[ANN] eMunie (EMU) - NOT a BitCoin fork/clone - call for beta testers

[Fuserleer]

Hatcher trust is calculated over the hatcher's entire history since it's first transaction processed.

Aha! Yes. I was thinking something like that would be employed. Basically, we have a whole system that is constantly monitoring each other, the longer hatchers have been trustworthy, the more the network trusts them and if they ever do anything that was verified to be a false transaction, everybody kicks them out, they lose their reputation.

The currency is assigned in greater proportion to anyone spawning infinite nodes on amazon servers to validate transactions.  Validating transactions is a trivial task.  That's why bitcoin does not hand out currency to anyone running a bitcoin node verifying transactions.  Now there appears to be some kind of reputation/trust model built into it.  What could possibly go wrong?  Pirate had a super high level of trust on OTC until he defaulted on 5 million.  It looks like they turned the proof of work into "who can spawn more nodes."  I am kind of suprised that serious development work would go into something this obviously bad.   Anyone with 51% of the horde of amazon hatchers can build up a reputation and then double spend.  Non-hatchers cannot tell that the honest hatchers from the dishonest ones or see the double spend.  The dishonest 51% has a higher chance of choosing the clients and telling them the double spend is valid.

Assuming that's correct then I'm surprised you support BitCoin either, 51% attack is valid there too no?

The trust method is reliable:

Simple math

Hatchers process transactions of peers randomly.

10,000,000,000 hatcher nodes...9,999,999,999 of them owned by one person.

10,000,000,000 transactions come in, who has the advantage?  They all have an equal chance of having the highest trust value due to random probabilities and distribution.

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[timeofmind]

Hatcher trust is calculated over the hatcher's entire history since it's first transaction processed.

Aha! Yes. I was thinking something like that would be employed. Basically, we have a whole system that is constantly monitoring each other, the longer hatchers have been trustworthy, the more the network trusts them and if they ever do anything that was verified to be a false transaction, everybody kicks them out, they lose their reputation.

The currency is assigned in greater proportion to anyone spawning infinite nodes on amazon servers to validate transactions.  Validating transactions is a trivial task.  That's why bitcoin does not hand out currency to anyone running a bitcoin node verifying transactions.  Now there appears to be some kind of reputation/trust model built into it.  What could possibly go wrong?  Pirate had a super high level of trust on OTC until he defaulted on 5 million.  It looks like they turned the proof of work into "who can spawn more nodes."  I am kind of suprised that serious development work would go into something this obviously bad.   Anyone with 51% of the horde of amazon hatchers can build up a reputation and then double spend.  Non-hatchers cannot tell that the honest hatchers from the dishonest ones or see the double spend.  The dishonest 51% has a higher chance of choosing the clients and telling them the double spend is valid.

Assuming that's correct then I'm surprised you support BitCoin either, 51% attack is valid there too no?

The trust method is reliable:

Simple math

Hatchers process transactions of peers randomly.

10,000,000,000 hatcher nodes...9,999,999,999 of them owned by one person.

10,000,000,000 transactions come in, who has the advantage?  They all have an equal chance of having the highest trust value due to random probabilities and distribution.

Well, that is a bit unrealistic. If he owned that much of the network, he could pretend to do the work with a low chance of ever getting caught.

I think an important point is that there is a measurable amount of cpu work to be done, and if anyone is caught not doing that work, they lose their rep. and have to rebuild it from scratch.

[Fuserleer]

Unrealistic yes, but I wanted to use an outrageous figure to make the point about trust.

[Seth Otterstad]

There is no "work" being done.  POW has been eliminated from the system.  Validating transactions is a trivial task.

@timeofmind:  Anyone with 51% of bitcoin nodes doing trivial validating work CANNOT double spend.  An attacker must have 51% of MINING POWER to double spend.  This has been eliminated from eMunie for some reason.

"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.  Also, the odds that one of D's instances accumulates a higher trust is incredibly high.

[Fuserleer]

"the odds that one of D's instances accumulates a higher trust is incredibly high."

I fail to see how on earth you came to that conclusion.

In this scenario, no hatcher would have a significantly higher chance, or resulting trust anywhere near even 1 order of magnitude greater than any other node in the system.

If that's the case then you should be able to flip a coin 1000 times and have a clear majority winner of heads v's tails every time you perform 1000 flips.  But that doesn't happen.

[timeofmind]

There is no "work" being done.  POW has been eliminated from the system.  Validating transactions is a trivial task.

@timeofmind:  Anyone with 51% of bitcoin nodes doing trivial validating work CANNOT double spend.  An attacker must have 51% of MINING POWER to double spend.  This has been eliminated from eMunie for some reason.

"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.  Also, the odds that one of D's instances accumulates a higher trust is incredibly high.

