[ANN][DCR] Decred - Community Governance | Bitcoin Devs | Lightning Network

[metallicelmo]

By the way has anyone ever bought a  "NEW" ASIC?

Have fun with your used toy  

I had two Butterfly Labs ASICs for Bitcoin once. Unfortunately they arrived 6 months later than planned so when I got them they were almost obsolete. Sold them to a another guy two weeks later after mining with them

[Wind_FURY]

November News Round-up

https://medium.com/decred/november-news-round-up-87c20de5d281
Yet again, it’s been another busy few months for Decred! In the wake of the Atomic Swap release we’ve had several new developers jump aboard, three new exchange listings, a growing presence at conferences and events, and a new Decred community YouTube show. We’ve also had the release of the new Decred website, the start and end of the Lightning Network activation vote, the unveiling of the Politeia platform, and the news that ASICs will be coming to Decred! Furthermore, I’m pleased to announce that due to an increase in staking participation the circulating supply of Decred has officially dropped over the last two months!

Thanks for posting. I want to know how far ahead is Decred in releasing its own implementation of the Lightning Network compared to Bitcoin?

I am a believer of Lightning and offchain as the only solution to scale cryptocurrencies. The first coin to do it will profusely reward its investors in my opinion.

[Janaj]

You can see chart Decred on PumpSignal http://www.*****coinbot.me/PumpSignal.rar

Win32.Trojan.WisdomEyes.16070401.9500.9898

[Anon11073]

I came to this thread for a long time.
Currently DCR seems to aim for the moon...

[smeee]

Thanks for posting. I want to know how far ahead is Decred in releasing its own implementation of the Lightning Network compared to Bitcoin?

I am a believer of Lightning and offchain as the only solution to scale cryptocurrencies. The first coin to do it will profusely reward its investors in my opinion.

Lightning will be incorporated in block 189567 - in the next few days

it may be one of the reasons for the rising price

though listing on upbit korean exchange might also be helping

I would suggest you keep current with the news on the blog - https://thedecreddigest.com/

and then discuss on the DeCRed reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/decred/ or this firum

[metallicelmo]

So Decred is up in price this week, anything new coming?

[amktt]

how is the lightning network doing ?? can someone in this community explain it ?

[reffi]

how is the lightning network doing ?? can someone in this community explain it ?

I think it means the transactions will be almost instant, like speed of lighning, but maybe I am wrong.

[revelacaogr]

Decred Assembly - Ep16 - Decred and ASICs Part II

http://video.genyoutube.net/8TPFIVYy_i4

[voteformeg]

By the way has anyone ever bought a  "NEW" ASIC?

Have fun with your used toy 

well i ordered 1 just in case , i know about another coin and what happened when asic's arrived , whish i bought my asic's for that one in earlier days ,

even when they where used , there was a time that the ROI was 6 days or less so i just give it a try

[denysrodman]

