[neㄘcash, ᨇcash, net⚷eys, or viᖚes?] Name AnonyMint's vapor coin?

[TPTB_need_war]

I could explain the math for Shen's Ring Confidential Transactions in layman's terms (it really isn't that difficult at all once you think about it in terms of the properties of a modulo operation in math), but I don't have time right now to organize the prose.

Edit: after writing the following it caused me to realize I had overlooked (or conflated) a detail which changed the conclusion of my analysis as follows. Thus I will eventually be explaining the math in layman's terms for (Compact or just) Confidential Transactions and how to combine them with one-time rings of Cryptonote.

Also this is a lower priority right now for me, I now think (recently discovered) that one-time ring signatures are not tenable (against DDoS) for micro-transactions scaling level (regardless whether alone as for Cryptonote, combined with Blockstream's Confidential Transactions as Shen has published, or combined with an improved version of Denis's Compact Confidential Transactions as I claimed to have accomplished but haven't yet published).

Also one-time ring signatures do not obfuscate IP address which means correlation by IP can unmask the rings, so I now view them as a waste of time, because to obfuscate the IP addresses requires a non-autonomous form of mixing (e.g. CoinShuffle) which also provides the same function as a ringa ring function but apparently not in the presence of homomorphic sums.

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[coins101]

Interesting update. Thanks.

[TPTB_need_war]

More code released into the open source public domain:

https://github.com/shelby3

My winternitz explanation is perhaps the most accessible you will find for a layman:

https://github.com/shelby3/winternitz/blob/master/winternitz/winternitz.h

In that explanation, I think I correctly invented either an improvement to Winternitz signatures, or at least pointed out what afaics is a (just slightly) suboptimal description in the venerable Daniel Bernstein's Post Quantum Cryptography. (correction: note however that section of the book was written by Johannes Buchmann, Erik Dahmen, Michael Szydlo)

P.S. health update is I am able to work consistently and coping reasonably well (deep 8+ hours sleep daily) with the huge doses of anti-oxidant supplements (as documented upthread). I ran my 2.33 kms loop in 12:35 days ago and then 11:22 this night (7:48 per mile pace), which is not bad considering I am (approaching 50.5 age and) still chronically ill (just coping consistently enough, but still ill with the digestive tract and head symptoms lurking/threatening continuously).

Health Update again: the next day after that 11:22, I ran perhaps below 11 minutes but pressed wrong button and lost my time. I also ran 7 x 100m windsprints and did a lot of jumping (24" vertical leap these days). The next day (yesterday) I ran the 2.33 kms loop twice in one day. First in the middle of the night I registered a 11:11 time, but I was starting to accumulate fatigue from some consecutive days of running it (at roughly 80% of my current ability). Then in the hot+humid noon tropical sun, I ran approximately 12:00 and I was really gritting my teeth because I was under accumulated fatigue that comes from consecutive days of exercise (especially at my age of 50.5). But I felt pretty strong and I really was ready to go again today, but decided to let my body rest a bit.

I have discovered that all my ailments come from inflammation. When I feel the inflammation coming on, I eat the coconut milk + native raw veggies (lightly cooked in the milk) + the baby whole fish fried tuna and then take my huge doses of the anti-oxidants I listed up thread (except for the EGCG green tea extract which I take on empty stomach in between). It seems that by beating the inflammation back down every time it rears its head, I am actually starting to make improvements on my overall chronic illness. This seems to confirm that the inflammation contagion spiral causes the gut dysbiosys which is in turn symbiotically causes the inflammation. And this also ties into the inflammation in the brain. It appears to be highly correlated to deficiency in glutathione although I have no lab results to confirm anything. Just going by what happens in my body and the correlations with my treatment experiments.

So all-in-all, my athleticism may be returning a bit and also my work consistency seems to becoming very good.

My only complaint is that the anti-oxidants make me too "space cadet" (air head) too often. For example, this whole night I was trying to write up and code up the winternitz code and my brain was just in dumb mode. I couldn't make it process information. After several hours, the cobwebs abated and my brain was back to full throttle.

Really I think I been pushing too hard for too long. The volumes of research I read, etc.. My gf reminded me I haven't had a shower in 2-3 months. Literally every waking second is in front of computer screen. I really need a break, but no time for that right now. Go, go, go... push, push, push.

[tromp]

More code released into the open source public domain:

https://github.com/shelby3

Shouldn't
     (a) boolop (b) ? (a) : (b);
be
      (_a_) boolop (_b_) ? (_a_) : (_b_);
in your EFFECTLESS?

PS: I sent you a PM...

[TPTB_need_war]

More code released into the open source public domain:

https://github.com/shelby3

Shouldn't
     (a) boolop (b) ? (a) : (b);
be
      (_a_) boolop (_b_) ? (_a_) : (_b_);
in your EFFECTLESS?

PS: I sent you a PM...

Thanks (surprised that anyone actually studied my code). Afair, I actually haven't used that particular C macro (within shelby3/cmacro/effectless.h) in any code yet, so it might be incorrect and untested. I'll look and correct if necessary.

I am behind on checking PMs and will catch up soon, as well finishing the transfer of ion.cash to Aeon's assigned custodian.

Sorry I am behind on so many things, including bodily hygiene and paying my bills in the USA. Had my head down in research, coding (milestone targets before end of Nov was my goal), battling my "inflammation contagion spiral" chronic condition.


Fixed: https://github.com/shelby3/cmacros/commit/b817c6cc5a0231a0ad9bb1e71a69a15df05e4d80


Btw, the retirement of Kobe Byrant has really been weighing on my thoughts and emotions. Almost brought me to tears of emotions.

I was in Davao (writing Cool Page in a Nipa Hut and living penniless in squalor) when Kobe came to Manila in 1998. Watch those linked videos and you see a huge difference in his speed and agility then as compared to now where it is so painful to watch him play now. I never forgot how he mesmerized the fans with his fancy tricks with the ball. And also I had played on that court in the Manila mall before Kobe did (at that time you could just grab a ball and start playing on that special court in the mall and since you were a foreigner, no one had the gall to tell you to stop). I didn't know that court was in preparation for his visit, so when I was watching him from Davao on our 13" B & W television (no cable, just antennae), I was feeling a connection to that event.

What is more sobering for me is that I remembered when MJ retired around 2001 - 2004, I was in my mid to late-30s (Kobe's current age) and I do remember my altheticism started to decline slightly but not so much. I remember competing on the basketball court in Texas, USA during that time period (which was right after I lost the vision in my right eye Dec. 1, 1999 in the Philippines) and all the young kids were talking about how great Kobe is and I was "no MJ was the greatest" and I then I would try to dominate those young guys on the court as sort of a will-power call to MJ to not retire. MJ is 16 months older than me.

