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

[Fuserleer]

The major 8 sections of the white paper are completed. 16,621 words. 250+ paragraphs, 104 references. I am awaiting feedback from two people who will be reviewing it. These two guys aren't thoroughly qualified though to do peer review. I don't know who I can trust to do peer quality review before public release. Any way, one guy reviewing it is a programmer with a college education. The other guy has a degree in Applied math.

alkan, I will reply to you later. I am busy for next few hours on athletics with my son.

I'd love to offer to do it and finally see something tangible from you after all this time and hard work.

Unfortunately I'm at least (if not more) as maxed out as you at the moment  So I'll just have to wait until its public.

The sections you've posted though seem to be concise and make sense for the most part (though I did only skim), and share a lot of overlap with my own findings and thoughts.

[iamnotback]

The sections you've posted though seem to be concise and make sense for the most part (though I did only skim), and share a lot of overlap with my own findings and thoughts.

Afaics having afair not read a precise specification of your design, there is some overlap of broad concepts in my design with what you've described in various forum threads. In general, those (few?) of us who've studied this in depth know we must partition in some form in order to scale asynchronously.

[iamnotback]

By that definition, proof-of-work is also not objective, because you don't know which hidden chains are the longest chain. You are trusting that the sources who send you chains are omniscient.

That's a fair point if you look at objectivity in a strict sense. However, practically, it does make a difference if you only need one honest and omniscient (or at least up-to-date w.r.t. the longest block chain) node to get the latest state of the network. If you can connect to an unbounded number of nodes, you can asymptotically achieve objectivity since the probability that one of them will send you the longest chain will approximate 1 provided that at least one out of all nodes is honest and up-to-date.

That doesn't help if the longest chain is not yet published, which is a plausible issue for short and medium range attacks and especially if your blockchain is not "the one chain that rules them all". And in theory this can also be the case for a long-range attack if a quantum computer becomes reality and is able to rewrite the entire chain in a fraction of a second.¹⁸

¹⁸ Serguei Popov. The tangle. §4.3 Resistance to quantum computations, p. 24, Apr 3, 2016.

Whereas with subjectivity, different nodes might come to different conclusions if some of the nodes are malicious.

Since we are mostly convinced that long-range attacks on PoW are not likely unless a quantum computer arrives, I argue that TaPoS with significant burned transaction fees is equivalently objective and does not depend on the honesty of any node. A long range chain with millions of transactions referencing the hashes of blocks is objective per my prior comment on this topic. The current stake holders are not going to accept a long-range attack which double-spends their stake back to a former stake holder's private key. The decentralized objectivity is in the community's unwillingness to build on that attacker's chain.

The weak subjectivity seems more applicable to nothing-at-stake (i.e. without TaPoS) and where propagation makes a difference in terms of which transactions are confirmed and there is nothing other than centralized checkpoints to resolve ambiguity. TaPoS is decentralized checkpointing.

Vitalik's entire premise was undecidable and irrelevant.

Vitaliks definition is too narrow and thus irrelevant.

Even if we are talking about "asymptotic" objectivity, its impact on security (and partition tolerance) of a decentralized network seems questionable to me. You cannot download and use the network client without trusting anyone (expect if you are the creator of the network) because you can never be sure if it's the right client or just a malicious copycat that is perhaps using a different protocol.

The objectivity of PoW is that the longest chain of hashrate difficulty wins. The objectivity of TaPoS with burned transaction fees is that the most burned transaction fees wins.

In both cases, the attacker can burn less PoW or fees than he double-spends, and thus attack. But for PoW, I argued that for the "the one chain that rules them all", the mining farms are not going to rent out 51% of the systemic hashrate for short-term attacks. I would however not make the same argument for minority PoW blockchains (especially those without an ASIC) such as Monero. And I would not make that argument for burned fees for the short-term because it can be plausibly more liquid to attack and short, then to sell xx% of the stake. However for the long-term and assuming minting of new money supply tapers asymptotically towards 0, the burned fees will asymptotically approach 100% of the stake (and the current stake holders can not build on an attacker's chain which reverts their stake) so it becomes more and more implausible the longer-range the attempted attack (note this does require that stake being infinitely divisible or practically so). Thus nodes that recently come online (for both Monero and my design) would need to wait a while for the network to stabilize in absence of either node reputation and/or a more objective finality to the consensus. I resolve this in my design with a two-factor, fail-safe combination of the two (optional node reputation and optional deterministic finality) with a fallback to the need to wait a while otherwise.