Detailed Analysis of Decred Fork Resistance
There have been several questions regarding how Decred makes minority forked coins, in the sense of Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold, extremely difficult without majority stakeholder approval, and, for all intents and purposes, impossible without also destroying the hybrid nature of the system in the process.
In order to try and explain why this is the case, the following is an analysis that first describes the important aspects of the system as they relate to this topic and then walks through the process of what would happen in a fork attempt under the worst case scenario.
Preliminaries
The Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system works by locking up chunks of coins into what is called a ticket. These tickets function as the fundamental building block which allows stakeholders to participate in governance. Once acquired, all tickets are placed into a pool of live tickets after a maturity period. This pool is known as the live ticket pool and has a target size of 40960, but it can grow larger or shrink as tickets are added and removed throughout the course of operation, and the ticket price (stake difficulty) is adjusted, per supply and demand, to try to maintain that target pool size. This is covered more in depth in DCP0001 for readers who want a more thorough treatment.
The consensus rules enforce a ticket selection algorithm that works to ensure that ticket selection is both random and impossible for miners to manipulate. It achieves this by pseudorandomly selecting 5 tickets from the aforementioned live ticket pool which are eligible to vote on the previous block and that at least 3 of them must be included. The subsidy is reduced if only 3 or 4 votes are included, by 20% and 40%, respectively, in order to discourage miners from ignoring votes and otherwise attempting to game the system. A detailed treatment of the theory behind each of these parameters is beyond the scope of this post, however, it primarily has to do with protection against various adversarial situations.
Further, the pseudorandom ticket selection process is primarily based on seeding it with the hash of the block it's voting on. This implies that, if you're building, say block 100000, on top of block 99999 (hash 00000000000000dab92a8a0c0e706eb74115f0f373669c01ffb4882f9555f494), the chosen votes are known to every other full node on the network and can't be changed without going back to find a new solution to block 99999 such that it has a different hash (say 00000000000004289d9a7b0f7a332fb60a1c221faae89a107ce3abbd186c386c), which in turn will cause a new set of 5 tickets to be selected for voting eligibility.
Step-by-step Walkthrough
Scenario, Assumptions, and Methodology
With all of that in mind, let's walk through an attempt to create a minority fork that the majority stakeholders don't agree with. Let's also assume that both sides of the attempted fork have equal hash power (so 50% hash power on each fork). Given that a successful vote requires 75% stakeholder approval, in the worst case, 75% of the stakeholders are on the majority chain, while 25% are on the minority chain. Further, let's assume the most recent block at the point of the fork is block 99999. Thus both side of the fork are working on trying to find block 100000, one side on the minority rule set, the other side on the majority rule set. Finally, in order to simplify the description and make it easier to follow the logic, since only 25% of the stakeholders are on the minority chain, let's say that every 4th ticket in the live ticket pool is a stakeholder on the minority chain and the rest are on the majority chain. In other words, ticket numbers 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, ..., 40956 are tickets in the live pool which represent stakeholders on the minority chain, while ticket numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, ..., 40957, 40958, 40959, are tickets in the live pool which represent stakeholders on the majority chain.
Block 100000
The following is the sequence of events that will happen:
The hash power on both chains will try to build a new block on top of block 99999.
Per the above description, in order for this new block to be built on the minority chain, it needs to acquire at least 3 votes from the live ticket pool and the selected votes depend on block 99999.
The tickets required to build block 100000, which is based on 99999 are ticket numbers 17113, 17331, 21307, 21328, 24903.
As we can see, 4 out of those 5 tickets are stakeholders on the majority chain (ticket numbers 17113, 17331, 21307, and 24903), which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100000 on the majority chain.
The minority chain is only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 21328), so it can't build a block 100000, instead, it must go back and find a new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of tickets to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows. The parentheses with the * in this notation indicate blocks that are being worked on.
... -> 99999 -> (100000*)   <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999a*)            <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100000, while the minority chain is stuck trying to find a new block for 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes. Since, per our thought experiment, both chains have equal hash power, we can safely assume that, on average, both block 100000 on the majority chain a new block 99999 (call it 99999a) on the minority chain will be found around the same time.
Block 100001
As the point, the following will happen:
The hash power on the majority chain will try to build a new block on top of the majority chain's block 100000. The votes required for this block are ticket numbers 563, 6766, 21009, 37394, 37775.
This time around all 5 out of those 5 tickets happen to be stakeholders on the majority chain, which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100000 on the majority chain which allows block 100001 to be built.
