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

[iamnotback]

You're missing that setting the goal creates a net effect, it's no longer karate or boxing, it's mma. We aim for a perfection and achieve various degrees of success based on preferred taste--sooner or later, you will get there, or not, but all your negative energy helps

You are the one with the negative erroneous phrase "of course" in that context.

Keep trying to shoot me down with nary a veil concealing your envy to save your pathetic Moanuro and Crypo Kongdung good ole boys club of robber goats and baronistas. Keep trying in vain.

TheFascistMind = iamnotback.

The following is a rebuttal to you, rpietila, and r0ach which I wrote presciently wrote 2 years in advance, knowing that one day you'd need to read this:

One last attempt to explain how I see that the rich buys club is incongruent with the future.

I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4

You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.

Sorry guys, Monero killer-
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=681725.msg8754756#msg8754756

Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.

We start with swans, then it gets interesting, and hard.

There IS an obliterating black swan (i.e. Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..

I am also a business angel, funding people's things ever since 2004.

And this produced how many million user products?

I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).

I am fine if you don't want to come to my castle but that is the necessary condition if you want to deal with me.

I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.

This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.

Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.

Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.

My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".

You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.

Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.

"Talk is cheap, show me the code"— Linus Torvalds

"Those who can't build, talk"— Eric Raymond

Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.

This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).

Open source is the odds of large numbers.

"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow"— Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable"— Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.

We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.

The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.

P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.

I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.

Time is of the essence.

It doesn't matter if Paypal accepts Bitcoin because users who are not investors (e.g. especially females and the billions of impoverished) have no incentive to convert from their unit-of-account (dollars) to BTC just to pay for something. They might as well just fund their Paypal transactions with their credit card or bank account. Bitcoin will not become the unit-of-account without the blessing of the government, because it has no distribution scale.

Most of the impoverished don't have a credit card nor bank account.

The Paypal plan.

The reason Paypal couldn't just issue everyone in the developing world an account is because of jealousy thus legal and political risk. Governments would resist take over of their financial control by an overtly fascist corporation.

Peter Thiel et al are more clever.

Issue everyone a supranational digital account that is "decentralized and controlled by no one", when in fact it is centralized and controlled by the fascist powers-that-be.

Use this to force other countries into submission when they attempt to offer their own top-down centralized digital currencies, e.g. Ecuador.

The people are trapped either way in a fully traceable block chain and NWO Technocracy.

Monero (portmanteau of money+dying euro?) offers no hope of scaling to avert this rapidly developing fascist outcome.

C'est la vie. Fait accompli.

And the competing and equally devastating Apple Plan.

Any other ideas of how to scale a crypto-currency to beyond 10 million users within 3 years or less from launch?

Build it into a game that becomes a massive hit.

Note 'game' has a wider scope of context than what you might be thinking. For example, life is game.

Oh, poor little him!

Continue your fantasies please.

Sometimes I think out-of-the-box. I don't claim to be a genius. I have a reasonably high IQ (probably not as high as aminorex on standardized tests) and some different approaches. Linus Torvalds probably doesn't have as high an IQ as Eric Raymond (clearly evident by reading their respective blogs), but Linus has a skill set of being able to contain the complexity of large projects which Eric may not possess (Eric wrote this).

This is embarrassing for me and the best way for me to depersonalize this discussion is for me to stop speaking. Because I have very strong opinions.

Sorry for rocking the boat. I guess I don't know how to not speak my mind.

Edit: I had sent PMs twice to Hal telling about the treatments I am trying, because my autoimmunity and his ALS may share the autoimmunity issue. I don't know if he ever read them, and I may have been too late. Perhaps a quote from him is apropos.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2f1ijk/hal_finney_was_bitcoins_first_follower_when_you/

"When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in."

Watch the video!

If you emphasis on reading comprehension, the actual questions was how many processor cores is need to verify the incoming transactions + the mined block?

Since you asked, I just looked in the log file on a 4-year old Xeon server I'm using as a node. It takes approximately 0.14 seconds from the time a new transaction arrives until the time it is relayed. I believe most if not all of this processing is single threaded, which suggests approximately 7 transactions per second per core on a 4-year old CPU.

On the order-of-magnitude of 20 txs/sec per core on a late model CPU, i.e. an order-of-magnitude higher than Bitcoin (<1 tx/s) now per core but two orders-of-magnitude less than Visa (2 - 6K tx/s) now per core, means Monero (Cryptonote) can't scale to any where even close to global Visa scale and remain both decentralized for mining with fast block period (thus fast transactions), not to mention the likely order(s)-of-magnitude more scaling above that to reach ubiquitous global micro transactions and programmable contracts on the block chain.

So you would have to solve both this and the blockchain bloat in order to scale to global widespread use. It appears that one-time ring signatures are fundamentally incompatible with scaling.

Cryptonote can't encourage too much use with zero transaction fees, because it can't accept the scaling that can come with it.

I believe Zerocash has similar scaling issues. DarkCoin (and CoinJoin) has the simultaneity problem that fights scaling because to mix you need someone else who wants to mix with you at the same denominations at the same time (not mention being either theoretically defeated with jamming and/or Sybil attack on masternodes) and to perform this meeting with scaling you need global coherence on submitted txs which means either centralization (synchronicity) or no scaling.

(8 ) Every day we go lower, there has to be new sellers selling a growing number of coins to satisfy even stagnant demand. I would not bet it happening indefinitely.

You are ignoring my point about marginal supply and demand sets price.

We can't use fundamental demand arguments during a speculative move.

The lower the price goes, the more panic selling among those who bought at higher nosebleed levels during the 2013 bubble.

At what price did the huge surge in new buyers come last year? Looking at a volume x price chart from 2013 should tell us where the bottom should be.

Because price is now low, people are making this supposed loss of fungibility a big issue, as if it was the end of everything. We have been dealing with this kind of legislation in the PM industry for decades and it is not a big deal. It is not the reason why PM's are not practical to be used as money.

Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.

Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..

You ignore and did not address the point.

Also all jurisdictions are classifying Bitcoin as a commodity or property that is subject to capital gains tax. (It is irrelevant to my point, but Obama and EU are planning to raise taxes to 70%).

Bitcoin will continue to have value because it is an ignorance bubble among white male fanatics. It will also have value because it is the liquid backbone of exchange for an ecosystem that will solve the above problem with altcoins that are superior to Bitcoin. Bitcoin will also grow in value because it is the NWO coin and the governments are going to be promoting it and the institutional players will chime in with government compatible offchain services that eventually get the blessing from the government and exclusions to tax hurdles in order to increase mass adoption. At that point, Bitcoin will be effectively a fiat system. Any way, Bitcoin is already controlled by a few people.

