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

[benthach]

I think ultimately you are perhaps concentrating on the issue of 2 or more partitions existing for an extended period of time.

You must be referring to monsterer's comments. I was always emphasizing that 2 or more temporary partitions can be tolerated if there is a resolution mechanism.

I was referring to you both.

No temporary partitions can be tolerated at all if the resolution of said partitions is the total destruction of one partition or another.  This is the only resolution method possible if the data structure is block based with POW or POS.

If you think otherwise, explain how two blocks secured with POW (or POS) could be merged between two block chains without loss of data?  You don't need details on my, or anyone's protocols to explain how this is so.

Temporary partitions can be merged if they don't contain conflicting double-spends. The advantage of creating temporary partitions in this context (what I contemplated in my design) is it afaics can both enable a form of instant transactions and also it can radically reduce the data that must be propagated as a transient spike on block announcement, thus solving the propagation delay which drives orphan rate which is one of the main issues with increasing the block size in Bitcoin and other Satoshi coins such as Monero. Note I didn't write that the temporary partitions have to use PoW or PoS; only the global resolution mechanism does.

As for your (and Iota's) idea of using a different global resolution method, I maintain that no design will be sound if it doesn't use blocks with PoW (or the inferior PoS). The reason is because there is no way to gain Byzantine consistency on double-spends. I have thought about this in great detail for months and years. I will be very stunned if you or anyone else has found an exception to this rule. It seems to be fundamental to the Byzantine Generals Problem. As I explained upthread my understanding for Iota is that if competing cliques with less than 50% of the total hash rate each, for what ever reason decide not to confirm each other's chains, then there is no mechanism in Iota's DAG without blocks to force a consensus and thus the user of the currency has to contend with forks and multiple spends on multiple partitions. Although this may not occur in the early stages for Iota, if it really gains any significant value (not just insiders buying from themselves to pump the illusion of a large market cap and trade volume) that is when it will be tested conceptually. Satoshi's PoW design in Bitcoin (Monero, etc) has already passed this crucial test but PoS and other block chain consensus designs not yet. I suspect for eMunie what you are attempting to design is some resolution based on propagation and different powers for different types of nodes in the network, and I am confident I will be able to point out to you how this is unsound once you release the details. If you want to waste your effort in this direction, who am I to discourage you. I personally don't want to waste any more effort on pie-in-the-sky failure delusion. I can't really nail down with 100% certainty if your design is a delusion until I see all the details, but I strongly suspect it is. I don't say this to be unfriendly with you. I am concerned that we are wasting a lot of effort and resources. I am trying to be very frank with myself as well.

Apologies for misspelling your username upthread.

your scam idea is delusional. the purpose of bitcoin is decentralized money and bitcoin have achieved just that. all this crap scam ideas/add-on smart contracts, smart ledger, crypto 2.0, crypto 9.0 are just delusional scam idea, simple as that.

I have never seen you display in any of your posts (that I've read) any technical knowledge and thus apparently you are not able to comment with any level of sufficient technical understanding. Thus your comments are a total waste of time for readers who are technically capable. So please don't spam this thread. You seem to want to spam every thread I write for some personal reasons. If you want to try to display some technical knowledge, then go ahead and make my day.

In this thread, we have already started documenting why Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed:

Crypto currency is up to this point a "mining the investors" paradigm. Not even Bitcoin has achieved viability as a DECENTRALIZED ideal that brought us here in the first place!

The post linked in the above quote, explains that Bitcoin (and any other coin that uses Satoshi's PoW design) is also a "mining the investors" paradigm. In future posts, I will elaborate on the following quote from the OP:

I went off on several days of just thinking all day. I contemplated all the possible designs (including Iota's DAG, Lightning Networks, DPOS, Proof-of-Stake, Masternodes, Raiblocks/Blocklattice, etc), and I can't think of any design that uses a block chain or a DAG (or any other form of determining the longest chain of truth) which doesn't either centralize (factoring in society's ability to regulate the consistent partition) or diverge into inconsistent truths. Due to the CAP theorem it is fundamentally impossible for there to exist any block chain or consistent DAG design that won't centralize (even without regulation once you require scaling). Worse yet, it is impossible to attain any sort of end-to-end principled, decentralized scaling of transaction processing, because consistency is lost without centralization (even Proof-of-Work centralizes economically due to the Power Law distribution of capital).

