Do you think "iamnotback" really has the" Bitcoin killer"?

[irritant]

whitespace is the best programming language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)#Sample_code

[iamnotback]

whitespace is the best programming language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)#Sample_code

That was the original choice but forced me to employ <pre> tags on all promotional code samples on the non-existent ICO-stage website, which was deemed to be excessive complexity tacked on an otherwise elegant, simple language. We just didn't think speculators would get quite the same FOMO effect without the <pre>.

[iamnotback]

Afaik, side-chains can't be secured:

...

Yeah and I posit that @gmaxwell is going to be the spectator.

Side-chains are fundamentally flawed and can't ever work securely. Lightning Networks can't work decentralized.

Side chains are constrained by a fixed number of coins. As far as I can see, without an emission of new coins there is no practical way to secure them with one notable exception; namely demurrage. The credit for this belongs to Freicoin http://freico.in/

I know this is controversial but it can work, particularly for a side chain whose purpose is transactions as opposed to wealth storage. A 1% per year demurrage rate is not a real issue if the velocity of money is say 2 weeks.

The problem is incentivizing mining, because merge mining is insecure, side-chains can't create coins, and transaction fees are not incentives compatible in PoW.

How do you envision demurrage incentivizing sufficient mining to secure a PoW side-chain?

Secondly merge-mining suffers from 50+% attacks if the chain being merge-mined doesn’t have a majority of total hashing power... which kinda defeats the point if we're worried about miner scalability.

Follow-up:

...

The problem is incentivizing mining, because merge mining is insecure, side-chains can't create coins, and transaction fees are not incentives compatible in PoW.

How do you envision demurrage incentivizing sufficient mining to secure a PoW side-chain?
...

A 1% per year demurrage rate can produce a 1% per year block reward while keeping the number of coins in the side chain constant. The demurrage amount and block reward are adjusted continuously to reflect the number of coins in the side chain. In Freicoin demurrage is used to compensate the miners while keeping the number of coins constant. Their demurrage rate I believe is higher.

1% is approximately the tail emission of Monero (0.6 XMR per 2 min block). This roughly corresponds to 3 XBT per 10 min block for Bitcoin.

Afaics, this is not secure for reasons:

1. The block reward is much smaller than the rewards on the main chain, thus unless the side-chain uses a different mining algorithm, then the main chains miners can 51% (or 33% selfish-mining) attack the side-chain. To incentivize sufficient security, then side-chains will not be competitive with coins kept on the main chain (or a different consensus algorithm which doesn't need to spend so much on security as PoW does, which is my yet unpublished design because of lower sunk costs as compared to PoW).

2. An attacker can yoyo the difficulty of the side-chain by moving many coins into and out of the side-chain. Difficulty attacks either leave a coin with periods of being very slow to confirm or enable the attacker to 51% attack during periods of very low difficulty.

There are likely other problems. Side-chains are simply a broken concept.

[iamnotback]

The consensus algorithm and other aspects of my blockchain such as the sub-second instant confirmations, unbounded scaling/TPS, no block size issue, and eliminating PoW and PoS (and any reliance on the flaws of Byzantine agreement), while retaining the key desirable attributes of PoW is too complex to summarize. I wrote to my angel investor today:

The design has too many facets to summarize. I attempted to start writing a summary and realized it hinges on too many details and the summary doesn't make sense without all the details.

No coin out there has a chance of being relevant against this design. I am feeling quite good after re-reading the key chapter 7 of my whitepaper again. I really did a good job in Q4 2016 of writing that down. If I get hit by a bus, my angel investor can make sure the design is not lost.

[Chikito]

crypto increasingly attractive in the world. increasingly tempted people will easily get the money, the more easily cryptocurrency has a high price. and no doubt some of the world intelgent will also intervene? .

[Fatoshi]

I don't know if the guy really can make the bitcoin killer but it seems he thinks he can at least and will try to invest my last few bitcoins into it as a last hoorah to the idea of crypto.