And so now with Kobe retiring who is like a baby compared to me, and with so many people pointing out he just can't play at that level any more, even if he wanted to, his body can't do it. So it makes me wonder, am I lying to myself? Can my body just not do coding any more (with age and chronic illness)? I have had my moments where I wanted to code longer non-stop lately and my body just can't go beyond so many hours before I become non-productive. And even sometimes after sleeping, I awake non-productive (but this is less rollercoaster than the recent horrible past). But I also remind myself that even in my late 20s and early 30s I would get terrible insomnia and dysfunction when I tried to work too many days on the computer without time off and outside.

So that is why I ran hard the past few days.

Look I played my gf's ages 20-something brothers in basketball back in March of this year. I was still ill, but felt good enough on one day to go. And one of her brothers is almost my height. All of them can jump higher than I can now by this age (they can basically fingertip touch the rim and I am just barely touching the bottom of the backboard or up to the middle of the net perhaps). But I was still somewhat competitive with them, meaning I could still guard them one-on-one and keep up with their speed, I even made a few slashing moves to the basket that demonstrated my first step speed is not entirely gone, and I was not even in any trained conditioning and I was chronically ill.

I do remember that before I got very ill back in my late 30s, I really noticed a significant decline in my endurance (e.g. I couldn't just play basketball non-stop for hours), but still I've never entirely lost my speed and power. The last time I remembered still be blazingly fast was around age 37 when I played tackle football with some young guys in Texas and I was still every bit as fast as my roughly 4.5 second 40 speed. It is difficult to analyze anything after age 40 because May 2006 was when my ex infected me with some high (abnormal) extremely virulent strain of HPV that so ravaged my body that I was never the same after that. And I do believe that was a significant factor in the cascade of factors that drove my body into this current chronic malaise that's been getting progressively worse since at least 2011. I did briefly join a flag football team in Cebu at age 41, and seemed I was still reasonably fast but also that chronic illness has started and I didn't stick with that long enough to know. I remember feeling I was still athletic at times (especially before 2012) even up to early 2015 before the "wheels fell off" my health this past July/August/September. Although I was also pretty much debilitated since May 2012.

So I am thinking that maybe I've still got hope if I can cure my chronic illness, I could still prove that I am somewhat of an exception to Father Time, as for example Evander Holyfield and others who have been (albeit drastically reduced in speed and endurance) champions at 49 or 50. Any way I am pushing 51 now. The time is slipping away.

Sobering and somewhat depressing, but also the stubborn fighter in me refuses to be defeated.

http://fbdio.com/video/tracy-mcgrady-recalls-the-exact-moment-his-body-failed-him-and-h-1284064/

[TPTB_need_war]

My winternitz explanation is perhaps the most accessible you will find for a layman:

https://github.com/shelby3/winternitz/blob/master/winternitz/winternitz.h

With a clearer mind this morning, I combed over that documentation and improved the coherence significantly. So that could now suffice as an example of how I can elucidate a technical issue for layman's comprehension (albeit lacking diagrams which would make it must faster to visualize than words can alone).

To run 2.33 kms or not run, that is the question right at this moment (4am Philippines time).

Edit: finished 11:06 (666 seconds) which is roughly 7:37 per mile pace for 1.46 miles. My legs are still slightly sore, and stomach pains were noticeable but not severe, so probably can benefit from a couple more days of no running to fully recover. 7:37 per mile is decent. I'd like to break below 7 minute mile pace, so I need 10:11. I ran 11:08 casually for 2 miles at age 17 one month after my birthday (winning that fun run on my summer vacation in my hometown New Orleans):



Which is slower than the 4:23 for 1500 meters (early in senior season) and 4:30s for 1600 meters (later in season before I tore my hamstring in senior season) I ran in high school and the 35 mins I ran for 6.2 miles (10K) in the summer after high school. I think my true mile time was below 4:30 in high school because I was running near 2 minutes flat for 800 meters before I tore my hamstring due to losing our head coach and being overtrained on hill sprinting by a volunteer coach. Even as a freshman in college after a whole summer of not exercising due to falling in love programming BASIC on an Apple II, casually ran 5 minutes flat on the track. Afair, I ran mid-10s for a 3200 meters in high school senior season, just casually running it to secure a second placing for the team points. So I was probably capable of low 10s or perhaps below 10 that season had I focused on it. I rarely ran the 3200 (~2 mile) because I was focused on the 800 and 1600 meter races (and sometimes the 400 but my best was only either afair 54 but I never trained for it). I realized watching the league championship while I was injured that I was not competitive with the top guys running low 1:50s for 800, but I was likely competitive for a top 3 placing with a sub-4:30 time for the mile. I should have focused more on the mile than the 800. At the initial semi-final heats for league championship, I tried to run the 800 with my torn hamstring (liberally loosen with Heat and bound very tight with elastic wrap and I limped to a 2:08 time (actually feeling I had a lot in my tank but I pulled up lame in the last lap and had to basically hop on one leg in). Who knows what I was really capable of that year. Horrible coaching. And I quit Track & Field after that when I arrived at college (and took up American football again). Actually going from long-distance running back to football again was very difficult because I had messed  up my fast twitch muscle fiber by doing too much long distance training. So after that I never went back fully to long distance training, because I wanted to be both quick for ball sports and have endurance.

In 2008, I placed in 2nd place here in Davao for my 35+ age group for a 5K fun run, and I believe my time was below 7 minute mile pace perhaps 6:30ish (and the course included one significant hill). But unfortunately they didn't have someone recording the times and also that was after taking DHEA (a precursor hormone) tablet that morning. Even in 2008 I was suffering malaise which was I believe the early symptoms of this chronic illness I have now. I was surprised that day how fast and strongly I ran and noticed how my malaise was intimately related to hormones (endocrine dysfunction). Around those years most of my symptoms were limited to tired and sometimes slightly swollen feet and just generally not as much energy as before the 2006 HPV infection. But not nearly as debilitating as after the May 2012 hospitalization for acute peptic ulcer and subsequent precipitous (and rollercoaster capricious) decline.

[TPTB_need_war]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

Making anonymity that is immune to the global police state is an immense challenge especially for businesses, because they can't just go hop on another anonymous WiFi connection every time they want to interact with the block chain (and that won't even help you individually with a low scale coin like Monero, because you are the only person hopping on anonymous WiFi in your geographical area so your transactions can still be correlated!). Making an IP address mixnet that is immune to a party which can see all traffic over the internet is an extremely challenging if not implausible statistically. I have been thinking deeply for a long time about the sort of attacks that are possible on mixnets and nothing (that I've analyzed) seems to entirely immune.

A generative essence realization is there is no possible way to obfuscate your IP address with an autonomous cryptographic protocol (such as RIngCT or Cryptonote). The only way to obfuscate IP addresses is with an interactive mixnet, which then either incurs a simultaneity requirement or the mixnet must generalize to many forms of internet traffic so a sufficient mix set always available. But especially generalized mixnets suffer from Sybil attacks because of the cost of scaling relaying nodes scales with traffic and DDoS. As smooth knows from our past private discussions (afair last year), my only idea on how to attack the Sybil problem of Tor and I2P is to pay the nodes you are want to relay through for an onion routing. But this comes with another set of holistic issues. So far, I haven't been able to design the system that is immune to the NSA. I am still working on this problem, but have deprioritized it, because to my consternation it is such an intractable quagmire (a.k.a. clusterfuck).

