DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?)

[monsterer]

One way to think of the difference between an "append-only" ledger and one that isn't (e.g. LCR without checkpoints) is the difference between a strict teacher that allows no late work and a soft teacher that allows late work just the same.  Half way through the semester, a clever student in the soft teacher's class who hasn't done any work can still pull off a perfect total score in the class just by cramming at the end, turning in all homework, and getting all previous zeroes turned to perfect scores.  It's a function of what rule the system uses - does it allow previously confirmed ledger entries to change or not? Trustless or not.  Right?

I guess it is assumed that you are watching for rule violations constantly.  Once a violation is spotted, you just freeze your ledger and it remains append-only.

Checkpoints in POS (and to a lesser extent in bitcoin) add trust to the equation. You might ask if checkpoints are so great, why not have them for every single block and the obvious answer is that this means you are trusting the checkpoint producer 100%, which is against all that trustless crypto attempts to achieve.

LCR should mean that you don't need checkpoints at all; this is something which POW has over POS and all other consensus techniques which do not expend a resource to create a block.

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[TPTB_need_war]

Added another flaw to PoS:

• PoS usually pays dividends to stake holders (and even relays a percentage to the developers thus must register as a Money Transmitter with FinCIN) thus arguably creating investment securities under the Howey test and thus must be registered with the SEC or face possible jail time

[3]

The other flaw of PoS, and especially DPOS and Dash masternodes (as pointed out by smooth et al) is you are paying yourselves via the shares from an enterprise that issued unregistered investment securities and which also requires each stakeholder to register as a money transmitter with FinCIN. I can't fathom how you convinced yourself that you are not going to jail in the future or end having to lick the boots of the SEC as Erik Voorhees did to wiggle out of jail time.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Added another flaw to PoS:

• PoS usually pays dividends to stake holders (and even relays a percentage to the developers thus must register as a Money Transmitter with FinCIN) thus arguably creating investment securities under the Howey test and thus must be registered with the SEC or face possible jail time

[3]

The other flaw of PoS, and especially DPOS and Dash masternodes (as pointed out by smooth et al) is you are paying yourselves via the shares from an enterprise that issued unregistered investment securities and which also requires each stakeholder to register as a money transmitter with FinCIN. I can't fathom how you convinced yourself that you are not going to jail in the future or end having to lick the boots of the SEC as Erik Voorhees did to wiggle out of jail time.

This is not a flaw, otherwise you have to accept that decentralized cryptocurrencies are impossible just because in the future USA can declare them illegal.

[wingspan]

Checkpoints in POS (and to a lesser extent in bitcoin) add trust to the equation. You might ask if checkpoints are so great, why not have them for every single block and the obvious answer is that this means you are trusting the checkpoint producer 100%, which is against all that trustless crypto attempts to achieve.

LCR should mean that you don't need checkpoints at all; this is something which POW has over POS and all other consensus techniques which do not expend a resource to create a block.

I agree that checkpoints in POW fail the trustlessness goal.  It seems you also agree that POW/POS are never both append-only and trustless.  But based on my reading of the consensus algo of eMunie, its possible to have a ledger system that is all three important qualities:  trustless, append-only, and resourceless (meaning doesn't waste resources).  Is there another crypto with those three?

[TPTB_need_war]

Added another flaw to PoS:

• PoS usually pays dividends to stake holders (and even relays a percentage to the developers thus must register as a Money Transmitter with FinCIN) thus arguably creating investment securities under the Howey test and thus must be registered with the SEC or face possible jail time

[3]

The other flaw of PoS, and especially DPOS and Dash masternodes (as pointed out by smooth et al) is you are paying yourselves via the shares from an enterprise that issued unregistered investment securities and which also requires each stakeholder to register as a money transmitter with FinCIN. I can't fathom how you convinced yourself that you are not going to jail in the future or end having to lick the boots of the SEC as Erik Voorhees did to wiggle out of jail time.

This is not a flaw, otherwise you have to accept that decentralized cryptocurrencies are impossible just because in the future USA can declare them illegal.