After reading though his posts I kind of have a non gay bro crush due to his political views. My biggest sadness part from losing all my coins nearly investing in projects that turned out to be scams is there is very little subversiveness in crypto anymore. My pet hate is when people desperately discuss when and how Bitcoin can become 'legitimate' and accepted by the 'mainstream'  Screw that I want to rip the system a new one to the point the Federal Reserve leaders are begging on the streets for gold pieces.


I believe Satoshi was always thinking about the system as toxic and was thinking how to remodel it in a more Libertarian anti Fed system but I feel like he chickened out somewhat..who knows though.


Crypto needs more Subversion and more cowbell IMO.

[iamnotback]

Thanks @Fatoshi. I am a mix of pragmatic and rebellious. Well I won't be doing an ICO, so if and when you decide to buy some tokens, then it will be for an open source project that is already live. And let's hope we can do something that really makes an impact on more people than Bitcoin has thus far. And that means hopefully it will be the product of the effect and reward of a lot of hyper talented and motivated people, not just myself. I am just the initial force to get the snowball rolling downhill.

The key is making it scalable while maintaining decentralization (which no one else knows how to do, even Lightning Networks won't scale decentralized). And making the blockchain open so anyone can build stuff on the blockchain (which then should drive the number of developers on the open source blockchain project as well). And a monetization model that doesn't require all the app vendors to create their own unwanted tokens as in the current Ethereum "smart contract' ICO craze. And more...

Afaics, my blockchain and consensus design eliminates the huge sunk costs of PoW mining farms, while being more secure. It doesn't have the nothing-at-stake problems of PoS nor the "can get stuck requiring a hard fork" problems of Byzantine agreement (e.g. TenderMint/Cosmos, Byteball, Ethereum's Casper, etc). Again I can't easily summarize this design, because the devil is in the details, so you'll just have to read the whitepaper whenever I decide to publish it.

Here is a hint from the whitepaper and probably the most significant hint I've ever released:

Even if one concluded the transacting participants only have an altruist-prime incentive to do validation spot checks, it is not an undersupplied public good^{[^subjectivity]} because there is no practical incentive, nor plausible way to verify and pay participants, to not do it. It seems plausible that there is the additional motivation of jealously (aka “crab bucket mentality”^{[^crab-mentality]}) in that any participant or faction wouldn’t want to allow any other participant or faction to be able to cheat to obtain an (especially non-meritorious) advantage. A generative essence that seems to drive the viability of decentralized systems is that if no factions are powerful enough to overcome the checks of the other factions, then the resultant Nash equilibrium is a stalemate that preserves decentralization and meritocracy, which is the antithesis of a power vacuum such as is otherwise the case with politics and democracy.^{[^ESR] [^voting]}

Note I am hoping someone more skilled than myself at the task of technical writing, could rewrite the whitepaper before it is published. Also simply because writing it and thus rewriting is a huge distracting task and I have far too much to do.

[iamnotback]

I bump this one more time on a technical sharing (hopefully going dark for a while after this):

Re: Blockchain vs DAG (Byteball's concencus algorithm).

The Byteball algorithm is about a set of witnesses forming a consensus opinion about the total order selected out of a plurality of partial orders in the DAG. By partial orders, we mean conflicting paths through the DAG which yield different ordering of which double-spend was first.

8.1 Byteball’s “Stability Point” Rule

...

Witness units which do not transitively reference their prior unit in their ancestor path^* are provably misbehaving and ignored thus can’t do any harm other than if the majority does. If the threshold of the count for the stability point is only the majority, a single witness could make finality ambiguous by signing two conflicting observations which (transitively) reference their same prior unit without one of the the observations (transitively) referencing the other. The faulty witness could publish one of the conflicting observation units after delay, possibly enabling the reversal of finality for some conflicting transactions. But this requires the minority of witnesses which didn’t reference the first to then reference the delayed observation unit― which seems to require a majority (aka “50+%” or “¹/₂+”) attack even if the delay was within ambiguity due to propagation delay because all (which is not random) of those minority have to join the attack. To increase the safety of finality, the said threshold could be increased to +²/₃ of the witnesses so that reversing finality would require +¹/₃ to sign conflicting observation units and in all likelihood +²/₃ to be malevolent. Thus would reduce the liveness threshold from ¹/₂+ to +¹/₃.