I discuss this in my whitepaper:

Analogous to the finality of the longest chain rule in PoW, the proposed probabilistic finality is deterministically ambiguous because [redacted] nodes can stand up or down at will; thus there is no unambiguous deterministic finality of the consistency of the [redacted] provided by the weighted majority of [redacted] nodes. It is not sufficient to define the longest [redacted] to be the one that has the most burned transaction fees with a rule to revert the conflicting transaction(s) in the shorter [redacted] when two or more [redacted] are merged via [redacted], because this would enable an attacker with control over the majority of stake which has been transacted over the period to launch a (somewhat far-fetched) long-range double-spend attack wherein the double-spent theft exceeded the burned transaction fees.

Thus, instead when the [redacted] node ...

Bottom line is I can't imagine any real-time instant microtransactions system functioning without some reliance on community oversight. A key facet in my design is that the oversight should be objectively driven and decentralized. The inertial statistical objectivity of the nodes that are online carries over to those who recently come online, i.e. nodes which recently come online aren't trusting any of the nodes but rather trusting that at least one of them is honest. Which is essentially what you wrote, "you can asymptotically achieve objectivity since the probability that one of them will send you the longest chain will approximate 1 provided that at least one out of all nodes is honest and up-to-date". In other words, the Linus law so modified to our context, that "given objectivity and enough eyeballs, all malevolence is shallow and eventually orphaned". That even defeats a Sybil attack.

Concluding that PoW is more objective is to say that the winner-take-all power vacuum with one victor securing the chain, is more reputable than the decentralized community. In other words, the subjectivity pops out in other facets. Sure the longest chain is (probabilistically) objective if it is not hidden, but that doesn't mean the system is behaving objectively in a Nash equilibrium and without malevolence. So I agree with you as quoted:

Vitaliks definition is too narrow and thus irrelevant.

Vitalik's blog is useful as starting point for discussion.

I am not insinuating that Vitalik doesn't make valuable and interesting insights. He is overachieving for his age, and he has contributed to the prior art which we build on. And in hindsight we can state things which we didn't know at the time he wrote that. He has I assume learned a lot since then as well. And he was arguing that he learned to love subjectivity. Yeah because there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in our universe.

[r0ach]

To create a real decentralized currency would probably require active participation ... senders of transactions ...

... the only way that really makes sense is ...

Let me ask you a rhetorical riddle. Does the proper functioning of some open source software require every user of that software to review every line of code. Linus' law is the only known positive scaling law of software engineering.

I started off replying to your post in this thread but decided to make the post a thread on it's own, so I present to you:

The dark secret of money the sheeple aren't supposed to know

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1700073.0

[iamnotback]

My replies to @r0ach are in his new thread, so let's keep that side-discussion over there...

, and things like physical silver coins as a currency would be vastly superior in terms of both decentralization and avoidance of usury or seigniorage fee.

Unfortunately that can't be the case because of Gresham's law and the fact that sheeple prefer the money with the stamp which is backed by military force, because sheeple want hassle-free money that is enforced by the State. Study 1000s of years of history.³⁸

³⁸ Shelby Moore III. Value of currency has historically been public confidence in it as a reliable unit-of-exchange. Bitcointalk.org, “Precious metals are not useful in a collapse scenario!” thread, post #62, Nov 2, 2016.

The circulating currency unit-of-exchange form of "money" (as differentiated from the Gresham's law hoarded higher quality store-of-value form of "money", e.g. pre-1965 U.S. silver dimes) is always subject to a power-vacuum on who is in control of the legality of legal tender.

Satoshi's PoW (and best-of-breed alternatives thus far such as DPoS) is also a winner-take-all power vacuum.

The world is not going to entrust the control of money to some cartel of mining farms in China, nor the whales who control 80% of the stake (money supply) of Steem(it).

This (along with user issues such as security, ease-of-use, and applicability to mainstream commerce) is why crypto-currency is stagnating. We haven't improved on the problem of money yet. The world will instead rather turn to a political power-sharing monetary reset wherein the IMF SDRs will be valued by weighted basket of national currencies, precious metals, and perhaps some key commodities.

