Obyte: Totally new consensus algorithm + private untraceable payments

[iamnotback]

Yes I am AnonyMint.

I haven't been reading the thread to see if there are any follow ups.

I am still analyzing your design. I think the main issue is because afaics witnesses have nothing-at-stake and afaics it can't be objectively determined which witnesses are creating units referencing MCs which create ambiguity about whether finality was really final. It may also not be objective which witnesses are mishaving. But I may not yet completely understand the design.

Don't confuse with PoS, witnesses' stakes are outside the system.

I mean stake in more general terms of what is at risk in the game theory of attacks not specifically its assumed meaning in PoS, but I need to understand your design better before I can posit anything concrete on that. Any way...

I don't understand how you achieve this sentence in Section 6 of the white paper:

We   would   stop   traveling   as   soon   as   we   had   encountered the   majority   of   witnesses.   

How can you know what the set of witnesses is in the history when the set is allowed to change in time?

Note I may be wrong about lack of objectivity since I have just noticed your rule that addresses have to reference their prior units in the parent chain else that is objectively misbehavior, so I presume the same rule applies (stringently) to witnesses.

Before I had just skimmed the paper and now I am reading it in detail.

[tonych]

Yes I am AnonyMint.

I haven't been reading the thread to see if there are any follow ups.

I am still analyzing your design. I think the main issue is because afaics witnesses have nothing-at-stake and afaics it can't be objectively determined which witnesses are creating units referencing MCs which create ambiguity about whether finality was really final. It may also not be objective which witnesses are mishaving. But I may not yet completely understand the design.

Don't confuse with PoS, witnesses' stakes are outside the system.

I mean stake in more general terms of what is at risk in the game theory of attacks not specifically its assumed meaning in PoS, but I need to understand your design better before I can posit anything concrete on that. Any way...

I mean exactly the same.

I don't understand how you achieve this sentence in Section 6 of the white paper:

We   would   stop   traveling   as   soon   as   we   had   encountered the   majority   of   witnesses.   

How can you know what the set of witnesses is in the history when the set is allowed to change in time?

It is the set of witnesses specified in the unit we started traveling from.

[galaxiekyl]

Hi,

Do we have any bounties available?

signature campaign/Facebook?

I will like to do an Indian Translation if not reserved

hi, yu can find sign campagn here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1666370.0;topicseen

translat isn't reserved do it and contacted @tonych gy 

[galaxiekyl]

hello @tonych

i check new testnet (tn) but i dont know if i will do good choice..so can yu tell me if it is best to choose full wallet or light wallet..wht do yu recommend ? i can reboot after install it if my choice doesn't satified me ?

[galaxiekyl]

where i can take testnet Bitcoins?
thanks

hello

wallet===


http://testnetwallet.com/wallet

recieve fake BTC fake testnet btc

https://testnet.coinfaucet.eu/en/

gd luck

 

An online wallet for bitcoin testnet?    How cool is that?  

Thanks for sharing mate!

Another option for android users is the mycelium testnet app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycelium.testnetwallet

lol its a fake blockchain it will work with bb testnet ?

i cant use it..i have 2 transac but no balance..how it work pls 

[valley365]

From the white paper it seems that the introduction of witness is to do some sort of automatic check points, do I understand correctly? Many coins do manual checkpoint by releasing new software. If we have another automatic way to checkpoint the existing DAG, then witness should no longer be needed.

Yes, there is some similarity with checkpoints, with important differences though that make the system decentralized:
1.  There are 12 "checkpointing authorities", not 1
2.  Each and every witness can be replaced by users, without developer intervention

But do you have a mechanism for ensuring that most users will have the same witnesses? If you let people to choose randomly, it will not be good. As if I am let to choose all by myself, I'd probably make a list of my friends which I trust the most.

Yes.  When you create a new transaction, you choose parents - earlier transactions in the DAG.  At least 1 of the parents must have the witness list that differs from yours by no more than 1 mutation.  That means that users should mostly agree on the witness list.  The white paper discusses this issue in depth.

What happens if I can't find such parent, the transaction fails? Also as a user, how do I choose witness? if I have full control of the list, then there's no guarantee that I can choose most the same as others.