Firstly, POW has not been eliminated, and that is an important point. Calculating the merkel-tree of the whole chain of transactions is not trivial. It takes some CPU. If your node pretends to do this work, it will eventually get caught and lose its rep. If you want to actually do this work and build your reputation with millions of nodes, then all the power to you. You deserve your share of the funds for your work done. Keep in mind that there will be heavy competition, as everyone will want to do this work, and they will likely all fire off enough nodes so that they can do as much of the share of the work that is possible. In fact, this system would probably be most secure if you allow every participant to fire off as many nodes as their CPU can handle, and then let them fight over the transactions.

[timeofmind]

Also, might want to penalize nodes for being slow to keep the network efficient. The transaction could be sent to two hatchers at the same time, one monitors and verifies the work of the other... the second hatcher could then also calculate how fast the first one is capable of doing its job?

I'm also thinking that there could be a reward for nodes that discover dishonest nodes...

[Visin]

not sure who this 'Seth' guy is, but he seems very ignorant to new methods. I bet 'Seth' is one of those people proposing we fix piracy but then states that no matter what its impossible >.>

[Seth Otterstad]

There is no "work" being done.  POW has been eliminated from the system.  Validating transactions is a trivial task.

@timeofmind:  Anyone with 51% of bitcoin nodes doing trivial validating work CANNOT double spend.  An attacker must have 51% of MINING POWER to double spend.  This has been eliminated from eMunie for some reason.

"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.  Also, the odds that one of D's instances accumulates a higher trust is incredibly high.

Firstly, POW has not been eliminated, and that is an important point. Calculating the merkel-tree of the whole chain of transactions is not trivial. It takes some CPU. If your node pretends to do this work, it will eventually get caught and lose its rep. If you want to actually do this work and build your reputation with millions of nodes, then all the power to you. You deserve your share of the funds for your work done. Keep in mind that there will be heavy competition, as everyone will want to do this work, and they will likely all fire off enough nodes so that they can do as much of the share of the work that is possible. In fact, this system would probably be most secure if you allow every participant to fire off as many nodes as their CPU can handle, and then let them fight over the transactions.

Sure it takes some CPU, but a even a cell phone could do it.  Why don't you go in the bitcoin dev forum and say "hey guys why don't we switch the proof-of-work system from SHA256 to just calculating the merkel-tree of the blockchain?"  See what they say.  Maybe Gavin will post again and tell you.  Replacing SHA256 with a competition to run the most nodes is idiotic.

"the odds that one of D's instances accumulates a higher trust is incredibly high."

I fail to see how on earth you came to that conclusion.

In this scenario, no hatcher would have a significantly higher chance, or resulting trust anywhere near even 1 order of magnitude greater than any other node in the system.

If that's the case then you should be able to flip a coin 1000 times and have a clear majority winner of heads v's tails every time you perform 1000 flips.  But that doesn't happen.

The point is that the attacker has 1m (essentially unlimited number) of nodes with equal trust to the honest nodes.

Also, address this:
"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.

[Fuserleer]

Sure it takes some CPU, but a even a cell phone could do it.  Why don't you go in the bitcoin dev forum and say "hey guys why don't we switch the proof-of-work system from SHA256 to just calculating the merkel-tree of the blockchain?"  See what they say.  Maybe Gavin will post again and tell you.  Replacing SHA256 with a competition to run the most nodes is idiotic.

You are forgetting a very significant bottleneck, HDD.  It may be trivial in CPU time, but performing an entire sweep of the transaction chain, both forward and backward involves lots of disk access, which increases as the transaction chain grows, and that will slow you down.

Hashing doesn't require HDD or large amounts of memory, performing this work does.

The point is that the attacker has 1m nodes (essentially unlimited number) of nodes with equal trust to the honest nodes.

Now address my real questions:
"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.

And?? D has done the majority of the work and had real world costs to pay, so he should get the majority share.

[Seth Otterstad]

Sure it takes some CPU, but a even a cell phone could do it.  Why don't you go in the bitcoin dev forum and say "hey guys why don't we switch the proof-of-work system from SHA256 to just calculating the merkel-tree of the blockchain?"  See what they say.  Maybe Gavin will post again and tell you.  Replacing SHA256 with a competition to run the most nodes is idiotic.

You are forgetting a very significant bottleneck, HDD.  It may be trivial in CPU time, but performing an entire sweep of the transaction chain, both forward and backward involves lots of disk access, which increases as the transaction chain grows, and that will slow you down.

Hashing doesn't require HDD or large amounts of memory, performing this work does.

The point is that the attacker has 1m nodes (essentially unlimited number) of nodes with equal trust to the honest nodes.

Now address my real questions:
"Lets say A and B are hatchers.  They both have the same work load capacity, and over time, they both do an equal share of the work.   D rolls in with 1 million amazon instances, which combined are 1 million times more powerful A & B."

Now instead of A and B each getting 40% of new EMU, they get .001%.  D gets 79%.

And?? D has done the majority of the work and had real world costs to pay, so he should get the majority share.