Note I have proposed that including PoW with each transaction may be a solution to the flaws in Satoshi's design which causes it to drive centralization, government takeover, and oligarchy. But I need to spend some more time going over the details of that idea. Note apparently Iota may be implementing some variant of that idea, but as I explained upthread, I don't think it can be Byzantine fault tolerant on Consistency without blocks.

i said again and again, technical knowledge of altcoins = scam idea. this is the reason you never see me talk about it.
"Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed", prove it now! do it, pull the plug! all the scam artists keep saying bitcoin going to fail but it's keep running smoothly. you scammer keep poking and finding holes which never can prove or never prove, not possible. example holes, oh bitcoin taking so long, oh the 51% attack, oh.. oh.. oh.. i'm sure the taking too long is easy fix but do they want to fix? no reason to. the scammers keep bringing all these nonsense ideas just to distracting those dumb morons to fall into their many scams. heck, most of these scammers idea worth millions and some are millionaire when their idea don't even exist or have a working wallet.

i never want to talk in your crap nonsense threads, your shits is just full of it, too much nonsense. i have posts a few replied to your crap threads and you have asked them to delete, which all got deleted. i've never bother to repost or post to your nonsense crap beside this post here. you think you can prove or know something but basically nonsense crap which can prove nothing, you just want to plug in your cheap scam. anon, smart ledgers, smart contracts crap, we don't need your tech shit, mainstream don't need your tech shit. cryptocurrency = decentralized internet money/currency, simple as that, not the type of money which come with a fridge, a bath, a cat with string attached, a borrower, a fat man in a hat with big fat wallet, none of that nonsense craps. you think you can build some credentials here so you can pull a big scam and then be retired, you're talking about retirement/life saving a lot here.

also all of these scam altcoins having chance of 0.0000000000001% adoption. ask you this, what is the purpose of it when there is just 0.0000000000001% adoption?

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[Come-from-Beyond]

i said again and again, technical knowledge of altcoins = scam idea. this is the reason you never see me talk about it.
"Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed", prove it now! do it, pull the plug! all the scam artists keep saying bitcoin going to fail but it's keep running smoothly. you scammer keep poking and finding hole which never can prove or never prove, not possible. the scammers keep bringing all these nonsense idea just to distracting those dumb morons to fall into their many scams. heck, most of these scammers idea worth millions and some are millionaire when their idea don't even have a working wallet.

i never want to talk in your crap nonsense threads, your shits is just full of it, too much nonsense. you think you can prove or know something but basically nonsense crap which can prove nothing, you just want to plug in your cheap scam. anon, smart ledgers, smart contracts crap, we don't need your tech shit, mainstream don't need your tech shit. you think you can build some credentials here so you can pull a big scam and then be retired, you're talking about retirement life saving a lot.

also all of these scam altcoins having chance of 0.0000000000000% adoption. ask you this, what is the purpose of it when there is just 0.0000000000000% adoption?

Refer to https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/images/FallaciesPosterHigherRes.jpg and rewrite your post to conform to the rules of a civil conversation, please.

PS: Even your sig is full of fallacies...

[benthach]

i said again and again, technical knowledge of altcoins = scam idea. this is the reason you never see me talk about it.
"Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed", prove it now! do it, pull the plug! all the scam artists keep saying bitcoin going to fail but it's keep running smoothly. you scammer keep poking and finding hole which never can prove or never prove, not possible. the scammers keep bringing all these nonsense idea just to distracting those dumb morons to fall into their many scams. heck, most of these scammers idea worth millions and some are millionaire when their idea don't even have a working wallet.

i never want to talk in your crap nonsense threads, your shits is just full of it, too much nonsense. you think you can prove or know something but basically nonsense crap which can prove nothing, you just want to plug in your cheap scam. anon, smart ledgers, smart contracts crap, we don't need your tech shit, mainstream don't need your tech shit. you think you can build some credentials here so you can pull a big scam and then be retired, you're talking about retirement life saving a lot.

also all of these scam altcoins having chance of 0.0000000000000% adoption. ask you this, what is the purpose of it when there is just 0.0000000000000% adoption?