The minority chain, now with a new version of block 99999 (99999a) has a new hash, so it ends up requiring ticket numbers 1069, 8007, 16413, 19172, 31821.
The minority chain is still only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 19172), so it must once again go back and find yet another new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of tickets to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows:
... -> 99999 -> 100000 -> (100001*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999b*)                     <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100001, while the minority chain is still stuck trying to find yet another new solution for block 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes. Since, per our thought experiment, both chains have equal hash power, we can again safely assume that, on average, both block 100001 on the majority chain a new block 99999 (call it 99999b) on the minority chain will be found around the same time.
Block 100002
As the point, the following will happen:
The hash power on the majority chain will try to build a new block on top of the majority chain's block 100001. The votes required for this block are ticket numbers 174, 1999, 12808, 31928, 38317.
This time, 3 out of those 5 tickets are stakeholders on the majority chain (ticket numbers 174, 1999, 38317), which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100001 on the majority chain.
The minority chain, now with a new version of block 99999 (99999b) has a new hash, so it ends up requiring ticket numbers 4653, 15211, 29988, 35175, 35665.
The minority chain is still only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 29988), so it must once again go back and find yet another new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of votes to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows:
... -> 99999 -> 100000 -> 100001 -> (100002*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999c*)                               <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100002, while the minority chain is still stuck trying to find yet another new solution for block 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes.
Fast-forward to Block 100010
The process repeats until, eventually, some variant of block 99999 on the minority chain gets lucky and happens to select 3 tickets that are on the minority chain. This turns out to be roughly 1 in 10 tries. So, fast forwarding a bit to see the chain by the time this happens, the chains would look as follows:
... -> 99999  -> 100000 -> 100001 -> 100002 -> ... -> 100009 -> (100010*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> 99999j -> (100000a*)                                                <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
It should be pretty clear, since both chains have equal hash power, there is no way the minority chain can now ever catch up to the majority chain. Furthermore, the same process is going to repeat for the minority chain's block 100001 where it go back and remine (find new solutions) for its block 100000 over and over until it gets a lucky draw again such that it gets the 3 votes it needs. Consequently, miners are not going to stay on the minority chain because they're never going to be able to become the majority chain and hence would be mining for free.
Common objections
What if the minority chain gets more than 10x the hash power of the main chain?
Theoretically, if the minority chain with only 25% stakeholder approval had 10x the hash power of the main chain, yes, it could keep up with the majority chain, however, this is not a realistic scenario because of the economic incentives. Mining the minority chain with 10x the hash power effectively means the miners would only be getting 1/10 of the subsidy as they would on the majority chain based on hash power alone, but it's reduced even further by being 1/10 of 60% of the subsidy due to only being able to acquire 3 votes on average. In other words, miners would only receive 6% of the rewards they would by mining the majority chain, or looking it from the other way, they would receive 94% less by mining the minority chain.
Putting that into numbers, if a miner had, say 5% of the total network hash power, they could expect to receive roughly 5% of the PoW subsidy per block, or 5% of ~13.89 ~= 0.6945 DCR at the current time. However, on the minority chain, first the subsidy would be 60% of ~13.89 ~= 8.334 DCR, and then that 5% hash power would only be 0.5% of the total hash power on the minority chain, thus 0.5% of ~8.334 ~= 0.04167 DCR. Thus, we can see that 0.04167 DCR is indeed 6% of 0.6945 DCR.
PoW mining is very competitive since it is a zero sum game. Most miners, especially those without huge advantages such as free electricity, have very thin margins and are often banking on future appreciation to pick up the slack. Miners would actually have to pay money to mine the minority chain due to the aforementioned effective 94% reduction in income.
Can't somebody just change the consensus rules to ignore the stakeholders?
Yes, it is theoretically possible to do this, but doing so would completely destroy the hybrid system and return the forked currency to effectively being a pure Proof-of-Work system thereby removing any value of the system. It would also undoubtedly no longer be Decred, since, unlike in a pure PoW coin where nobody can really say which chain is the "real" one and which isn't due to lack of a provable and formalized governance system, Decred has a very clear and well understood governance model where the majority of stakeholders make the decision which chain is the real Decred and they do so in an on-chain and cryptographically provable fashion.
Further, stakeholders sign up for Decred with the expectation that major consensus decisions are made by the stakeholders themselves. Removing the authority of the stakeholders would be akin to removing Proof-of-Work from a pure PoW coin. In other words, it would completely destroy the security properties of the system. How much confidence are holders going to have in a coin that ignores one of the primary characteristics it claims to offer?