If we are going to offer an alternative to the coming SDRs system (where national currencies will be backed by SDR reserves and all the nation-states will be destroyed by borrowing in SDRs with wages paid in depreciated national currencies, which is what destroyed the PIIGS especially Greece), then we need a crypto-currency that has an equilibrium which isn't a winner-take-all power vacuum disequilibria.

I have a whitepaper coming which proposes a radical new design for crypto-currency which is posited to be a solution. I also propose solutions for the other items holding back crypto-currencies (and blockchains) such as a solution to end exchanges fraud, a solution to eliminate theft of private keys, and a solution to making crypto mainstream (virtual) commerce.

[iamnotback]

Btw, in section 7.1 of my whitepaper I have disproved the thesis of this blog:

http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

PoW is not the cheapest (least wasteful) for the equivalent security. The illiquidity cost in my design orders-of-magnitude less than the illiquidity cost of PoW for comparable security level, because PoW requires a huge globally superior sunk cost to eliminate the risk of rented hashrate attacks. (Smooth this is the essence of Satoshi's flaw which you felt was the weakest point in his whitepaper).

For example, 10 second finality epochs provide 4320 epochs per day, so its an opportunity cost of 100% interest rate per day if the net profit from service fees earned by the [redacted] nodes are 1 ÷ 4320 of the value of transactions secured by illiquid collateral. The opportunity cost of PoW mining farms is not within orders-of-magnitude of 100% return-on-investment per day. Free market competition will not necessarily drive the return-on-investment from service fees lower because service fees are insignificant thus irrelevant to the transacting participants. Given the lower barrier to entry to and exit from the [redacted] nodes market, the diversified market for service fees can anneal to not lower than any commensurate opportunity cost in the external markets. Whereas, PoW has massive sunk costs barriers to entry/exit which provide dumb/captive (or corrupt charged to the collective, e.g. fiat usury, Yuan/dollar exchange manipulation, subsidized electricity) capital a moat to justify return-on-investment which is only prospectively competitive to external market opportunity costs with a winner-take-all cartel expectation.

[David Rabahy]

I wonder; can there be an orderly conversion from Bitcoin to your new thing?  I have a rather sizable investment at stake in Bitcoin and would like to convert it into your new thing if/when it becomes real enough.  Or am I missing the point?  If/when your new thing becomes real enough then it will possibly/likely accelerate the demise of Bitcoin (cutting into my investment).  Does your new thing have to be deployed disruptively?  I gather it can live side-by-side with Bitcoin but I'm hoping there would be an orderly way for everyone that wants to shift over to do it without a stampede.  I wouldn't want to get left behind.  If it is truly only disruptive, i.e. no facility for an orderly conversion, then it will be up to each investor to time the transition of their own investments.

I've toyed around with other so-called alt-coins but they hold little interest for me.  Ripple, please.  Litecoin, meh.  Dogecoin, seriously?  Monero, meh.  Etherium, meh.  Zcash, maybe.  Mimble-wimble, maybe.  Your thingie sounds potentially interesting but the meat hasn't been released yet to chew on.

[iamnotback]

I am copying this post from another thread in Economics -> Speculation, because it is relevant here:

Re: The adoption boom is coming

...MegaUpload2/BitCache and Yours.

I had already detailed why Yours.network has the wrong model, so they don't concern me:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1567519.msg15753046#msg15753046
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1679021.msg16861040#msg16861040
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1698932.msg17048740#msg17048740

Whereas, MU2/BitCache is a serious threat to my coming altcoin offering in the microtransaction+social networking arena:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/kim-dotcom-megaupload2bitcache-will-take-bitcoin-mainstream
https://bnktothefuture.com/pitches/megaupload-2-0-bitcache
http://insidebitcoins.com/news/thoughts-kim-dotcoms-bitcache/36379

Essentially BitCache will be an effectively centralized, optimization of Lightning Networks, because that is the only way to make LN work. Don't forget that decentralized is not the same meaning as distributed! I do expect BitCache to be distributed:

https://z.cash/blog/bolt-private-payment-channels.html
http://www.coindesk.com/anonymous-blockchain-micropayments-bolt/
https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/701

I don't think users will really care that the microtransaction network is actually highly centralized. Whereas, I have a design which is decentralized, but will anyone care?