Refer to https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/images/FallaciesPosterHigherRes.jpg and rewrite your post to conform to the rules of a civil conversation, please.

PS: Even your sig is full of fallacies...

your scam ioata is worth nothing in my book, useless like other scams. just some coding and idea in fantasy land, like hardwares or master jedi attacking each others which translate into endless bitcoins depositing into your pocket. it's not cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency = simple internet money/currency. good job in scamming the dumb morons.

[Come-from-Beyond]

your scam ioata is worth nothing in my book, useless like other scams. just some coding and idea in fantasy land, like hardwares or master jedi attacking each others which translate into endless bitcoins depositing into your pocket. it's not cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency = simple internet money/currency. good job in scamming the dumb morons.

Your integrity amazes me. Usually, inability to critically analyze your own point of view is a sign of very low IQ. Obviusly it's not your case, because with such low IQ you wouldn't be able to write such long posts. Might be an unknown mutation...

[benthach]

your scam ioata is worth nothing in my book, useless like other scams. just some coding and idea in fantasy land, like hardwares or master jedi attacking each others which translate into endless bitcoins depositing into your pocket. it's not cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency = simple internet money/currency. good job in scamming the dumb morons.

Your integrity amazes me. Usually, inability to critically analyze your own point of view is a sign of very low IQ. Obviusly it's not your case, because with such low IQ you wouldn't be able to write such long posts. Might be an unknown mutation...

now you're talking about my iq.
ah, you also talking about integrity which you disgraced human scammers got none.
same ol' craps which getting repeats again and again, no reason to waste much time in one subject.

[TPTB_need_war]

CfB please don't feed the troll because he wants to fill up this thread with spam.

benthach, I tried to make this thread unmoderated because I expect you to be a mature person and not post "every altcoin is a scam" in every thread. That point is off topic. Please read the title of the thread. There are other threads for discussing whether altcoins are scams. If you post again offtopic, I will start to flag your posts to the moderator. Please try to control yourself and post relevant text. If you have any technical information to add to the point of this thread, please do contribute. If you continue to post offtopic spam in this thread, I will urge every reader to click the link on your posts to flag your posts as spam, so the moderator can deal with you.

I am trying to have a very serious technical discussion here. And many readers appreciate this effort from me, because they won't get this from anyone else. Please respect that many readers want this information and do not want to have to wade through your offtopic crap.

[TPTB_need_war]

I heard there is a multi-wallet potentially coming (more than just the major coins supported by existing multi-wallets). But that is not my development effort.

In terms of speculation aid, a multi-wallet consolidation seems to make some marketing sense.

I am still leaning my development efforts more towards trying to make some fundamental breakthroughs for crypto currency. Thus I would not be the guy to go after multi-wallet (since my goals are more on creating the Bitcoin Killer if possible) but you can see other altcoins that have tried to be a clearing house for many other coins.

According to you what are the features an alt is supposed to have in order to kill BTC?

Please see my other thread on DECENTRALIZATION. For example, study carefully my point that Bitcoin mining drives the price down.

I think without microtransactions and instant transactions, then there is no hope of getting widespread adoption. Bitcoin's mining design can't do those features, not even with hard forks. It is fundamentally incorrectly designed. Some are hoping Lightning Networks can provide this functionality, but even if the block size is increased enough to accommodate LN's transient spike requirements on block size load (which will centralize Bitcoin mining further thus making it more prone to oligarchy control/regulation), LN is a paradigm which hands transaction processing control to large corporations. Thus the oligarchies will continue to close down opportunities for individual entreprenurialism thus erasing any motivation for widespread network efforts adoption. Refer to the following quotes where I allude to how the world is collapsing in oligarchies with a China/Russia model for our global future:

Today I finally got confirmation of my suspicion that the big Pharma and government had worked to shut off the ability to display food supplement ads in the Philippines. The following vendor confirmed to me that mid-2015, after olx.ph bought out most of the popular online classifieds in the Philippines, they stopped accepting food supplement ads and Lazada.ph was formed where each seller has to be a registered entity and all payments must be via credit card.

http://www.istorya.net/forums/food-and-beverages-55/607771-moringa-malunggay-capsules-php270-00-per-bottle-60caps-content.html

What is apparently going on in ebay, inquirer.net, etc.. are in part of a push to force all food supplements (vitamins, etc) to be sold only in taxed and regulated manner.

