[SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement

[systim]

Why Bitcoin will be Banned in America:

This is very good historical context.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/the-taxman-cometh/

No it won't be banned, because it is mostly traceable and the authorities love it because naive are putting all their incriminating transactions there. They G20 tax hunt will cometh and the block chain ledger will be cursed by the faithful.

China hates it because they have no need to hunt for taxes, and thus it only represents a western invasion of the taipan's control over the economy (but the Communist Party will lose in the end). When the Chinese own it, they will allow it. Or the grassroots will use it without being caught.

And that is why I have an idea that can both help Bitcoin and drive an altcoin.

Careful you can lose weeks reading Armstrong.

skycoin can u work together with the idea and drive skycoin? it sounds very tempting

[chompyZ]

skycoin can u work together with the idea and drive skycoin? it sounds very tempting

Skycoin: imho, just ipo and launch. Whoever wants to join and contribute thereafter is welcome. Don't try to reach 'consensus' with other coders regardless how talented they are. At this point, instead of propelling the project, it only stagnates it.
After the IPO, talented coders will be able to easily review the code, see how it works in practice, and tap into your vision. imho ONLY THEN it is reasonable for other coders to come up with concrete ideas and justification to replace any Skycoin procedure. As you claimed, Skycoin consensus is a 'container' that we can later plug-out and replace, so lets not waste valuable time.
No project has ever been launched and left as-is, untouched. There will be changes, modifications, new modules, and so forth.

At the end of the day- you are the project OP / lead dev.
Lets rock...

[iamback]

I agree with chompyZ. I'd prefer you expend scarce time down your current path and it would take me more time to convince you (I mean I could never convince you to change your philosophy, you have to learn trying), than to code it all myself.

I did this discussion to illustrate to those who keep wondering why I don't work with others, how difficult it is to work with others when my thought processes are so out-of-sync with the way most people are thinking on these forums.

I don't agree that Ethereum is doing very well. I think they will be an enormous bust and they are just expending a lot of zealot money while receiving nice salaries, capital gains,and having fun attending conferences and socializing. The fundamental issues were never solved.

I have my own ideas and path to forge. Best of luck to you.

P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus.

And apologies for cluttering your thread. I'd prefer not to comment on any more altcoins. If anyone messages me about such and I don't reply, you know why. I don't enjoy making enemies or creating animosity.

skycoin can u work together with the idea and drive skycoin? it sounds very tempting

No! Not even close to working together. We disagree. Your simplistic idea of my unstated design and marketing strategy matching his is ludicrous to me because I know we are not even close to synergy. There is no way to marry the two. He would have to mostly quit most of what he has developed up to this point and start over. There is no way he would do that.

Caveat being if he could prove to me that his algorithm guarantees global consensus. Perhaps there might be some way to incorporate all his existing code and design.

[chompyZ]

I did this discussion to illustrate to those who keep wondering why I don't work with others, how difficult it is to work with others when my thought processes are so out-of-sync with the way most people are thinking on these forums.

anonyMint, I welcome your thought processes, and as you can see in this forum - everyone else value it.
Skycoin IPO is geared to raising a modest sum of money to pay [in BTC] to coders, and a majority of skycoins held by OP to code contributors and hardware design perhaps, for this project.

To the best of my comprehension, Skycoin is so wide, that there are bound to be many elements (e.g. file sharing, mesh communication, anonymous messaging, personal blockchains, etc.) that will cater to your interests and vision... and since post-ipo, OP will have the funds, there is bound to be many building blocks to develop, where you can contribute and gain considerable rewards as one of the earliest significant contributes.

Please stay tuned...

[iamback]

Ok let's see then what develops... Thank you also.

Agreed and now is not the right time to cater to me. If my ideas or interests fit with what develops, I can come back at that time.

[peri1224]

Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase. By the time this starts, the capital flows get cut off and there will be no money or capital inflows left to pump into the assets...

I roughly agreed with everything you had written, except for the clarification on Armstrong's model complexity, and I disagree with the above quote.

That capitals flows will get cut off is a possibility and worth discussing. If that happens, even partially, it will surely have effects, Dark Age or not. You cannot just ignore it or declare it not so.

I did not write that capital flows will not get cut off. They surely will!

Disagreeing with a quote that says "capital flows get cut off" surely looks like you reject that argument. Now you say you agree. So which is it?

[skycoin]

P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus.

The account of "skycoin" is actually shared by more than one core developers.
I am another guy who wrote the consensus paper.

The consensus algorithm is cross discipline in some sense, the key words are "naming gaming", "opinion dynamics", "social consensus", "complex network" etc. and the topic is actively studied in the fields of statistics physics and system science. Most of the related papers are published in journals like "Physical Review E", "science", "nature" rather than ACM transactions.

here is one related paper: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140704/srep05568/full/srep05568.html
another one(considering attack): http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130

The basic principle is to drive the **immergent phenomena** of a complex network by *only local* information(no global clock or any other global information are needed).

[iamback]

Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase. By the time this starts, the capital flows get cut off and there will be no money or capital inflows left to pump into the assets...

I roughly agreed with everything you had written, except for the clarification on Armstrong's model complexity, and I disagree with the above quote.