[iamnotback]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

[CryptKeeper]

where i can take testnet Bitcoins?
thanks

hello

wallet===


http://testnetwallet.com/wallet

recieve fake BTC fake testnet btc

https://testnet.coinfaucet.eu/en/

gd luck

 

An online wallet for bitcoin testnet?    How cool is that?  

Thanks for sharing mate!

Another option for android users is the mycelium testnet app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mycelium.testnetwallet

lol its a fake blockchain it will work with bb testnet ?

i cant use it..i have 2 transac but no balance..how it work pls 

Here's a step by step guide:

- make yourself a bitcoin testnet wallet (online wallet, mycelium testnet for android, etc.)
- grab some testnet bitcoin at a faucet
- install the Byteball TN wallet
- click the link for the transition bot on byteball.org, it's under the download links
- transition bot will start in byteball wallet and will guide you
- send the exact bitcoin amount to the bitcoin testnet address the bot tells you
- wait for confirmation (the more bitcoin fees you add to the tx, the faster it gets confirmed)
- the bot tells you your balance, probably not enough, because your bitcoin wallet moves the change amount to a new bitcoin address. In this case, you have to transfer the complete amount of bitcoins in your wallet to yourself. The bot tells you from which bitcoin address your payment came in, check if that is your address and if you're sure that this is your address, send your complete bitcoin balance there
- wait for confirmation of this tx, the bot will update your linked balance (you can enter any text like "Hi" for an update from the bot)

[iamnotback]

Yes I am AnonyMint.

I haven't been reading the thread to see if there are any follow ups.

I am still analyzing your design. I think the main issue is because afaics witnesses have nothing-at-stake and afaics it can't be objectively determined which witnesses are creating units referencing MCs which create ambiguity about whether finality was really final. It may also not be objective which witnesses are misbehaving. But I may not yet completely understand the design.

Don't confuse with PoS, witnesses' stakes are outside the system.

I mean stake in more general terms of what is at risk in the game theory of attacks not specifically its assumed meaning in PoS, but I need to understand your design better before I can posit anything concrete on that. Any way...

I don't understand how you achieve this sentence in Section 6 of the white paper:

We   would   stop   traveling   as   soon   as   we   had   encountered the   majority   of   witnesses.   

How can you know what the set of witnesses is in the history when the set is allowed to change in time?

Note I may be wrong about lack of objectivity since I have just noticed your rule that addresses have to reference their prior units in the parent chain else that is objectively misbehavior, so I presume the same rule applies (stringently) to witnesses.

Before I had just skimmed the paper and now I am reading it in detail.

It is the set of witnesses specified in the unit we started traveling from.

The section on 7 on Finality in the Byteball whitepaper is written in a way that I find to be very convoluted. But I was eventually able to understand what you wrote there by conceptualizing it a different way and then relating my conceptualization to your explanation.

My conceptualization is that if witnesses are required to serialize their units and if we can assume we know what all the witnesses can be, then once we have a majority of the witnesses as ancestors of a unit, then the said unit is a stability point because it is impossible for a best parent MC for a future unit to assign a lower ordering number to a double-spend of any unit from which the said stability point unit is a descendant.

But sorry to say the flaw I see in your analysis is that you don't appear to consider the case where a new branch appears (which was formerly hidden by network disruption, propagation delays, or intentionally) which has a sufficiently different set of witnesses from the "current MC" which any particular node analyzed.

Thus afaics, there is no finality. The only way to have finality is to make the set of 12 witness globally static.

P.S. Readers the term 'serial' in the white paper means that it is assumed (how required?) that a witness will only create a new unit (i.e. vertex on the DAG) for which all of the prior units of that said witness have the newly created unit as a descendent. In other words, a witness is assumed to not go creating units which exist on branches of that DAG which don't contain the prior units of that said witness. Without this rule, then the logic of my 2nd paragraph above would not apply.

[tonych]

hello @tonych

i check new testnet (tn) but i dont know if i will do good choice..so can yu tell me if it is best to choose full wallet or light wallet..wht do yu recommend ? i can reboot after install it if my choice doesn't satified me ?

I think you'll have the best experience with the light wallet, but the choice is yours.

[tonych]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

[iamnotback]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

[tonych]

From the white paper it seems that the introduction of witness is to do some sort of automatic check points, do I understand correctly? Many coins do manual checkpoint by releasing new software. If we have another automatic way to checkpoint the existing DAG, then witness should no longer be needed.