Now I have to go to the mall and pay 3X more for supplements.

This is yet another way I can drive my altcoin demand and supply and also help fight the oligarchy that is strangling our world [Edit: but it requires that any altcoin I design could actually solve the problems on decentralization as well as micro/instant txns].

[...]

Also recently trying to think of ways I could attempt to have a business that didn't involve computer programming, caused me to study how crowded the opportunities outside of tech are becoming. For example here in Davao, there is a gas station every 200 meters. If you put up any successful business, it will be copied. There is too much capital that can't find a way to be invested productively. Manufacturing is very difficult because China can undercut you on price and China is becoming more adept at producing varied consumer goods (check out aliexpress.com, dhgate.com, and dx.com). If you do produce any innovation on a manufactured good (e.g. I was looking a portable speaker design), then China can just copy your intellectual property and produce it cheaper. The way forward is looking very bleak with the world being controlled by oligarchy, taxed to hell by government and the rest of us just slaves.

You there in in the West may not yet realize how dire this is becoming, because your debt economies haven't imploded yet and thus the governments are still supplying your economies with loads of debt so your standard-of-living is high and you feel not so worried (as the government will always take care of you). Once this comes crashing down 2017 or so, then you understand the urgency I feel about needing to find productive directions.

Edit: Bitcoin can attain adoption as pushed by the media and serving the interests of the bankster oligarchies and minions such as Peter Thiel, Larry Summers, George Soros, Bill Gates, etc... but this will just be more of the same crap of funneling the world towards top down China/Russia model of economics. I am talking about features that could ignite a grassroots wildfire that changes the world for the better. This would scale adoption much faster than Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is transitioning into a top-down oligarchy (even venture capital dominated) funnel which is not grassroots enabling. I have detailed the reasons in other posts.

[Jetboy]

TPTB,

Fundamentally, currency is about trust and consensus: A sufficient amount of people perceive value by proxy in a token.

Regardless of how truth is constructed and protected, it's the consensus part that matters. While the implementation may or may not be decentralised, it's the decentralisation of POWER that's interesting.

As you say, it may very well be a delusion. All currencies are delusions. It's just that we all agree on the value of the collective delusion.

[TPTB_need_war]

TPTB,

Fundamentally, currency is about trust and consensus: A sufficient amount of people perceive value by proxy in a token.

Regardless of how truth is constructed and protected, it's the consensus part that matters. While the implementation may or may not be decentralised, it's the decentralisation of POWER that's interesting.

As you say, it may very well be a delusion. All currencies are delusions. It's just that we all agree on the value of the collective delusion.

Please read my upthread post and the post immediately prior to yours.

If all we accomplish is fooling ourselves in a "mining the investor" paradigm without enabling a real grassroots e-currency, then we are just furthering the collapse of the world into totalitarian China/Russia model hell. And we won't on average generate any increase in capital for ourselves (some may win and most will lose in this zero-sum greater fool game of mining each other).

We need a true paradigm breakthrough (mostly technical challenges) that changes the internet and the world. Illusions/delusions won't suffice because they DO NOT SCALE GRASSROOTS ADOPTION.

The End-to-End Principle is fundamental property of the  internet which enabled it to scale so fast (but is being removed by Net Neutrality, China/Russia/Obama/FCC/UK model of internet top-down control). It means that the individuals have all the control and freedom. In the End-to-End Principle, the network is just a dumb replicator of what ever it is asked to do and can't apply any control (because the protocol doesn't allow it, e.g. with TCP/IP we can route our packets around any malfeasance unless of course ALL GOVERNMENTS COOPERATE TO DESTROY the End-to-End Principle which appears to be what is happening now). Without this property, there isn't internet wildfire scaling and the avenues for increasing production will wither and everyone will be forced to waste their capital on delusion (e.g. putting a gas station every 200 meters in Davao because there are not enough entrepreneurial opportunities and the world has been pumped full of funny money debt).