...

The stability point algorithm is able to achieve non-asymptotic BFT with only ¹/₂+ quorums because the ordering of the published observation units (analogous to validator votes) for each witness is orthogonal to those of the other witnesses. Whereas, Byzantine agreement requires +²/₃ quorums because validators much coordinate in quorums such that each validator can claim the unresponsiveness of the others because for a vote to published, all must combine their votes in a quorum.

[Fuserleer]

Thought I'd drop a post of support seeing as I'm stopping by....haven't been on for a while as I've been traveling a lot.

Glad to see that you're making progress and more importantly, that your health seems to be under more control now.  I imagine it's VERY frustrating when you want to work but are unable.  Keep it up though dude, one way or another your persistence will surely pay off.

Time is ticking though, every day is another day that the current offerings get a little more sticky...so you (and me) better get a move on!

Any forecasts on when you'll have a PoC?

[thejaytiesto]

I don't know if the guy really can make the bitcoin killer but it seems he thinks he can at least and will try to invest my last few bitcoins into it as a last hoorah to the idea of crypto.

After reading though his posts I kind of have a non gay bro crush due to his political views. My biggest sadness part from losing all my coins nearly investing in projects that turned out to be scams is there is very little subversiveness in crypto anymore. My pet hate is when people desperately discuss when and how Bitcoin can become 'legitimate' and accepted by the 'mainstream'  Screw that I want to rip the system a new one to the point the Federal Reserve leaders are begging on the streets for gold pieces.


I believe Satoshi was always thinking about the system as toxic and was thinking how to remodel it in a more Libertarian anti Fed system but I feel like he chickened out somewhat..who knows though.


Crypto needs more Subversion and more cowbell IMO.

Luckily I didn't waste my bitcoin on tons of altcoins. As a noob I lost some money on quarkcoin back then, the super strong multi hashing algo and stuff looked cool for a noob back then, also that guy Max Keiser and Bill Still shilled it... fuckers.
Other than that, I didn't lose any money, I learned the altcoin scam lesson fast. I am willing to give this guy a chance and i'll risk some of my BTC, but not a lot. If it is really a bitcoin killer, by buying 100 bucks it would be enough to retire.
I guess we will have a lot of time to buy cheap since it will probably stay under the radar for a while in marginal exchanges before the token is introduced in the big P.

Note I am hoping someone more skilled than myself at the task of technical writing, could rewrite the whitepaper before it is published. Also simply because writing it and thus rewriting is a huge distracting task and I have far too much to do.

You must take a lot of care when you do this, don't send it to the wrong person and instead of doing a re-writing this person releases it as his own work.. i guess you know this.

If I really had a "bitcoin killer" in the form of a whitepaper i would be too paranoid to send to anyone to be honest.

[miscreanity]

Even if one concluded the transacting participants only have an altruist-prime incentive to do validation spot checks, it is not an undersupplied public good^{[^subjectivity]} because there is no practical incentive, nor plausible way to verify and pay participants, to not do it. It seems plausible that there is the additional motivation of jealously (aka “crab bucket mentality”^{[^crab-mentality]}) in that any participant or faction wouldn’t want to allow any other participant or faction to be able to cheat to obtain an (especially non-meritorious) advantage. A generative essence that seems to drive the viability of decentralized systems is that if no factions are powerful enough to overcome the checks of the other factions, then the resultant Nash equilibrium is a stalemate that preserves decentralization and meritocracy, which is the antithesis of a power vacuum such as is otherwise the case with politics and democracy.^{[^ESR] [^voting]}

Byzantine fault tolerance allows individual nodes to assess whether another node is behaving out of the ordinary in relation to the rest of the network and thus ignore that misbehaving node?

