[ANN] [PPC] PPCoin 0.3.0 Release - Upgrade Required

[galambo]

If you ask Gavin about his position on this matter he likely would have to tell you the same thing.

... or not.  There's a difference between "unfixed vulnerabilities" and "half-baked design."

I think big decisions that affect the fundamentals of the design should be discussed in the open (see the current Bitcoin debate over raising the block size limit).

Yes, but at the same time people can lead dishonest discussions of design decisions to spread uncertainty about new or different ideas. For example here where gmaxwell spreads uncertainty about ripple. Or this thread where I make a dishonest argument against PPCoin to see why Sunny King made some decisions which the Bitcoin developers think is a bad idea. Or the quoted post where the lead developer of Bitcoin spreads uncertainty against an altcoin attempting to fix its problems.



Anyways, congratulations Sunny King. I hope whatever you did fixes the problems you were having.

[1714797012]

1714797012

[KrLos]

Done!

Nice have the qt now as default, just got 10 PPCs but worth keep updated xD

I accept donations xD

PKteaUnJXfRuZGFmBBh67cWu5ymnR9RBoF

Good job!

[Sunny King]

Yes, but at the same time people can lead dishonest discussions of design decisions to spread uncertainty about new or different ideas. For example here where gmaxwell spreads uncertainty about ripple. Or this thread where I make a dishonest argument against PPCoin to see why Sunny King made some decisions which the Bitcoin developers think is a bad idea. Or the quoted post where the lead developer of Bitcoin spreads uncertainty against an altcoin attempting to fix its problems.

Anyways, congratulations Sunny King. I hope whatever you did fixes the problems you were having.

Hmm interesting  Okay so you sound like you are okay with the difficulty adjustment formula now. Well if freicoin is interested in adopting it my offer to help still stand.

[galambo]

Yes, but at the same time people can lead dishonest discussions of design decisions to spread uncertainty about new or different ideas. For example here where gmaxwell spreads uncertainty about ripple. Or this thread where I make a dishonest argument against PPCoin to see why Sunny King made some decisions which the Bitcoin developers think is a bad idea. Or the quoted post where the lead developer of Bitcoin spreads uncertainty against an altcoin attempting to fix its problems.

Anyways, congratulations Sunny King. I hope whatever you did fixes the problems you were having.

Hmm interesting   Okay so you sound like you are okay with the difficulty adjustment formula now. Well if freicoin is interested in adopting it my offer to help still stand.

I think your difficulty adjustment is a pretty good demonstration that cryptocurrency is not as delicate as a lot of people claim it is. Also see the 'resurrection' of BBQCoin.

However, I'm not sure if it is a good idea to use your idea for a coin as large as bitcoin. I'm still inclined to think that using a average of many past points is better than an EMA for this application. Who knows, you may be right.

Anyways, congratulations. I haven't had the chance to see what the problem was. Programming is not my background, to be honest.

[Sunny King]

No problem, thanks galambo 

[smoothie]

... or not.  There's a difference between "unfixed vulnerabilities" and "half-baked design."

I think big decisions that affect the fundamentals of the design should be discussed in the open (see the current Bitcoin debate over raising the block size limit).

It's a whole gray area I am not really interested debating about this. You make judgement on bitcoin what should be discussed in the open what needs to be kept under wrap until it's patched, I make my judgement on ppcoin. Meanwhile, let's focus on getting the real work done.

This kind of proves the point that the design should be discussed openly.

What is the problem with that? Do you fear that by discussing it publicly that someone may find an exploit in your algorithm? Gavin makes a valid point that the two he mentions in QUOTES are worlds apart.

not sure what all the secrecy of the design is about....but then again like you said...we'll just have to resort to the code which limits the participants in the discussion to only those who know how to read source code. In my opinion that is close-minded.

But to each his own.

Glad Gavin commented on this.

[Sunny King]

Reminder that upgrade to 0.3 is required before March 20th.

[gmaxwell]

Yes, but at the same time people can lead dishonest discussions of design decisions to spread uncertainty about new or different ideas. For example here where gmaxwell spreads uncertainty about ripple.

The only dishonesty here is your claim that I've been dishonest. As you can see in the thread, Joel has (generally?) agreed with every attack scenario on the ripple distributed consensus I've proposed. It's unclear how serious they might be because its unclear how validator trust would be configured. Joel points out that in practice it might be fine.

Actually _disclosing_ how a thing that you're asking people to use and put value it works is the most effective remedy to people spreading 'dishonesty' about it. Secrecy doesn't prevent someone who wants to make dishonest claims is not at all inhibited by secrecy. Quite the opposite, being secretive about it is an open invitatation for people to speculate that it works however they want to claim it works— both in more secure than reality and less secure than reality directions.