This is fundamental. If you are just here to pump some altcoin and try to mine the other fools out of their money, then carry on (generally any business model that caters to fools is not successful one overall ... although some few might make out like bandits some of the time, it doesn't have good odds of being a positive outcome for anyone involved). I am too old to waste my remaining production on that. I was rich before. I'd like to be have money again, but if that is not my destiny then I have to accept it. More important to me is to work on something that I believe in (and which can provide enough savings so I can eat as I get older without relying on the government because I hate social welfare conceptually as it leads this oligarchy crap I am writing about that we all end up suffering in).

[monsterer]

...POW ensures permissionless behaviour

PoW doesn't insure permissionless nor decentralized if mining is inherently centralizing.

I think you missed my point in the beginning of that sentence: 'if only you can mine your own transactions'. That changes quite a lot of things; eradicating pools for one.

POW is permissionless even if mining is centralising. Example: turn all mining equipment in the world into a unicorn - will the chain recover? The answer is yes, because regular non professional miners will take over again; granted it will take a long time to produce a block, but eventually it will recover.

[Jason.W]

opposed to individual PoW per tx, why not just design to randomly pick tx's out of the pool to include and forego the extra computation and verification completely?

[monsterer]

Correct with regard to your first scenario where 2 partitions never talk to each other in the future, you dont need to consider it.   If they do talk to each other in the future, and have to merge, this is where Bitcoin, blocks, POW and longest chain rule falls on its arse.  Only one partition can exist, there is no merge possibility so the other has to be destroyed.   Even if the 2 partitions have not existed for an extended period of time you are screwed as they can never merge without a significant and possibly destructive impact to ALL historic transactions prior to the partition event, so you end up with an unresolvable fork.

I think you mean 'post' partition event? But yes, I agree this is a bit brutal. However, on the limit where each partition spends the same outputs as the other, this would be the net result anyway. I guess any new design ought to be able to merge partitions which were completely unrelated, which is what, I agree, longest chain does not.

[TPTB_need_war]

...POW ensures permissionless behaviour

PoW doesn't insure permissionless nor decentralized if mining is inherently centralizing.

I think you missed my point in the beginning of that sentence: 'if only you can mine your own transactions'. That changes quite a lot of things; eradicating pools for one.

I thought you were referring to an impossible "bearer coin" type of design where PoW wasn't needed when you wrote that 'if only you can mine your own transactions'. Now I understand you meant something else but it doesn't make sense to say that submitting a PoW solution in Bitcoin (or any other Satoshi PoW coin such as Monero) can be done by users without pools because of the great variance on mining (for technophobes this means that a small miner may win a block solution every 100 years or something like that, thus without a pool they can't pay for their mining electricity). That is why I proposed a solution. You are really driving at is if Satoshi's design was End-to-End Principled, but it is not. The only incentive to mine in Satoshi's design is to generate BTC from mining, thus economically pools can't be eliminated.

Several of your posts have been misinterpreted by both myself and CfB. Maybe your terse writing style. I even noticed I had to intervene in a developing argument between you and Illodin in my thread last month to iron out the misunderstanding between you two. It may be that you are deep in coding and don't have a lot of time to be verbal.

POW is permissionless even if mining is centralising. Example: turn all mining equipment in the world into a unicorn - will the chain recover? The answer is yes, because regular non professional miners will take over again; granted it will take a long time to produce a block, but eventually it will recover.

You forget I pointed out to smooth (in our discussion about Proof-of-Stake versus Proof-of-Work in my vaporcoin's thread last month) that assumption fails when the government + oligarchy is the one taking control, because they can charge the cost to the collective. Thus Proof-of-Work devolves to Proof-of-Stake in a society-wide holistic basis (in the sense that the ongoing cost is no longer shouldered by the attacker when the attacker is top-down controlled society itself). My proposal aims to improve the situation by forcing that society-wide funnel to dictate to every user what they must include in their PoW share (which is much much more difficult to control and was the original idealism of Bitcoin!) which in my proposal is no longer sent to a pool because mining is made unprofitable. Iota accomplished a similar feat (because there is no mining reward and each user submits some PoW with his transaction), but albeit with the flaws I conjectured already in this thread. Whereas, Satoshi's design naturally leads to top-down centralization without having to control what every user mines. You see I place very high technical economics high IQ goals on my efforts. I am very hard on myself. I don't want to work on bullshit.

