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

[brekyrself]

@TPTB_need_war your design calls for blocks, which need miners (who are only in it for the profit), yet you've been talking about making mining unprofitable to avoid centralisation? There seems to be a conflict here - would you care to explain?

Would it be possible to shift the "mining" to the receiver?  Just like with credit/debit payments today, the receiver willingly pays the fee to make it easy for customers to pay for goods and services.  The receiver will always be motivated to collect their payment.


Great thread by the way, still shows hope in the crypto community.  Thanks for continued education.

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[monsterer]

There are many times where I don't think I can do it, because I seem to be battling some kind of problem with food digestion and concomitant autoimmunity, perhaps bile duct blockage but the symptoms from what I read point more towards cancer

Obvious question - why aren't you seeing a specialist? Self diagnoses will lead nowhere good.

[TPTB_need_war]

There are many times where I don't think I can do it, because I seem to be battling some kind of problem with food digestion and concomitant autoimmunity, perhaps bile duct blockage but the symptoms from what I read point more towards cancer

Obvious question - why aren't you seeing a specialist? Self diagnoses will lead nowhere good.

I think I explained that in my post:

But damn it, I don't see other good options. I guess I could leave the Philippines and return to USA try to get socialized medical care and then that might restore me to the level of function where I could hold a daily software engineer job again. Psychologically I seem incapable of making that move. I don't even have the energy to devote to thinking out that option and its impacts.

I'm tempted to go for a checkup here (there are MRI machines in Davao), but I don't even trust the doctors here in terms of diagnosis and certainly I would not trust them for any invasive procedure. Also I am trying to conserve funds and I have no medical insurance.

In short, I don't expect a quick solution. And maybe the prognosis will make me totally depressed. And I don't have the resources to deal with the problem in a way that I feel is safe.

The filipino surgeons butchered my eye. I could still see after being attacked in 1999, but they gave me an intern to do the first surgery on my eye at St. Luke Hospital in Manila.

Also when I was in my doctor's office after the hospitalization for the acute peptic ulcer, a younger (30s) American man was also awaiting checkup and he was grimacing with pain. My doctor had performed a "J-pop" (something about removing part of the colon and sewing together or something like that) on him some years before and had screwed him so bad that now the young guy was on permanent morphine.

The attitude of doctors here is callous, unprofessional. For example, in Sept I got an eye checkup at an ophthalmologist and he said poked at my right blinded eye and said something like "you might as well just remove that" or something derogatory to that effect. Also he poked at it very hard which didn't feel like it was good for the eye. I told him that the pressure in that eye oscillates depending on my overall health (and remember I was in horrible condition in August/September).

I don't trust the system here. And my mother has reminded me that I am unlikely to get along well with the doctors in the USA because I always want to ask questions and I don't like being dictated procedures until I fully understand them and get perhaps 2nd and 3rd opinions. But none of that I can afford.

And I certainly can't afford the lengthy down time.

My life options are very stressful. My rope is short. Difficult to explain to others who are healthy and in other circumstances. Sounds like an excuse until you walk in the other person's shoes. It is a self-inflicted circumstance, so I don't fault anyone but myself.

Let's return to the technical discussion.

[TPTB_need_war]

@TPTB_need_war your design calls for blocks, which need miners (who are only in it for the profit), yet you've been talking about making mining unprofitable to avoid centralisation? There seems to be a conflict here - would you care to explain?

Would it be possible to shift the "mining" to the receiver?  Just like with credit/debit payments today, the receiver willingly pays the fee to make it easy for customers to pay for goods and services.  The receiver will always be motivated to collect their payment.


Great thread by the way, still shows hope in the crypto community.  Thanks for continued education.