[hannusolo]

I can see some correlation of the price rise with ETH. In my opinion dual mined coins tend to move together eth's price a bit.
Siacoin also started to rise 2 days ago, but dcr is stronger Lightning network and big piece of supply in staking.

[matrixturk]

when will release lightning application?

[gembitz]

bittrex scam devs involved here RUN DON'T NOT WALK FROM THIS DECRED(DISCRED) TEAM AND BITTREX ANTI-BITCOINERS :\  #expect_us

[smeee]

a good article on DCR

https://btcmanager.com/beginners-guide-decred/

[gembitz]

Detailed Analysis of Decred Fork Resistance
There have been several questions regarding how Decred makes minority forked coins, in the sense of Ethereum Classic and Bitcoin Gold, extremely difficult without majority stakeholder approval, and, for all intents and purposes, impossible without also destroying the hybrid nature of the system in the process.
In order to try and explain why this is the case, the following is an analysis that first describes the important aspects of the system as they relate to this topic and then walks through the process of what would happen in a fork attempt under the worst case scenario.
Preliminaries
The Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system works by locking up chunks of coins into what is called a ticket. These tickets function as the fundamental building block which allows stakeholders to participate in governance. Once acquired, all tickets are placed into a pool of live tickets after a maturity period. This pool is known as the live ticket pool and has a target size of 40960, but it can grow larger or shrink as tickets are added and removed throughout the course of operation, and the ticket price (stake difficulty) is adjusted, per supply and demand, to try to maintain that target pool size. This is covered more in depth in DCP0001 for readers who want a more thorough treatment.
The consensus rules enforce a ticket selection algorithm that works to ensure that ticket selection is both random and impossible for miners to manipulate. It achieves this by pseudorandomly selecting 5 tickets from the aforementioned live ticket pool which are eligible to vote on the previous block and that at least 3 of them must be included. The subsidy is reduced if only 3 or 4 votes are included, by 20% and 40%, respectively, in order to discourage miners from ignoring votes and otherwise attempting to game the system. A detailed treatment of the theory behind each of these parameters is beyond the scope of this post, however, it primarily has to do with protection against various adversarial situations.
Further, the pseudorandom ticket selection process is primarily based on seeding it with the hash of the block it's voting on. This implies that, if you're building, say block 100000, on top of block 99999 (hash 00000000000000dab92a8a0c0e706eb74115f0f373669c01ffb4882f9555f494), the chosen votes are known to every other full node on the network and can't be changed without going back to find a new solution to block 99999 such that it has a different hash (say 00000000000004289d9a7b0f7a332fb60a1c221faae89a107ce3abbd186c386c), which in turn will cause a new set of 5 tickets to be selected for voting eligibility.
Step-by-step Walkthrough
Scenario, Assumptions, and Methodology
With all of that in mind, let's walk through an attempt to create a minority fork that the majority stakeholders don't agree with. Let's also assume that both sides of the attempted fork have equal hash power (so 50% hash power on each fork). Given that a successful vote requires 75% stakeholder approval, in the worst case, 75% of the stakeholders are on the majority chain, while 25% are on the minority chain. Further, let's assume the most recent block at the point of the fork is block 99999. Thus both side of the fork are working on trying to find block 100000, one side on the minority rule set, the other side on the majority rule set. Finally, in order to simplify the description and make it easier to follow the logic, since only 25% of the stakeholders are on the minority chain, let's say that every 4th ticket in the live ticket pool is a stakeholder on the minority chain and the rest are on the majority chain. In other words, ticket numbers 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, ..., 40956 are tickets in the live pool which represent stakeholders on the minority chain, while ticket numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, ..., 40957, 40958, 40959, are tickets in the live pool which represent stakeholders on the majority chain.
Block 100000
The following is the sequence of events that will happen:
The hash power on both chains will try to build a new block on top of block 99999.
Per the above description, in order for this new block to be built on the minority chain, it needs to acquire at least 3 votes from the live ticket pool and the selected votes depend on block 99999.
The tickets required to build block 100000, which is based on 99999 are ticket numbers 17113, 17331, 21307, 21328, 24903.
As we can see, 4 out of those 5 tickets are stakeholders on the majority chain (ticket numbers 17113, 17331, 21307, and 24903), which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100000 on the majority chain.
The minority chain is only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 21328), so it can't build a block 100000, instead, it must go back and find a new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of tickets to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows. The parentheses with the * in this notation indicate blocks that are being worked on.
... -> 99999 -> (100000*)   <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999a*)            <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100000, while the minority chain is stuck trying to find a new block for 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes. Since, per our thought experiment, both chains have equal hash power, we can safely assume that, on average, both block 100000 on the majority chain a new block 99999 (call it 99999a) on the minority chain will be found around the same time.
Block 100001
As the point, the following will happen:
The hash power on the majority chain will try to build a new block on top of the majority chain's block 100000. The votes required for this block are ticket numbers 563, 6766, 21009, 37394, 37775.