If I am correct on my design, then my design is the one we need to kill Bitcoin. But I need to go spend some more time thinking about flaws. In my haste of writing these voluminous online messages, I have probably forgotten some key detail that is a flaw. I will spend some time on this after we conclude these rapid fire discussions.

[TPTB_need_war]

opposed to individual PoW per tx, why not just design to randomly pick tx's out of the pool to include and forego the extra computation and verification completely?

You don't seem to understand the economic reason that pools are required. See my prior reply to monsterer.

As I understand Iota, each transaction includes some PoW because it wants to contribute to being on the longest chain which thus has the most veracity. But no mining rewards are paid. Iota incentivizes mining without paying rewards. But I conjecture this has problems which I mentioned already upthread. As for all these details, bear in mind that when we are writing posts rapid fire like this, we may miss key details. I will go offline soon and think about all this in detail again (rehash in my mind).

[TPTB_need_war]

Monero

...POW ensures permissionless behaviour

PoW doesn't insure permissionless nor decentralized if mining is inherently centralizing.

In Satoshi's formulation of it and every other one I have seen, it is. Please for example refer to my prior reply to monsterer. Also the upthread post I made about how adding instant transactions via LN (or any transaction rate scaling) forces further centralization.

There are many reasons that Satoshi's design is centralizing. One is for example that mining is profitable, thus there is a competition to drive difficulty higher and higher such that EACH transaction costs ~$10 in electricity (which is currently paid by mining the investors as professional miners who have loans from the oligarchy+banksters mine with huge farms near hydropower at $50 per BTC cost and sell all that they mine). Even if no debasement was paid to miners, they have a monopoly on transactions added to blocks, so they can charge what ever transaction fees they want if they control 51% of the hashrate. It begs for a oligarchy on mining to develop (which is the direction it appears to be headed and normally government steps in with regulation to aid the oligarchy).

And increasing the transactions per block also forces centralization, thus furthering a trend towards oligarchy control, so saying cost per transaction will fall as transaction rate increases is only true if the resultant oligarchy decides to go for market share first (perhaps as a longer-term strategy of 666 enslavement and world government trend).

Also since mining is only done for profit, then pools are required to deal with huge variance of winning a block for typical (non oligarchy) miners. Pools centralize mining, even if we argue that miners can switch pools, the government can more easily target the pools even if miners switch since by definition there will never be as many pools as miners (not even close).

There are many flaws in Satoshi's design which make it entirely broken from my view. I can't support Bitcoin (nor Monero). I support things that I feel enthusiastically could work out well for mankind and be successful. Bitcoin will succeed only because it is fitting in well with the existing oligarchy's (e.g. Peter Thiel) plans for world domination (and that includes that an illusion of decentralization will persist long enough for the centralization to finally take hold).

It seems like you have hit an impasse, but without knowing the details of the problem

I had thought so, but I think I explained in this thread how to break the impasse I thought I had hit. But I reiterate I will go over all the details when I am offline to see if I haven't missed something in my thought process while I am writing here online.

First I  do agree that Satoshi's design is flawed for the following two reasons:
1) Mining cannot be paid for entirely by fees, so a tail emission is a must.

Mining can be paid for by users who must add PoW to submit their transactions. The other reason for tail emission is because otherwise the coin supply is shrinking towards 0 as users lose coins, which will be much more likely once doing microtransactions and more frivolous widescale adoption.

The reason is that a fee market cannot properly develop in the absence of a block subsidy. One has either a fixed blocksize with a mining oligarchy and infinite fees or an infinite blocksize where competition between miners drive fees to zero.