One challenge for KimDotCom's plan is how to onboard users and get BTC into their wallets? My plan mints coins to onboard users. His plan can't mint BTC. So I presume he is going to try to have some easy way to buy a $5 of BTC for $10 using a credit card and eat the fraud. Onboarding is a huge issue, for example why most Indians can't just suddenly adopt Bitcoin.

Over time, I think it will become clear that my design scales better and is more trustless, permissionless. Thus I think ecosystem adoption of mine will eventually win against KimDotCom's. But I admit this is going to be serious threat to my plans.

I think what is likely to happen is we will capture different market subsets. Mine will include (not exclusively) the developing world who don't have credit cards and my coverage will be more widespread in terms of ecosystem diversity because of less potential for centralized chokepoints. The risk of those in the ecosystem embracing KimDotCom's system is association with illegality. Whereas, KimDotCom's plan will likely be successful amongst the pirate community.

Thus I see my plan targeting legal, mainstream, and onboarding the billions. And KimDotCom's once again blazing a path that ultimately flames out again.

We'll see... I will need more help asap...

(ICO and open sourcing will come as soon as I have enough code to reach testnet)

People need a real reason to use bitcoin over fiat, and so far I haven't seen really compelling reasons.  That's heresy, I know, but to me bitcoin works much better as an investment tool and store of value than as a currency to be adopted for spending.  But we'll see.

Indeed! Why will people flock to MU2 and go out their way to obtain BTC when they can get the same shit for free without any hassles elsewhere. Onboarding and compelling need are huge obstacles.

My plan addresses this both by providing a more compelling mainstream need which isn't associated with illegality, and which requires absolutely no perceived effort on the part of the users (which is radical improvement on Steemit's awespiring, exciting, but failed experiment).

The comments I read in the first two pages of this thread seemed to agree with my appraisal of it being unlikely that people will go out of their way to obtain BTC for spending on activities they can get for free on other sites.

That's heresy, I know, but to me bitcoin works much better as an investment tool and store of value than as a currency to be adopted for spending.  But we'll see.

The investment aspect, as well as the store of value aspect, will be the main points of Bitcoin that people will be interested in.

Indeed. That is why I tentatively plan to name the token 'shares' in my planned altcoin system. The word has a dual meaning, "to share" (social networking) and "a share of the growing pie".

We certainly need a new wave of adoption. We seem to have hit a wall, a bit of a plateau. I hope something can draw lots of people in & we see the price rise significantly.

I recently wrote about this:

The circulating currency unit-of-exchange form of "money" (as differentiated from the Gresham's law hoarded higher quality store-of-value form of "money", e.g. pre-1965 U.S. silver dimes) is always subject to a power-vacuum on who is in control of the legality of legal tender.

Satoshi's PoW (and best-of-breed alternatives thus far such as DPoS) is also a winner-take-all power vacuum.

The world is not going to entrust the control of money to some cartel of mining farms in China, nor the whales who control 80% of the stake (money supply) of Steem(it).

This (along with user issues such as security, ease-of-use, and applicability to mainstream commerce) is why crypto-currency is stagnating. We haven't improved on the problem of money yet. The world will instead rather turn to a political power-sharing monetary reset wherein the IMF SDRs will be valued by weighted basket of national currencies, precious metals, and perhaps some key commodities.

If we are going to offer an alternative to the coming SDRs system (where national currencies will be backed by SDR reserves and all the nation-states will be destroyed by borrowing in SDRs with wages paid in depreciated national currencies, which is what destroyed the PIIGS especially Greece), then we need a crypto-currency that has an equilibrium which isn't a winner-take-all power vacuum disequilibria.

I have a whitepaper coming which proposes a radical new design for crypto-currency which is posited to be a solution. I also propose solutions for the other items holding back crypto-currencies (and blockchains) such as a solution to end exchanges fraud, a solution to eliminate theft of private keys, and a solution to making crypto mainstream (virtual) commerce.