By definition to be SUSTAINABLY decentralized, then a P2P system should be resilient to government action against nodes of the system. Given that PoS makes the owners of the currency culpable to the government and they are also the miners, then in theory the design is not resilient to regulatory control (and as per my complaint against Satoshi's design upthread, it forces nation-states to cooperate in a world governance to cooperate on multinational regulation).

Contrast it to the Gnutella where you pretty much have to ban the protocol to destroy it. PoS is Napster, except with the distinction that government would have to go after numerous stake holders, not just one company. There is already a precedent for the authorities doing a globally coordinated sweep.

It doesn't logically follow that there surely can't exist other designs which are resilient. Thus IMO it is a flaw.

P.S. I linked to this post on the first page to include for clarification on the contention.

[monsterer]

I agree that checkpoints in POW fail the trustlessness goal.  It seems you also agree that POW/POS are never both append-only and trustless.  But based on my reading of the consensus algo of eMunie, its possible to have a ledger system that is all three important qualities:  trustless, append-only, and resourceless (meaning doesn't waste resources).  Is there another crypto with those three?

The last thing I read (months ago) was that eMunie was trust based, and followed a similar security model to POS, but things may have changed since then. Fusilier is supposed to be writing up his consensus summary when he gets a moment in this thread.

[patmast3r]

I agree that checkpoints in POW fail the trustlessness goal.  It seems you also agree that POW/POS are never both append-only and trustless.  But based on my reading of the consensus algo of eMunie, its possible to have a ledger system that is all three important qualities:  trustless, append-only, and resourceless (meaning doesn't waste resources).  Is there another crypto with those three?

The last thing I read (months ago) was that eMunie was trust based, and followed a similar security model to POS, but things may have changed since then. Fusilier is supposed to be writing up his consensus summary when he gets a moment in this thread.

Are you refering to this http://blog.emunie.com/?p=53 ?
Where do you see the similarities to POS ?

[Come-from-Beyond]

By definition to be SUSTAINABLY decentralized, then a P2P system should be resilient to government action against nodes of the system. Given that PoS makes the owners of the currency culpable to the government and they are also the miners, then in theory the design is not resilient to regulatory control (and as per my complaint against Satoshi's design upthread, it forces nation-states to cooperate in a world governance to cooperate on multinational regulation).

Contrast it to the Gnutella where you pretty much have to ban the protocol to destroy it. PoS is Napster, except with the distinction that government would have to go after numerous stake holders, not just one company.

It doesn't logically follow that there surely can't exist other designs which are resilient. Thus IMO it is a flaw.

P.S. I linked the post on the first page to this post for clarification on the contention.

Well, in this case in Panama PoS doesn't have those flaws. Maybe you should add a note, something like "not applicable in Panama"?

[TPTB_need_war]

You can't have checkpoints nor an append only ledger without either a decentralized LCR or centralization. Let's just wait for Fuserleer to detail his methods, so we can identify the flaw. If he succeeds, then we will bow at his feet.

[TPTB_need_war]

By definition to be SUSTAINABLY decentralized, then a P2P system should be resilient to government action against nodes of the system. Given that PoS makes the owners of the currency culpable to the government and they are also the miners, then in theory the design is not resilient to regulatory control (and as per my complaint against Satoshi's design upthread, it forces nation-states to cooperate in a world governance to cooperate on multinational regulation).

Contrast it to the Gnutella where you pretty much have to ban the protocol to destroy it. PoS is Napster, except with the distinction that government would have to go after numerous stake holders, not just one company.

It doesn't logically follow that there surely can't exist other designs which are resilient. Thus IMO it is a flaw.

P.S. I linked the post on the first page to this post for clarification on the contention.

Well, in this case in Panama PoS doesn't have those flaws. Maybe you should add a note, something like "not applicable in Panama"?

The threat of government action is globally pervasive. Please reread my post, as I edited it. There is already a precedent. Btw, the USA is in control of Panama. They are just allow fools to incriminate themselves before the world government takes form. Putin is in control of where you are. Putin is not a saviour. He is part of the push to world governance.