So let's say we only want privacy against other smaller corporations that don't have special access to NSA analysis. Yet now we must assume the NSA can't be hacked or individual employees bribed. And the NSA is not the only national security agency doing this. We have at least the 5 Eyes nations plus Russia and China with sophisticated, well funded national security agencies.

Can you know understand better why Martin Armstrong (and I reguritated) that a Dark Age is possible?

The world is in a pickle. I am doing my best to try to find a way out. I am now thinking perhaps anonymity is not the ticket (yet continuing to develop and consider it, as an option) and instead massive volume of micro-transactions might be more liberating. In short, to pursue my Knowledge Age theory of breaking the Theory of the Firm down to individualized production. In short, death the corporation as being too slow to even effectively use the data it is accumulating. If you read my 2010 thesis linked from the OP of the Economic Devastation thread (in the Economics forum), you can gain insight into what I am referring to where I explained that top-down access to information is not knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is accretive, spontaneous, and highly individualized.

Paradigm shift. I am apparently good at creating those, not so much at the intricate patterns of chess (too many intricacies are burdensome to the degrees-of-freedom to see over the forest). In short, I prefer deforestation paradigms.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

No, privacy from every idiot who wants to front-run you, or play amateur detective and figure out a lot of private things about your business or personal affairs and publish them. I've seen both happen on this forum.

Most businesses and people are just too obscure and unimportant to warrant much interest from the NSA or from the largest globalist corporations. But they all have nosy neighbors, with varying degrees of sophistication.

Though if the global police state does evolve to the point where everyone is a person-of-interest, then indeed it will be a dark age, and it isn't clear whether cryptography and cryptocurrencies can help with that at all. Maybe.

Don't know if you read the edit I did on my prior post.

Problem is that if anyone is collecting that data (even if the NSA has no desire to analyze it or retain it forever), they can be potentially hacked or individual employees bribed. The prize is so valuable, it nearly insures another Edward Snowden will surface yet with a profit motive to exploit that dataset. The problem is that even to collect that data means they have peeping routers all over the major backbones and these are thus vulnerable to hacking and bribes, etc..

When we live in a world where it is possible to collect all data, then the defense against bad outcomes with your data (and the greater threat than the NSA w.r.t. to data aggregation may be Google, Ad Sense, and Facebook Likes) is perhaps not to depend on the implausibility of statistical correlation (which may not be so implausible as the naive assumption, e.g. per my examples above and in the general paradigmatic category), rather perhaps to depend on keeping your assets stored in micro-granular Knowledge Creation paradigms instead of stored monetary calls on labor (which I claim is a dying paradigm). The data aggregator can't do anything with aggregated data against a micro-granular asset with attributes perhaps orthogonal to the flows of popularity. I mean everyone can see which ventures are popular and trending by numerous means such as Google metrics. Transparency aids competition which accelerates knowledge creation. The government can't tax to death a populous activity without declaring a global Dark Age (which has never occurred, i.e. even during the Dark Age in Western Europe the prosperity trended up else where).

As for being vulnerable to haters, I am surely vulnerable by posting on this forum and not being anonymous. This seems to go along with any action on the internet. I read where some teenager in the Philippines shot another teenager because of some insulting remark about a girl friend on Facebook. I am not so sure that anonymity can be holistically ubiquitous to protect me from all the potential ways the internet spreads the opportunities to be hated and not anonymous. It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth). Other than the risk of large wealth (and the obvious issues that raises) and being outspoken on the internet (and the conflicts that raises), my personal life story is a prime example of how risk to life and limb comes from chaotic, unexpected directions, so I don't know if focused on the very difficult issue of anonymous money transfer stands out as the greatest risk in most people's lives.

Any way I am not sure. So as I wrote, I am hedging my bets by still pursuing anonymity, but I have deprioritized it somewhat (not entirely) to focus more on micro-transactions.

Edit: I am contemplating whether it is possible that fungibility could be orthogonal to anonymity. Fungibility could first be defined as the ability to get your transactions into the majority consensus of the block chain, instead of a stricter definition that would require that anyone who accepts such a transaction can't be coerced nor hassled by the government nor whom ever. As long as you can get your transactions on the block chain, then if you spend them to parties that careless about coercion (e.g. in small morsels in social interactions where the government can't possibly go after every person who received a microtransaction). So instead of just anonymity designs, I have also been thinking a lot about how to insure block chain inclusion remains permissionless.

[Crestington]

Great to see some actual updates, soon we can stop calling it a vapor coin. I'll check out some of the code stuff when I have a bit of time, I am quite interested despite the light-hearted trolling.

What about actually naming it Vapor or VaporCoin? I don't think that name has been taken and can both be a little tongue and cheek, and represent anonymity.

[TPTB_need_war]

Publishing first rough draft of some "research" (more like an aggregation of data with my summaries and insights) which I had promised to deliver, DDoS Defense Employing Public Key Cryptography.

Please don't quote this post, because I will in near future edit the link (in this post) to point to more permanent version of that file after I add it to a permanent open sourced code module.

The Distributed authentication section will give some insight into some of my thoughts about the design of my cryptocurrency.

The significance of this "research" is multifold:

• First, I distill DDoS down to its generative essence and explain the relevance of authentication.
• Second, any microtransaction coin is going to have scaling issues around DDoS that are more severe than for the existing cryptocurrency designs.
• Third, I discuss some aspects of how to deal with Sybil attacks in a microtransaction cryptocurrency design.
• Fourth, I have compiled the precise data on relative performance and optimum designs for PKC signatures.

I think you can gleam from the list of references, the great depth of reading I do in my research. This should give readers some inkling that I am not a bullshitter when I claim to have written a white paper or done certain research.

P.S. yes I know cited references #23 & 24 are ______ and will be added soon. Also the cited reference #22 points to a new version of the Winternitz documentation which I haven't uploaded yet (mainly adds the bit security discussion and references). Also I want to add a section about employing proof-of-work and the tradeoffs.

To run 2.33 kms or not run, that is the question right at this moment (4am Philippines time).

