Dash Codename Evolution

[smoothie]

... Idk, crypto baffles me but I'd imagine it'd be possible to limit mining to the masternodes and use them as a distributed p2pool.

...

Wow that idea sounds horrible (if it isnt yet already implemented).

Only master nodes could mine? Hmm that sounds pretty centralized and gives no reason to have people join mining because they would have this barrier to entry (1000 dash) plus specialized hardware a specific caliber before you could mine.

Sure you can call it "distributed" but if someone owns a majority of the masternodes because they own a fuckton of Dash then you now have a problem.

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[illodin]

Ok, allow failed InstantX transactions to appeal to the next 10 selected masternodes to detect bad actors and flag them.

How do you prove the masternode received your InstantX communication   Thus who is lying the masternode or you?

Masternode could sign the "I have received an InstantX request with ID x" message using its private key?

[illodin]

Wow that idea sounds horrible (if it isnt yet already implemented).

Only ASIC factories could mine? Hmm that sounds pretty centralized and gives no reason to have people join mining because they would have this barrier to entry (a factory hall with cheap electricity) plus specialized hardware a specific caliber before you could mine.

Sure you can call it "distributed" but if someone owns a majority of the hashpower because they own a fuckton of ASICs then you now have a problem.

Agreed fully.

[iCEBREAKER]

... Idk, crypto baffles me but I'd imagine it'd be possible to limit mining to the masternodes and use them as a distributed p2pool.

Wow that idea sounds horrible (if it isnt yet already implemented).

Only master nodes could mine? Hmm that sounds pretty centralized and gives no reason to have people join mining because they would have this barrier to entry (1000 dash) plus specialized hardware a specific caliber before you could mine.

Sure you can call it "distributed" but if someone owns a majority of the masternodes because they own a fuckton of Dash then you now have a problem.

Dash only pays lip service (for marketing purposes) to the ideal of decentraliztion.  They don't really GAF or understand the concept.

That's why vertoe blew the whistle on the scam, and left the Cult of the Golden Donkey to work on less centralized projects.

i left because i disagree darkcoin or however it will be called next year is not a decentralized entity. it never was but i ignored it as long as darkcoin was following the same path i was following.

this currency is lead by a single person. darkcoin is like an old conservative company with strong hierarchical comamnd structures and a single person on the top of the pyramid. evan duffield. the rebranding using a detergent name was just a step forward in creating something like apple or paypal.

fuck this i tell you. what we need is a trustless, decentralized and anonymous currency. darkcoin is not decentralized as it still relies on a single person. and this reaches deep into the code base.

the core devs were just a bunch of volunteers exploited for the big thing.

the extended darkcoin team was the same with even a lower place to sit on that pyramid. and what was the darkcoin foundation again? right, something to reserve some rights on some names and collect money. who nominated and voted for the foundation board? who does even know who are these guys? how did we learn about the foundation? from local news papers!

the team listings kept counting names of people nobody ever noticed before. and they never committed anything visible to the community or the repository. and i was spending 25 hours a day monitory everything that happened in the darkcoin community for more than a year.

the things going on here are fishy, intransparent and rely on a single entity.

i will get out and and will contribute to something decentralized and anonymous. i always hoped darkcoin could fill that void. i cant blame anyone to stay with this project. you are probably investors trying to win a gold donkey. or you are simply trying to exploit every possible vector of profit in the coins space. whatever. you are not here because darkcoin is something it claims to be.

if you disagree with my statement above, i dont care, but answer that simple question: what if evan duffield suddenly announces he quits the project tomorrow morning?

As for Evolution, the DashHoles' latest blue-sky unicorn project, it has no chance in hell against ETH and rootstock.io.   

[othe]

Ok, allow failed InstantX transactions to appeal to the next 10 selected masternodes to detect bad actors and flag them. Truth is, we don't know how he plans to implement it and we won't know until January in Miami, could be the Dash developers solution is very different from your own.

EDIT: Lol, late to the party and butthurt

Dash is that the instamined coin where the instamine grows continuously with the aid of the "masternode" scam.