Bottom line is Bitcoin will bottom and then the price will go up again. It is an investment but not a solution to what we wanted idealistically. But it is a necessary stepping stone.

do i think 9/11 was an inside job? yes. herp.
 
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.

the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.

some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.

Those bad guys wielded widespread power to pull off what they did and get the entire world to change into a police state against terrorism, yet you attribute relative impotence to them.

Have you not seen the billboards for example in London urging citizens to report anything they see, because of the threat of terrorism. Have you not traveled and seen that nearly all public venues (malls, airports, etc) have security guards that have hissy fits if they see even a hang bag laying unattended.

Or I guess that global coordination was just a random outcome.  

You ignore the overt efforts of for example David Rockefeller who travels the globe working on the global coodination, such as his Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg group. These are all real institutions for global coodination.

You ignore that corporations and media all over the world push this junk science of man-made global warming. Just a random, uncoordinated outcome eh?  

Can you tell me how fires and debris could bring the Eiffel tower down vertically in free fall entirely with not any portion standing nor falling off center?

Maybe this

Stay away from that thermonuclear idea. That is outlandish and planted to make us look like kooks.

The best hypothesis I've seen thus far is the buildings were brought down with detonated Thermite cutting charges planted on the steel beams. There is much evidence of this, in spite of the steel was quickly shipped to China to be melted to destroy the evidence. The Thermite (which melts steel) is why it burned hot for weeks as can be seen by aerial IR photography. The melted angle cuts can even be seen on photos of beams from the rubble.

One problem I have with the Thermite hypothesis is that how could timing of the cuts be so tightly coordinated to obtain the free fall implosion onto self. Perhaps the Thermite was combined with traditional demolition charges. I haven't followed the detailed developments much in many years because the evidence is mostly destroyed and my understanding is satisfied based on other analysis that the government's story was impossible. Knowing we've been lied to and that it required some form of demolition is sufficient to prod me into the activities I am doing now to defeat this slide into totalitarianism.

(8 ) Every day we go lower, there has to be new sellers selling a growing number of coins to satisfy even stagnant demand. I would not bet it happening indefinitely.

You are ignoring my point about marginal supply and demand sets price.

We can't use fundamental demand arguments during a speculative move.

The lower the price goes, the more panic selling among those who bought at higher nosebleed levels during the 2013 bubble.

At what price did the huge surge in new buyers come last year? Looking at a volume x price chart from 2013 should tell us where the bottom should be.

Because price is now low, people are making this supposed loss of fungibility a big issue, as if it was the end of everything. We have been dealing with this kind of legislation in the PM industry for decades and it is not a big deal. It is not the reason why PM's are not practical to be used as money.

Sure you have to pay taxes on gains, but the fact that you have gains should be the interesting thing here. Even if there was a blockchain-level registration of all your bitcoins, and requirement to keep track of the cost basis of every satoshi, you would not even notice given proper software. This ruling is the beginning of all good things bitcoin, except the loss of anonymity which wasn't there to begin with.

Besides I am sick with this US-centricism. There are 220 other legislations out there to choose from if you don't like the ruling. In my opinion it was very reasonable and I can only dream of 18% cgt rates here..

You ignore and did not address the point.

Also all jurisdictions are classifying Bitcoin as a commodity or property that is subject to capital gains tax. (It is irrelevant to my point, but Obama and EU are planning to raise taxes to 70%).

Bitcoin will continue to have value because it is an ignorance bubble among white male fanatics. It will also have value because it is the liquid backbone of exchange for an ecosystem that will solve the above problem with altcoins that are superior to Bitcoin. Bitcoin will also grow in value because it is the NWO coin and the governments are going to be promoting it and the institutional players will chime in with government compatible offchain services that eventually get the blessing from the government and exclusions to tax hurdles in order to increase mass adoption. At that point, Bitcoin will be effectively a fiat system. Any way, Bitcoin is already controlled by a few people.

Bottom line is Bitcoin will bottom and then the price will go up again. It is an investment but not a solution to what we wanted idealistically. But it is a necessary stepping stone.

do i think 9/11 was an inside job? yes. herp.
 
do i think there is a a super secret cabal in charge of the whole world. no.

the truth is likely far more mundane than the hollywood NWO scenario.

some powerful/rich guys sometimes do some really bad stuff to stay in charge/rich. its always been like that. just the same as there have always been other guys who think they are super genius for figuring that out. it's not 'breaking news'.

Those bad guys wielded widespread power to pull off what they did and get the entire world to change into a police state against terrorism, yet you attribute relative impotence to them.

Have you not seen the billboards for example in London urging citizens to report anything they see, because of the threat of terrorism. Have you not traveled and seen that nearly all public venues (malls, airports, etc) have security guards that have hissy fits if they see even a hang bag laying unattended.

Or I guess that global coordination was just a random outcome.  

You ignore the overt efforts of for example David Rockefeller who travels the globe working on the global coodination, such as his Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg group. These are all real institutions for global coodination.

You ignore that corporations and media all over the world push this junk science of man-made global warming. Just a random, uncoordinated outcome eh?  

Can you tell me how fires and debris could bring the Eiffel tower down vertically in free fall entirely with not any portion standing nor falling off center?

Maybe this

Stay away from that thermonuclear idea. That is outlandish and planted to make us look like kooks.

The best hypothesis I've seen thus far is the buildings were brought down with detonated Thermite cutting charges planted on the steel beams. There is much evidence of this, in spite of the steel was quickly shipped to China to be melted to destroy the evidence. The Thermite (which melts steel) is why it burned hot for weeks as can be seen by aerial IR photography. The melted angle cuts can even be seen on photos of beams from the rubble.

One problem I have with the Thermite hypothesis is that how could timing of the cuts be so tightly coordinated to obtain the free fall implosion onto self. Perhaps the Thermite was combined with traditional demolition charges. I haven't followed the detailed developments much in many years because the evidence is mostly destroyed and my understanding is satisfied based on other analysis that the government's story was impossible. Knowing we've been lied to and that it required some form of demolition is sufficient to prod me into the activities I am doing now to defeat this slide into totalitarianism.

[generalizethis]

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but walls of words can't hurt my argument--if you would stick with what offers the best solution and work towards it--instead of away from it--you may end up in the right hemisphere, but then again, your negativity is good for quality control.