So, to recap:  SHA256 is replaced with running merkel roots.  Whoever is able to fire up the most instances can assign themselves 79% of all new coins, and is able to double spend.

Dishonest hatchers will not lose their reputation in this case.  Honest hatchers will reject the double spends, but the honest ones are only 1% so the clients won't know.  All the clients will see are 99% of the amazon nodes telling them the double spends are valid.

[Seth Otterstad]

I'm sure I cannot think of even 1/10th of the downsides that switching proof-of-work from SHA256 to merkel roots has.  Let me see if I can get a dev in here to comment.

[Fuserleer]

So to recap:  Whoever is able to fire up the most miners can assign themselves 51% of all new coins, and is able to double spend.   That's BitCoin.  Yet you have no issues there.

Additionally you are under-estimating the work involved with the verification with the HD bottleneck in place, disregarding the actual real world costs in order to produce such a high number of nodes, and claim that in a in a random distribution of n, 1 n is is able to have a much higher result (trust) than all the rest.

This is just pointless circle running.

[Etlase2]

Anything that is relying on an "HD bottleneck" is cruisin' for a bruisin'. You do realize that only 1 HD is required for an infinite number of nodes and they can all get their hash trees from one source, right? RAID array of SSDs perhaps?

[Fuserleer]

It's not relying on HDD's it's an example of one.  It's 6am here so perhaps I'm not being as clear in my points.  I'm attempting to point out that straight SHA256 hashing has little else other than number crunching power to bog it down.

With this there is all kinds manner of other external influences to think about, memory bandwidth, CPU power, HD bottle necks.  Even an SSD is no match for DRAM, but sure, you can buy up a server or instance with 64GB of RAM and fit it all in, but then that has cost attached to it.

I'm feeling like I've ran around in circles all night, with a issue being presented, I explain a solution to that problem, then that solution is used to justify a totally separate argument.

[Fuserleer]

As an exercise in "work" and "triviality"

Someone set up a DB, any DB, populate it with 1M rows, 5 fields a row, drop 512bytes into each row.   Query every row, read every byte of said row, time it.  Don't do ANY processing of data, just read it.

Now you have to do it 100 times as that's how many transactions you have to process.

Trivial?

[Etlase2]

With this there is all kinds manner of other external influences to think about, memory bandwidth, CPU power, HD bottle necks.  Even an SSD is no match for DRAM, but sure, you can buy up a server or instance with 64GB of RAM and fit it all in, but then that has cost attached to it.

You did not address the fact that a (theoretically) infinite number of nodes can all use the same source of information. Mining is different because the more people that do it, the harder it gets...

[Seth Otterstad]

So to recap:  Whoever is able to fire up the most miners can assign themselves 51% of all new coins, and is able to double spend.   That's BitCoin.  Yet you have no issues there.

Additionally you are under-estimating the work involved with the verification with the HD bottleneck in place, disregarding the actual real world costs in order to produce such a high number of nodes, and claim that in a in a random distribution of n, 1 n is is able to have a much higher result (trust) than all the rest.

This is just pointless circle running.

I just answered this.  Anyone with 51% of bitcoin nodes CANNOT double spend.  An attacker must have 51% of MINING POWER to double spend.  You don't increase your power in the bitcoin network by firing up more trivial full validating node instances.  You have to do the SHA256 proof-of-work.  

Looks like Etlase2 already answered your "HD bottleneck" claim.

The 2nd most important function of proof-of-work (besides double-spend protection) is to get an initial distribution of the coins into a lot of people's hands.  If the only people able to get coins are people running millions of instances, this will be very few individuals, and the coin will fail.  You need to get a wide initial distribution for it to work.  The best current method of doing a distribution is to try to make it so it can only be mined on a CPU, since there are many more people with CPUs than GPUs.  Using a radix sort or a tree search algorithm as the proof-of-work is currently your best bet, since those run faster on CPUs and no one has implemented one yet in an alt-coin.  Another method is the Ripple model of assigning yourself all the coins and then giving them away to anyone with a forum account or a facebook account.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=216049.0

[Fuserleer]

They still have to get the data from somewhere and that takes time,  however you cut it.

With my read test, point 10 nodes at the same data source, they will all take longer to do it, and all will take longer than each node having its own data source.

[timeofmind]

So, to recap:  SHA256 is replaced with running merkel roots.  Whoever is able to fire up the most instances can assign themselves 79% of all new coins, and is able to double spend.

Dishonest hatchers will not lose their reputation in this case.  Honest hatchers will reject the double spends, but the honest ones are only 1% so the clients won't know.  All the clients will see are 99% of the amazon nodes telling them the double spends are valid.

Keep in mind a little something... when network is first started and runs with honest nodes for some time, nodes will build their reputation off the amount of available transactions... as network runs on, transactions will be going first to most trusted nodes before they reach untrusted nodes. If someone comes into the network with a million hatchers... this will be way more hatchers than is needed to meet the transaction volume of the network, so those hatchers will  likely never even be asked to process a single transaction.