Taylor05 did a detailed analysis of the coins launch and, other than a very small number of trolls, no one really gives a damn about the early distribution but it's worth a read:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg12689175#msg12689175

The analysis is fundamentally flawed, anonymint / TPTB_need_war will agree i am sure. Claiming that someone has just a fixed number of hashrate in times of cloud computing is stupid and naive or a plain lie to trick people into it that don´t know how mining is done. As the code didn´t even compile in the first hours theres it´s highly unlikely that someone else did it.

As proven here every CPU coin gets mined with cloud instances in the beginning http://da-data.blogspot.de/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html
You setup one AWS or Azure or whatever cloud image, clone it and spin it up x hundred times (or even more).


The hashing code btw in dash is still not optimized so even for cpu miners who know what they do there were big improvements possible. This is due to a fact that a standard crypto library called sph is used http://www.saphir2.com/sphlib/ which is unoptimized C code.

[TPTB_need_war]

Ok, allow failed InstantX transactions to appeal to the next 10 selected masternodes to detect bad actors and flag them.

How do you prove the masternode received your InstantX communication   Thus who is lying the masternode or you?

Masternode could sign the "I have received an InstantX request with ID x" message using its private key?

And if they refuse to sign how do you prove they refused to sign  

They could argue you never sent the request to them or their connection was offline.

What you can do is build up witnesses who also try to submit to the same masternode and establish a pattern for many different transactions over a longer window of time. But the problem is the masternode may sign some transactions and not others, e.g. maybe it signs its own transactions or only the ones that have KYC identification attached to them, depending on what their driving motivation is for denial-of-service. There are many game theories and scenarios.

Instead of solving this problem that way which is very complex and probably unprovable in the holistic game theory if the entire design, I invert the paradigm in my design, but details are withheld at this time.

[TPTB_need_war]

...
And if they refuse to sign how do you prove they refused to sign  

Really not sure about this but I think you make a request to send and receive an acknowledgement from the masternodes, if you don't get it the send fails and you can choose to try again or send as a regular transaction.

Exactly. A truly decentralized (as opposed to top-down distributed) system can't easily prove the masternode is being intentionally uncooperative and ban it. And now instant transactions are broken for those who the masternodes wish to target, for what ever motivation. See also my post of how this interacts holistically with the intention to be immune to 51% attacks and thus why it fails in Dash's proposed design.

I have much more detailed analysis of scenarios and attacks, but I will reserve that for the appropriate time. If I spill too many beans now, it is a disadvantage for myself and my work.

[smooth]

The hashing code btw in dash is still not optimized so even for cpu miners who know what they do there were big improvements possible. This is due to a fact that a standard crypto library called sph is used http://www.saphir2.com/sphlib/ which is unoptimized C code.

TIL. And they complain that Monero didn't have optimized code for a few weeks after launch? Yikes.

[smooth]

idk but it doesn't really sound like a hard problem to fix

Hello? Building fault tolerate decentralized systems is an extremely hard problem.

[stonehedge]

I'm a long term supporter of Dash and whilst I ceased involvement some time ago for unfortunate reasons I hope the longer standing members of the community know that I still support Dash as a project.

However, the information about Evolution that has been released so far has left me feeling unexcited.  There is no meat on the bones.  I believe that the dev team are saying that further details will be restricted for a while for reasons of commercial protection which they are quite entitled to do. Unfortunately this doesn't quite add up for me.  

I look forward to reading the whitepaper when it is released. As it stands, the information released so far is uncharacteristically vague compared to the innovation announcements that the Dash team have made over previous years.  There are perfectly reasonable explanations for this but for the first time in a long time I'm not completely sold on what is going on.

Time will tell.

[BagHolder010]

idk but it doesn't really sound like a hard problem to fix

Hello? Building fault tolerate decentralized systems is an extremely hard problem.

That's why we have Evan

Killed it.

[TPTB_need_war]

This screenshot tells me absolutely nothing besides the fact there will be deterministic nodes to increase TPS and it appears he's going to ask supernode operators to act as price feeds or conflict resolution in gambling results.