[iamnotback]

I wonder; can there be an orderly conversion from Bitcoin to your new thing?  I have a rather sizable investment at stake in Bitcoin and would like to convert it into your new thing if/when it becomes real enough.  Or am I missing the point?  If/when your new thing becomes real enough then it will possibly/likely accelerate the demise of Bitcoin (cutting into my investment).

I don't think it will play out that way.

There is going to be a battle of offerings per my prior post about MU2/BitCache.

It will take a year or years for the dust to settle. I believe there is no way my project even if wildly successful, will kill Bitcoin overnight. Even if Bitcoin ended up only remaining as the entrenched and well established crypto-currency <--> fiat on/off ramp, it would continue to grow adoption for that purpose. If anything my project will drive more demand for Bitcoin.

So I would suggest that if I am able to make good on building a project with many contributors and a significant ecosystem, then speculators should scale in their purchases over time, in order to be diversified and minimize unforeseen risks.

And I have a lot of work in front of me that is not yet certain to be completed (especially challenging given my health problem, for which I won't get an expert diagnosis until mid-January at the earliest).

I appreciate the enthusiasm, but actually what I need most right now is good health. That is my most significant obstacle at the moment. Then after that are several more significant obstacles.

Does your new thing have to be deployed disruptively?  I gather it can live side-by-side with Bitcoin but I'm hoping there would be an orderly way for everyone that wants to shift over to do it without a stampede.  I wouldn't want to get left behind.  If it is truly only disruptive, i.e. no facility for an orderly conversion, then it will be up to each investor to time the transition of their own investments.

It is very rare for a technological innovation to be that quickly disruptive. That is more reserved for long-tail events such as 10 year cycle weather disasters, 1000 year cycle massive volcano eruptions, or a 100,000 year cycle massive asteroid strike.

You'll be able to evaluate over time and increase stake as progress warrants. The only reason to rush early is to buy a small speculative position on something that might yield 100 - 1000X gains. But you never risk your core investment capital on such wild, early stage speculations.

If I make it to testnet and everything is looking good with community peer review, and if you are a $millionaire, then I would think a 10 - 100 BTC speculative investment would be appropriate. If you are not quite a millionaire, then early stage speculation of 10 BTC or less as small percentage of your portfolio. Or just wait for the project to mature and pay perhaps 10 X higher prices.

I've toyed around with other so-called alt-coins but they hold little interest for me.  Ripple, please.  Litecoin, meh.  Dogecoin, seriously?  Monero, meh.  Etherium, meh.  Zcash, maybe.  Mimble-wimble, maybe.  Your thingie sounds potentially interesting but the meat hasn't been released yet to chew on.

That mostly concurs with my perspective. Indeed you need to wait for the meat. Remain skeptical.

Monero and Ethereum are reasonably important in different ways. Both also assembled significant contributor ecosystems. And Monero may be undervalued still. I don't think Monero will end up being the mass adoption entry. I don't have any ecosystem, not even a functioning s/w yet. So this is all too premature (slightly embarrassing for me).

The reason I am talking is to make sure I have analyzed and published my analysis on various factors.

But what really needs to happen now is silence and coding. And I really need better health, but I am limping along as best as I can until January medical appointment.


So I think I will try my best now to go silent. Thanks for the feedback and encouragement.

[philakone]

Bye Zcash. What's the next big fail coin?

[iamnotback]

Copying this from @r0ach's thread, because I think it is my best summary yet of the outcome this thread I started about finding a decentralized solution to global consensus...

Cryptocurrencies give us the opportunity to digitally control our own money and really own it instead of being dependent on banks that operate on fractional reserve.

That's enough reason for its existence.

I agree except please note that Satoshi's proof-of-work will unavoidably end up (probably already is) controlled by a cartel of miners who can censor your ability to transact. Imagine they are bribed to exclude you. Or the coming world finance government (e.g. IMF, World Bank, SDRs replacing the dollar as the global reserve currency) regulates the miners and dictates who can and can't transact. At the moment, this developing cartel is not focused on censoring you, but rather on gaining a monopoly on transaction fees, so that they can raise their income to the maximum that the market will bear. This is the politics around the blocksize debate. I wrote in great detail about this in my coming whitepaper (excepts have been published to these forums already). Any entrenched centralized control ultimately ends up being co-opted by the State and the political power vacuum of collectivism. We have 1000s of years of human history without any exception!