I certainly agree with not giving people exploit walkthroughs on systems people depend on... but that doesn't excuse swapping out a consensus algorithm and not explaining how its supposed to work. No point in arguing it— Sunny can shy the sunshine as much as he likes: everyone else is free to run far, far away.

If anyone wants to speculate on the changes: here is a diff to get you started.

I do note that the "eventually be removed" centralized control over the blockchain identity are still there, even though the system has transitioned to mostly POS mining, and in fact it seems to have been made _much_ more central to the system: Now a centrally controlled clock must tick to advance the stake search. It also seems to me that whomever can create these modifiers could also use computation to choose ones that advantage their own stake.

[Sunny King]

I do note that the "eventually be removed" centralized control over the blockchain identity are still there, even though the system has transitioned to mostly POS mining, and in fact it seems to have been made _much_ more central to the system: Now a centrally controlled clock must tick to advance the stake search. It also seems to me that whomever can create these modifiers could also use computation to choose ones that advantage their own stake.

Checkpoint still needs to be strong as that's how the network survived the vulnerability in 0.2. Also ppcoin market is still tiny it's easy to buy a bunch of coins and try controlling via proof-of-stake.

I am not aware of any centrally controlled clock that you are talking about. Could you expand on that?

Yes, if your block is the last selected block you can change 1 bit of the modifier (giving you two choices). It's a slight advantage, not enough to pose immediate threat like in v0.2 protocol.

[gmaxwell]

I am not aware of any centrally controlled clock that you are talking about. Could you expand on that?

As I understand it, PPCoin's original POS has a problem that the POS is really POW in disguise: miners could twiddle values fast and do computation to boost their PoS chances. This is a typical problem for PoS systems: "nothing is at stake", holding something doesn't translate into a finite resource you consume as you attempt to mine. Likewise, they could manipulate timestamps to improve their stake effectiveness.

You appear to have fixed this by constraining the values that can be twiddled for POS, so extra twiddling can't give you a gain over other miners. This produces a problem that no active PoS miners may be able to solve a block, so it appears that you've fixed that by using your checkpoint mechanism as a centrally controlled TICK that announces a modification value the PoS miners include in their PoS (CheckStakeModifierCheckpoints()).  So now the speed of PoS searching is ultimately limited by how fast your checkpoint clock 'ticks' by announcing new modifications.   Have I got that right?

[Edit: I pulled out a bunch of conclusions which are probably wrong, in the likely case that I'm wrong above.]

Of course, I could be totally off in space. Reverse engineering behavior from source takes some effort, and I did nothing beyond letting the diff scroll over my screen— I'm mostly only interested in what you're doing academically, and that would better wait for someone to produce a clear writeup of it.

[Sunny King]

CheckStakeModifierCheckpoints() is just used to make sure the stake modifier computation is deterministic and every node computes to the same value. It's only checked with a few blocks, like the hard checkpoint that bitcoin uses.

It's not actually part of the protocol itself. The reason it was there is because of the complexity of modifier computation there could be bugs that made it non-deterministic. I put it there just so if someone runs into it then I would know a bug exists with the modifier computation.

Each block stores its then-current modifier in its block index. When stake hash is computed, the coin (txout) generating the stake kernel must hash with the modifier that's 9 days into the future of the coin. There is no central clock involved.

[Zoiner]

Does the QT version also do the proof of stake calculation or do I have to run the daemon?

[cabin]

You can mine both types of blocks with the qt version, I can confirm this still works in 0.3.

Does the QT version also do the proof of stake calculation or do I have to run the daemon?

[Sunny King]

Reminder that upgrade to 0.3 is required before March 20th.

[Wekkel]

Great coin!

I have some difficulty understanding how to install it in Windows. Could someone provide a simple guide for downloading and installing PPCoin in Windows?

I assume a GUI is included?

Reading up on this coin and getting more and more enthusiastic 

[Sunny King]

Great coin!

I have some difficulty understanding how to install it in Windows. Could someone provide a simple guide for downloading and installing PPCoin in Windows?

I assume a GUI is included?

Reading up on this coin and getting more and more enthusiastic 

Yes Qt GUI is included in v0.3.0. For windows you just download ppcoin-0.3.0-win32-setup.exe and run it to install.

[Sunny King]

Reminder that upgrade to 0.3 is required before March 20th.

[buryfarmer]

Is there going to be a client for windows or mac?

[Sunny King]

Is there going to be a client for windows or mac?

ppcoin-0.3.0-win32-setup.exe is for Windows. mac build is not supported right now.

[papamoi]

hi how can we mine for it?