Edit: finished 11:06 (666 seconds) which is roughly 7:37 per mile pace for 1.46 miles. My legs are still slightly sore, and stomach pains were noticeable but not severe, so probably can benefit from a couple more days of no running to fully recover. 7:37 per mile is decent. I'd like to break below 7 minute mile pace, so I need 10:11. I ran 11:08 casually for 2 miles at age 17 one month after my birthday (winning that fun run on my summer vacation in my hometown New Orleans):



Which is slower than the 4:23 for 1500 meters (early in senior season) and 4:30s for 1600 meters (later in season before I tore my hamstring in senior season) I ran in high school and the 35 mins I ran for 6.2 miles (10K) in the summer after high school. I think my true mile time was below 4:30 in high school because I was running near 2 minutes flat for 800 meters before I tore my hamstring due to losing our head coach and being overtrained on hill sprinting by a volunteer coach. Even as a freshman in college after a whole summer of not exercising due to falling in love programming BASIC on an Apple II, casually ran 5 minutes flat on the track. Afair, I ran mid-10s for a 3200 meters in high school senior season, just casually running it to secure a second placing for the team points. So I was probably capable of low 10s or perhaps below 10 that season had I focused on it. I rarely ran the 3200 (~2 mile) because I was focused on the 800 and 1600 meter races (and sometimes the 400 but my best was only either afair 54 but I never trained for it). I realized watching the league championship while I was injured that I was not competitive with the top guys running low 1:50s for 800, but I was likely competitive for a top 3 placing with a sub-4:30 time for the mile. I should have focused more on the mile than the 800. At the initial semi-final heats for league championship, I tried to run the 800 with my torn hamstring (liberally loosen with Heat and bound very tight with elastic wrap and I limped to a 2:08 time (actually feeling I had a lot in my tank but I pulled up lame in the last lap and had to basically hop on one leg in). Who knows what I was really capable of that year. Horrible coaching. And I quit Track & Field after that when I arrived at college (and took up American football again). Actually going from long-distance running back to football again was very difficult because I had messed  up my fast twitch muscle fiber by doing too much long distance training. So after that I never went back fully to long distance training, because I wanted to be both quick for ball sports and have endurance.

In 2008, I placed in 2nd place here in Davao for my 35+ age group for a 5K fun run, and I believe my time was below 7 minute mile pace perhaps 6:30ish (and the course included one significant hill). But unfortunately they didn't have someone recording the times and also that was after taking DHEA (a precursor hormone) tablet that morning. Even in 2008 I was suffering malaise which was I believe the early symptoms of this chronic illness I have now. I was surprised that day how fast and strongly I ran and noticed how my malaise was intimately related to hormones (endocrine dysfunction). Around those years most of my symptoms were limited to tired and sometimes slightly swollen feet and just generally not as much energy as before the 2006 HPV infection. But not nearly as debilitating as after the May 2012 hospitalization for acute peptic ulcer and subsequent precipitous (and rollercoaster capricious) decline.

Health update is that on Dec. 2 (Philippines time) when I wrote the prior quoted excerpt, I ended up at 1pm (after a grocery trip to the mall) going to outdoor basketball court at 800 meters elevation on a cloudy day (thus perhaps 80 degrees F yet still very high humidity) and practicing basketball alone very aggressively non-stop for 30 minutes or so. By aggressive, I mean running full court full sprint and jumping to flight for finger roll layups with the body contorted in all sorts of angles depending on where you end up on the approach. Mostly my jump elevation was not better than the 24" I've been measuring at home, but on one full court sprint and leap, I felt a powerful spring action and seemed I got up to mid-way on the net which would be more like 26" (or maybe I was just hallucinating, haha). I also did a lot of fall away jumpers and practiced also my full speed from standstill drives. I really felt my hamstrings were so weak, which means my legs are very out-of-condition. The next day I ran 11:44 on my 2.33 kms loop at sea level and I was really sore as expected. Yesterday and today I didn't exercise because my body was experiencing more inflammation which is expected after such intense exercise given my chronic illness. But the very positive results are A) I was able to actually do that!; B) my aggression, energy and power was very intense as what I am used to all through my life before chronic illness, and C) I did not end up in a debilitating head fog malaise the next days after, just only increase in inflammation but not a totally bezerk cascade (as had been the case past years after intense exercise).

Thus I can say I am seeing probable progress with my current treatment regimen. I am quite excited about being about to push on my athletics again! But need to see if this pattern of improvement sustains.

The icing on the cake was Kobe Byrant looking like his younger version on Wednesday (USA time) and scoring 31 points with a good percentage of made shots.

My illness appears to correlate well with the theory of glutathione/glutamate/glutamine imbalance and contagion with gut inflammed gut dysbiosys. Glutathione can only be produced in the liver and when the gut, brain, endrocine/immune/regulation system is out-of-whack, then these imbalances spiral out-of-control because the imbalances feed the construction of greater imbalances. Endotoxins can be a result and/or a contributing factor. It appears supplementation is able to moderate the duty cycle and intensity of the inflammation, thus perhaps dialing down the contagion cascade effect. Any way, that is my theory on it for now and based on what I've read and correlated with my experience thus far.

Also this narcissism if you want to call it that, is an update for those who want to know if my health will be an issue, but more so this talking about what I did and want to do, is because I can't do! If I can go out and kill myself every day for hours in sports, I won't be talking because I will be too busy doing what I am yearning to do. I love it when I feel really sore and push harder. If illness will back off so I can do that, then I won't be sitting in the chair fantasizing about doing it. It makes me crazy not to be able to do my sports. I am addicted to it.

[TPTB_need_war]

P.S. ...8<... Also I want to add a section about employing proof-of-work and the tradeoffs.

Note I finally completed that Proof-of-work hash section. I thought it would be done yesterday, but suddenly incurred our 3 hour rotating brownout (and coverage mapping), so while laying in the dark I fell asleep for 9 hours.

I think I more succinctly explained why Gregory Maxwell's suggestion/idea of employing proof-of-work for DDoS defense is not viable, or at least not robust.

[TPTB_need_war]

I may no restate my opinion that anonymity is not a priority for a currency to found the knowledge age upon, as actors would wish to create and sustain fame.
What it needs from a crypto as production entities get smaller in size and more networked is a way to orchestrate contracts with auto-orders and auto-payments that are triggered demand-side and are transmitted over a "contract-network".
Its the only way to make the jump to decentralized production, otherwise vertical and huge corps will still have the edge.

Astute. You describe some of the unique features I am designing into my "altcoin".

[OROBTC]

...

Geez, and all I thought was that NOTHING was happening in Cryptostan while I was gone.  Guess I have a LOT of reading to catch up on.

Pleased to see you moving ahead, TPTB.  With what I just saw (India & Nepal) and what I have read (NSA & FBI had ZIP on the two Paki murderers in California), I would line to see BOTH orthogonality of fungibility and and anonymity (both) in you coin.

[Crestington]

...

Geez, and all I thought was that NOTHING was happening in Cryptostan while I was gone.  Guess I have a LOT of reading to catch up on.

Pleased to see you moving ahead, TPTB.  With what I just saw (India & Nepal) and what I have read (NSA & FBI had ZIP on the two Paki murderers in California), I would line to see BOTH orthogonality of fungibility and and anonymity (both) in you coin.

