This message was too old and has been purged

[Cryptorials]

Well I'm not that knowledgeable.  I just skipped over what I couldn't understand until I found something I could.  It's still possible that someone in that project is doing cool.  I mean, it's not as though our white paper, or for that matter, our website is particularly impressive.

Lol, that's true. I think there are two devs on that, the one who wrote that blog post I think does the 'agoras' part (the token and end services) and the other the 'tau chain' part that its built on top of, so it is possible that this blog post is just straying into the other guy's territory and making mistakes because of that.

But in any case, I was mainly wondering if they had any ideas there which might inspire a better solution for ELC, but it seems that anything relevant is either not being shared or just isn't there.

[1715289545]

1715289545

[1715289545]

1715289545

[1715289545]

1715289545

[SISAR]

On a second thought, what makes this coin competitive versus BOINC? At BOINC there is a huge amount of computing power already available for free. So why would someone mess with crypto and pay for computing power in the first place? Also, if there are no regular PoW block rewards that means miners are not incentivized to process regular transactions, will network stall until someone pays enough for miners to start computing?

As for amount of coins, 5M sounds fine but I would also be OK with 1M or 100M. Just don't go retarded and opt for 100B or 100k coins.

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[haggis]

I thought there would be some kind of default hashing task in case the network idles.

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[Dazza]

I thought there would be some kind of default hashing task in case the network idles.

Yes this would be the fall-back solution when there is absolutely no work at all.
This would only allow for collecting the tx fees. This is by the way also open for discussion, maybe someone comes up with something better.

Personally I think tx fees suck.  Why should people have to bribe the miners to get their transactions processed?

I think we need a small tx fee, say 0.01% of every transaction, to combat transaction spam and for no other reason.

Edit: on second thoughts, scrap that.  Make it a flat 0.0001ELC  Let's go for transaction neutrality.  If you're mining for the tx fees, everyone's is a good as anyone else's.  Nobody's transaction should have to wait because other more lucrative transactions are jumping the queue.

[Dazza]

Of course this is no "security" as it is defined in theory, but unless an attacker contacts all miners and lets them run a modified version of the client software, I dont think that this attack would be practicable.
Not saying this is a very good idea, I was just brainstorming what may or may not be important to the design of ELC. So I put it up for discussion.

Well, the user's data, to the extent that it is used in a proof of work, must be publicly visible.  We could maybe obscure who the user is, and what the data means, but that's about it.

I am greatly in favour of encrypting data while it is being passed around the network, but in the end, confidentiality is not going to be one of our selling points.

[Dazza]

it is possible that this blog post is just straying into the other guy's territory and making mistakes because of that.

Or perhaps he's just straying into theoretical areas he doesn't understand, but which aren't really relevant to what he's working on, which could be perfectly fine and functional.

But in any case, I was mainly wondering if they had any ideas there which might inspire a better solution for ELC, but it seems that anything relevant is either not being shared or just isn't there.

Well I don't know.  As I said I'm not really competent to evaluate it.  I'm just a guy on the internet, after all, who doesn't know that much about anything.  Most of what I know about crypto came from Wikipedia.

[Cryptorials]

Well I don't know.  As I said I'm not really competent to evaluate it.  I'm just a guy on the internet, after all, who doesn't know that much about anything.  Most of what I know about crypto came from Wikipedia.

I think you're being overly modest. Regardless of where you got your cryptocurrency knowledge, you clearly have some fairly in-depth understanding of both it and computer science in general.

[Cryptorials]

At some point I would like to hear what Evil Knievel was thinking about using something other than a blockhain so that it doesn't matter who is the fastest - something already being developed like Iota's DAG (I think that's what they call it) or something new?

[Dazza]

EK, do you have any thoughts on the subject of data persistence?

[beyinsi]

Evil-Knievel please contact me, i sent a private msg about blockcahain.info's beta-wallet

[TheDR]

I bet that if you design this coin with a way to do multiple merged mining easily for everybody you would have your main attraction for it's adoption.
Edit: P.S. EK it is possible protect it from quantum computation and even design room for it into future mining functions.