[pereira4]

It will be considered a basic human right that Internet money and access be without borders/barriers. The globalists want this. I believe the elite created Bitcoin as a Trojan horse against nation-state and banking interests selfishness. They are using us to force a wedge between nation-states and banks, and the global village reality of the Internet

I don't really get this theory (conspiracy theory that is) about how Bitcoin is a trojan horse by the so called elite. Why would the elite deploy a software that is open source, and allows people to hide money from the government or anyone else but you and the other party?

I mean people that work for bitcoin, if they never cash out and buy with bitcoin... the circle is closed, government can't never tax any of that, they will never know how much bitcoin a person that got bitcoin within bitcoin ecosystem be it by mining or by working in exchange of bitcoin has... so what's the point? If I was the elite, I would be hating bitcoin and having nightmares about it. I don't see how the elites benefit from bitcoin.

I think bitcoin was simply the work of crypto anarchists/hackers. They saw that the future is digital, and that governments will deploy closed source currencies where they have total control. They saw this coming, and released bitcoin as a way to fight against that. Therefore I don't buy the conspiracy theory of bitcoin being a trojan horse, since I fail to see how the elite benefits in any way from it.

[iamnotback]

It will be considered a basic human right that Internet money and access be without borders/barriers. The globalists want this. I believe the elite created Bitcoin as a Trojan horse against nation-state and banking interests selfishness. They are using us to force a wedge between nation-states and banks, and the global village reality of the Internet

I don't really get this theory (conspiracy theory that is) about how Bitcoin is a trojan horse by the so called elite. Why would the elite deploy a software that is open source, and allows people to hide money from the government or anyone else but you and the other party?

Because the nation-states and banks are powerless to stop the lurch to crypto-currency and the global ledger. They simply don't have globalized jurisdiction. This creates a demand for a world government system, so that regulations can be placed on all countries at once. In this way, crypto-currency can be regulated later after the world government takes form. Until then, the nation-states will find themselves powerless to stop crypto-currency unless they shut off the Internet, which they can't do. Even China will succumb (the people already know how to use VPNs to subvert the Great Firewall of China).

I mean people that work for bitcoin, if they never cash out and buy with bitcoin... the circle is closed, government can't never tax any of that,

This is why the nation-states will need to support the creation of a world government. Bitcoin is the Trojan horse that forces them to.

... they will never know how much bitcoin a person that got bitcoin within bitcoin ecosystem be it by mining or by working in exchange of bitcoin has... so what's the point?

Well Bitcoin is traceable if you have the resources of the NSA, but other countries don't have those resources. And more anonymous coins are underway, so yes ultimately governments can't track it if they can't regulate it globally to force a government viewkey to be attached to every transaction. Again crypto-currency breaks the authority of nation-states and renders banks irrelevant. It thus drives the need for a world government and a world bank.

If I was the elite, I would be hating bitcoin and having nightmares about it. I don't see how the elites benefit from bitcoin.

Grasshopper you don't think in sophisticated logic, and that is one reason why you could not ever be a member of the global elite.

Bitcoin is working perfectly as they designed it to do.

Ask yourself this. Does Bitcoin eliminate the need for people to borrow money and will Bitcoin prevent fractional reserve lending? The answer to both is no. And so the business of the global elite is still intact, while they destroy all their competitors with the Bitcoin Trojan horse.

I think bitcoin was simply the work of crypto anarchists/hackers. They saw that the future is digital, and that governments will deploy closed source currencies where they have total control. They saw this coming, and released bitcoin as a way to fight against that. Therefore I don't buy the conspiracy theory of bitcoin being a trojan horse, since I fail to see how the elite benefits in any way from it.

That is of course what they knew you would think. Masterful their plan. They know very well, you could not possible conceive of them making Bitcoin and instead you want to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto is a real person. Lol. Larry Summers has a bellyache from laughing too much.

[BitCoinPokerBro]

This is vary interesting

[iamnotback]

Bitcoin removes the necessity of requiring third parties to keep track of personal transactions

Incorrect if you mean to imply that Bitcoin is not centralized:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1690725.msg16991114#msg16991114

The distinction is that the centralized entities are global. The nation-states can't regulate the miners. But the miners are centralized and will become ever more so. It is a winner-take-all economic paradigm. Why wouldn't the global elite love that?

Decentralized is not the same as distributed!

[ArticMine]

...


Here is the rough draft from my white paper for the section concerning transactions fees, block size, and the unavoidable monopolization of Proof-of-Work by a few:

https://gist.github.com/shelby3/c0d6e0ed132be7e4577df3663c81ee09


Applies to every proof-of-work coin which attempts to scale up, not just Bitcoin.



...

I edited it after proof-reading upon awakening.

I waited a few days before responding to this.

The analysis is the paper is correct, except for the where the POW coin has a tail or permanent block reward sufficient to secure the coin on its own. The notable cases with a tail or permanent block reward are Monero and Dogecoin. In the Monero case the net fees paid to the miners (fees less block increase penalties) could theoretically approach zero under the right circumstances, where there is a sharp decrease in the transaction volume. The obvious example would be on Christmas Day. The point in Monero is that fees are not there to secure the coin, that task is left to the block reward, but rather to regulate the adaptive blocksize and deter spam. I would expect gross fees, before any penalties are paid, in Monero to be about 2 - 4% of the block reward so we are dealing with the case where to quote from the paper

the minted block reward is significantly greater than the average transaction fees per block

In this situation since the fees are insignificant and determined by the block reward and the variance in transaction demand, the financial incentive for a centralizing cartel over fees is simply not there.

[iamnotback]

...


Here is the rough draft from my white paper for the section concerning transactions fees, block size, and the unavoidable monopolization of Proof-of-Work by a few:

https://gist.github.com/shelby3/c0d6e0ed132be7e4577df3663c81ee09


Applies to every proof-of-work coin which attempts to scale up, not just Bitcoin.



...

I edited it after proof-reading upon awakening.

I waited a few days before responding to this.

The analysis is the paper is correct, except for the where the POW coin has a tail or permanent block reward sufficient to secure the coin on its own. The notable cases with a tail or permanent block reward are Monero and Dogecoin. In the Monero case the net fees paid to the miners (fees less block increase penalties) could theoretically approach zero under the right circumstances, where there is a sharp decrease in the transaction volume. The obvious example would be on Christmas Day. The point in Monero is that fees are not there to secure the coin, that task is left to the block reward, but rather to regulate the blocksize and deter spam. I would expect gross fees, before any penalties are paid, in Monero to be about 2-3% of the block reward so we are dealing with the case where to quote from the paper

the minted block reward is significantly greater than the average transaction fees per block

In this situation since the fees are insignificant and determined by the block reward and the variance in transaction demand, the financial incentives for a centralizing cartel over fees are simply not there.