I think ideally you would want to have high quality smart contracts, speed of less than 1 second transaction times, high anonymity and if possible derived from a type of Proof of Stake. I think Bitshares delegate Proof of Stake is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to adoption because everyone wants to be on the receiving end of Staking so you get more people who would want to buy traditional Proof of Stake over Delegate Proof of Stake. The problem with traditional Proof of Stake is that ongoing funding becomes a problem so you have a bit of a catch 22. When it comes to buy/sell pressure from pricing I do not like Proof of Work because it's cost intensive and weighs on price far more than in a Proof of Stake system since you have outside influences that do not have the psychological price barrier of entry so they sell at any price that is profitable, then holders sell into the downward spiral.

Inflation (or even deflation if a type of POB) model, Fees, and ongoing funding is going to be as crucial, if not more so than the anonymity and throughput you seek.

I did read your paper on the DDOS protection, a little over my head but a good read nonetheless.

[TPTB_need_war]

Uploaded more open sourced code:

https://github.com/shelby3

So that is now an open sourced quantum computing secure, optimized (but no assembly nor SIMD intrinsics code yet) hash-based cryptographic signature.

Updated the links on my prior two posts, so anyone is welcome to quote them now.

To run 2.33 kms or not run, that is the question right at this moment (4am Philippines time).

Edit: finished 11:06 (666 seconds) which is roughly 7:37 per mile pace for 1.46 miles. My legs are still slightly sore, and stomach pains were noticeable but not severe, so probably can benefit from a couple more days of no running to fully recover. 7:37 per mile is decent. I'd like to break below 7 minute mile pace, so I need 10:11. I ran 11:08 casually for 2 miles at age 17 one month after my birthday (winning that fun run on my summer vacation in my hometown New Orleans):



Which is slower than the 4:23 for 1500 meters (early in senior season) and 4:30s for 1600 meters (later in season before I tore my hamstring in senior season) I ran in high school and the 35 mins I ran for 6.2 miles (10K) in the summer after high school. I think my true mile time was below 4:30 in high school because I was running near 2 minutes flat for 800 meters before I tore my hamstring due to losing our head coach and being overtrained on hill sprinting by a volunteer coach. Even as a freshman in college after a whole summer of not exercising due to falling in love programming BASIC on an Apple II, casually ran 5 minutes flat on the track. Afair, I ran mid-10s for a 3200 meters in high school senior season, just casually running it to secure a second placing for the team points. So I was probably capable of low 10s or perhaps below 10 that season had I focused on it. I rarely ran the 3200 (~2 mile) because I was focused on the 800 and 1600 meter races (and sometimes the 400 but my best was only either afair 54 but I never trained for it). I realized watching the league championship while I was injured that I was not competitive with the top guys running low 1:50s for 800, but I was likely competitive for a top 3 placing with a sub-4:30 time for the mile. I should have focused more on the mile than the 800. At the initial semi-final heats for league championship, I tried to run the 800 with my torn hamstring (liberally loosen with Heat and bound very tight with elastic wrap and I limped to a 2:08 time (actually feeling I had a lot in my tank but I pulled up lame in the last lap and had to basically hop on one leg in). Who knows what I was really capable of that year. Horrible coaching. And I quit Track & Field after that when I arrived at college (and took up American football again). Actually going from long-distance running back to football again was very difficult because I had messed  up my fast twitch muscle fiber by doing too much long distance training. So after that I never went back fully to long distance training, because I wanted to be both quick for ball sports and have endurance.

In 2008, I placed in 2nd place here in Davao for my 35+ age group for a 5K fun run, and I believe my time was below 7 minute mile pace perhaps 6:30ish (and the course included one significant hill). But unfortunately they didn't have someone recording the times and also that was after taking DHEA (a precursor hormone) tablet that morning. Even in 2008 I was suffering malaise which was I believe the early symptoms of this chronic illness I have now. I was surprised that day how fast and strongly I ran and noticed how my malaise was intimately related to hormones (endocrine dysfunction). Around those years most of my symptoms were limited to tired and sometimes slightly swollen feet and just generally not as much energy as before the 2006 HPV infection. But not nearly as debilitating as after the May 2012 hospitalization for acute peptic ulcer and subsequent precipitous (and rollercoaster capricious) decline.

Health update is that on Dec. 2 (Philippines time) when I wrote the prior quoted excerpt, I ended up at 1pm (after a grocery trip to the mall) going to outdoor basketball court at 800 meters elevation on a cloudy day (thus perhaps 80 degrees F yet still very high humidity) and practicing basketball alone very aggressively non-stop for 30 minutes or so. By aggressive, I mean running full court full sprint and jumping to flight for finger roll layups with the body contorted in all sorts of angles depending on where you end up on the approach. Mostly my jump elevation was not better than the 24" I've been measuring at home, but on one full court sprint and leap, I felt a powerful spring action and seemed I got up to mid-way on the net which would be more like 26" (or maybe I was just hallucinating, haha). I also did a lot of fall away jumpers and practiced also my full speed from standstill drives. I really felt my hamstrings were so weak, which means my legs are very out-of-condition. The next day I ran 11:44 on my 2.33 kms loop at sea level and I was really sore as expected. Yesterday and today I didn't exercise because my body was experiencing more inflammation which is expected after such intense exercise given my chronic illness. But the very positive results are A) I was able to actually do that!; B) my aggression, energy and power was very intense as what I am used to all through my life before chronic illness, and C) I did not end up in a debilitating head fog malaise the next days after, just only increase in inflammation but not a totally bezerk cascade (as had been the case past years after intense exercise).

Thus I can say I am seeing probable progress with my current treatment regimen. I am quite excited about being about to push on my athletics again! But need to see if this pattern of improvement sustains.

The icing on the cake was Kobe Byrant looking like his younger version on Wednesday (USA time) and scoring 31 points with a good percentage of made shots.

My illness appears to correlate well with the theory of glutathione/glutamate/glutamine imbalance and contagion with gut inflammed gut dysbiosys. Glutathione can only be produced in the liver and when the gut, brain, endrocine/immune/regulation system is out-of-whack, then these imbalances spiral out-of-control because the imbalances feed the construction of greater imbalances. Endotoxins can be a result and/or a contributing factor. It appears supplementation is able to moderate the duty cycle and intensity of the inflammation, thus perhaps dialing down the contagion cascade effect. Any way, that is my theory on it for now and based on what I've read and correlated with my experience thus far.

Also this narcissism if you want to call it that, is an update for those who want to know if my health will be an issue, but more so this talking about what I did and want to do, is because I can't do! If I can go out and kill myself every day for hours in sports, I won't be talking because I will be too busy doing what I am yearning to do. I love it when I feel really sore and push harder. If illness will back off so I can do that, then I won't be sitting in the chair fantasizing about doing it. It makes me crazy not to be able to do my sports. I am addicted to it.