So it is not enough to say we control the private keys. We must also have a global ledger consensus which is impervious to centralization. So far, neither Satoshi's Proof-of-Work (PoW), nor state-of-the-art alternatives such as Bitshare's (Steemit's) Delegated Proof-of-Stake (aka DPoS, combined with Transactions as Proof-of-Stake (TaPoS)), avoid the centralization of control of the global ledger consensus.

As I have alluded to, I believe I have a design alternative which provides a solution to this fundamental problem that has been plaguing society since time eternal.

Concerning Bitcoin POW winner takes all argument, I can tell you there won't be any system that will be 100% without any flaw.

Life requires flaws. It is precisely flaws that make us unique and alive. If everything was predetermined (flawless), then nothing would exist. The past and future would collapse into indistinguishable (the light cones of special relativity would collapse onto each other). Life requires that real-time omniscience is impossible, which is a conceptual analogy of flaws (i.e. that not all of our actions can be congruent always in real-time).

However what we are talking about here is not attaining "perfection" (not attaining holistic congruence), but rather how to have a system which has some ordered state of equilibrium which is not trending towards Coasian costs maladaptation implosion. In other words, we want a system with maximal degrees-of-freedom. The flaw of PoW and DPoS is they lack degrees-of-freedom because they depend on the economies-of-scale control of some finite resource (mining or stake).

Thus, I believe there can be a design for global consensus which has a form of decentralized equilibrium.

[generalizethis]

If you ignore gambling, you'll probably never get "why?"

And if you ignore increasing layers of complexity, you'll never get "how?"

And if you never examine how social structures act in the same rationalization structures as a single brain architecture, then you'll never get "neither."

(someday, someone will get this joke, and that's the bet)

[iamnotback]

If you ignore gambling, you'll probably never get "why?"

And if you ignore increasing layers of complexity, you'll never get "how?"

And if you never examine how social structures act in the same rationalization structures as a single brain architecture, then you'll never get "neither."

(someday, someone will get this joke, and that's the bet)

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

[generalizethis]

If you ignore gambling, you'll probably never get "why?"

And if you ignore increasing layers of complexity, you'll never get "how?"

And if you never examine how social structures act in the same rationalization structures as a single brain architecture, then you'll never get "neither."

(someday, someone will get this joke, and that's the bet)

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

[iamnotback]

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

I'll dumb it up metaphorically for you: diversification of steel rolly pollies is an oxymoron.

Talk to the quants who modeled diversification of hedge funds before the collapse of LTCM.

[generalizethis]

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

I'll dumb it up metaphorically for you: diversification of steel rolly pollies is an oxymoron.

Talk to the quants who modeled diversification of hedge funds before the collapse of LTCM.

repair industry is the winning bet here

[iamnotback]

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

I'll dumb it up metaphorically for you: diversification of steel rolly pollies is an oxymoron.

Talk to the quants who modeled diversification of hedge funds before the collapse of LTCM.

repair industry is the winning bet here

You don't seem to understand that prediction markets fail when their boards are all sinking in the same quicksand (i.e. the same light bulb behind the star cutouts in your upthread metaphor).

Currency doesn't function fragmented.^{[public-confidence]} There is no relativity of multiple currencies. Currency is a loss of degrees-of-freedom paradigm.

The winner is the one who scales a new currency. There is no long-term panacea. Currencies grow, peak, decay and water-fall collapse. This is the pattern of such natural phenomena.

Asians understand life is a cycle (a circle of repeating paradigms). Westerners wish for an unnatural linear progression. Risto needs to get the fuck out of Europe!

^{[public-confidence]} Shelby Moore III. Value of currency has historically been public confidence in it as a reliable unit-of-exchange. Bitcointalk.org, “Precious metals are not useful in a collapse scenario!” thread, post #62, Nov 2, 2016.

[generalizethis]

Do they distribute LSD along with Crypto Kongdung.

I'll dumb it down for you: two things you can't stop in this world, gambling and progress.

I'll dumb it up metaphorically for you: diversification of steel rolly pollies is an oxymoron.