Yes, there is some similarity with checkpoints, with important differences though that make the system decentralized:
1.  There are 12 "checkpointing authorities", not 1
2.  Each and every witness can be replaced by users, without developer intervention

But do you have a mechanism for ensuring that most users will have the same witnesses? If you let people to choose randomly, it will not be good. As if I am let to choose all by myself, I'd probably make a list of my friends which I trust the most.

Yes.  When you create a new transaction, you choose parents - earlier transactions in the DAG.  At least 1 of the parents must have the witness list that differs from yours by no more than 1 mutation.  That means that users should mostly agree on the witness list.  The white paper discusses this issue in depth.

What happens if I can't find such parent, the transaction fails? Also as a user, how do I choose witness? if I have full control of the list, then there's no guarantee that I can choose most the same as others.

If you can't find such parent, you can't send any transaction.  But remember, although it is the default behavior to choose parents among the most recent childless units, you don't have to behave this way, you can also choose an older parent if it is compatible with your witness list.

You edit your witness list in your wallet.  Obviously, having full control also means being able to hurt yourself (not fatally, though).

[tonych]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

Well, while theoretically possible, the valuations need to be quite high for this to happen.  The size of a simple transaction is about 500 bytes, let's round it up to 1000 bytes.  For this fee to be equal to $1.00, the market cap will have to be $10¹², or $1tn.

[yvv]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

This is true. And if the market price falls too low, it will not be a good anti spam token.

[iamnotback]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

Well, while theoretically possible, the valuations need to be quite high for this to happen.  The size of a simple transaction is about 500 bytes, let's round it up to 1000 bytes.  For this fee to be equal to $1.00, the market cap will have to be $10¹², or $1tn.

Okay good point, but the counter point is that we shouldn't assume that all lower valued transactions will be necessarily simple transactions. Let's think multi-sig, smart contracts, etc, then we might see problems at around $10 - $100 billion market. And if those are micropayments (which smart contract gas is for example), then we are getting into potential trouble at $100 million market cap.

Also there is probably also a tradeoff in that the lower the value of the fees for witnesses at low market caps, then perhaps the more incentive witnesses have to game and attack the system. That is getting into what I alluded to by "nothing-at-stake".

[tonych]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

Well, while theoretically possible, the valuations need to be quite high for this to happen.  The size of a simple transaction is about 500 bytes, let's round it up to 1000 bytes.  For this fee to be equal to $1.00, the market cap will have to be $10¹², or $1tn.

Okay good point, but the counter point is that we shouldn't assume that all lower valued transactions will be necessarily simple transactions. Let's think multi-sig, smart contracts, etc, then we might see problems at around $10 - $100 billion market. And if those are micropayments (which smart contract gas is for example), then we are getting into potential trouble at $100 million market cap.

Typical multi-sig and smart contracts are not going to grow the size of transaction by orders of magnitude.  And I don't see much use of Byteball in microtransactions, in particular because we don't address the blockchain bloat (or rather ledger bloat) problem.

Also there is probably also a tradeoff in that the lower the value of the fees for witnesses at low market caps, then perhaps the more incentive witnesses have to game and attack the system. That is getting into what I alluded to by "nothing-at-stake".

That would be true if the ability to earn fees were the only witness' stake.  But it isn't.  As I said, the stake is outside the system, it is the reputation, the trust, the business that a witness has in the real world and would damage if it were to misbehave.

[tonych]

But sorry to say the flaw I see in your analysis is that you don't appear to consider the case where a new branch appears (which was formerly hidden by network disruption, propagation delays, or intentionally) which has a sufficiently different set of witnesses from the "current MC" which any particular node analyzed.

There can't be a branch with substantially different set of witnesses.  There are no forks by design.  This is because the stability point can't advance without support of the majority of witnesses named in the previous stability point.  And there is a rule that the set of witnesses in new units should differ from the witness list at the stability point (specified in the new unit) by no more than one mutation.  The rules are really tight, you can't go too far from the witness list at the stability point.

[iamnotback]

But sorry to say the flaw I see in your analysis is that you don't appear to consider the case where a new branch appears (which was formerly hidden by network disruption, propagation delays, or intentionally) which has a sufficiently different set of witnesses from the "current MC" which any particular node analyzed.