So the evening of the prior post I ran my 2.33 kms during our 2.5 hour scheduled brownout, at just a relaxed pace. Because my inflamation was getting really bad yesterday afternoon and evening. My legs were all swollen and my head ached like someone was hitting me with a bat every time I chewed. During that run I almost went blind. I could see the blue "floater" closing from a pacman like shape to eventually obscuring all my field-of-vision in the left eye (90% blind in my right eye since 1999). When the power came back on at 8pm, I got really pissed off and took like an overdose of my anti-oxidant supplements, including for the first time taking 3 x 400mg of curcumin (turmeric) extract with my coconut milk. Also took 2000mg of vitamin C which I hadn't done since 2014. Also many other supplements and I think 400mg of niacin as nicotinic acid (not niacinamide) in one dose. Don't know if it is was that specific curcumin supplement, but it is known to block specific enzymes that cause inflammation, but what something worked. The inflammation was reduced and I ended up getting my libido back and making love for the first time in a couple of months.

And then at 11am today in the hot tropic sun I ran my 2.33 kms with very sore legs in 11:40. Actually that is my fastest time yet without stopping and I had considerable abdominal pain (symptom of my chronic illness) towards the end of that run. My prior 11:11 time was with two (few seconds) stops along the run and also was run in the cooler nighttime. Then we had out brownout at 3:30pm and I played basketball for 30 minutes at sealevel in our subdivision. This was the first time I was hitting > 50% of my jumpshots in years. At one point I made 3 of 4 of the 3 pointers was a few feet behind the arc (i.e. Step Curry range). I was making 3 and 4 shots in a row from inside the arc. And remember I am blind in my formerly stronger (right) eye. When I arrived back at the house after the brownout, the power was back on after only 1 hour brownout. So I was able to upload the latest code.

Update: tonight having considerable sensations (numbness and pressure) of inflammation coming at the back of my head. Did the 4 x 400mg of curcumin in coconut milk with black pepper and my other supplements. That seemed to calm it down some, but not entirely. Will probably take more supplements when eat again later. Having no difficulty concentrating and working.

[TPTB_need_war]

I think ideally you would want to have high quality smart contracts, speed of less than 1 second transaction times, high anonymity and if possible derived from a type of Proof of Stake.

Of those only 1 second transactions are my first priority, and some other priorities you didn't mention. Once you see what I am up to marketing wise, then I think you will understand why.

I think Bitshares delegate Proof of Stake is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to adoption because everyone wants to be on the receiving end of Staking so you get more people who would want to buy traditional Proof of Stake over Delegate Proof of Stake.

The fact that PoS can't do distribution is one of its major hindrances. As people lose their private keys, the currency is highly deflationary which is very bad for encouraging people to spend and use the currency, and use for exchange is what makes the network effects spread the most.

The other hindrance for PoS is that it is impossible for it to be secure without centralized control. Proof-of-stake coins work because they are just private clubs, so there is an apparency of security.  I will in the future try to outline (in a future paper) specifically how and why the security of these PoS coins will fail.

The problem with traditional Proof of Stake is that ongoing funding becomes a problem so you have a bit of a catch 22.

It is going to be difficult to fund these crypto projects that don't have widespread adoption. I don't think the paradigm of mining debasement has much to do with it. If a project is widely adopted, the devs will get funded one way or the other.

When it comes to buy/sell pressure from pricing I do not like Proof of Work because it's cost intensive and weighs on price far more than in a Proof of Stake system since you have outside influences that do not have the psychological price barrier of entry so they sell at any price that is profitable, then holders sell into the downward spiral.

Agreed this is a problem when there is a huge double-digit percentage annual debasement due to PoW that is mostly ending up in professional miners hands. The professional miners locate their latest model ASICs next to hydropower plants have 1/4 the electricity costs (compared to residential) and 1/100th - 1/1000th (for a specially designed PoW hash function such as the one I will soon release, not SHA) the computational costs compared to general CPU at home, thus their cost of mining for example a Bitcoin is less than $50 each. They will always have an incentive to add more resources to capture a greater percentage of the mined coins.

But that isn't the only way to structure PoW mining.

There are two ways to deal with this problem:

1) Force every user to submit PoW with their transactions, i.e. no transaction gets on the block chain without PoW attached. Note getting this sort of design to be robust, requires an entirely different way of structuring a block chain. If the attached PoW is low enough difficulty, then it costs more to farm it out (network latency cost) than to mine it locally given it is an insignificant and unnoticeable cost.

2) Limit debasement to a small annual percentage.

In that case, the professional miner will not be able to mine a significant quantity of the coins, and they will not be selling a significant percentage of the market cap. Thus the downward pressure on the price that impacts Bitcoin will be abated.

I did read your paper on the DDOS protection, a little over my head but a good read nonetheless.

For a decentralized cryptocurrency design to do micro-transaction (1 second) block chain that isn't just a set of private servers (which is basically what a PoS system is, such as DPOS), then DDoS is one of the major design hurdles. I am nearly certain that if someone wants to DDoS attack Bitshares, they could do so effectively, because there is one designated server responsible for processing each block.

If there is a sufficiently liquid market for Bitshares, then it could be potentially profitable to short it and DDoS attack it. But as I understand, most of the market caps at coinmarketcap.com are just an illusion. The volume is fake and created by the insiders who own most of the coins, trading to themselves. Thus there really isn't a liquid market and thus you can't really profit by attacking these altcoins, because their markets are actually tiny. It is all a mirage.

Now if you plan to create a currency with millions of users and deep liquidity, then you indeed have to be concerned about DDoS attacks, because they will surely be incentivized.

Apology I didn't really consider the layman when composing that document. I was more interested in making all the key points as concisely and as abstractly generalized as possible. As marketing goes on, those aspects that need to be explained more carefully to laymen, can be.

[Crestington]

I think ideally you would want to have high quality smart contracts, speed of less than 1 second transaction times, high anonymity and if possible derived from a type of Proof of Stake.

Of those only 1 second transactions are my first priority, and some other priorities you didn't mention. Once you see what I am up to marketing wise, then I think you will understand why.

I think Bitshares delegate Proof of Stake is a bit of a hindrance when it comes to adoption because everyone wants to be on the receiving end of Staking so you get more people who would want to buy traditional Proof of Stake over Delegate Proof of Stake.

The fact that PoS can't do distribution is one of its major hindrances. As people lose their private keys, the currency is highly deflationary which is very bad for encouraging people to spend and use the currency, and use for exchange is what makes the network effects spread the most.

The other hindrance for PoS is that it is impossible for it to be secure without centralized control. Proof-of-stake coins work because they are just private clubs, so there is an apparency of security.  I will in the future try to outline (in a future paper) specifically how and why the security of these PoS coins will fail.

The problem with traditional Proof of Stake is that ongoing funding becomes a problem so you have a bit of a catch 22.

It is going to be difficult to fund these crypto projects that don't have widespread adoption. I don't think the paradigm of mining debasement has much to do with it. If a project is widely adopted, the devs will get funded one way or the other.

When it comes to buy/sell pressure from pricing I do not like Proof of Work because it's cost intensive and weighs on price far more than in a Proof of Stake system since you have outside influences that do not have the psychological price barrier of entry so they sell at any price that is profitable, then holders sell into the downward spiral.