For layman technophobes, your astute point (which many of us technophiles already aware of and I wrote Spiraling Transactions Fees thread in 2013) is that when the block size is unlimited then anyone can include all the transactions that were excluded by a miner that was trying to force higher transaction fees. But if block size is unlimited then transaction spam can be unlimited, so a mining oligarchy must form to constrain block size. The problem is not due to relative block size (so compression wouldn't fix it), but due to the fact that someone centralized needs to decide which transactions are spam or not (otherwise in decentralization at least in Satoshi's design then all spam transactions are allowed).

But you are incorrect to assert that tail emission fixes this. This is a fundamental flaw in Satoshi's design which is not fixed with tail emission. It is fundamental problem of a design that includes blocks. This is one of the flaws that Iota is attempting to correct by eliminating blocks, but then I have conjectured in this thread that Iota has other flaws because it eliminates flaws. This is why crypto gets so frustrating because it seems every design always ends up with centralization, because the CAP theorem can not be avoided!

My idea for fixing all of this, has to do with the way the temporal intrablock partitioning is done. I will probably find some flaw in my design too, but I will spend more time thinking about it. This thread is helping me enumerate all the issues I need to write down when I rehash the analysis of my design again (sans the part I had mentioned is already flawed but now I think that part may have been unnecessary any way).

In short, IMO Monero isn't close to solving the real problems of crypto. Even the anonymity is highly flawed as I explained in the recent discussions in the Monero vs. Dash thread (only Zerocash could be reliable anonymity). I don't want to waste my time on baby steps that aren't really moving us to any true solution. Sorry because I know you and the Monero folks are very smart. I just can't feel we will get the breakthrough we need working to improve Monero because there is some ingrained inertia there I don't want to fight to overcome.

2) In order to have a permission less system on needs an opaque blockchain where censorship is impossible or at least very expensive.

There are two vectors to accomplish this:

1. Mining is controlled by users, not centralized.

2. Transactions are entirely opaque, which is only accomplished in Zerocash. Cryptonote's anonymity breaks down in theory with chain and meta data analysis by a global snoop such as top-down society (NSA, etc).

Either one of those would probably suffice, but together that afaics would be fabulously permissionless.

There is a cost to censorship which has already been demonstrated in Bitcoin. It is manifested in the opposition to an increase in the blocksize by those miners that are based in China. The reason for this is the latency introduced by the Great Firewall of China puts a centralized data centre in China at a significant disadvantage with respect to say a residential connection in Canada. The irony here is that if Bitcoin had allowed for larger blocks earlier on this situation would not have developed since the Chinese ASIC manufacturers would have been forced to sell their devices for export leading to a much more decentralized Bitcoin mining situation. The lesson from Bitcoin is that a small blocksize can actually lead to mining centralization by accommodating censorship rather than the other way around.

Astute, well stated, and agreed. The block size is a double-edge sword no matter which direction it is increased or decreased. Real solutions will change entirely the design.

The second factor of PoW that must be taken into account is PoC (Proof of Cold). The key is that in a situation where electricity is used for space heating the marginal cost of mining is zero; however the heat is only valuable if it is decentralized. The key here is that one can easily distribute electricity but not heat forcing decentralization. This in effect gives the small player a very significant cost advantage over the large centralized operation.

Heat from electricity is the most inefficient way to heat (better to use wood, gas, or any carbon). Besides Larry Summers' 21 Inc is dreaming up ways to hook users into being slave oligarchy miners by giving them free heaters and cell phones in exchange for using their device to mine on behalf of 21 Inc (last time I looked 21 Inc was already a significant % of the global Bitcoin hashrate and climbing fast).

Sometimes I wonder if you Monero folks are actually a Trojan Horse planted to fool everyone to keep them away from furthering real solutions.

The reality is that it is very premature to dismiss a true second generation PoW coin such as Monero over what are very valid failures in the original Satoshi design. As with many technological innovations the first generation is not the one that eventually gains prominence.

And IMO/AFAICS Monero is too much of a baby step to be the one that kills Bitcoin. It doesn't really solve any problems truly.