I do believe I have already solved this challenge by:

• Payers do the PoW because they must attach it to each transaction submitted to the network, same as for Iota
• Making the PoW share calculation faster than the latency to outsource it (this was explained in detail upthread); otherwise ASICS could be paid to mine it more efficiently which is a crucial detail
• Pools are disincentivized because mining isn't profitable any way, so payers are not doing PoW to gain income (although when they do win a block they get the unprofitable block reward, which was an important factor for reasons explained in detail upthread)
• The block chain design must provide an ability for payers to hash an entire block in their PoW shares, which Iota accomplishes by allowing multiple permanent partitions (which is what leads to the complex math of DAGs as explained upthread) and which I accomplish in my design with multiple intra-block temporary partitions (details on this crucial aspect of my design have not been revealed)
• In my design, the intra-block partitions provide the instant transactions feature, eliminate the Tragedy of Commons block chain scaling issue articulate between myself and ArticMine upthread. Ditto for Iota, except the partitions are permanent which leads to the complex math that I alleged causes unprovable Consistency. Security/Consistency in my design remains the same math as for Bitcoin, just gaining the many improvements I enumerated.
• Although there is centralization in my design due to the intra-block partitions being handled by servers, unlike the pools in Bitcoin and economics of mining (and blocks) in Bitcoin, the PoW remains unprofitable and thus these centralized servers can be changed at any time by some minority of the payers (or a fork if there is a 50% attack by the servers and the majority of the payers won't move from those servers). Thus I argue my design has a much better fighting mode to remain decentralized, permissionless. Iota is also decentralized because payers can choose which partition/chain/tip to reference, I allege upthread the implications of permanent partitions causes the math of the Security/Consistency to be unbounded in complexity which I thus contemplate could potentially lead to centralization due to a Tragedy of Commons around unbounded game theory which would be I theorize thwarted with some centralized policies.

So in summary, I think I have designed the best decentralization we will get from a block chain. Wouldn't there be many here who would be interested in seeing my design implemented and open sourced (as well launched as an altcoin)?

P.S. I don't release details on the intra-block partitioning scheme because Dash Evolution might copy it and claim it as their own, stealing the last thing I have remaining to try to help me in my life situation, while also helping the community (I hope). I think I already provided too many details and it is likely we may see some copycat version of my design in a delayed Evolution. Nevertheless even Evan et al copy me, they will not likely get rid of the masternodes which cause the following insoluble mess:

It is the math of attack vectors which thus converts Dash into a PoS(hit) coin. Smooth appears to have forgotten the conclusions we arrived at in the prior technical discussion on this matter (or I have).

[...]Not to mention the fraud and the fact that masternodes are illegal unregistered money transmitters under FinCIN regulations, since they transfer value to the developers.

On top of all that, Dash has NO USERSHIP and NO ACTUAL MARKETS (other than some delusional speculators playing greater fool game theory with each other).

[TPTB_need_war]

I think your hesitation may be wise. If we accept the (admittedly unproven) hypothesis that all potential cryptocurrency designs can be centralized by determined government then the economic factors above may in the end determine the degree to which that centralization actually happens. A superior technical solution will be successful only to the degree it shifts those underlying economic incentives.

Even an unequivocally superior conceptualization may utterly fail if the underlying substructure of the society is not ready to support it. In an primitive age where tribalism is just giving way to dictatorship the man calling out for constitutional democracy is probably wasting his breath.

Afaics, the technical design I have enumerated in the prior post enables society to fight malicious centralization for as long as payers (i.e. the users of the currency, as opposed to professional mining farms which are stuck in one location with a huge capital investment) will move away from servers which are doing the malfeasance. So this makes it much more difficult to regulate because the government hates to make laws that require them to enforce the laws against every decentralized individual because the government knows they can not enforce this. Instead the government always prefers to regulate the centralized nodes in any paradigm, e.g. upcoming regulation forcing all instant messaging and video providers to register global encryption keys with the government (amazing we are sliding into 1984 already!).

So the only way the government can centralize control over my design is to regulate all the protocols of the entire internet to detect and force traffic to not implement my protocol. This is nearly impossible for the government to accomplish, even the world government will have difficulty with this.

I think I have the design we need.