Agreed this is a problem when there is a huge double-digit percentage annual debasement due to PoW that is mostly ending up in professional miners hands. The professional miners locate their latest model ASICs next to hydropower plants have 1/4 the electricity costs (compared to residential) and 1/100th - 1/1000th (for a specially designed PoW hash function such as the one I will soon release, not SHA) the computational costs compared to general CPU at home, thus their cost of mining for example a Bitcoin is less than $50 each. They will always have an incentive to add more resources to capture a greater percentage of the mined coins.

But that isn't the only way to structure PoW mining.

There are two ways to deal with this problem:

1) Force every user to submit PoW with their transactions, i.e. no transaction gets on the block chain without PoW attached. Note getting this sort of design to be robust, requires an entirely different way of structuring a block chain. If the attached PoW is low enough difficulty, then it costs more to farm it out (network latency cost) than to mine it locally given it is an insignificant and unnoticeable cost.

2) Limit debasement to a small annual percentage.

In that case, the professional miner will not be able to mine a significant quantity of the coins, and they will not be selling a significant percentage of the market cap. Thus the downward pressure on the price that impacts Bitcoin will be abated.

I did read your paper on the DDOS protection, a little over my head but a good read nonetheless.

For a decentralized cryptocurrency design to do micro-transaction (1 second) block chain that isn't just a set of private servers (which is basically what a PoS system is, such as DPOS), then DDoS is one of the major design hurdles. I am nearly certain that if someone wants to DDoS attack Bitshares, they could do so effectively, because there is one designated server responsible for processing each block.

If there is a sufficiently liquid market for Bitshares, then it could be potentially profitable to short it and DDoS attack it. But as I understand, most of the market caps at coinmarketcap.com are just an illusion. The volume is fake and created by the insiders who own most of the coins, trading to themselves. Thus there really isn't a liquid market and thus you can't really profit by attacking these altcoins, because their markets are actually tiny. It is all a mirage.

Now if you plan to create a currency with millions of users and deep liquidity, then you indeed have to be concerned about DDoS attacks, because they will surely be incentivized.

Apology I didn't really consider the layman when composing that document. I was more interested in making all the key points as concisely and as abstractly generalized as possible. As marketing goes on, those aspects that need to be explained more carefully to laymen, can be.

Thank you for answering my questions. I have a few more, apologies if I may be repeating myself. I am genuinely interested in Blockchain Tech, maybe my questions can be of some help in some way.

How would you cope if the uptake is not as strong as you had hoped and funding becomes an issue?

What would happen to the project in the event that you are unable to continue working on it due to health problems?

Is it mainly anonymity, transaction times and DDOS protection you are aiming for? What type of feature sets are you looking to include beyond that?

If working with POW, how will you incentivize mining enough in order to secure the Blockchain?

[TPTB_need_war]

How would you cope if the uptake is not as strong as you had hoped and funding becomes an issue?

By that point everything will be open sourced, so if there is any value in the work then it can be picked up in whole or in part by others. If any opportunities for paid work (or even my own profitable entrepreneurial venture) come to me from that, then I will have still succeeded personally as well, even though have failed on my wide-scale adoption aspirations.

Also it is very likely I will continue to receive some funding from angel investors if I have shown that much, because there just are not many top flight developers working on altcoins that can radically challenge the status quo in terms of fundamental tech. You can I guess include smooth and a few others in that short list.

And smooth and I talk (not so much recently because I've had my head down trying to show something other than bad health and I told him I didn't want to bind together at such as early stage where I need flexibility and don't want to put anyone else at risk for my rapidly changing/advancing decisions in a leadership role), so there is perhaps a possibility that whom ever of us is most successful at getting an altcoin platform rolling with the greatest momentum, will be capable of convincing the other to join. For example code I am developing might end up in other projects and me joining them, or vice versa. The open sourced code I've published thus far is highly modularized, so it is easy to integrate with any project not just my own.

Also my viral marketing strategy seems to me to be very solid. I am excited to see how it will work out. So I am not planning on failing with it.

What would happen to the project in the event that you are unable to continue working on it due to health problems?

Ditto as above.

My health seems to improving. It is no where near as bad as it was in August and September. And improved over October. I am sleeping well every day and working with a good concentration for more than 8 hours daily consistently. I am still having problems with inflammation (autoimmunity) that attacks all over my body including gut, head, and legs (peripheral neuropathy) which seems to uptick with exercise as it always had over the past years. The difference lately is I've got a treatment and diet regiment that seems to contain it such that it doesn't send me into an insomnia and non-productivity spiral. I need more weeks to confirm the consistency of this improvement. For example, I just awoke from 8 hours sleep and the inflammation at the back of my head from last night is abdated. I would still prefer the inflammation to be gone entirely and to be able to train sports intensely hours per day, but heck I am 50.4 years old so my sports (even ill) is already more than many 50 year olds.

Is it mainly anonymity, transaction times and DDOS protection you are aiming for? What type of feature sets are you looking to include beyond that?

Anonymity is on the back burner. You can see my post yesterday (Zero Knowledge Transactions thread) about Zerocash which looks like the most promising technology to integrate in the future. But that would slow me down too much to make that a first priority.

My priority focus for now are the features I need for wide-scale marketing adoption and the distributed (and decentralized) block chain design. I am not going to detail those before I release, for reasons of competing altcoins. I will move quickly towards launch, because much development can be ongoing after a marketing launch.

I am trying to design a block chain that can be adapted to any new features with soft forks, or even viewed as user-level addons. So that adding features can be done orthogonal to the block chain design. I want to lock the block chain design in stone asap (hopefully within on the order ofa year of launch).

To give you one example of a feature for wide-scale marketing adoption, I don't want users to have to store their data any where. I want it to always be available for them on the block chain. All they need to remember is one password (and that can be a very strong one for those who have large balances or a weak one for those who are just toying around with the micro-transactions concept). Also payments won't be made to hexadecimal address, but rather to an email address just like Paypal.

So joining this currency will be as simple as loading a webpage and logging in. But you can login from any site that reads the block chain for you, not just one particular website.  This is radical user friendliness (n00b ease-of-adoption) improvement over Bitcoin, Monero, etc..

Again let me emphasize again that the marketing launch will not be targeted to investors and speculators, but rather to users (including both consumers and businesses) of micro-transactions. This is how I can claim strongly that this will not be an unregistered investment security. I am creating a software and token system for users and it will be distributed to them, not to investors and speculators. If any of you manage to get some tokens, you will get them in the same way that other users do, until a secondary exchange market opens for them (and I won't be encouraging such a secondary market and will try to prevent/discourage it from being on exchanges for up to 1 year). Obviously I can't stop the free market from creating a secondary exchange, but my goal is exactly the opposite of most who try to as quickly as possible get listed on an exchange. If you want to get some of these tokens, you will be committing to hold them for a long time and/or spend them in micro-transactions, but not having an exchange available for pump & dump type activity.

If working with POW, how will you incentivize mining enough in order to secure the Blockchain?