[nihilnegativum]

On a second thought, what makes this coin competitive versus BOINC? At BOINC there is a huge amount of computing power already available for free. So why would someone mess with crypto and pay for computing power in the first place?

In BOINC you create a project and start looking for people who find your project interesting and who want to contribute their computational resources to it (and only to it) for free.
You have a boring task? Nobody will contribute. Also you first have to do some advertising so that BOING workers take note of your task.
With Elastic Coin you immediately (and quickly) get access to (hopefully) a large number of miners which only wait to solve your task and get some ELC in return.

Its not just that, BOINC projects are fragmented communities of volunteers, but if there would be a huge amount of computing power ready to be used, people can work on posing more questions in a way that computation can solve. Cryptocurrencies are enough to provide a basis for such a network, but the next step would be to figure out the economical viability of BOINC-like projects that seem impossible for markets as they don't generate immediate exchange value.

[haggis]

Maybe stupid question: I sent BTC from my Electrum wallet. What do I need to claim the ELC later? Is the seed enough?
When I export private keys I get numerous BTC addresses with their corresponding private key. Will I need them?

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[Dazza]

I think you're being overly modest. Regardless of where you got your cryptocurrency knowledge, you clearly have some fairly in-depth understanding of both it and computer science in general.

Not modest, just honest.  It's easy to create the illusion of knowledgeably if you have a little knowledge about a range of topics.  You just say "I don't know much about foo, but bar is yadda yadda yadda", and you go on for five pages, then people think "this is a smart fellow who knows all about bar" and they forget that you said that you don't know much about foo (In fact, you don't know anything about foo), and you didn't mention baz, you've never even heard of qux, and that even five pages on bar is barely scratching the surface.  This is me.  Ontologies?  I've heard of them.

My knowledgeability is fractal.  There are great big gaping holes.  And if you zoom in on the areas that look solid, you find lots of little holes, and so on down to every level of magnification.

Please do not build me up into a computer genius superhero.  I really am just a guy on the internet.

[Dazza]

I know what a DAG is, but that is all I know about DAGs.

By which I meant that I knew what a DAG was in the context of graph theory, not in the contest of cryptocurrency. See, I just accidentally gave the impression of more knowledge than I have.

I've have now read the DAGcoin white paper.  My conclusion is that it is brilliant, but it is not a technology we can use for our purposes here.  DAGcoin uses a distributed PoW work scheme.  Instead of a few miners doing a lot of work, each transactor becomes a mini-miner, doing a little work to confirm his transaction.  We cannot possibly run a user supplied program that way, and even if we could, FAA would probably rear its ugly head.

But even if we could use it, I would argue against it.  DAGcoin is cutting-edge.  The problem its developers face is how to make exciting new technology work.  Ours, in my opinion, is to make boring old technology useful.

We need research programs like DAGcoin, and I wish them well.  But it's not for us.

[Dazza]

Edit: P.S. EK it is possible protect it from quantum computation and even design room for it into future mining functions.

We already had a discussion about this in the old thread, which you started.  If there is something you think has been left unaddressed you will need to ask a more specific question.

[Dazza]

By strange coincidence, two subdiscussions have merged.

I've been reading this paper on DAGs, which contains a useful section on the threat posed by QC.  I was stunned to discover that Bitcoin miners are currently hashing at a rate of 2^68 nonces per block.  I had no idea of the power.  That turns the vulnerability I discussed in this post, which I thought was only theoretical, into a reality today.  That attack would have required only 2^64 hashes on average.  Don't worry, I think we are far away from Lionel's paper so this won't be an issue.

With QC, the effective width of a hash function is reduced from half the number of bits, to a third. So SHA-256, classically brute-forceable in about 2^128 hashes via the birthday attack, reduces in difficulty to about 2^85.  A back-on-an-envelope calculation shows that an attacker with the power that all the bitcoin miners put together have today, but quantum, could brute force a 256-bit hash collision in about forty years.

We're gonna need a bigger hash.