Which my paper states very clearly, that is only true because you assume that transaction volume won't be significant enough such that transaction fees do not approach the minted block reward. You assume Monero will never handle any where near the world's volume of transactions and/or that the market cap will rise sufficiently such that the tiny perpetual minted block reward is greater than the transaction-related costs (but given the horrendous O(n²) scaling problem of Satoshi's design, then this assumption also isn't likely true at VISA scale).

But in any case none that can help, because as my paper states very clearly, proof-of-work remains a winner-take-all any way. Thus Monero's perpetual minted block reward does nothing to solve the problem.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

[ArticMine]

...

Which my paper states very clearly, that is only true because you assume that transaction volume won't be significant enough such that transaction fees do not approach the minted block reward. You assume Monero will never handle any where near the world's volume of transactions and/or that the market cap will rise sufficiently such that the tiny perpetual minted block reward is greater than the transaction-related costs (but given the horrendous O(n²) scaling problem of Satoshi's design, then this assumption also isn't likely true at VISA scale).

But that doesn't help because as my paper states very clearly, proof-of-work remains a winner-take-all any way. Thus Monero's perpetual minted block reward does nothing to solve the problem.

The cartel will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

I make no such assumptions. What you are assuming, incorrectly I must add, is a fixed per KB transaction fee in Monero regardless of blocksize or market cap. This assumption is fundamentally incorrect as I have explained before because of the adaptive blocksize limit and penalty function ensure that over time the total fees paid per block remain in a constant range when compared to the block reward. Increase the blocksize in Monero by a factor of 100x and the fees per KB drop by a factor of 100x.

[iamnotback]

...

Which my paper states very clearly, that is only true because you assume that transaction volume won't be significant enough such that transaction fees do not approach the minted block reward. You assume Monero will never handle any where near the world's volume of transactions and/or that the market cap will rise sufficiently such that the tiny perpetual minted block reward is greater than the transaction-related costs (but given the horrendous O(n²) scaling problem of Satoshi's design, then this assumption also isn't likely true at VISA scale).

But that doesn't help because as my paper states very clearly, proof-of-work remains a winner-take-all any way. Thus Monero's perpetual minted block reward does nothing to solve the problem.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

I make no such assumptions. What you are assuming, incorrectly I must add, is a fixed per KB transaction fee in Monero regardless of blocksize or market cap. This assumption is fundamentally incorrect as I have explained before because of the adaptive blocksize limit and penalty function ensure that over time the total fees paid per block remain in a constant range when compared to the block reward. Increase the blocksize in Monero by a factor of 100x and the fees per KB drop by a factor of 100x.

ArticMine here you are again posting your inkblots. Slow down and try to understand your mistakes. Go take some quiet time and think for a while before you respond, so you don't fill up thread with useless noise.

I am saying that is as the "transaction-related costs" approach the minted block reward, then the Tragedy of the Commons in transaction fees results. This has nothing to do with a fixed per KB transaction fee, but rather the costs of actually processing the transactions. You have to factor in that costs include the fact in proof-of-work mining, that a 0.1% hashrate miner must propagate and validate 100% of the systemic transaction volume (yet he is only paid 0.1% portion of the total systemic rewards, and probably even paid less because of selfish mining and asymmetric propagation costs due to mining on the wrong chain part of time).

And any way, the entire discussion is irrelevant, because regardless, the economies-of-scale in proof-of-work dictate that it is a winner-take-all power vacuum. So you are just wasting your time any way arguing about the transaction fee aspect.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

[generalizethis]

...

Which my paper states very clearly, that is only true because you assume that transaction volume won't be significant enough such that transaction fees do not approach the minted block reward. You assume Monero will never handle any where near the world's volume of transactions and/or that the market cap will rise sufficiently such that the tiny perpetual minted block reward is greater than the transaction-related costs (but given the horrendous O(n²) scaling problem of Satoshi's design, then this assumption also isn't likely true at VISA scale).

But that doesn't help because as my paper states very clearly, proof-of-work remains a winner-take-all any way. Thus Monero's perpetual minted block reward does nothing to solve the problem.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

I make no such assumptions. What you are assuming, incorrectly I must add, is a fixed per KB transaction fee in Monero regardless of blocksize or market cap. This assumption is fundamentally incorrect as I have explained before because of the adaptive blocksize limit and penalty function ensure that over time the total fees paid per block remain in a constant range when compared to the block reward. Increase the blocksize in Monero by a factor of 100x and the fees per KB drop by a factor of 100x.

ArticMine here you are again posting your inkblots. Slow down and try to understand your mistakes. Go take some quiet time and think for a while before you respond, so you don't fill up thread with useless noise.

I am saying that is as the "transaction-related costs" approach the minted block reward, then the Tragedy of the Commons in transaction fees results. This has nothing to do with a fixed per KB transaction fee, but rather the costs of actually processing the transactions. You have to factor in that costs include the fact in proof-of-work mining, that a 0.1% hashrate miner must propagate and validate 100% of the systemic transaction volume (yet he is only paid 0.1% portion of the total systemic rewards, and probably even paid less because of selfish mining and asymmetric propagation costs due to mining on the wrong chain part of time).

And any way, the entire discussion is irrelevant, because regardless, the economies-of-scale in proof-of-work dictate that it is a winner-take-all power vacuum. So you are just wasting your time any way arguing about the transaction fee aspect.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

No. Dude, this goes back to what I was saying about decentralized power structures, they feed multiple pools of resources, so the more payment gateways you add the more decentralization you have--if you run around chasing oil fields, of course you are going to get train costs plus land cost plus whatever, but if your aim is towards the stars, you must create multiple points of entry, re-entry, pull, push, whatever....my point is that if you land the thing to friendly miners in a control spasm of leaked resources, of course you get a parasite that can barely get airborne--the lust for power works as a virtual control mechanism through the will for control and anarchy--these are fail safes built into the natural order of Earth--they don't necessarily apply to space, which in our limited terms is infinite--so infinity negates limited resource arguments as I can at least fathom self-replicating drone farms that intertwine and create new outposts as they scour the universe for not-so-rare minerals that remain in abundance. The Egyptians kept pointing us out of the fertile crescent and towards the sun god--that's why he remains a part of myth and religion. What's weird is that I sucked at puzzle's growing up, but I was always good at drawing them.

