Hi tacotime,
Finally, somebody working on a coin that substantially improves upon bitcoin, and is not just another copy/paste clone with a few changed parameters. I'm not a cryptologist or a programmer, but I'd like to provide some real world input where IMO bitcoin is failing and where improvement is seriously needed for mass adoption or longevity of the currency is to become a reality. Here's a few things to consider improving:
1) Transaction times - Starbucks, gas station and grocery lineups (something many of us deal with daily) are long enough as it is, can you imagine the patience of people in a lineup to wait for your 10 minute cryptocoin transaction to go through?! Or imagine on black Friday, you need to purchase that $1,000 flatscreen and BestBuy makes you wait for 6 confirmations (~1hour) before approving the transaction. We BADLY need transaction times to be 30 seconds or less, ideally on par or better than credit cards. This IMO is the #1 hurdle to mass adoption. Who the heck wants to wait around to pay for something? And which business owner wants less customers because they are too frustrated waiting around to buy something?
I'm trying now to get it down to 4 minutes or less. Faster may be possible, but it will involve playing with the protocol on the testnet and getting the block down to something very small, like 8 KB, and hoping that can propagate across the network appropriately in seconds.
2) Network Security - Please don't make the same mistake as bitcoin and use a single TCP port that can be shut down on a firewall in less than 1 minute. Imagine the currency gets too popular and government somehow passes a law to shut it down under some false pretense (ZOMG its used by Al-queida and drugdealers!). Bitcoin can be shut down overnight by blocking TCP port 8333 at all Tier1 ISPs. The counter argument of the bitcoin developers is extremely poor, in that, there's other open source software such as TOR or i2p that bitcoin could function through... but that assumes that bitcoin would even survive the TCP port shutdown attack which is pretty much cost free to the government. Look at Mtgox.. it gets DDOS'ed for a few hours and bitcoin value crashes by 70%+. Now imagine a firewall rule that blocks bitcoin at the Tier1 ISP backbone level, and 95% of the users who don't have a clue about Tor or i2P (or 99.9999% of non-tech users), and you can bet the currency will crash to near ZERO and be finished. In other words, include proper network layer security from day 1 ! This is far more important that trying to figure out how to prevent complex 51% attacks. This costs ZERO money for the government and ISPs to do, every ISP already has firewalls as part of their core and edge infrastructure. And if you think the USA would never pass such a law to enact the crushing of a popular competing currency... well then think about the other 190+ countries on this planet that may pass such laws with far less hesitation.
Well, the solution I guess would be to start on a default port and then scan subsequent ports in some order until it finds one with traffic permissible and use that. The just transmit your port to known nodes and propagate it across the network.
3) ASIC security - Using 8 different sCrypt algorithms somewhat randomly is an improvement, but what's to prevent mining software from rejecting anything but type 1 Scrypt algo block and mining only those? This would result in at least 8 different types of ASICs needed, sure, but not ASIC proof, IMO. Alternatively, you could still create an ASIC that could direct mining to one of 8 segments of the ASIC and still be much faster than GPU mining. This would mean you have a much more complex ASIC design and 1/8th the potential crunching power, but still many orders of magnitude better than PC/GPUs/FPGAs. So my suggestion is please don't think like Bill Gates that 640K or.. 8 algos should be enough. Why not make it 4096+ of them and outright discourage any kind of ASIC... ever. My concern with ASICs isn't even somebody trying to make a lot of money faster than others, but rather government 3 letter agencies throwing 1 Billion printed dollars at the problem creating an ASIC farm, and killing the coin altogether. The NSA just built a 2 billion dollar data center in 2012. With a Homeland security budget in the Trillions, 1 billion is like petty cash, and you can bet that preventing the US dollar from collapse against popularity gaining crypto currencies is a homeland security issue.
I'm working on a new algorithm that incorporates all the hash algorithms together via scrypt. At some point too adding hash algorithms will slow things down for CPU or GPU because you'll overflow the instruction cache I imagine, so you have to evaluate all the hash functions individually and see how many clock cycles it takes to compute each one, and the same thing for scrypt memory transfer.
4) The 5th grader problem - Let's face it, Joe 6 pack can't do basic math, he is not smarter than a 5th grader, even less so in 3rd world countries where education is seriously lacking. DON'T fractionalize the coins into ridiculous numbers of decimal places, or make people use 8 different fractional acronyms mBTC, satoshi's etc. The major problem with bitcoin from gaining mass adoption is that it is seriously not adhering to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. You think in 10 years, your average person is really going to understand or want to deal with .000004 bitcoins? Please consider the Brazilian solution. Brazil in the past few decades had severe bouts of high inflation in their "Real" currency... after the inflation got too high, i.e. the number of ZEROs on the notes got too be too many they simply issued a new currency and said something like 1,000 of the old Real's are now worth 1 of the new issued Real's. This didn't solve the high inflation issues of course, but it's a simple solution that could solve trying to deal with .24056794 bitcoins to buy a loaf of bread.[/b]
Well, you could just make a box in your wallet that is based on the SI prefix that you cycle through, for instance cNTC, mNTC, etc to get a denomination close to a dollar. Clicking the button would automatically change the value everywhere in the wallet. I can't control what the value of the coin will be, so this is probably the best answer. The everyone can just click in the wallet to change it every 6 years when it increases by an order of magnitude or whatever.