Talk to the quants who modeled diversification of hedge funds before the collapse of LTCM.

repair industry is the winning bet here

You don't seem to understand that prediction markets fail when their boards are all sinking in the same quicksand (i.e. the same light bulb behind the star cutouts in your upthread metaphor).

Currency doesn't function fragmented. There is no relativity of multiple currencies. Currency is a loss of degrees-of-freedom paradigm.

The winner is the one who scales a new currency. There is no long-term panacea.

Huh?

There's no long term solution to the knowledge problem (how do you run out of questions to study?), but that doesn't stop academics from spending their whole life to studying one question--why? We gamble that our life has some purpose--it's irrational, yeah, but people do it every day--anyone who's jumped off a cliff or skydives know it feels good to be alive--and no amount of game theory is going to change that risk assessment.

[alkan]

That doesn't help if the longest chain is not yet published, which is a plausible issue for short and medium range attacks and especially if your blockchain is not "the one chain that rules them all".

Agreed.

The current stake holders are not going to accept a long-range attack which double-spends their stake back to a former stake holder's private key. The decentralized objectivity is in the community's unwillingness to build on that attacker's chain.

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).

I think we must distinguish two things:
#1 Can an attacker obtain enough private keys (for transactions) to forge the block chain?
#2 Will the forged block chain be accepted by the current stake holders?

#1 Despite the game theoretic incentive described by Vitalik, it is not plausible to assume that such an attack can be carried out in practice if the initial coin distribution is appropriately decentralized.

#2 I'm not sure if the resistance is sufficient in any case. What happens if an attacker builds an alternative block chain that rewards the majority of current stake holders with a (somewhat) larger stake, while double-spends the minority to gain an undue advantage?  In such a scenario, the majority has an incentive to accept the forged chain.

The weak subjectivity seems more applicable to nothing-at-stake (i.e. without TaPoS) and where propagation makes a difference in terms of which transactions are confirmed and there is nothing other than centralized checkpoints to resolve ambiguity. TaPoS is decentralized checkpointing.

What do you mean by "where propagation makes a difference in terms of which transactions are confirmed"? Ordering by the time when the nodes receive (or hear of) the transactions?

However for the long-term and assuming minting of new money supply tapers asymptotically towards 0, the burned fees will asymptotically approach 100% of the stake (and the current stake holders can not build on an attacker's chain which reverts their stake) so it becomes more and more implausible the longer-range the attempted attack (note this does require that stake being infinitely divisible or practically so).

I'm not sure if I understand this. How can the burned fees approach 100% of the stake? Without new money supply, the money would finally disappear if all the fees are burned. Or are you rather referring to some sort of statistical detection as quoted below?

3.2.2 Statistical Detection
Transactions can reference blocks belonging to the canonical blockchain, thus implicitely signing the chain. An attacker attempting to forge a long reorganization
can only produce transactions involving coins he controlled as off the last checkpoint. A long, legitimate, chain would typically show activity in a larger fraction of the coins and can thus be distinguished, statistically, from the forgery.

This family of techniques (often called TAPOS, for “transactions as proof of stake”) does not work well for short forks where the sample is too small to perform a reliable statistical test. However, they can be combined with a technique dealing with short term forks to form a composite selection algorithm robust to both type of forks.

Bottom line is I can't imagine any real-time instant microtransactions system functioning without some reliance on community oversight. A key facet in my design is that the oversight should be objectively driven and decentralized. The inertial statistical objectivity of the nodes that are online carries over to those who recently come online, i.e. nodes which recently come online aren't trusting any of the nodes but rather trusting that at least one of them is honest. Which is essentially what you wrote, "you can asymptotically achieve objectivity since the probability that one of them will send you the longest chain will approximate 1 provided that at least one out of all nodes is honest and up-to-date". In other words, the Linus law so modified to our context, that "given objectivity and enough eyeballs, all malevolence is shallow and eventually orphaned". That even defeats a Sybil attack.

That sounds interesting even though I haven't really grasped all the details of your design yet.

Yeah because there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in our universe.

That's certainly true.

[r0ach]

Yeah because there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in our universe.

That's certainly true.

Oh jeez Louise, can a r0ach at least have a session guarantee?

The best 20 second case study on causality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ThPAW5sd0

Why does the world have a prime mover if nobody is running the thing?  Can I please speak to who's in charge around here?