[Fuserleer]

Even if one concluded the transacting participants only have an altruist-prime incentive to do validation spot checks, it is not an undersupplied public good^{[^subjectivity]} because there is no practical incentive, nor plausible way to verify and pay participants, to not do it. It seems plausible that there is the additional motivation of jealously (aka “crab bucket mentality”^{[^crab-mentality]}) in that any participant or faction wouldn’t want to allow any other participant or faction to be able to cheat to obtain an (especially non-meritorious) advantage. A generative essence that seems to drive the viability of decentralized systems is that if no factions are powerful enough to overcome the checks of the other factions, then the resultant Nash equilibrium is a stalemate that preserves decentralization and meritocracy, which is the antithesis of a power vacuum such as is otherwise the case with politics and democracy.^{[^ESR] [^voting]}

Byzantine fault tolerance allows individual nodes to assess whether another node is behaving out of the ordinary in relation to the rest of the network and thus ignore that misbehaving node?

Kind of... the more accepted definition is that Byzantine fault tolerance allows non-faulty nodes to still form a consensus and produce the same output even with the presence of a high percentage of faulty nodes.  Most BFT algorithms are able to cope with 20-33% of nodes in a faulty state and ensure that the network can still function perfectly well.

A "faulty" node is quite ambiguous though, as you can't ever determine if a node is experiencing a general malfunction, an isolated error due to being sent incorrect information, simply lagging behind (bandwidth saturation, DDoS) or is dishonest.  Thus any schemes that penalize faulty nodes are very dangerous as they could easily escalate to large amounts of honest nodes being penalized for innocent errors.

[Fatoshi]

I wonder how a distribution would work?



I kind of like the idea of people having to put their nuts on the line in terms of buying a set percentage of a coin with BTC....but not this being like 20% of total coins BUT nearly all the total supply....with 5-10% going to development.  I think it rewards individual and community risk. The byteball distribution just made richer people richer...and zero risk.


lets see what he comes up with...

[iamnotback]

I am just waiting for my original health to come back, so I can go vroooooom.


Liver pain (which also causes the back of my head to itch and ache and chronic fatigue) is preventing me from doing any productive work. Just sleeping always (not always comfortably). 12 (to 15) more days on the 4 drug regimen. The meds are toxic to the liver (as was the disseminated TB infection before I started the meds). But there is no guarantee that the liver pain won't continue for the additional 16 weeks (minus 3 days) on the 2 drug regimen.    

I'll go for another liver enzymes test.

At least in 12 - 15 days I stop the drug which is so toxic to the optic nerve. Which is damn dangerous for me considering I am already blind in one eye. And I have become very near-sighted in the other eye.

Please no suggestions. Just have to finish my treatment. There are no shortcuts. Even there is no guarantee this treatment is going to work, but I am optimistic. @dinofelis I can't finish that debate/discussion on entropy right now as I am too cognitively limited for the time being.

There is a much better new PaMZ treatment for TB coming from the http://TBalliance.org in a couple of years. In Phase 3 trials now. Will also be effective against MDR-TB.

The current treatment for MDR-TB is horrific:

TB is the world's deadliest infectious disease, killing 1.8 million people each year.

TB patients urgently need new and better antibiotics. Treatment for drug-resistant TB is long, toxic, complicated, and expensive. It can consist of more than two years of a dozen or more pills per day, along with six months of daily injections. And for those unfortunate enough to have extensively resistant TB, even if they take every one of those 20,000 toxic pills and hundreds of injections, they will still have less than a one in three chance of survival.

I don't know if I have MDR-TB or not. I suppose my risk of having it is greater than 4%. I am not treating for MDR-TB, which is very frustrating because if I have MDR-TB, then the treatment I am doing now is useless (well it might reduce bacterial load temporarily in any case). Unfortunately my filipino doctor did not culture my spitum before prescribing meds, thus I think there is no way to culture it now for testing resistance. We just have to wait to see if the TB comes back again. Any way, the MDR-TB treatment is so horrific, it is probably better to try to wait for the PaMZ treatment to become approved. I will have ingested 480 large tablets when my treatment is completed.