TLDR : a way to counteract electrical mining cartels is to increase distribution field and to create software designed to disrupt centralizing.

phones # + software # + entry/exit points # = scale of decentralization

Focusing on power constraints misses the point.

[ArticMine]

...

ArticMine here you are again posting your inkblots. Slow down and try to understand your mistakes. Go take some quiet time and think for a while before you respond, so you don't fill up thread with useless noise.

I am saying that is as the "transaction-related costs" approach the minted block reward, then the Tragedy of the Commons in transaction fees results. This has nothing to do with a fixed per KB transaction fee, but rather the costs of actually processing the transactions. You have to factor in that costs include the fact in proof-of-work mining, that a 0.1% hashrate miner must propagate and validate 100% of the systemic transaction volume (yet he is only paid 0.1% portion of the total systemic rewards, and probably even paid less because of selfish mining and asymmetric propagation costs due to mining on the wrong chain part of time).

And any way, the entire discussion is irrelevant, because regardless, the economies-of-scale in proof-of-work dictate that it is a winner-take-all power vacuum. So you are just wasting your time any way arguing about the transaction fee aspect.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

Again a false assumption bold since there is no explanation how this is supposed to happen in the presence of a fixed tail emission. This assumption is up against:
1) The Equation of Exchange in economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange MV = PQ. What is being assumed here is to increase Q without a corresponding decrease in P.  Or to put it in simpler terms one cannot expect a 100x increase in the number of transactions (Q) in Monero without a corresponding increase in 1/P (purchasing power) of the tail emission in Monero.
2) The fall in real terms of the unit cost of the "transaction related costs". The best example of the latter is the credit card industry. The transaction throughput of the VISA network today would not be possible with the technology of 1949 (punched cards, tabulating machines telegraph lines etc. ) This is relevant because the business model that was conceived in 1949 for Diner's Club, retail payments of high margin luxury goods and services (Tiffany & Co.). fails today when it is applied to very low margin retail purchases of commodity items (Walmart). We do not see American Express at war with Tiffany & Co but we sure see VISA ar war with Walmart. I wonder why.

Edit 1: The only other variable in the equation of exchange that can change is V (The velocity) and changing V would require a change in use of the coin. M is set by the protocol and cannot be changed. One time changes in V and the slight increase in M due to inflation are more than compensated by the drop in real terms of the unit cost of the "transaction related costs".  

Edit 2: One cannot simply extrapolate what are valid assumptions in Bitcoin to Monero without running into some very serious problems.

[r0ach]

I've been trying to research claims by this Hill's group about thermodynamic collapse of oil:  http://thehillsgroup.org

It's something that will obviously happen eventually since we take all the low hanging fruit first, but they're claiming that within only 10 years 75% of gas stations in the US will be gone, which is a pretty big shocker for ending of fossil fuels in modern civilization.  I know that peak oil seems to have occurred in 2004 (peak of conventional, high return on investment crude production and not low return shale/fracking/etc), so it looks like there's going to be some mega paradigm shift somewhere along the lines here.  The only question is when it occurs.

The part that makes this a more immediate event is that other sources claim you need $120 a barrel oil to bring new and not existing sources online right now (and oil is currently $50ish).  Some people say, well, the free market will just jack up the price to fix it, but that's not really possible in the following scenario.  Let's make two assumptions, that you have a drive to Walmart economy where people are blowing lots of energy to travel long distances to buy things, and that cars (specifically delivery vehicles) will not get significantly better MPG.  If the market cannot bear $120+ a barrel oil, the price doesn't go up with supply continuing to flow, the drive to Walmart economy simply ceases to exist, demand collapses, and nobody drills the oil.  

The oil has been constrained from being delivered to market both due to production costs that the average human can't afford, and the fact you eventually reach a point where it requires more energy to extract than it gives you.

[alkan]

Proof-of-importance is an obfuscation of proof-of-stake, because it doesn't burn transaction fees, so a cartel majority of stake holders (who thus can control which chain wins) could do as many transactions as they want, paying any transaction fees to themselves:

I am doing my best to share why I abandoned unprofitable PoW within the limited time I have to share.

I am not going to share the scheme because a facet of the scheme is employed in my ongoing (current) solution, even though my current design no longer employs unprofitable PoW. I am instead burning transaction fees and using TaPoS to prevent long-con nothing-at-stake attacks. But the "longest chain rule" is not the default consensus mechanism in my design. I can't give more details than that right now. My design has multiple facets which are (afaik) novel.

W.r.t to consensus ordering algorithm, I have I think a design which removes the power of control from those who have the most wealth resources and puts the control in the hands of those who transact the most. The capitalists transact very little and thus are not consumers and are wealthy. The rest of us transact a lot and our power is that we are the consumers!

Thank you for providing these interesting details! I think I got your basic idea. I'm curious to know in what ways your concept can improve the idea of TaPoS.

Btw, does you model offer objective consensus or does it rely on weak subjectivity in the sense of V. Buterin?

I explained to you that your negative interest idea could be attacked by a 51% attack which enables only the majority to retain stake by orphaning the minority's blocks. So it is just an obfuscated minted block reward. That is not unprofitable PoW.

Of course, this scenario would be possible. But would it make sense economically? I have my doubts. In case of profitable PoW, such an attack indeed makes sense since you only hurt the minority miners, whereas the owners of the currency remain unaffected. With a negative interest on your stake (that gets inevitable due to the attack), the owners would quickly get discouraged from using/keeping the currency, which will eventually lead to depreciation.
It's not sufficient to look at the nominal value of your stake, you also have to take its real value into account.

Additionally I explained to you that if you did indeed have unprofitable PoW then it would have insufficient hashrate and it could be attacked very cheaply by renting hashrate.

I'm not sure how big the hashrate would be if it's used to avoid negative interest on your stake. For sure the total hashrate would depend on the market capitalization of the coin and its popularity. It would also depend on the interest rate itself and how it can be decreased by PoW blocks.

Even if the hashrate alone was insufficient to protect the coin, an attacker would still have to buy/rent 51% of the stake if we put an upper limit on block creation for each account, in proportion to its stake.