I hope I will receive the support of the community.

[TPTB_need_war]

Few brightest minds in cryptography proposed how data archiving could be incentivized and used instead of Proof-of-Work via Proof-of-Retrievability   http://www.coindesk.com/cryptocurrency-mining-help-archive-societys-important-data/ (academic paper: http://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/permacoin.pdf ).

Warning I as AnonyMint proposed this in mid-2013 and referred to it as Proof-of-Storage. I also discovered it was fundementally flawed. If you continue, you will be wasting your time. Eventually I will come back and explain to you and Andrew Miller PhD why this is flawed.

[GingerAle]

I think your hesitation may be wise. If we accept the (admittedly unproven) hypothesis that all potential cryptocurrency designs can be centralized by determined government then the economic factors above may in the end determine the degree to which that centralization actually happens. A superior technical solution will be successful only to the degree it shifts those underlying economic incentives.

Even an unequivocally superior conceptualization may utterly fail if the underlying substructure of the society is not ready to support it. In an primitive age where tribalism is just giving way to dictatorship the man calling out for constitutional democracy is probably wasting his breath.

Afaics, the technical design I have enumerated in the prior post enables society to fight malicious centralization for as long as payers (i.e. the users of the currency, as opposed to professional mining farms which are stuck in one location with a huge capital investment) will move away from servers which are doing the malfeasance. So this makes it much more difficult to regulate because the government hates to make laws that require them to enforce the laws against every decentralized individual because the government knows they can not enforce this. Instead the government always prefers to regulate the centralized nodes in any paradigm, e.g. upcoming regulation forcing all instant messaging and video providers to register global encryption keys with the government (amazing we are sliding into 1984 already!).

So the only way the government can centralize control over my design is to regulate all the protocols of the entire internet to detect and force traffic to not implement my protocol. This is nearly impossible for the government to accomplish, even the world government will have difficulty with this.

I think I have the design we need.

I hope I will receive the support of the community.

If you make the coin actually fungible then you've piqued my interest.

And of course actually fungible means opaque blockchain, and the only actual implementation of complete opacity is Monero.

If you make another traceable asset chain, whats the point?

And I don't got the money, but I'll mine it, which IMO is more important.

[monsterer]

I don't think you've actually answered my question directly (or explained why it might be irrelevant): what incentive will these 'servers' have to participate in the system?

Obviously, senders of transactions must generate a POW in order to participate, so their incentive is clear, but the servers are not users so must have different incentives.

[TPTB_need_war]

I don't think you've actually answered my question directly (or explained why it might be irrelevant): what incentive will these 'servers' have to participate in the system?

Obviously, senders of transactions must generate a POW in order to participate, so their incentive is clear, but the servers are not users so must have different incentives.

Okay agreed I didn't yet explain all the economics of the mining. The servers involved in the ephemeral intra-block partitions (which are merged into each PoW block) charge transaction fees, but the key point is that they are just dumb signatories that don't have any power except to refuse to sign, and the payer's can choose any server (and I expect the community to maintain a list of servers that are well behaving), thus the transaction fees will trend to the actual cost of the service (which should be microscopically low) since these servers do not have any power (unless they collude in a 50% attack but then the payers can minority fork).

The payers have the incentive to compute the PoW because the protocol requires it to be attached to each transaction. Note the payer has to sign the PoW (which CfB explained upthread can not be the case for Iota![1]), so the server can't be outsourced to do this PoW for the payer without a roundtrip network communication and since it is faster to compute the PoW locally than wait for this latency (and since the inefficiency of computing the PoW locally versus as ASIC is irrelevant in this context because the payer is only computing this when he pays not continuously), so payers will not outsource their PoW computations to ASICs.

You are probably wondering how payers can sign full blocks without being full nodes. Well that is one the things I am not going to reveal now for competitive reasons. But it shouldn't be too difficult for you to contemplate a way to do this. I'd prefer you not post your ideas about this and give me a chance to implement first. If I fail to implement timely, then I will open source my entire design so others can implement it.