5) Anonymity Improvements - I'm not sure why satoshi only went 1/2 way to make the bitcoin anonymous. Clearly he didn't go far enough in the eyes of many. There are now all kinds of academics studying the bitcoin blockchain and trying to figure out who has how many coins (including satoshi himself), and where they live. Look, blockchain.info can identify a user's aproximate location and map it:
http://blockchain.info/tx/58d961336f14d3c8305dfe193c5e00ac00a3a9de21aa605ee701da714fb1657cPlease prevent identifying user's IP and thus geo location. I know IPs aren't in the blockchain, but they can and are apparently being collected by major nodes - this could be mitigated by having bitcoin work within a TOR like system. Probably there are many other anonymity improvements that can be made, I am just mentioning the most glaring one for me.
They already can't identify my IP in bitcoin; I check blockchain.info constantly when I make transactions and I have never seen my IP come up as a trafficking node. You can easily just transmit a transaction over TOR already if you really want to, though (it'll come out of the exit node to a bitcoin node). I guess it'd be desirable to have a few nodes with connection ports of 80 to easily accept these tx, too.
6) Wishlist - I honestly don't understand 80% of the items on this bitcoin improvement wish list, but seriously consider implementing the best ones because from my understanding, once a coin gets too popular, the risk of making any major changes becomes ever bigger, and thus innovation will stall. In other words, get it right from the get go as much as possible, because hardforks are not popular.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist I'm trying my best. A number are already being addressed, such as the use of an alternative light ledger system to complete downloading of the blockchain.
7) Hardforks - Why are hardforks so hard on the system? Chrome and IE now force automatic updates upon 100's of millions of users, with little seeming repercussions... why not do the same with your coin? If auto-updates are not somehow possible, then establish a coin-holiday, or several a year (say 1 major update opportunity per quarter), where all clients/miners must update to the new patch-level whose details of course would be pre-announced. Also, if you can, think of a way to establish an Emergency change system in case something goes horribly wrong by accident.
An update system that simply prompts the user would be desirable, yes, but it may also make the chain less secure, for instance if someone found a way to redirect the DNS of the update on the target computer to a version that was illegitimate. You'd have to be careful and use some kind of validation method like public key encryption.
8 ) SatoshiDice blockchain pollution - Please figure out a way that the blockchain doesn't get polluted with 5 million .00001 transactions per day. Please discourage ridiculous micro transactions. Micro transactions are definitely wanted, but not millions of them by the same entity. What % of the blockchain now is satoshidice garbage ? Maybe have a transaction fee that is high enough to prevent excessive number of small transactions.
This is easily solvable by just keeping the per KB fee high enough.
9) The Mega Blockchain problem - Is there any viable way to prevent the blockchain from growing into Terabytes of size? Can we not archive it every X years or every X gigabytes or something ? I mean, sure storage is cheap these days and bandwidths are getting higher, but think like a Chinese government in loooong timespans. In 200 years, how large might the blockchain be? 5 billion petabytes ? Hopefully we won't hit a technological wall of storage or bandwidth along the way resulting in the crash of the currency because no more transactions can be added to the blockchain, because every user would have to own their own private data center.
You can decentralize block storage (eg only keep blocks that contain transactions to and from your block address) and store the block hashes and a ledger. Then persons can share blocks and eventually reconstruct the blockchain. However, it's of interest to keep the total chain in at least one location, but by decentralizing like mentioned you can significantly reduce the overall world storage used.
10) Democratic voting of interest rates - I'm not sure this is such a good idea, with humanity being what it is. The lowest common denominator would always win, and this is rarely the best decision that can be made. This is readily evident in today's government formations. Nobody goes on a campaign trail announcing massive necessary spending cuts, increases in taxes or interest rates, because none of the constituents in their right mind want less money. Likewise, if people could vote on things like interest rates, they would always vote for whatever is best for them right now, not for the survival of the system in the long run. Thus, I think satoshi had it right in that the problem with fiat is that it is controlled by humans, and the advantage of bitcoin is that everyone can trust an intelligent algorithm. As the philosophers proclaim (paraphrase): Genius does not belong the majority, it is the inherent attribute of the rarest of human. .... fortunately for us, we can work hard at making a genius algorithm.
You can partially mitigate this by enforce a minimum reward for both PoS and PoW, and also a maximum, and also by allowing only small changes allowed per year. It's similar to allowing the difficulty to only adjust a little bit each round instead of letting swing violently.