If you review the quotes of Evan I dug up and if you understand how he implemented InstantX, then you can deduce very obviously how he is intending to implement faster TPS, as I explained. To resummarize, the block chain hash combined mathematically (hashed?) with the inputs to a transaction is used to determine which quorum of masternodes can sign the transaction, then if M of N of them sign, this is broadcast to the block chain and the transaction is considered confirmed even before the block chain has produced the next block. Note Evan specifically stated inputs and not outputs and I assume the reason is so you can't game which masternodes can be the quorum, but then each input needs to reach a mathematically determined quorum separately (don't know if he has realized that yet), and thus the number of signatures on the block chain will increase by the average number of inputs per transaction (multiplied by N!).

Thus the negative implications of this increased TPS and instant confirmations (which will be realized in his design) are as I stated upthread:

• Block chain becomes more bloated due to N times more signatures, not less.
• Immunity to 51% attack is an incorrect claim, because the block chain hash determines which quorum, thus a chain reorganization can rewrite which quorum was authorized to M of N sign.
• The instant confirmations can not be trusted because if they are on an orphaned chain (not 51% attack but just the normal process of orphan rate or even 25 - 33% selfish mining attack), then they can be reversed. This is the same reason the prior InstantX (a more limited scope for instant confirmations than Evolution because the inputs had to precommitted to the quorum yet this committed could still be overturned by an orphaned chain, a.k.a. chain reorganization) was a technical failure.
• If the masternodes collude to refuse your M of N (and they don't need to be a majority of masternodes, just when ever they control an M of N, then your instant confirmation can not be routed to other masternodes until the next block thus no longer instant so even with a minority they can wreck havoc for example to cause a price decline where they could repurchase before the "fix" and next pump), they can remove your ability to do instant transactions. Remember masternodes are run by real people potentially with agendas and complicity with other motivations (e.g. selling out to the government to enforce KYC on all transactions or colluding to block transactions on decentralized exchanges to aid manipulations of clearing and market price movements or a zillion other things you can think of because top-down distributed is not the same as trustless decentralization. Bottom line is the masternode is not fungible!)

There are other issues. I am just touching the tip of the iceberg of hurt potentially lurking. Apparently not that many people actually use Dash (other than investing it and even then it is suspect how many people use it versus how many TXs are just fictional volume created by the insiders to make it look like the coin is widely used), so perhaps nothing gets really fully stress tested so this enables releasing stuff that wouldn't work in a widely used scenario but under reduced usership works well enough that people think the designs are solid when they aren't. Even Evan said in the Q & A session in the linked video that he has no idea how many users there are of Dash.

Btw, I am not a hater of Dash. I am forced to comment because I have a competing design in development and so I want people to start to think about the technical issues rationally. I will not comment a lot more about this. I would rather release a correct design and take the positive route of introducing solutions rather than analyzing the faults of other designs. I will not be sitting in Dash threads repeating these points. Investors have free will and if they choose to ignore my expertise, that is their prerogative. So let this be my last comments on this. At least I have given you some insight. And also Evan can read this and perhaps he can devise solutions to those weaknesses. So actually I should have shut my mouth. Last time I opened my mouth to explain to Evan in his thread the problems with his implementation of CoinJoin, then masternode concept was born as a way to address my technical points. So seems I am having $millions of influence on the crypto markets, yet haven't yet released a coin myself. This need to change.

[othe]

Kind of crazy folks are saying the masternodes are centralised though, there's over 3000 of them now and its growing all the time.

Of course it is, but you can join the crazy club of masternodders obeying the church of evan for just 2400 usd currently.
30 % of them are at OVH, 17% at Choopa LLC....

No ponders you called them like Kim Kardashians Boutique stores (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3032841/Kourtney-Khloe-Kardashian-lead-celebrations-DASH-store-goes-online.html),

With DASH it´s even better, the rich get richer and richer as they rake in the most masternode rewards and can launch new masternodes faster thus owning a bigger percent of the network faster and faster, such decentralziation.
Compound intersted is a bankers or dashers wet dream i guess.