There is an additional wrinkle to this that you would not have likely contemplated. The servers have to broadcast transactions to each other which thus creates DDoS (amplification) and Tragedy of the Commons economic issues. The DDoS issues I addressed already in a white paper DDoS Defense Employing Public Key Cryptography which was also discussed in the Bitcoin Technical Discussion forum in a thread I started there.

The Tragedy of the Commons issue is that if one server is a signatory for more transactions then it gains a larger percentage of the transaction fees but all servers have to process/verify all transactions in order to keep their local copy of the block chain up-to-date. So a server that gains more payers than the rest of the network thus has lower relative costs and thus can charge lower transaction fees. This would seem to be a centralization issue (and was one of the first flaws that initially caused me to think the design was going to fail to sustain decentralized, permissionless attributes). However, note that the cost per transaction is so insignificant (unlike in Bitcoin where the electricity cost is ~$9 per transaction!), that payers don't really have a cost incentive to favor one server over another and the community is very likely to maintain a list of the concentration of network activity per server so that payers can make sure they decentralize where they send their transactions (in order words using human social intelligence to thwart centralization, which will develop the correct non-apathetic attitudes in users). So this means that the economics encourages a proliferation of servers since everyone who makes a server can make a reliable and fast server will get some network share of the profit, for as long their fees are insignificant. Likely servers will compete on being as transparent and high availability as possible. This is a much different insoluble economic situation than we have with profitable PoW mining which mathematically forces the use of pools with signifiant network share (to maximize profitability since mining is barely profitable at the margins). This is really a paradigm shift as compared to Satoshi's design and a very important breakthrough for crypto currency.

[1]	Make sure you understand the implications of this. Iota (any DAG) can't sign the PoW because it creates an attack vector. Thus it seems that Iota's mining can be outsourced to ASICS, thus Iota's mining will economically centralize same as for Bitcoin!

[monsterer]

The servers involved in the ephemeral intra-block partitions (which are merged into each PoW block) charge transaction fees,

Ok, interesting; I was expecting the servers to be involved in generating the blocks and the payers to be doing intra-block stuff. If you have the other way around, doesn't that raise questions about availability and consistency - payers are unlikely to be online for any extended period of time, so their capabilities are not aligned with blockchain consistency, in the way that a more permanent miner might be. More than that, consistency between blocks submitted by different payers might be extremely poor given their limited online presence?

So this means that the economics encourages a proliferation of servers since everyone who makes a server can make a reliable and fast server will get some network share of the profit, for as long their fees are insignificant.

This implies some kind of favourable discovery protocol for electing these servers?

Likely servers will compete on being as transparent and high availability as possible. This is a much different insoluble economic situation than we have with profitable PoW mining which mathematically forces the use of pools with signifiant network share (to maximize profitability since mining is barely profitable at the margins)

How will the system cope in its adoption period where transaction fees alone are not enough to cover the costs of maintaining a server?

[monsterer]

Re-read my prior post. I just discovered a new flaw in Iota.

[1]   Make sure you understand the implications of this. Seems to me that Iota's mining can be outsourced to ASICS, thus Iota's mining will economically centralize same as for Bitcoin!

There are no fees in Iota to encourage centralised mining. The reason they have this non-signing policy is because transactions can become orphaned, therefore unless they expect the payers to continually monitor the tangle and re-send any orphaned transactions, 'others' must be required to do that job for them.... It was never clear to me what incentive there is for anyone to redo that work, though.

[TPTB_need_war]

Re-read my prior post. I just discovered a new flaw in Iota.

[1]   Make sure you understand the implications of this. Seems to me that Iota's mining can be outsourced to ASICS, thus Iota's mining will economically centralize same as for Bitcoin!

There are no fees in Iota to encourage centralised mining. The reason they have this non-signing policy is because transactions can become orphaned, therefore unless they expect the payers to continually monitor the tangle and re-send any orphaned transactions, 'others' must be required to do that job for them....