There can't be a branch with substantially different set of witnesses.  There are no forks by design.  This is because the stability point can't advance without support of the majority of witnesses named in the previous stability point.  And there is a rule that the set of witnesses in new units should differ from the witness list at the stability point (specified in the new unit) by no more than one mutation.  The rules are really tight, you can't go too far from the witness list at the stability point.

Can't I sign a unit that has as its parent the, differs by 1 witness from the, genesis. Then sign a unit that has as its parent the, differs by 1 more witness from the, unit I signed in the prior sentence. Repeat as necessary. All those witness can be ones I control which I have sign units in my chain. If necessary I can control different addresses to make it appear that many people were using this chain branch.

So I can build a secret chain branch that double-spends one of my units from the public chain, then I release this secret chain branch. Then it is entirely ambiguous which of the double-spends is first and which of the chain branches is the "real" one, i.e. finality was not reached and the "stability" point was not stable.

I repeat that afaics your design is flawed unless you set a static global list of 12 witnesses.

[iamnotback]

Byteball spends transaction fees to the witnesses (and perhaps the payer portion is effectively burned as it is passed along?) instead of employing proof-of-work (but I am not yet clear if this is used as the metric of the chain length in any way in consensus algorithm).. These fees per section “1. Introduction: Exchange rate” on page 3 are tied to the system wide exchange value of adding bytes to the database.

Furthermore, I am sorry to say that my analysis is that once the exchange price has risen high enough, the transaction fee will exceed the value of the transaction and so the transaction can't be economic.

This appears to break the coin.

The transaction fee is equal to transaction size.  How can it be related to the exchange price?

Because the bytes being spent in the transaction have an exchange value. As the exchange value rises, then the quantity of bytes that will be transacted will decrease. When it decreases below the size of the transaction, the transaction is no longer economic.

Well, while theoretically possible, the valuations need to be quite high for this to happen.  The size of a simple transaction is about 500 bytes, let's round it up to 1000 bytes.  For this fee to be equal to $1.00, the market cap will have to be $10¹², or $1tn.

Okay good point, but the counter point is that we shouldn't assume that all lower valued transactions will be necessarily simple transactions. Let's think multi-sig, smart contracts, etc, then we might see problems at around $10 - $100 billion market. And if those are micropayments (which smart contract gas is for example), then we are getting into potential trouble at $100 million market cap.

Typical multi-sig and smart contracts are not going to grow the size of transaction by orders of magnitude.

I am calculating ~2000 bytes per Ethereum transaction and that is diluted since not all of those are smart contracts. I figure 10,000 bytes per smart contract might be the average, which is an order-of-magnitude higher than your example. And we are concerned here not with the average, but the outlier transaction that becomes uneconomic to do. So that might be 100,000 bytes.

And I don't see much use of Byteball in microtransactions, in particular because we don't address the blockchain bloat (or rather ledger bloat) problem.

Okay but the gas payment of a smart contract is typically a microtransaction. Also many smart contracts are of microtransaction in value, i.e. there are many services that require many, many smart contract executions each of microvalue but in aggregate of great value.

Also there is probably also a tradeoff in that the lower the value of the fees for witnesses at low market caps, then perhaps the more incentive witnesses have to game and attack the system. That is getting into what I alluded to by "nothing-at-stake".

That would be true if the ability to earn fees were the only witness' stake.  But it isn't.  As I said, the stake is outside the system, it is the reputation, the trust, the business that a witness has in the real world and would damage if it were to misbehave.

But their reputation on the coin itself is only as valuable as the fees they can earn with that reputation. Their external reputation may still have the same value even if they profit by attacking, destroying, and shorting on the exchanges some two-bit altcoin. They don't have any huge stake in the coin itself, neither in the form of mining hardware investment nor in the form of opportunity cost of huge future fees forsaken. I am not going to waste my time arguing with someone who isn't well versed/experienced with economics. You asked me to present the flaws I see, so I have presented. I see no benefit to arguing. Either we can agree on rational truth, or not. I will submit if you provide a truthful and compelling argument. Otherwise it means I think you are incorrect.

Separately, per my prior post a few moments ago, my secret chain branch can employ entirely fake witnesses and Sybil addresses and how can you objectively determine the difference?