A decentralized system shouldn't have systemic failure modes. It should be self-healing where if you destroy 99% of the nodes, then it bounces right back.

[monsterer]

Are you refering to this http://blog.emunie.com/?p=53 ?
Where do you see the similarities to POS ?

No, it was on these forums - there was a consensus primer, but it lacked critical information. What I could discern at the time was that it was vulnerable to long range attacks (like POS), and there were edges cases around when the validating nodes changed. Both of these problems challenge the idea of an append only ledger, unless you add trusted authorities.

[Come-from-Beyond]

The threat of government action is globally pervasive. Please reread my post, as I edited it. There is already a precedent. Btw, the USA is in control of Panama. They are just allow fools to incriminate themselves before the world government takes form. Putin is in control of where you are. Putin is not a saviour. He is part of the push to world governance.

The point is that if you mix politics with math you'll get useless mess in the end.

[TPTB_need_war]

Are you refering to this http://blog.emunie.com/?p=53 ?
Where do you see the similarities to POS ?

No, it was on these forums - there was a consensus primer, but it lacked critical information. What I could discern at the time was that it was vulnerable to long range attacks (like POS), and there were edges cases around when the validating nodes changed. Both of these problems challenge the idea of an append only ledger, unless you add trusted authorities.

It was the same information as that post. And it is too vague to come to any conclusions.

[TPTB_need_war]

The threat of government action is globally pervasive. Please reread my post, as I edited it. There is already a precedent. Btw, the USA is in control of Panama. They are just allow fools to incriminate themselves before the world government takes form. Putin is in control of where you are. Putin is not a saviour. He is part of the push to world governance.

The point is that if you mix politics with math you'll get useless mess in the end.

You are missing the point that a self-healing system is immune to politics. Math doesn't have to exclude politics as a threat vector.

Perhaps we have a different culture than you all in the former Communist States. You all probably learned to cope. We fight to the death. "Give me liberty or give me death".

You are from Belarus correct?

Putin in the USA of yore would have been destroyed overnight. The youth have lost our core values. It is sad. But I am old fucker.

I understand the Baltic States are tired of ethnic war. So they are a divided peoples. Divide and conquer.

Now I try to fight with math.

[Come-from-Beyond]

You are missing the point that a self-healing system is immune to politics. Math doesn't have to exclude politics as a threat vector.

Got it.

[TPTB_need_war]

You are missing the point that a self-healing system is immune to politics. Math doesn't have to exclude politics as a threat vector.

Got it.

If you said PoS is centralized, then I would agree with you that it has functionality orthogonal to politics, which is my point to Stan @ Bitshares that they can run it according to the law and be subject to the law. Once you say it is decentralized then it CAN NOT BE orthogonal to politics, because you can't control which terrorists and others will use the system. This applies in any jurisdiction, e.g. criticizing the leaders of your country on a decentralized Twitter app.

Now hopefully you get it.

Based on your writings here and other posts, it appears you believe critical mass adoption still lies at the blockchain level instead of apps built upon a blockchain?  Seems all the "2.0" chains are going more for apps (marketplaces, exchanges, social interaction, etc...).

Based on where this began with Bitcoin and where we are now, I am not sure if the average Joe will care about the underlying technology.  We see this everyday with consumer perception and marketing instead of performing due diligence into competitive products.  Unfortunately, average Joe's just want a simple app on their smart mobile phones and cars that drive themselves

First two quotes:

1. So the decentralized database is a block chain?

2. Does the browser need to run Java applets to do wallet level operations?

3. What is the advantage for the user of a decentralized block chain storage for their tweets? The data is open to display/access to anyone and thus isn't owned by Twitter, so tweets can be displayed by any client, not just through an API authorized by Twitter. Talk about how this creates advantages that users care about? Sounds like it will be used by terrorists so then the government has an incentive to shut it down.

4. How can this remain decentralized if the mining becomes centralized? Seems the same centralization problems that plague crypto currency thus hang over the head of any current block chain design.