Without acquiring the necessary stake, you would have to create a whole new alternative chain (fork) by doing PoW, which would be very costly even if the hashrate is lower than in Satoshi's PoW. This would amount to surpassing the cumulative hash power (or energy) as I explained here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1570198.msg15972492#msg15972492

[iamnotback]

It's something that will obviously happen eventually since we take all the low hanging fruit first, but they're claiming that within only 10 years 75% of gas stations in the US will be gone

Because we are transitioning to battery powered transportation. These dense cities are suffocating on smog in China. Ditto Asia in general. Just makes sense as Asia becomes the most wealth economy in the world.

As for fossil fuels generation plants, Australia and other places are loaded to gills with cheap coal.

Also, for those suggesting a world government is a good thing; not on the banker's terms, and not before the rest of the world catches up to "first-world" status. The labor imbalances and new labor markets opening up for super cheap, along with societies further back in technology, are a net negative. Plus national culture is lost, among other things. Not a benefit.

Malthusians are always correct.  

(they never are, never)

They always see a larger pie as impossible.

Malthusians want to return to simpler time when there was no surplus and thus we were all struggling every day to find food:

The government is the most inefficient use of resources, so keeping resources out of the government's hands should be the best for growing the economy.

Yea, the government requires lots of waste to exist.  Humans used to be hunter gatherers, then as soon as they started creating surplus, the predator class (govt) arose from that surplus.  It seems like peak conventional crude oil (which appeared to happen in 2004) will force the state to scale back most of it's power unless it can replace all of it's current waste with fusion energy or having a dangerous fission plant every few feet.

[iamnotback]

...

ArticMine here you are again posting your inkblots. Slow down and try to understand your mistakes. Go take some quiet time and think for a while before you respond, so you don't fill up thread with useless noise.

I am saying that is as the "transaction-related costs" approach the minted block reward, then the Tragedy of the Commons in transaction fees results. This has nothing to do with a fixed per KB transaction fee, but rather the costs of actually processing the transactions. You have to factor in that costs include the fact in proof-of-work mining, that a 0.1% hashrate miner must propagate and validate 100% of the systemic transaction volume (yet he is only paid 0.1% portion of the total systemic rewards, and probably even paid less because of selfish mining and asymmetric propagation costs due to mining on the wrong chain part of time).

And any way, the entire discussion is irrelevant, because regardless, the economies-of-scale in proof-of-work dictate that it is a winner-take-all power vacuum. So you are just wasting your time any way arguing about the transaction fee aspect.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

Again a false assumption bold since there is no explanation how this is supposed to happen in the presence of a fixed tail emission. This assumption is up against:
1) The Equation of Exchange in economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange MV = PQ. What is being assumed here is to increase Q without a corresponding decrease in P.  Or to put it in simpler terms one cannot expect a 100x increase in the number of transactions (Q) in Monero without a corresponding increase in 1/P (purchasing power) of the tail emission in Monero.
2) The fall in real terms of the unit cost of the "transaction related costs". The best example of the latter is the credit card industry. The transaction throughput of the VISA network today would not be possible with the technology of 1949 (punched cards, tabulating machines telegraph lines etc. ) This is relevant because the business model that was conceived in 1949 for Diner's Club, retail payments of high margin luxury goods and services (Tiffany & Co.). fails today when it is applied to very low margin retail purchases of commodity items (Walmart). We do not see American Express at war with Tiffany & Co but we sure see VISA ar war with Walmart. I wonder why.

Edit 1: The only other variable in the equation of exchange that can change is V (The velocity) and changing V would require a change in use of the coin. M is set by the protocol and cannot be changed. One time changes in V and the slight increase in M due to inflation are more than compensated by the drop in real terms of the unit cost of the "transaction related costs".  

Edit 2: One cannot simply extrapolate what are valid assumptions in Bitcoin to Monero without running into some very serious problems.

I expect V to be on the order of 10 - 100 for a microtransaction coin for use on all the activities we do on the Internet. So a minted block reward in the realm of ~1% would require transaction-related costs that are less than 0.01 - 0.1%. Yet microtransaction values may be so small that actual costs may be higher than that. Most damning is my additional point which you did not respond to:

You have to factor in that costs include the fact in proof-of-work mining, that a 0.1% hashrate miner must propagate and validate 100% of the systemic transaction volume (yet he is only paid 0.1% portion of the total systemic rewards, and probably even paid less because of selfish mining and asymmetric propagation costs due to mining on the wrong chain part of time).

So for the control over mining to remain decentralized and for their to be a viable fee market, this means the 0.1% hashrate miner has to have transaction-related costs in the realm of 0.0001 - 0.001% of the tiny microtransaction values of transactions. You may argue that Monero will be a coin for high valued transactions and you don't think microtransactions are important, and I will rebut by arguing that it will not survive then as a system of money:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg16969596#msg16969596
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1693466.msg16993233#msg16993233
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1685115.msg16993524#msg16993524

Also although costs will decline over the decades, transaction volumes can also increase at that rate or faster than Moore's law.

And lastly, as I said arguing about your tail reward is pointless, because it can't stop the economies-of-scale which cause proof-of-work (in Monero, Bitcoin, etc) to be a power vacuum which is a winner-take-all economic system. You didn't even address this point:

And any way, the entire discussion is irrelevant, because regardless, the economies-of-scale in proof-of-work dictate that it is a winner-take-all power vacuum. So you are just wasting your time any way arguing about the transaction fee aspect.

The inevitable mining cartel (presuming Monero becomes economically relevant) will dictate transaction fees in Monero as well, and also control the mining and all the bad impacts (censorship, deanonymization, etc) that come with it.

Sorry. Better luck next time.

Edit: apologies about the gloating. I am just letting out some pent up frustration about the way I felt about the way (some or most of the) Monero folk were so sure they were superior to everyone else. That had really alienated me and I admit it one of driving motivations I have. I understand the importance of building a community, but not a community that thinks that no other experimentation from outside can be valuable. Any way talk is cheap. So unless someone demonstrates a better way, then it is useless for me speculate verbally about what sort of community I would like to be a part of.

[iamnotback]

Proof-of-importance is an obfuscation of proof-of-stake, because it doesn't burn transaction fees, so a cartel majority of stake holders (who thus can control which chain wins) could do as many transactions as they want, paying any transaction fees to themselves:

I am doing my best to share why I abandoned unprofitable PoW within the limited time I have to share.