Btw, most of those over age 60 here the Philippines don't survive the medicines. I hear so many first-hand accounts of fathers who died of liver failure when attempting to cure TB. Could be the high rate of alcoholism. I should make it through because I don't drink and I still do some running once in a while on these meds. I think maybe my liver flared up again because I was indulging in eating all the things I used to love to eat before I got sick such as pizza and dark chocolate. Back to my monotonic diet again. Our liver is much less durable after age 50.

[klee]

Good luck with your health and project(s).

Thread title is ideal for a prediction market, ain't it? 

[DevelopFI]

Even if he made a vastly superior coin to BTC it wouldn't kill it. BTC has had to much time in the public eye for any other coin to overtake it. In the future, with more people involved, we might see a shift to a better coin but for now, BTC is untouchable.

[Geraldo]

Looking forward to this.

[iamnotback]

Trying to be the astute manager again that enabled me to get projects completed.

Note we really need a better programming language for the apps that will be built on the blockchain. That is what the linked discussion is about.

[Fatoshi]

Sorry to state the obvious cause I haven't followed the full trajectory of your ideas of project but if you are struggling with finding the effort to code your concepts into reality why don't you try to bring in a couple of respected people from this site that you can delegate work too, people with real world identities who can be held accountable if they were to plagiarise your work or try to be less than faithful?


You could do something like NEM did and build coders and community around your core ideas. If done right it seems to me like you can still lead and have full control but be supported in more grunt work. Maybe promising a small percentage of coins to coders you bring in.

[iamnotback]

@Fatoshi, there's no need to panic yet. Delegation is also dilution of momentum, focus, leadership, etc. There is a reason Ethereum Classic didn't prosper and that is because Vitalik isn't leading Classic. Leaders can't delegate leadership. If I am not the right leader, then I won't succeed. But I don't succeed by not leading especially at the nascent stage. The Mythical Man Month also applies very profoundly especially at the nascent stage. I'd spend more time communicating everything that is in my head on every little nuance, than the other person(s) would spend actually getting anything done. Open source avoids to a large extent this Mythical Man Month effect, when the contributors are autonomous. How can they be autonomous when there isn't even an existing project and skeleton for them to work from autonomously (i.e. being autodidact). Even Monero had already Bytecoin, a fork, and Cryptonote whitepaper as a starting point for open source collaboration. Once the project reaches a critical mass, then one person is ineffective, and then open source takes over. But at the nascent stage, even two cooks can be less efficient than one in some cases. If the two cooks are co-equals who've been involved together since the beginning, that can work. But bringing in more cooks when one is trying to start the first recipe, is a recipe for muddling it. This is especially true when what is being cooked has never been cooked before and is to a large extent still only existing in one person's head. The draft whitepaper is around 30,000+ words and 250+ cited references. I got exhausted in December and decided I couldn't write everything down. Btw, before @smooth started (or just after) Aeon and got involved in Steem, we explored about the possibility of working together. And he is very skilled and very intelligent. But even then, it was a lot of communication load. It really isn't easy to integrate two cooks, and especially when you are not in the same office daily or at least able to video conference instantly without notice throughout the work day.

The gist of my plan is to try to get as quickly as possible to some point where others could contribute.

P.S. If you are wondering why @smooth and I didn't work together, from my perspective it was probably because a) he is very highly paid, b) he is anonymous (so that means no video or voice communication), c) I didn't have a final design and sufficient confidence yet in 2015, d) slight clash of personalities and priorities perhaps although we didn't get deep enough to know this for sure, e) I felt it would create animosity with Monero's community and I didn't feel confident enough to put this potential problem on him, f) potential conflicts of interest given for example he is the moderator Monero's main thread here. Mostly I would emphasize my illness and that I wasn't ready, then he got involved in Aeon and Steem. Also as much as I respect everything he has done that is publicly visible, his anonymity was point of worry for me.