NXT :: descendant of Bitcoin - Updated Information

[BitcoinForumator]

we have discussed this issue on previous on occasions...and i'm sure it will be solved but it's the same problem the internet has....i'm not smart enough to suggest any solutions for this one.

It's a different problem. With the general Internet, when illegal content springs up it can generally be dealt with (speed & mechanisms dependent on the type of content), and the rest of the Internet chugs along just fine. Systems that try to combat that (tor etc) do so with sophisticated techniques, and it's a cat & mouse game against the authorities.

Fact is, we are hosting a blockchain that allows arbitrary data to be stored in it, with no mechanism to remove it, and hoping that people won't take advantage of that in a way that harms us. Is that wise?

+1 Don't overestimate the load our blockchain can take as we may end up with 10G data file pretty soon. One reason Bitcoin devs don't want to implement any other features     because Bitcoin already reaches the 10G blockchain and almost maximum bandwith by doing only transaction processing. So now they decided to be a payment specialist only.

When we have asset exchange, plus messenger, voting etc and pyamnet system. We may do 10X the load Bitcoin is taking right now. Need to think ahead.

Ok so we can't implement all these features because of blockchain bloat. But didn't we tout these as the advantages and the reason NXT is far ahead of Bitcoin and now the bloat is the reason it won't be implemented? Huh?

Just use common logic. Features are good. We love features but don't kid yourself that you can get a fee lunch.

Fee lunch? I don't care about fees. It was promised that these features would be implemented with no mention of the blockchain size being a big road block. It's news to me what you just said.

Free lunch. The more features, the bigger blockchain. There are tricks to reduce that but the common sense is that if you want to put in a lot of furnitures, your house will necessarily be bigger.
now you heard it, don't complain later that no one told you.

The fact that the blockchain grows with features is a given. But the fact that this is a such a big road block now is news at least to me. Nowhere before in hundreds of pages was it mentioned that all of a sudden we have a huge problem with the blockchain size. But we did have an emhasis on all of the "nice future features" that we will easily implement. Now I understand this is not feasible in practice. Is that what you're saying?

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[mkmen]

Since it is not stored in the blockchain in plaintext, I think the problems about illegal content are minimized. Only receiver can decode it.

That's not true, you can store any HEX data and anyone can decode that to plaintext (or anything else - images etc.).

Pruning the blockchain would be a nice feature to have.  Some things you need to be around for a long time, such as the ledger of currency transactions.  Other things, like messages, I agree a TTL option would be nice.  If you need your use-specific data in the blockchain to be around for a long long time, then you pay more.  If you only need it to be around for a few weeks or days (or hours!) then you could pay much less.  Arbitrary messages should be essentially transient data.

I was thinking about that too, fee based on TTL.

[utopianfuture]

we have discussed this issue on previous on occasions...and i'm sure it will be solved but it's the same problem the internet has....i'm not smart enough to suggest any solutions for this one.

It's a different problem. With the general Internet, when illegal content springs up it can generally be dealt with (speed & mechanisms dependent on the type of content), and the rest of the Internet chugs along just fine. Systems that try to combat that (tor etc) do so with sophisticated techniques, and it's a cat & mouse game against the authorities.

Fact is, we are hosting a blockchain that allows arbitrary data to be stored in it, with no mechanism to remove it, and hoping that people won't take advantage of that in a way that harms us. Is that wise?

+1 Don't overestimate the load our blockchain can take as we may end up with 10G data file pretty soon. One reason Bitcoin devs don't want to implement any other features     because Bitcoin already reaches the 10G blockchain and almost maximum bandwith by doing only transaction processing. So now they decided to be a payment specialist only.

When we have asset exchange, plus messenger, voting etc and pyamnet system. We may do 10X the load Bitcoin is taking right now. Need to think ahead.

Ok so we can't implement all these features because of blockchain bloat. But didn't we tout these as the advantages and the reason NXT is far ahead of Bitcoin and now the bloat is the reason it won't be implemented? Huh?

Just use common logic. Features are good. We love features but don't kid yourself that you can get a fee lunch.

Fee lunch? I don't care about fees. It was promised that these features would be implemented with no mention of the blockchain size being a big road block. It's news to me what you just said.

Free lunch. The more features, the bigger blockchain. There are tricks to reduce that but the common sense is that if you want to put in a lot of furnitures, your house will necessarily be bigger.
now you heard it, don't complain later that no one told you.

The fact that the blockchain grows with features is a given. But the fact that this is a such a big road block now is news at least to me. Nowhere before in hundreds of pages was it mentioned that all of a sudden we have a huge problem with the blockchain size. But we did have an emhasis on all of the "nice future features" that we will easily implement. Now I understand this is not feasible in practice. Is that what you're saying?

I said need to think ahead

[Come-from-Beyond]

and we don't even have encryption yet.

We do - https://nextcoin.org/index.php/topic,727.0.html

[bittick]

I am about to add NXT to http://cryptokopen.eu
any donations are very welcome!

10772787204751253513

[jl777]

and we don't even have encryption yet.

We do - https://nextcoin.org/index.php/topic,727.0.html

CfB
Can you confirm that all Arbitrary Messages (Storage) in the blockchain are encrypted

[xyzzyx]

It seems to me that any actual text/messaging service that needs long term storage would be best tackled by a service provider.  