I am not going to share the scheme because a facet of the scheme is employed in my ongoing (current) solution, even though my current design no longer employs unprofitable PoW. I am instead burning transaction fees and using TaPoS to prevent long-con nothing-at-stake attacks. But the "longest chain rule" is not the default consensus mechanism in my design. I can't give more details than that right now. My design has multiple facets which are (afaik) novel.

W.r.t to consensus ordering algorithm, I have I think a design which removes the power of control from those who have the most wealth resources and puts the control in the hands of those who transact the most. The capitalists transact very little and thus are not consumers and are wealthy. The rest of us transact a lot and our power is that we are the consumers!

Thank you for providing these interesting details! I think I got your basic idea. I'm curious to know in what ways your concept can improve the idea of TaPoS.

Many ways.  

Btw, does you model offer objective consensus or does it rely on weak subjectivity in the sense of V. Buterin?

I argue in my white paper that TaPoS is as objective as proof-of-work. I think Vitalik's idea of how TaPoS could be attacked is as implausible as doing a long-con attack on Bitcoin.

One class of approaches at solving the problem is to combine the Slasher mechanism described above for short-range forks with a backup, transactions-as-proof-of-stake, for long range forks. TaPoS essentially works by counting transaction fees as part of a block’s “score” (and requiring every transaction to include some bytes of a recent block hash to make transactions not trivially transferable), the theory being that a successful attack fork must spend a large quantity of fees catching up. However, this hybrid approach has a fundamental flaw: if we assume that the probability of an attack succeeding is near-zero, then every signer has an incentive to offer a service of re-signing all of their transactions onto a new blockchain in exchange for a small fee; hence, a zero probability of attacks succeeding is not game-theoretically stable. Does every user setting up their own node.js webapp to accept bribes sound unrealistic? Well, if so, there’s a much easier way of doing it: sell old, no-longer-used, private keys on the black market. Even without black markets, a proof of stake system would forever be under the threat of the individuals that originally participated in the pre-sale and had a share of genesis block issuance eventually finding each other and coming together to launch a fork.

In my white paper I refute the above logic:

6.5 Decidable

Unlike how PoW is pragmatically “decidable” only for the “the one chain that rules them all” (meaning effectively that all other PoW blockchains are undecidable except Bitcoin), the Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (aka “TaPoS”)¹ employed in DPoS makes implausible the “nothing-at-stake” long range retroactive chain forks (aka “long-con attack”) without requiring that any DPoS blockchain is predominant over all others.

TaPoS provides this security because although not selling the discarded private keys for the stake is in theory an “altruistic-prime” incentive for an undersupplied good[Vitalik], it is not plausible for an attacker to obtain the private keys for every historic transaction, so as to not create resistance by the current stake holders to the attacker’s fork (because otherwise the attacker’s fork would double-spend the current stake holders’ stake back to the historical owner of the stake).

Note that I helped Dan Larimer invent TaPoS.¹

¹ Daniel Larimer, Transactions as Proof-of-Stake. Invictus Innovations, Nov 28, 2013. Key design decision prompted by Shelby Moore III. Summary in BitFury whitepaper.

I explained to you that your negative interest idea could be attacked by a 51% attack which enables only the majority to retain stake by orphaning the minority's blocks. So it is just an obfuscated minted block reward. That is not unprofitable PoW.

Of course, this scenario would be possible. But would it make sense economically? I have my doubts. In case of profitable PoW, such an attack indeed makes sense since you only hurt the minority miners, whereas the owners of the currency remain unaffected. With a negative interest on your stake (that gets inevitable due to the attack), the owners would quickly get discouraged from using/keeping the currency, which will eventually lead to depreciation.
It's not sufficient to look at the nominal value of your stake, you also have to take its real value into account.

The hashrate value is only going to be some % of the market cap daily. So to attack this coin and double-spend, you just rent that level of hashrate. Otherwise the coin needs to become the "one chain that rules over all the rest" and is dominated by entrenched mining farms which refuse to rent out 51% of the hashrate.

So what happens in that later optimistic case is that if those who transact end up paying a transaction fee for this PoW to be done on some mining farm. Thus the mining farms are not paying for the hashrate, yet they have the hashrate available to attack the coin when they are ready to flip the switch and take control.

But the mining farms have this huge investment which they don't want to destroy, thus they will not attack in any overt way which undermines their investment.

Additionally I explained to you that if you did indeed have unprofitable PoW then it would have insufficient hashrate and it could be attacked very cheaply by renting hashrate.

I'm not sure how big the hashrate would be if it's used to avoid negative interest on your stake. For sure the total hashrate would depend on the market capitalization of the coin and its popularity. It would also depend on the interest rate itself and how it can be decreased by PoW blocks.

Even if the hashrate alone was insufficient to protect the coin, an attacker would still have to buy/rent 51% of the stake if we put an upper limit on block creation for each account, in proportion to its stake.

Without acquiring the necessary stake, you would have to create a whole new alternative chain (fork) by doing PoW, which would be very costly even if the hashrate is lower than in Satoshi's PoW. This would amount to surpassing the cumulative hash power (or energy) as I explained here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1570198.msg15972492#msg15972492

One of the other problems is that you are disincentivizing buy & hold investors/speculators.

You are basically emulating Freicoin's market failure and its demurrage concept.

I don't see penalizing those who don't transact as a viable model for a store-of-value which is one of the attributes of money.

Power vacuums are disequilibria. That is the fundamental point of my white paper and my attempt at a technical solution.

So in your proposed negative interest rate design, if the loss of stake is greater than the cost of the proof-of-work, then all savers will transact to themselves, thus this is just proof-of-stake so the majority stake must collude to do the 51% attack I explained as quoted above. If the loss of stake is less than the cost of the proof-of-work, then there is a gradual transfer of the ownership of the coin to the mining farms and thus the stake eventually becomes winner-take-all concentrated.

I hope readers are starting to understand how very difficult it is to design a money system which is not a winner-take-all power vacuum.

[generalizethis]

Shelby, if you look at BTC and XMR as modules for how to launch and implement a coin, then you are on the right page--this is how opensource works : stages.

[alkan]

Note that I helped Dan Larimer invent TaPoS.¹

I've read Dan's paper and the thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=354573.0, but I'm a bit confused as there seems to exist several versions or understanding of TaPoS. In principle (as explained in the great BitFury paper), TaPoS is nothing more than having a block reference in every transaction to prevent them from being included in multiple blocks/chain forks. On the other hand, Dan's paper is describing a consensus mechanism that is based on coin-days-destroyed, with no PoW involved at all. According to the conversion you had with him, he replaced PoW all together in favor of transaction fees to regulate block production. Vitalik in his blog is talking about yet another (simplified) model where transactions are chained together directly (without any blocks). Can you please enlighten me what TaPoS is actually all about?