In my block chain design, the 51% attack is fairly impotent because the minority can objectively ignore it if it attempts to unwind activity that was already confirmed. The longest chain could for a long time refuse to include already confirmed transactions, but if it attempts to unwind or double-spend already published confirmations, then the minority chain will fork off from the majority chain and ignore it as fraudulent. In my design, you need 100% of the PoW in order to snuff out the minority. This was one of my crucial goals for permissionless commerce.

The only point of PoW in my design is to provide the entropy to allocate resources so there is a single-point-of-truth on the current distributed resource set for distributed block chain confirmation. Some weeks ago, I stated that inertia could accomplish this alone without any PoW, but this was flawed. Without any PoW at all, there is no trustless objectivity on which resources are valid. However, unlike Satoshi's design, I am not using PoW to confirm transactions. One of the implications in my design is that propagation of data is crucial and thus an objective truth about who is not propagating has to be established. Afaics, this can't be accomplished with an adhoc P2P network where data propagates over several peer hops.

That is the most detail I have released on my design thus far. So I will stop for now, until actually at marketing launch.

[TPTB_need_war]

This might not be an issue at all, but gmaxwell seems to imply here that there might be a vulnerability in the way segregated witness is implemented in BBR:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3vq8hm/multiple_new_bip_proposals_coming_up_on_day_2_of/cxpxi5t

Is this something to be worried about? Does it potentially impact other CryptoNote coins or just Boolberry?

All they are saying there is that if you want to prune the signature data, you need to still keep a hash of the signature data in the chain of hashes (of Merkle trees) for the blocks. In other words, you need to still be able to prove which signature signed which transaction, even if you've actually discarded the signature data.

I believe BBR already does the correct thing. And afaik, Monero does not discard signature data, but I could be wrong about that. If they do, I assume they would do the right thing as well.

BBR does not include a hash of the signature data in the blockchain. I'm not sure what exactly are the alleged vulnerabilities either, but I've always been uncomfortable with it, as I said way back in the 2014 BCX free-for-all thread.

Monero does not have any kind of segregated witness so no issue there.

I think the original motivation was to remove signatures from the data that is hashed so as to make the hash of the transaction (the TX ID) orthogonal to the signature data, so as to deal with malleability since due to the use of ECDSA there are two versions of the same signature that are equivalent (one of the reasons Wuille says he wants to replace them Schnorr signatures instead).

But then to do what they are calling a "segregated witness", the security model changes from every node verifying every detail for themselves, to every node assuming that some node will publish a proof-of-cheating if any activity was incorrect. In other words, these non-full nodes are able to maintain a UTXO (and thus aren't as dumb as SPV lite nodes) but don't verify every signature themselves. So in order to construct that proof-of-cheating, there must be a means to refer to which transaction on the block chain an invalid signature applied to which can be proven because of including a hash of the signature in the block chain. So in other words, malleability only applies until the transaction gets into the block chain. Once it is in the block chain, it is safe to hash the signature data and this enables segregated witness to function as intended.

Apparently BBR is including the signatures in the hash of the TX ID. Cryptonote doesn't have the malleability issue due to ECDSA because CN employs ed25519  which is an Edwards curve (variant of Schnorr). BBR isn't really doing a segregated witness. Rather BBR just discards signature data after assuming all full nodes had verified enough blocks of history. This is just checkpointing with lossy compression. Whereas, segregated witness is where all nodes don't verify the signatures and proof-of-cheating is used as the security model instead. Remember smooth, I had told you my design required a change in the security model.

However, I don't think Bitcoin can implement segregated witness correctly:

---8<---

One of the implications in my design is that propagation of data is crucial and thus an objective truth about who is not propagating has to be established. Afaics, this can't be accomplished with an adhoc P2P network where data propagates over several peer hops.

Wuille admitted this:

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/segregated-witness-and-its-impact-on-scalability/

So your security assumption goes from not being sybilled, and no miner collusion, goes to "and I am not censored from other nodes which altogether do 100% validation" (for receiving fraud proofs).

This is a far-more scalable full-node or partial-full-node model that we could evolve to. It's a security tradeoff. It's certainly not one that everyone would want to make, but it doesn't effect those who wouldn't want that.

Which I think is why they are not proposing for segregated witness to exist without the current security model still in force. And I think once they dig down in DDoS, they will realize you can't mix the two.

This is why I say Bitcoin can't graft this on. It is stuck where it is. We will need an altcoin to start over from scratch. (well I've been wrong before about certain details, so wait for me to write a very detailed paper before assuming this is certain)

Note I had mentioned to you in private weeks (or months?) ago that I had discovered a way to restore the security model to equivalent of Satoshi's. I thought I had. But once I dug into the details of DDoS, I found issues.

[Hueristic]

....

Agreed this is a problem when there is a huge double-digit percentage annual debasement due to PoW that is mostly ending up in professional miners hands. The professional miners locate their latest model ASICs next to hydropower plants have 1/4 the electricity costs (compared to residential) and 1/100th - 1/1000th (for a specially designed PoW hash function such as the one I will soon release, not SHA) the computational costs compared to general CPU at home, thus their cost of mining for example a Bitcoin is less than $50 each. They will always have an incentive to add more resources to capture a greater percentage of the mined coins.

But that isn't the only way to structure PoW mining.

There are two ways to deal with this problem:

1) Force every user to submit PoW with their transactions, i.e. no transaction gets on the block chain without PoW attached. Note getting this sort of design to be robust, requires an entirely different way of structuring a block chain. If the attached PoW is low enough difficulty, then it costs more to farm it out (network latency cost) than to mine it locally given it is an insignificant and unnoticeable cost.

2) Limit debasement to a small annual percentage.

In that case, the professional miner will not be able to mine a significant quantity of the coins, and they will not be selling a significant percentage of the market cap. Thus the downward pressure on the price that impacts Bitcoin will be abated....

Why not just use copyrighted cpu extensions that are illegal for manufacturers to produce without Intel and or AMd licensing?

[monsterer]

There are two ways to deal with this problem:

1) Force every user to submit PoW with their transactions, i.e. no transaction gets on the block chain without PoW attached. Note getting this sort of design to be robust, requires an entirely different way of structuring a block chain. If the attached PoW is low enough difficulty, then it costs more to farm it out (network latency cost) than to mine it locally given it is an insignificant and unnoticeable cost.

2) Limit debasement to a small annual percentage.

In that case, the professional miner will not be able to mine a significant quantity of the coins, and they will not be selling a significant percentage of the market cap. Thus the downward pressure on the price that impacts Bitcoin will be abated.

The reason for the block reward is to subsidise the security of the blockchain. In bitcoin, each transaction would need to pay $7 of transaction fees to achieve the level of security that it currently enjoys, without block reward.

Point 1 - if only transaction submitters can mine their own blocks, how do you handle difficulty adjustment?

Point 2 - If it is not profitable to mine the chain, how do you achieve the same level of security as with a subsidised chain?