Effectively you have a proof of stake system in it´s most pervers form ever.
And with this switch to a PoS system you also inherited all the problems too... in a PoW system you have a healthy split of powers between miners and investors/users/merchants where both have to cooperate or all will lose, you just got rid of it and investors control everything now. congratulations.
What happens if someone confiscated a big amount of BTC or steals them? Yeah really, you are fucked.


 
Let´s not even get into the jurisdical problem running one of those nodes can bring you...

The older ones here know your "masternode" concept already. We called them Supernodes back in the day. Even Skype was sooo cool to use them.
Gnutella has/had (didn´t study it since years) the same flaws.

Anything different than a pure P2P, any model with relaxed rules can and will be used to attack the network more effectively. Randomization is the most important design principle in a fault tolerant p2p network. Some learned it the hard way (Kazaa).

[illodin]

• Immunity to 51% attack is an incorrect claim, because the block chain hash determines which quorum, thus a chain reorganization can rewrite which quorum was authorized to M of N sign.
• The instant confirmations can not be trusted because if they are on an orphaned chain (not 51% attack but just the normal process of orphan rate or even 25 - 33% selfish mining attack), then they can be reversed. This is the same reason the prior InstantX (a more limited scope for instant confirmations than Evolution because the inputs had to precommitted to the quorum yet this committed could still be overturned by an orphaned chain, a.k.a. chain reorganization) was a technical failure.

Apologies for being clueless, and I see you said that would be your last comment on this, but perhaps you or someone else can still answer - InstantX could take a hash of a block that is old enough to be considered safe from reorg, wouldn't this solve the issue?

[smoothie]

Wow that idea sounds horrible (if it isnt yet already implemented).

Only ASIC factories could mine? Hmm that sounds pretty centralized and gives no reason to have people join mining because they would have this barrier to entry (a factory hall with cheap electricity) plus specialized hardware a specific caliber before you could mine.

Sure you can call it "distributed" but if someone owns a majority of the hashpower because they own a fuckton of ASICs then you now have a problem.

Agreed fully.

No ASICs so far and its likely most folks would support changes to make them useless should anyone start making them, not sure how hard a fork at that level would be to implement but if a fork could do it then it's not a problem as forks have been handled gracefully in the code for a long time now. That was only a thought off the top of my head on preventing anyone with dominant hashing power taking over, changing things so the only way anyone can point hashing power at the network is through a pool run by the masternodes but I've done practically no mining so I'd take it with a pinch of salt.

Kind of crazy folks are saying the masternodes are centralised though, there's over 3000 of them now and its growing all the time, that's over half the number Bitcoin has already and folks are looking at Bitcoins node count and worrying its heading towards centralisation someday, that's tens of nodes, not thousands and they're spread out all over the world. if we're not careful it could tend towards large numbers being hosted with the same VPS providers and that's something anyone setting up a MN will see warnings about when they read up on it, there's talk of methods to hide MN IPs to protect against that but I've no idea on the details.

EDIT: Its hard to know where all the angst against Dash is coming from, there's only a couple of the regular trolls posted in this thread so far but the number attacking it in the main thread is incredible. There's some obvious sour grapes at having missed the boat or having overstretched themselves on other coins and see Dash as a competitor but that's only really at the edges of the hate. I think the biggest issue is Dash puts speculators out of the loop, the masternodes hold the liquidity instead of the markets and that makes it very difficult to pump and dump and manipulate the crap out of, some of those coins are never coming out from making interest in safe storage so they'll never get their hands on them

doesnt matter how many masternodes. You are trusting another person to make sure your transaction is handled correctly or that the VPS provider doesn't just F up the nodes they have on their platform/servers.

You could have 10,000 masternodes and those issues still exist.

Even Evan said he is trying to bring it to the protocol level as opposed to masternodes. I think it is too late at this point. His design is probably too far gone to get it to that point without starting completely over.

[illodin]

Even Evan said he is trying to bring it to the protocol level as opposed to masternodes. I think it is too late at this point. His design is probably too far gone to get it to that point without starting completely over.

Why too late? The only coin where it seems to be too late to change anything is Bitcoin.

