Instead of building a better miner... why not build a better coin.
Someone rang?
First flaw...
- Rewards are a gamble. They should be directly related to actual work provided, not a pot-luck. ... Your reward would be a direct fraction of the processing reward at the difficulty. Not a set reward, that excludes others actual work. That is just dumb, and as stated, already countered, thus, just leading to ASICs dominance. Eventually leading to one singular controller with the biggest asic-factory.)
In the Decrits proposal, people only create currency when it is profitable to produce the currency--there is high demand. The security of the network is separate from the monetary system. Security is paid for by tx fees. Coins are created as a block amount based on network activity, with each person wanting to mine part of the block "bidding" for it by producing small proofs-of-work. To reduce the "hardware tax" of the incentive to create ever more efficient hardware that ends up being more costly in the end (as explained by this thread), many coins are given freely away as a result of minting, via tx activity and account interest.
As these coins are given away, the incentive to continue creating coins quickly diminishes. Producing ASICs would quickly ramp up the difficulty so that ASICs are no longer profitable, and unlikely to ever see a return on the initial investment to create them, rather than the sunk costs of using a GPU. And new blocks of coins cannot be created unless there has been sufficient tx activity, so ASICs attempting to inflate the supply will quickly run into a wall where they can no longer mint until tx activity catches up.
It requires people to embrace the idea that using wasteful proof-of-work can not be the security of the system.
Second flaw...
- Poorly structured "tree branching", leading to 51% attacks. Though it can be corrected, it can not be avoided, and thus, 50% of this effort is wasted, and can lead to reversed transaction confusion, as "invalid transactions" get removed by the "corrected blocks". At minimum, no single entity/pool should be able to reach 33.333333% of the load. At the current time, pools are allowed to expand to 100% if desired. There should be a MINIMUM of 3x 33.333333% sections available for pool polling. Thus, always 3 separate entities, that can be confirmed, and can not "merge" works to become a 66.666666% pool, by obtaining two portions of the workload.
There is no competition in Decrits for who decides the network view. Shareholders stake the ability to create the network view with decrits. If they create a malicious view, their decrits can be destroyed, thus making it difficult to repeat the action. Each shareholder has a 10 second window where it can add transactions to be added to the chain. As long as the chain is relatively unbroken, small transactions can be reliably confirmed within 5-15 seconds.
Third flaw...
- Poor database structure and management. The "user", will eventually be burdened by a 385TB DB of transactions that only contain 1MB of transactions that relate to them. What are we at now, 9GB+ after 4.5 years, and growing exponentially with each transaction. (Users should only have to download transactions that pertain to them, and no more. Starting from the point at which they get that first transaction, and ignoring any other blocks that do not have transactions that do not pertain to them.)...
Decrits uses an account ledger that is updated by the consensus of shareholders every 10 days or so. Transactions after a set time are no longer necessary to maintain the state of the network. This limits the size on disk to the number of accounts times the number of bytes for an account. Somewhere on the order of 100 bytes. So even 1 billion accounts is only about 100GB. Additionally, because of the consensus system, "lite" clients can verify small blocks of accounts with only 50-100MB of data transferred per week in a network with millions of participants.
Fourth flaw...
- Lost accounts. There is no method of recovery for lost accounts. There are tools to assist with a recovery of a partial loss, if you have data to recreate it... but that only helps recover up to 100 keys beyond the point of where it can restore. Since, for some reason, new keys ask the network for the next 100 keys, instead of generating them sequentially, and selecting valid ones from YOUR selection, not asking the network for 100 more keys that you could never "guess", once a wallet is recovered. If it is ever recovered.
This is a software problem, not a network problem. Deterministic wallet addresses created by using personal information that is hard to obtain (
good security questions) plus a sufficiently long password that must be securely kept, no one could lose their money due to a hard drive crash. Strongly enforcing this provision in the software is key to making this work.
Fifth flaw...
- Burden of load that does not expand, will only diminish in time. A diminished burden of load will result in failure of the network, as machines become fast enough to handle all transactions at once. Thus, leaving only one operator running the whole show. In the advent of ASIC's, it will turn the 30,000 GPU load-balanced network into 1,000 ASIC operators, which will fade into 10 Super-ASIC operators, which will end-up as 1 Super-Super-ASIC operator running the trillions of micro-transactions, and thus, not be able to "keep-up" the burden of the load, while manipulating the entire market that still exists.
"Handling" transactions is only a matter of bandwidth and CPU time. ASICs do not handle anything regarding transactions, only finding a nonce for proof of work. It is not required at all to secure the network. In decrits, as transaction volume increases, transaction fee receipts increase which encourages decentralization because to get paid, you only need to invest decrits into the security of the network, or you can also get paid by being a transmitting node. The Decrits proposal, coupled with its account ledger, will be highly bandwidth efficient, and the CPU time required to verify transactions can easily scale with home PC processing power.
Conclusion... Build a better coin. Otherwise you are just adding to the future problem, creating a super-asic.
See my signature for a link to the decrits proposal.