This time around all 5 out of those 5 tickets happen to be stakeholders on the majority chain, which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100000 on the majority chain which allows block 100001 to be built.
The minority chain, now with a new version of block 99999 (99999a) has a new hash, so it ends up requiring ticket numbers 1069, 8007, 16413, 19172, 31821.
The minority chain is still only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 19172), so it must once again go back and find yet another new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of tickets to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows:
... -> 99999 -> 100000 -> (100001*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999b*)                     <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100001, while the minority chain is still stuck trying to find yet another new solution for block 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes. Since, per our thought experiment, both chains have equal hash power, we can again safely assume that, on average, both block 100001 on the majority chain a new block 99999 (call it 99999b) on the minority chain will be found around the same time.
Block 100002
As the point, the following will happen:
The hash power on the majority chain will try to build a new block on top of the majority chain's block 100001. The votes required for this block are ticket numbers 174, 1999, 12808, 31928, 38317.
This time, 3 out of those 5 tickets are stakeholders on the majority chain (ticket numbers 174, 1999, 38317), which means they are going to provide their votes for block 100001 on the majority chain.
The minority chain, now with a new version of block 99999 (99999b) has a new hash, so it ends up requiring ticket numbers 4653, 15211, 29988, 35175, 35665.
The minority chain is still only able to acquire 1 vote (ticket number 29988), so it must once again go back and find yet another new solution to block 99999 in order to cause a new set of votes to be selected.
At this point, the chains now look as follows:
... -> 99999 -> 100000 -> 100001 -> (100002*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> (99999c*)                               <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
In other words, the majority chain is now working on block 100002, while the minority chain is still stuck trying to find yet another new solution for block 99999 in order to get a new set of tickets hoping this time they'll be able to get at least 3 votes.
Fast-forward to Block 100010
The process repeats until, eventually, some variant of block 99999 on the minority chain gets lucky and happens to select 3 tickets that are on the minority chain. This turns out to be roughly 1 in 10 tries. So, fast forwarding a bit to see the chain by the time this happens, the chains would look as follows:
... -> 99999  -> 100000 -> 100001 -> 100002 -> ... -> 100009 -> (100010*)  <--- majority stakeholders (75%) are on this chain
   \-> 99999j -> (100000a*)                                                <--- minority stakeholders (25%) are still on this chain
It should be pretty clear, since both chains have equal hash power, there is no way the minority chain can now ever catch up to the majority chain. Furthermore, the same process is going to repeat for the minority chain's block 100001 where it go back and remine (find new solutions) for its block 100000 over and over until it gets a lucky draw again such that it gets the 3 votes it needs. Consequently, miners are not going to stay on the minority chain because they're never going to be able to become the majority chain and hence would be mining for free.
Common objections
What if the minority chain gets more than 10x the hash power of the main chain?
Theoretically, if the minority chain with only 25% stakeholder approval had 10x the hash power of the main chain, yes, it could keep up with the majority chain, however, this is not a realistic scenario because of the economic incentives. Mining the minority chain with 10x the hash power effectively means the miners would only be getting 1/10 of the subsidy as they would on the majority chain based on hash power alone, but it's reduced even further by being 1/10 of 60% of the subsidy due to only being able to acquire 3 votes on average. In other words, miners would only receive 6% of the rewards they would by mining the majority chain, or looking it from the other way, they would receive 94% less by mining the minority chain.
Putting that into numbers, if a miner had, say 5% of the total network hash power, they could expect to receive roughly 5% of the PoW subsidy per block, or 5% of ~13.89 ~= 0.6945 DCR at the current time. However, on the minority chain, first the subsidy would be 60% of ~13.89 ~= 8.334 DCR, and then that 5% hash power would only be 0.5% of the total hash power on the minority chain, thus 0.5% of ~8.334 ~= 0.04167 DCR. Thus, we can see that 0.04167 DCR is indeed 6% of 0.6945 DCR.
PoW mining is very competitive since it is a zero sum game. Most miners, especially those without huge advantages such as free electricity, have very thin margins and are often banking on future appreciation to pick up the slack. Miners would actually have to pay money to mine the minority chain due to the aforementioned effective 94% reduction in income.
Can't somebody just change the consensus rules to ignore the stakeholders?
Yes, it is theoretically possible to do this, but doing so would completely destroy the hybrid system and return the forked currency to effectively being a pure Proof-of-Work system thereby removing any value of the system. It would also undoubtedly no longer be Decred, since, unlike in a pure PoW coin where nobody can really say which chain is the "real" one and which isn't due to lack of a provable and formalized governance system, Decred has a very clear and well understood governance model where the majority of stakeholders make the decision which chain is the real Decred and they do so in an on-chain and cryptographically provable fashion.
Further, stakeholders sign up for Decred with the expectation that major consensus decisions are made by the stakeholders themselves. Removing the authority of the stakeholders would be akin to removing Proof-of-Work from a pure PoW coin. In other words, it would completely destroy the security properties of the system. How much confidence are holders going to have in a coin that ignores one of the primary characteristics it claims to offer?

