ppcoin, which I entirely came up with by myself.
Yeah I know, you developed it for 9 months, then two weeks after release you found a way to make it much better and completely different. Your sudden enlightenment has nothing to do criticism you read on forums.
I hope you can realize the error in your ways and start engaging in meaningful discussions without unreasonable attack on ppcoin and me.
Apparently spending several hours on analysis and writing down a couple of formulas doesn't count as meaningful now.
As for unreasonable attacks, you should probably send a message to that guy who found 2^253 attack on a weakened SHA-256: his attack is just unreasonable, he shouldn't have published that paper. Likely he's just too mean and has too much ego and doesn't want to engage in meaningful discussions.
I think you are smart and maybe can contribute some good ideas if your mind is in the right place. As I said before I wish everyone of us can look deeper and realize that maybe we work towards the same larger goal so we can throw away our petty differences and be respectful to each other.
Oh, how cute, so when will you publish detailed design documents and analysis so we can discuss it?
IIRC you said that you have it, but you don't want to share it with anyone.