Now, coming back to your new concept...

I argue in my white paper that TaPoS is as objective as proof-of-work.

Okay, but does it also provide objective consensus in the strict sense of the following definition (personally, I'm sharing Vitalik's opinion that weak subjectivity is sufficient)?

A consensus protocol is objective if a new node can independently arrive to the
same current state as the rest of the network based solely on protocol rules (e.g., a definition of the
genesis block) and messages propagated across the system (e.g., a set of all blocks).

Although I won't reveal my proposed improvement in detail now, I will reveal that the solution involves objective "eventual consistency". Satoshi's design suffers from fact that blocks compete with each other instead of being complementary (additive and subtractive in the notion of sets of events).

Again consensus systems are probabilistic. Just like with Bitcoin, the probability of an orphaned virtual partition declines over time. One difference from Bitcoin is there isn't the requirement of not more than one virtual partition (just one longest chain), yet convergence is probabilistically inevitable.

Based on your earlier statement, I would assume that by "Eventual consistency" you meant that the transactions would eventually become probabilistically consistent (as in Bitcoin), rather than (provably) immutable like in Swirlds (which in its current form cannot effectively deal with node churn and thus relies on PoW or PoS for Sybil defence).

"The hashgraph is provable. Once an event occurs, within a couple of minutes everyone in the community will know where it should be placed in history. More importantly, everyone will know that everyone else knows this. At that point, they can just incorporate the effects of the transaction, and then discard it." See http://www.swirlds.com/downloads/Overview-of-Swirlds-Hashgraph.pdf

But you are critisizing Satoshi's PoW for ...

7. Orphans blocks. High transaction confirmation latency. Confirmation only probabilistic, never final. Burning must exceed double-spend value."

... which makes me think that your model does provide provable consensus.

A key design decision distills down to mitigating that Satoshi's design has aliasing error due to taking point samples on the continuous domain of partial orders.

Just because someone can Sybil attack the UTXO, doesn't necessarily follow they can Sybil attack the "inertia" which an interpretation (a chronological, partitioned structuring) of the UTXO. Someone could send a zillion transactions to their Sybil addresses (if they can recoup the TX fees by running their own full node), but if the rest of the inertia doesn't consume those UTXO, then it isn't inertia and it is a private, virtual "subnetwork" of the attacker.

I have mentioned the long-term inertia limits the rate of change in the near-term (a form of anti-aliasing) so that objective reality in the near-term moves into the long-term history before the rate of change could enable a double-spend by "replacing the 51% of delegated authority".

So, your strategy appears to make use of latent social information present in the graph determined by the past transactions (does that correspond to your notion of "inertia"?). This is a very interesting aspect indeed.  

Social graphs and their mixing times are a well-known subject of anonymity literature by the way (though I'm sure you already know that):
http://www.cs.unibo.it/~babaoglu/courses/cas05-06/papers/sybildht.pdf
https://www.princeton.edu/~pmittal/publications/pisces-ndss13.pdf
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/sybil_asiaccs.pdf

I'm not sure how that's related to the idea of Economic Clustering as discussed here:
https://nxtforum.org/news-and-announcements/economic-clustering/?PHPSESSID=mlinoglt5ii5d6mjeeka013l03
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=622440.0

[iamnotback]

Shelby, if you look at BTC and XMR as modules for how to launch and implement a coin, then you are on the right page--this is how opensource works : stages.

I'd open source all of it immediately now because it could potentially accelerate the implementation, except it would defeat two important aspects:

1. It would create many competitor copycats, so more difficult to get clarity on which one the community should focus on as the likely winner.

2. It would likely defeat my opportunity to end up with say 1% of the tokens (medium-term, e.g. after a few years) so that I would be rewarded for my 3+ years (enjoyable, intellectually stimulating) "sacrifice" to spend all my UNPAID time working on crypto-currency. And to motivate me to dedicate the remainder of my career to the ecosystem ongoing (given my project is going to be a social network in addition to the consensus ordering algorithm claimed innovation we are discussing, so I see opportunities to replace the browser, invent a better JavaScript, etc). It would also cheat my angel investors accordingly.

Thus my best option is to make it to rudimentary implementation, then open source it with a lead on any copy cats. That will maximize value for the community as well. But the big question mark, is can I get that done quickly enough. If I was 100% health, I would be extremely confident. All I can say, is I am busting my ass on hard athletics trying to counteract the effects of the liver+digestive toxins and headed to Singapore Jan 12 for an expert diagnosis and hopefully treatment, if I can afford the treatment with my 9.5 BTC in funding. If I can make it to testnet before that (not likely!) then I could have more funding for treatment if I need it. I think originally there was a chronic, latent HPV viral infection involved as I had symptoms since 2006, but I think perhaps the viral aspect is eradicated from all the various experimental treatments I did over the past 3 years, such as AHCC, high-dose curcumin, sublingual and enteric oregano oil, etc.. So I am hopeful that only the (likely mechanical and/or microflora dysbiosis) liver+digestive problem remains to fix.

I relaxed most of the past 2 days to recharge my battery. Also because my 20 year old son arrived (without prior warning!) from the USA and first time I've seen him in 4 years. So a lot of catching up to do and also I am having to manage now the fallout of telling my gf all about my past life and kids. So Sunday, I brought her to an upscale beach resort with live band and fine dining yesterday to try to soothe this.

The story of my life is the chaos comes all at once.

Telling my life story to my gf was incredibly depressing. It was basically a "How to Waste for Twenty Years, Your Talent and Life for Dummies" book. I got home, went to bed, and locked the bedroom door. Depressing. But I feel better this morning. I was also feeling ill last night from the fried foods we ate at the resort. Okay this morning.




Edit: it added insult to injury to learn that my son has been earning up to $500 a day on tips working at the casino in Washington State, while I've been earning $0. He hasn't even started college yet is earning more than I have been earning for the past 4 years. Yet doesn't have any savings at all to show for it. He showed up without even a pair of basketball shoes. (I had an extra pair in my inventory so gifted it to him)


Edit#2: it is not ideal that my design is bottle-necked on my productivity until I can reach testnet! This is pushing me and stressing me, but I am probably not of the health where being pushed is ideal. I end up pushing too hard and get less done because of being zombifried. I don't have a good answer to this. Push on I guess.