[smoothie]

Even Evan said he is trying to bring it to the protocol level as opposed to masternodes. I think it is too late at this point. His design is probably too far gone to get it to that point without starting completely over.

Why too late? The only coin where it seems to be too late to change anything is Bitcoin.

It took Evan quite a while to figure out that the masternode concept is broken one And that he needed to implement privacy tech into the protocol itself.

The Q&A video he mentions that he wants to get away from the masternode concept.

Why even go towards that route if you now want to distance yourself from it?

Seems like he did not think that through very well.

[smoothie]

So much for decentralization if you rely on Evan to do pretty much all the hard work.

What if he were to be hit by a bus tomorrow? How would the project move on?

Doesnt it seem odd that there is no decentralized core team for dash development? Just one man? <---am I wrong?

[illodin]

Even Evan said he is trying to bring it to the protocol level as opposed to masternodes. I think it is too late at this point. His design is probably too far gone to get it to that point without starting completely over.

Why too late? The only coin where it seems to be too late to change anything is Bitcoin.

It took Evan quite a while to figure out that the masternode concept is broken one And that he needed to implement privacy tech into the protocol itself.

The Q&A video he mentions that he wants to get away from the masternode concept.

Why even go towards that route if you now want to distance yourself from it?

Seems like he did not think that through very well.

I'm not sure which question you're answering to, but I asked why it's too late? It could be changed to a clone of DOGE next week if enough people wanted it.

[TPTB_need_war]

• Immunity to 51% attack is an incorrect claim, because the block chain hash determines which quorum, thus a chain reorganization can rewrite which quorum was authorized to M of N sign.
• The instant confirmations can not be trusted because if they are on an orphaned chain (not 51% attack but just the normal process of orphan rate or even 25 - 33% selfish mining attack), then they can be reversed. This is the same reason the prior InstantX (a more limited scope for instant confirmations than Evolution because the inputs had to precommitted to the quorum yet this committed could still be overturned by an orphaned chain, a.k.a. chain reorganization) was a technical failure.

Apologies for being clueless, and I see you said that would be your last comment on this, but perhaps you or someone else can still answer - InstantX could take a hash of a block that is old enough to be considered safe from reorg, wouldn't this solve the issue?

You compel me to reply because that is a strong idea.

That will likely open up new game theory scenarios since you know a priori which quorum will receive which inputs in which future blocks. Perhaps an adversary can try to create masternodes to target inputs to accept or deny signing.

As for the claimed 51% immunity, how can one assume if the 51% that owns the mining power doesn't also own a large chunk of the masternodes thus can wreck havoc on any minority chain which desires to respect the signatures of other masternodes for which the 51% attack is not, i.e. a war between groups of masternodes.

Thus the masternodes could be restarted to by your change to infiltrate the quorums of the minority masternodes (up to the N - M + 1 threshold, another reason to set M very close to N  ), so they can remove instant transactions from the minority chain, thus making the claim of 51% immunity false.

Game theory is complex. There are likely many other scenarios of attacks.

The basic problem is using a hash to determine which masternodes are authorized (which is either subject to chain reorg or subject to game theory due to being known well in advance) combined with the fact that masternodes are not fungible but rather are entities owned and with motivation to maximize their gains.

Now having said that, masternodes earn very high payments from the block chain (I saw some chart Evan published that showed up to 50% per annum interest payments) thus I think for now the incentive is for masternodes to be cooperative. Afaics, Dash is basically designed (whether consciously or by serendipity) to funnel all the coins to the insiders over time.

But we are also discussing in the context of what would be the correct design for a coin that was not designed to be unfair and award an advantage to a few entrenched owners of the coin supply. In that case, we'd have to dump the masternodes and find a more fungible design that doesn't have these vulnerabilities. Dash may not actually have these vulnerabilities because the masternodes are making a killing by just cooperating. In a coin design where masternodes weren't leeching most of the coins away, then these game theory vulnerabilities would come into play because the masternodes would have an incentive to collude in other ways to maximize their profits. Yeah we can buy the illusion of decentralization and robust design by paying some masternodes all our coins over time. That works.