TL;DR = THE DEVS STOLE YOUR BTC

[IncludeBeer]

Detailed Analysis of Decred Fork Resistance

TL;DR = THE DEVS STOLE YOUR BTC

No no gembitz, it's not time to come out from under your bridge! That's a bad gembitz! 

[EmilioMann]

a good article on DCR

https://btcmanager.com/beginners-guide-decred/

Really nice!

here is the article for everyone who is afraid to click on the link posted by a new member:

"BTCManager first mentioned Decred in 2016 as one of the altcoins that took significant strides in 2015; since then, the project has come a long way, at the forefront of atomic swaps and set to become a contender in the privacy space. Here we provide an introduction to the cryptocurrency, Decred (DCR).

History
Jake Yocom-Piatt, the organizer of the Decred project and CEO of company0, stated on an Epicenter episode how Decred came into existence, “The Decred project began as an outgrowth of a whitepaper that was posted on bitcointalk in April 2013. In April 2013, a whitepaper was posted for a coin called memcoin two, and it was posted by someone named Adam McKenzie. Basically, it was an idea to hybridize proof of work and proof of stake, instead of a having a Proof of Work (or Proof of Stake) dominated system.“

“It allowed for on-chain governance, that’s what really led to the start of Decred. Adam McKenzie and another user pursued contact with me starting in July 2013, and then they pushed me for several months to pick up memcoin two as a project, and Decred is what came out of that process in approximately March 2014.”

The Decred organizer also said that the more time you spend in Bitcoin, you involuntary learn about the problems of governance. Over time, more people have switched onto Decred, according to Yocom-Piatt. Instead of proof of work miners having access to the shared ledger, there is an added ability for the stakeholders to override proof of work miners. Yocom-Piatt continued, “Back in 2013 or 2014, an empty block was mined with bitcoin, which is basically a low-grade denial of service attack. We saw that this process as bad, the hybridization takes power from those with specialized equipment, such as ASICs and GPU farms, putting power back into hands of holders of coins.”

Herein lies a major difference between Bitcoin and Decred. While Bitcoin is entirely Proof of Work, Decred is only partial Proof of Work. Miners in Bitcoin keep their machines running to receive their share of the block reward, whereas, with Decred, the miners doing the work receive 60 percent of the newly generated tokens, the Proof of Stake voters get 30 percent while 10 percent goes to a development subsidy.

Dave Collins, the lead developer of Decred, explained the rationale behind such a system:
“It allows stakeholders to completely control the direction, we’re not just talking about block sizes here, when quantum computing becomes more relevant, you change the signature algorithm, you change the encoding mechanisms… You can pretty much change any part of the system, and we think that’s really important. Things advance over time, and you definitely have to have some way to upgrade those rules. One of the fundamental mistakes in Bitcoin, in my mind, is the approach to governance.”

One advantage of a dual system such as Decred is that it is more costly to 51 percent attack hybrid systems compared to Bitcoin. Collins explained on the Epicenter episode that a 51 percent attack for Proof of Work would cost around $500 million (at the time). Now, assuming exact same price of bitcoin, same hashpower, same number of coins, under the Decred system it would cost $2.8 billion, as an attacker would have to purchase a lot of the stake too (you’d have to own a lot of the cryptocurrency as well as own a lot of hashpower).

Instead of using hashpower to engage in proof of work and mine DCR, you can also stake your DCR holdings by getting a ‘ticket.’ The current price of a ticket is around 75 DCR ($2504). Once you’ve got your ticket, you will earn returns over a period of approximately 28 days. At the time of writing, the approximate reward is 1.7 DCR ($56.5). The staking procedure also has the added advantage of locking coins away from the available supply, providing a positive fundamental for the cryptocurrency’s value over time.

For example, in a November update, the Decred team noted, “Over the last two months the circulating supply of decred has dropped due to an increase in staking participation… this amount has now risen dramatically to 3.068 million (or 46.65 percent of available supply).” If this trend continues, we could see Decred leading altcoin market cycles, as DASH has been doing recently in the altcoin rallies during the Summer and August 2017.

Decred and Bitcoin share the same supply schedule, namely, only 21 million of each will ever be in existence. Around 31 percent of the total 21 million DCR have been mined so far, compared to bitcoin’s 17 million. However, eight percent of Decred was pre-mined, four percent was given away as part of the increasingly popular method of airdropping coins, while the other four percent went to the developers who got the project off the ground.