The service provider could charge useage fees in NXT, and would have its own parallel blockchain for its data.

The concept as I see it is basically outlined here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4257311#msg4257311

Just replace the idea of SMS provider with client messaging provider.
 

[LiQio]

Can you confirm that all Arbitrary Messages (Storage) in the blockchain are encrypted

no, as is demonstrated with the client (html file) from wesley.

but client software can easily implement using the algo described on https://nextcoin.org/index.php/topic,727.0.html

at least that's my guess 

[chanc3r]

It seems to me that any actual text/messaging service that needs long term storage would be best tackled by a service provider.  

The service provider could charge useage fees in NXT, and would have its own parallel blockchain for its data.

The concept as I see it is basically outlined here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.msg4257311#msg4257311

Just replace the idea of SMS provider with client messaging provider.
 

I like this too, the NXT block chain gets pruned to maintain performance but if you subscribe to one or more (for resilience) service providers your chain elements are stored in their copy and of course they still can't read them

If they are storing the whole block chain forever then they can also charge for non-subscribers who suddenly find they need to recover a transaction record or message.

[bitcoinpaul]

Lowering fee opens up NXT blockchain to spam attack. Cost of a few cents to store 1K of data for 1 year (or permanently?) seems to be a pretty low price already

With NXT
the message is encrypted in the client but your passphrase unlocks it
it is unreadable anywhere except on a client that has the keys
the network of NXT nodes holds it so you can always get to it unless NXT ceases to exist.
no one can search, copy steal your ideas or communication.

You could also use arbitrary messages to communicate to yourself (sorry store) those secrets that you want to remember.

+1

[gbeirn]

going to a size-of-wallet voting scheme is plain MEDIEVAL - sure this has been brought up here before, but how about this:

Thanks everyone for the great ideas and discussion about voting, it's what I was hoping for

I agree with the above statement and that's why I proposed what I did. My concept of voting is only based on the American democratic process. So that's why I proposed how I did.

I am curious that no one commented about the account restrictions based on blockchain height I mentioned: If a vote was proposed and went public on block height of 45,000 an account would have to have existed for 'X' number of blocks before the block containing the vote (i.e, you have to be 18yrs old to vote in the U.S.), we could take it a bit further and say that that account would also have to NXT in it for a certain amount of blocks before the vote as well (like the 1440 blocks before you can forge). This could surely cut down on the amount of gaming no?

[Come-from-Beyond]

It seems "Arbitrary Messages" has gotten a lot of people thinking that its purpose is for messaging. Wouldn't the name "Arbitrary Storage" be more appropriate for what it does?

Arbitrary Storage would be confused with Alias System if u used abbreviations.

[Come-from-Beyond]

and we don't even have encryption yet.

We do - https://nextcoin.org/index.php/topic,727.0.html

CfB
Can you confirm that all Arbitrary Messages (Storage) in the blockchain are encrypted

They r plaintext if the sender doesn't encrypt them.

[instacalm]

Free lunch. The more features, the bigger blockchain. There are tricks to reduce that but the common sense is that if you want to put in a lot of furnitures, your house will necessarily be bigger.
now you heard it, don't complain later that no one told you.

Given the ever-raising blockchain size in the future, light (and mobile) NXT clients should / will be instant on in an Electrum-style manner, meaning that the clients do not download the blockchain but use a remote server to fetch required data. The blockchain will thus be verified by and stored in the decentralized network of tens/hundreds of thousands of NXT nodes.

Anyhow, the blockchain is indeed an issue of BTC, its copies as well as of NXT that results from their decentralized nature. As you may or may not know, the issue is actually described in the original BTC white paper under #7 Reclaiming Disk Space. "Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree, with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored." -- keeping the entire blockchain on each and every client is not necessary for Bitcoin/NXT to work.

[bitcoinpaul]

In the future, the whole blockchain is only saved by service providers, that's already what CfB mentioned. So it is not absolutely necessary to implement this for AM again. Sure, we could implement some kind of TTL for AM in the range of days or weeks, i suppose?! Smart people, please discuss

edit: too slow. already mentioned.

[NxtChoice]

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=39/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm

"Slasher: A Punitive Proof-of-Stake Algorithm" seems to be very similar to Nxt TF, right?

TF is really what makes Nxt the 2nd generation cryptocurrency!

[Come-from-Beyond]

Someone asked me about Cryptsy. They did contact me a hour ago. I already sent all info they asked for.

[coolfish]

Who will deposit in dgex, if the withdrawal is 1.4%? Everyone profitable?

[Come-from-Beyond]

In the future, the whole blockchain is only saved by service providers, that's already what CfB mentioned. So it is not absolutely necessary to implement this for AM again. Sure, we could implement some kind of TTL for AM in the range of days or weeks, i suppose?! Smart people, please discuss

edit: too slow. already mentioned.

I hope I'll implement Parallel Blockchains before quiting the project in April.

[utopianfuture]

http://blog.ethereum.org/?p=39/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm

"Slasher: A Punitive Proof-of-Stake Algorithm" seems to be very similar to Nxt TF, right?

TF is really what makes Nxt the 2nd generation cryptocurrency!

Cfb can you take a look at this. His solution sounds similar to what we are doing.