I think you missed my point, which is that if the PoW can be outsourced, then it is always more economical to do it on an ASIC farm near to cheap hydropower. Thus the mining PoW in Iota will trend to professional miners same as for Satoshi's design! They haven't accomplished anything at all on economic centralization (but have accomplished scaling but with other critical flaw I asserted upthread) because the economics of mining remains centralizing!

Note as we transition to mobile, battery life is important to users. Not needing to waste battery life on frequent microtransaction PoW computations would be desirable. Even IoT devices are often necessarily low powered. My design will face the same economic reality, but as I said if the latency cost is much higher than the cost to compute the PoW locally, then my design principle holds because in my decentralized, permissionless design the payer signs the PoW thus to outsource it would require a round-trip network communication (and wireless network communications consume battery life also).

It was never clear to me what incentive there is for anyone to redo that work, though.

If you don't understand the incentive to redo the PoW share for each Iota transaction, then please re-read the upthread discussion where in one of the other attacks on Iota that I contemplated (and posted about), CfB explained that attack could only be thwarted by allowing PoW shares to be recomputed without forcing them to be resigned. I understood why in the context of the upthread discussion with CfB. I prefer to not rediscuss the reasoning again (redundant, makes the thread too long, and my time/energy is scarce).

[monsterer]

I think you missed my point, which is that if the PoW can be outsourced, then it is always more economical to do it on an ASIC farm near to cheap hydropower. Thus the mining PoW in Iota will trend to professional miners same as for Satoshi's design! They haven't accomplished anything at all because the economics of mining remains centralizing!

It will only centralise like that if it becomes profitable enough for any such ASIC farm to do that work, compared to the reward they might achieve mining a coin with a block reward with all that expensive hardware.

If you don't understand the incentive to redo the PoW share for each Iota transaction, then please re-read the upthread discussion where in one of the other attacks on Iota that I contemplated (and posted about), CfB explained that attack could only be thwarted by allowing PoW shares to be recomputed without forcing them to be resigned. I understood why in the context of the upthread discussion with CfB. I prefer to not rediscuss the reasoning again (redundant, makes the thread too long, and my time/energy is scarce).

I was saying I wasn't clear on the incentive for others to redo the POW, as in, not the payers. It's clear the payers have an incentive, but this implies payers must always be online and monitoring to achieve reliability, which I don't think is an acceptable compromise. This is more likely to result in centralisation than anything else, because the complexity of that monitoring and resubmission process is high.

[CIYAM]

I think that the idea of using POW vs. latency is an interesting one (the only really original idea I've noticed in this topic actually).

The design for the CIYAM blockchain works very differently (to everything I've read so far) but it also has not resolved a specific Sybil problem which is why I have taken some interest in this topic (although there is a lot of noise here so I've only decided to post now that it has got a little quieter).

I don't intend to introduce my approach "piecemeal" so no need to worry about that - am just observing and interested to see if anything discussed here will help with the problems that I am trying to solve.

[TPTB_need_war]

I think that the idea of using POW vs. latency is an interesting one (the only really original idea I've noticed in this topic actually).

The design for the CIYAM blockchain works very differently (to everything I've read so far) but it also has not resolved a specific Sybil problem which is why I have taken some interest in this topic (although there is a lot of noise here so I've only decided to post now that it has got a little quieter).

I don't intend to introduce my approach "piecemeal" so no need to worry about that - am just observing and interested to see if anything discussed here will help with the problems that I am trying to solve.

Why are we not privately talking about whether we can work together?

(I would need to ask if you were involved in some project I recently criticized and then work through a discussion on that)

Thanks for posting.

[CIYAM]

(I would need to ask if you were involved in some project I recently criticized and then work through a discussion on that)

If that was to be of bother to me then I don't think I would have posted.

Welcome to PM me if you like or also to ask questions publicly - as I've not released many details (other than the source code) my project is pretty much "under the radar".