There are also differences in the hash functions; while Bitcoin uses SHA-256, Decred went with BLAKE-256 because of a significant number of improvements.

Decred Ecosystem
Governance is a key element of Decred while being digital money as well and the recent fork of Bitcoin Cash shows the importance of community decision-making. For instance, Decred stakeholders voted on Lightning Network implementation (98 percent in favor), where voting on such proposals can be done in the official wallets.

Two of the official wallets are Paymetheus and Decredition, with Paymetheus shown below. Here you can submit tickets and engage in stake mining, cast your votes, as well as store, send and receive DCR payments. The blockchain loads pretty quickly compared to other altcoin’s clients.

In November, it was revealed that third-party companies stated their intention to launch ASICs for Decred; ASICs are custom built chips specifically designed for mining and dominate bitcoin and litecoin mining. Expected to come online in mid-2018, Decred is not worried about miner centralization since it is not pure PoW. Therefore, the Decred network can take advantage of the increased security ASICs provide, creating a more robust network.  

Atomic swaps have been pioneered with Decred, with their open-source atomic swap software used by Altcoin.io exchange to conduct the first atomic swap between bitcoin and ether. BTCManager reported on the first atomic swap for decred and litecoin in September 2017:
“It is evident that the potential of atomic swaps in the market of OTC and P2P cryptocurrency trading is truly promising. In the upcoming months, the Decred development team aims to continue testing atomic swaps between Bitcoin Core, Litecoin Core and dcrwallet and encourage users of the three cryptocurrencies to integrate the technology into their GUI wallets.”
With this new technology, it would effectively disintermediate exchanges such as ShapeShift.

Privacy
The altcoin will also focus on privacy offerings toward the end of 2017, entering into the space dominated by Monero and Zcash. It is not clear what kind of technology will it be based on, but speaking to the Decred team, BTCManager learned that “it will be radically different to the technologies other privacy coins use.”

However, what is known, is that the team are working on a secure communications protocol known as zkc or zero knowledge communications. From the blog post, the team states, “We have chosen to keep it simple with zkc and take what we felt were the best parts of both Signal and Pond. zkc cuts the middle path between Signal and Pond in terms of UI/UX; it is not as easy to setup for clients as Signal, nor is it as challenging as Pond.”

The development of zkc is part of the project’s drive to “decentralize all things,” and the ultimate aim is to replace all of the communication tools currently in use, as well as avoiding the hassle of configuring them properly.

Politeia
In October, the project launched a governance data storage system called Politeia, which will be used to store of all Decred’s governance data off-chain anchored to the blockchain and reduce the on-chain footprint.
“While we will use it first as the basis for our proposal system, it has been developed as a generic tool that allows its users to create and maintain arbitrary data in a version-controlled and timestamped environment.”
The broader goal of Politeia is to serve a similar function as websites such as house.gov or senate.gov does to a nation state, namely to provide cryptographically verifiable records so that anyone can ensure that governance is being conducted transparently, making it more difficult to sabotage or subvert the governance process.

Price Analysis
Decred has displayed steady growth over 2017, as shown by the monthly chart below for DCR-USD. In early 2017, DCR-USD traded below $2 but then broke the $10 psychological handle in March. The bullish run continued into June 2017, when Decred hit a high of $51.794. Since the summer, DCR-USD retraced and now looks to test the 2017 high again, with the current price action holding firm above $40.
Notice only two fractal levels have formed for DCR-USD on the monthly timeframe. A buy fractal at $0.343 from December 2016 and a sell fractal from June 2017 at $51.794. A monthly close above $51.794 would open up decred to bullish momentum and should see a push to new highs. Notice also that the volume has been increasing over time on the Bittrex exchange (DCR can also be acquired on Poloniex), suggesting more traders and investors are becoming more interested in the altcoin.
The Fibonacci targets indicate that a break above $51.794 could materialize into a long-term drift toward the 161.8 and 261.8 percent extension levels, at $83.59 and $135.04 respectively.

DCR-USD Looks to Head to $83.59
Therefore, from a technical and fundamental standpoint, Decred looks like one cryptoasset to keep your eye on, with strong performance expected in late 2017/early 2018 as staking becomes more popular, more participants join the governance process, and privacy technologies are incorporated into the cryptocurrency.
 
The author owns no Decred but may enter a buy position in the next 48 hours."

by Jamie Holmes

[jztxeno]

Is there a PoS calculator for DCR?

[diogoo]

DCR finally on the move