5. Why should we think a product that is breaking SEC regulation by selling shares has any long-term future? The government can make an example out of you with SEC action.

Society will converge one one fungible unit. It always works that way. We are not creating apps here. This is money. I realize all the altcoins so far are not really money, but just delusional projects. But if we are talking about widepread adoption, then there will be only one.

Those who deny how history has already shown that there can only be one outcome for money (which is unification on one fungible unit), are in delusion.

Edit: note I am referring to money above. There could end up being multiple viable projects for block chain 2.0 features that are not money.

The entire point of DECENTRALIZED contracts, apps, databases is that they are permissionless. If we don't need the permissionless (End-to-End) principle, then a corporation/government can nearly always do that feature more efficiently and provide more robust servers to the users (e.g. have you scrolled the Facebook timeline lately and see all videos, games, and mesmerizingly addictive content that loads as you scroll it ... it is like a TV with 1000 channels).

DECENTRALIZATION is a threat to the Corporations (and they are the government), thus if a DECENTRALIZED paradigm becomes popular, the government is going to attack it the same as they did Napster.

Thus if your block chain design is not truly permissionless, then you've accomplished nothing.

Ethereum, BitShares, etc are Napsters. Daniel can't figure out how to make something truly decentralized so he argues that we substitute politics and governance for protocol. Sorry I am not inspired by that.

We are still waiting for someone to invent the Gnutella of crypto.

After that we can use that technology to go make the correct block chain for all these 2.0 features.

True DECENTRALIZATION enables the End-to-End Principle which enables grassroots wildfire viral adoption, because developers and others who invest in it are confident that no one owns it (i.e. just like open source, their investment doesn't depend on any third parties), as that is embodied in the definition of the End-to-End Principle.

And besides I've been thinking (since 2013 or 2014 when I first read gmaxwell's Coin Witness thread) the only way to do programmable block chain scalably is ZK-SNARKS. But first I want to perfect the block chain.

Sometimes the turtle and not the hare wins the race.

[Fuserleer]

If he succeeds, then we will bow at his feet.

I kinda doubt that.

[TPTB_need_war]

If he succeeds, then we will bow at his feet.

I kinda doubt that.

If you unequivocally solve the problem, I will praise you. Why are we discussing vaporware which you refuse to explain? Let's just wait until you disclose. If you feel there are explanations you can make which are interesting without full disclosure, then if it is interesting then I am interested to read.

[Fuserleer]

Are you refering to this http://blog.emunie.com/?p=53 ?
Where do you see the similarities to POS ?

No, it was on these forums - there was a consensus primer, but it lacked critical information. What I could discern at the time was that it was vulnerable to long range attacks (like POS), and there were edges cases around when the validating nodes changed. Both of these problems challenge the idea of an append only ledger, unless you add trusted authorities.

Did you announce the details of these long range attacks you perceived, I don't recall.  

Also the voting nodes change at specific intervals, theres an edge case where the majority of the selected voting nodes are offline, or unavailable and dont vote.  That then results in a failed vote and the ledger state is in "limbo" until the next set of selected voting nodes then vote.  As they are voting on the state of the ledger, their vote encapsulates the data as a matter of course from the missing vote.  Not really a critical issue.

[Fuserleer]

If he succeeds, then we will bow at his feet.

I kinda doubt that.

If you unequivocally solve the problem, I will praise you. Why are we discussing vaporware which you refuse to explain? Let's just wait until you disclose. If you feel there are explanations you can make which are interesting without full disclosure, then if it is interesting then I am interested to read.

Isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle?  If eMunie is vapourware then I dont believe there is a term to describe yours.  We've seen NOTHING from you but endless waffling and attacking of other solutions for 3 years.

eMunie has a beta client, I've published articles on it, you have the crux of the consensus its using, yet you of all people have to gaul to question why we are discussing vapourware??

A number of people have extensive inside information on how it operates, some even have copies of the full source code, either for review, safe keeping or other reasons.  These are people I TRUST to have this information before everyone else.

Just because you or other people on this forum are not fortunate enough that I explicitly trust you, does not mean it doesn't exist.