To be 100% clear I have not "nailed it" as I still have a Sybil issue I need to work out (but I think I have come up with some interesting stuff).

[TPTB_need_war]

I think you missed my point, which is that if the PoW can be outsourced, then it is always more economical to do it on an ASIC farm near to cheap hydropower. Thus the mining PoW in Iota will trend to professional miners same as for Satoshi's design! They haven't accomplished anything at all because the economics of mining remains centralizing!

It will only centralise like that if it becomes profitable enough for any such ASIC farm to do that work, compared to the reward they might achieve mining a coin with a block reward with all that expensive hardware.

That is an incorrect conceptualization of the economics. The relative profitability will drive the fees extracted from payers such there is no difference between the two scenarios you contemplated. Thus mining in Iota will centralize the same as for Bitcoin. Please let's not be noisy. Think this through and PM me if you still haven't agreed (you can public post after we sort out in private). Let's respect the reading time of the investors who are attempting to do due diligence.

If you don't understand the incentive to redo the PoW share for each Iota transaction, then please re-read the upthread discussion where in one of the other attacks on Iota that I contemplated (and posted about), CfB explained that attack could only be thwarted by allowing PoW shares to be recomputed without forcing them to be resigned. I understood why in the context of the upthread discussion with CfB. I prefer to not rediscuss the reasoning again (redundant, makes the thread too long, and my time/energy is scarce).

I was saying I wasn't clear on the incentive for others to redo the POW, as in, not the payers. It's clear the payers have an incentive, but this implies payers must always be online and monitoring to achieve reliability, which I don't think is an acceptable compromise. This is more likely to result in centralisation than anything else, because the complexity of that monitoring and resubmission process is high.

CfB's argument is the payee has an incentive to resubmit it with new PoW. (and so the PoW can't be signed by the payee)

[monsterer]

CfB's argument is the payee has an incentive to resubmit it with new PoW. (and so the PoW can't be signed by the payee)

Ahhh, yes, I'd forgotten about that; to some degree, that does mitigate the payer having to be online at all times, since the recipient (I'm switching to clearer terminology than 'payee') can always resubmit the transaction after redoing the work.

However, I'd like to discuss whether there is another way to approach all of this (not related to Iota), such that the payer does sign the POW which rules out pooled mining, while being totally different to your design, TPTB_need_war.

It all relies upon one critical point, which was a huge point of contention in our previous discussion: in a linear chain of transactions (A to Z), where B must point back to A, why must the transactions after A get orphaned if A is a double spend?

e.g.

Code:

A<-B<-A*<-C<-D

A* is the double spend. Why must C and D get orphaned?

If we can get over this point, I'll describe the entire idea.

[Come-from-Beyond]

e.g.

Code:

A<-B<-A*<-C<-D

A* is the double spend. Why must C and D get orphaned?

If we can get over this point, I'll describe the entire idea.

If you keep using "orphaned" talking about DAG you'll never get the core idea of this new concept. Even those transactions that reference "double-spends" are useful, because they also reference legit transactions. I'll repeat again, if you send a normal payment and a double-spending then you increase security of the system. Validation of transactions is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billet_reading, you mess with very young transactions but secure elder ones.

[TPTB_need_war]

e.g.

Code:

A<-B<-A*<-C<-D

A* is the double spend. Why must C and D get orphaned?

If we can get over this point, I'll describe the entire idea.

If you keep using "orphaned" talking about DAG you'll never get the core idea of this new concept. Even those transactions that reference "double-spends" are useful, because they also reference legit transactions. I'll repeat again, if you send a normal payment and a double-spending then you increase security of the system. Validation of transactions is similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billet_reading, you mess with very young transactions but secure elder ones.

Again per the upthread discussion, I allege this is only true if all participants are using the same probabilistic selection algorithms for paying and acceptance. I actually believe the natural state of the system is to devolve into chaos. I will in the future (perhaps) endeavor to show this mathematically (if it can be so reduced).