[TPTB_need_war]

Could a blockchain* be invented that deals with balances and not coins? If you don't have to track coins you can only update the newest balances. That would probably scale because all you have to do is update new balances in every network "refresh" when money movement took place - and if you have, say, 1bn accounts, you'll still have 1bn accounts after 10 days of transactions - only the balances will be different in them. So, practically, it doesn't get more bloated. I can consider several problems but are they insurmountable?

* It doesn't need to be a blockchain per se. It could well be something like a paypal-type database but decentralized/distributed that has network consensus on what the balances are.

Sorry No, not in anything that will be DECENTRALIZED. I went through all these sort of design diversions and found flaws in all of them.

I appreciate of course that everyone is still interested in finding solutions. We all know we need a solution. But if there is no solution, we have to accept the laws of physics. Please see the other thread I started for more detailed discussion on ideas and what I (and others) think works and doesn't work.

If we had a 99.9% compression algorithm*, that is able to fold data again and again, reducing a 2mb file to 4kb, but requires a CPU tradeoff for all this folding/unfolding, would that work for scaling?

* http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Has-a-New-York-startup-achieved-a-99-compression-rate

Video has a lot of redundant data because of high frame rates and many objects are static or just displaced with rotation, which can perhaps be modeled in 3D.

But even if we can compress the block chain to nothing, that doesn't really solve the fundamental problems such as:

• economics of mining
• economics of blocks

[monsterer]

I thought you were referring to an impossible "bearer coin" type of design where PoW wasn't needed when you wrote that 'if only you can mine your own transactions'. Now I understand you meant something else

Yes, something else - I was referring to a POW system with one transaction per block, minable only by the sender of the transaction. I guess Iota is an example of such a system, but it doesn't have to be the only one.

You forget I pointed out to smooth (in our discussion about Proof-of-Stake versus Proof-of-Work in my vaporcoin's thread last month) that assumption fails when the government + oligarchy is the one taking control, because they can charge the cost to the collective.

I guess this is the plain 51% attack? Again, I'd love to hear the key details to any system which claims to address this, which doesn't create much bigger problems than it solves.

[TPTB_need_war]

I thought you were referring to an impossible "bearer coin" type of design where PoW wasn't needed when you wrote that 'if only you can mine your own transactions'. Now I understand you meant something else

Yes, something else - I was referring to a POW system with one transaction per block, minable only by the sender of the transaction. I guess Iota is an example of such a system, but it doesn't have to be the only one.

And unfortunately afaics Iota forsaking blocks introduces another flaw which is consensus is not forced, thus there can be (at least in theory and probably not an observed effect until it becomes a phenomenon if ever) divergence of DAG chains.

You forget I pointed out to smooth (in our discussion about Proof-of-Stake versus Proof-of-Work in my vaporcoin's thread last month) that assumption fails when the government + oligarchy is the one taking control, because they can charge the cost to the collective.

I guess this is the plain 51% attack? Again, I'd love to hear the key details to any system which claims to address this, which doesn't create much bigger problems than it solves.

Well I have proposed submitting PoW with each transaction, but I haven't yet detailed how I envision doing the temporal intrablock partitioning. Let me go think more on all that has been enumerated in this thread to see if I have an obvious flaw. And I will also think about when I want to discuss those remaining details of my proposed design. I expect to find a flaw in my design. I think it is impossible to fix the CAP theorem.

[TPTB_need_war]

Note I added point #3 as why PoS is MUCH less secure than PoW.

Basically this boils down to the same conceptual tradeoff as the post where I replied to ArticMine, in that allowing decentralized participation enables unbounded conditions (which is a flaw) but centralizing participation also leads to another set of flaws.

Crypto currency is flawed as a concept. Appears it can't work.

[GingerAle]

I apologize for not reading the entirety of every post, but my opinion / thoughts are as follows:

one can consider a crypto currency network fully centralized if it is impossible to participate in the network without human-granted access.

once can consider a crypto currency network decentralized if it is possible to participate in the network by simply plugging in.

I.e., in these proof of stake / delegated / whatever, there is a human factor. An entity agrees to something. I get stake by buying it. I get delegate supervote powers somehow.

In PoW, you get hardware, you connect to the network.

the trick in keeping the PoW decentralized is to keep the hardware itself decentralized.