That capitals flows will get cut off is a possibility and worth discussing. If that happens, even partially, it will surely have effects, Dark Age or not. You cannot just ignore it or declare it not so.

I did not write that capital flows will not get cut off. They surely will!

Disagreeing with a quote that says "capital flows get cut off" surely looks like you reject that argument. Now you say you agree. So which is it?

Why can't you understand the difference between disagreeing that capital flows will get cut off in every nook and cranny and agreeing they will get cut off for Westerners??

I disagreed with his pronouncement that capital flows would get cut off to such a degree that gold and silver would not rise in price. Even you don't agree with that. You think gold and silver will rise. So why are you agreeing with him and against me? I was saying that gold and silver will rise because not all capital flows will get entirely confiscated.

The capital flows will be confiscated, but not 100% to the point where only food becomes money every where on earth and gold and silver are useless. I am sure you agree with me. So I don't know why you are making trouble with me?


Please do not quote me out-of-context then accuse of saying capital flows will not get cut off. Here follows what I wrote, and I clearly stated that capital controls will not get entirely cut off, but also agreed they would to a large extent for Westerners:

What you wrote is true only if we collapse into a Dark Age, where only food becomes money as was the case in Western Europe after the fall of Western Rome and also in Japan.

It is very unlikely we will collapse into a global Dark Age, because as I have explained, Asia is not burdened by large government liabilities and thus the wealthy will shift their capital there. Ditto during the fall of Western Rome, the Byzantine Empire rose.

I don't think there is an example of a global Dark Age in the history of mankind?

...

There will be a decline in the rule of law and ability to enforce property rights. If you can generate income from real assets, you will be limited in your ability to keep that income.

Agreed that will become increasingly the case in the West, but Asia is headed the opposite direction.

I understand the elite in China and Russia have an incentive to align with the elite in the West in terms of creating a Technocracy slave model. But I want you to understand my model is the "bottom up is rising"[1].

Which I further clarified for you as quoted below, when you indicated your misinterpretation of what I had written above:

I wrote that it is very unlikely that capital controls are successfully enforced in every nook and cranny of the globe, such that all global wealth is destroyed and we go into a Dark Age where only food is money. As far as I know, that has never happened in recorded history. Dark Ages have occurred (where only food was money and all the gold and silver gets buried in the ground because it is useless), but they were always limited to a portion of the globe. Asia has no economic incentive to do capital controls, they are not bankrupted by huge government socialism and cultural decadence as the West is. Asia will cooperate with the USA and Europe to hunt down the non-Asians, for as long as USA and Europe remain important markets. But Asia will not and has no incentive to apply wealth destruction to its own citizens, other than going after corruption in government (e.g. coup in Thailand, firing 900 party officials in China, and the Napoles scandal in the Philippines). Rather it is launching free trade and migration Asian Union in 2015. Asia is moving the opposite direction, and is becoming more financially liberalized, not less.

[iamback]

P.S. I do note you did not (yet) refute my technical skepticism about whether your algorithm can converge on global consensus.

The account of "skycoin" is actually shared by more than one core developers.
I am another guy who wrote the consensus paper.

The consensus algorithm is cross discipline in some sense, the key words are "naming gaming", "opinion dynamics", "social consensus", "complex network" etc. and the topic is actively studied in the fields of statistics physics and system science. Most of the related papers are published in journals like "Physical Review E", "science", "nature" rather than ACM transactions.

here is one related paper: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140704/srep05568/full/srep05568.html
another one(considering attack): http://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.84.011130

The basic principle is to drive the **immergent phenomena** of a complex network by *only local* information(no global clock or any other global information are needed).

Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science. And you didn't answer as to whether it depends on a delegated timestamp server? And that is much more complex than I have time to analyze now. For example the linked nature article refers to consensus on naming, but afaics there is no economic incentive to game it. And moreover, because I currently don't think that is the highest priority task, i.e. I don't want to build a "pie in the sky" coin.

But I don't discourage you. We need people doing all kinds of experimentation.

Thank you and apologies for interfering.

[skycoin]

Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science.

No, no game theory or political science are involved, in fact, the core algorithm is deadly easy that you can describe it within 15 lines of pseudo codes.
The heart of the algorithm is the *emergent phenomenon*, maybe it's a little difficult for one without background of physics or system science.
But if you coincidentally read one popular book called "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World"[1], you may have better idea of such a bottom-up, self-orgainized style.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Out-Control-Biology-Machines-Economic/dp/0201483408

And you didn't answer as to whether it depends on a delegated timestamp server?

No, no global clock/timestamp server is needed. Any dependency on global server will break the decentralization.
The logical time is called *round*, each message has a round number, and round can be determined to be timeout *locally*, that's all.

And that is much more complex than I have time to analyze now.

Until you read the paper, but...it's long and need patience.
I think you might begin to read it **ONLY** if you REALLY have interest on it.

[iamback]

Okay but I think that then involves game theory and political science.

No, no game theory or political science are involved, in fact, the core algorithm is deadly easy that you can describe it within 15 lines of pseudo codes.

Just because you model it without game theory and political science, doesn't mean there isn't an economic incentive to game it and a political motive to organize the "voting". Models can tell you anything you want to hear, and are not fool proof until they've been vetted in the real world.

You are correct I can't comment forcefully until I read the white paper and understand it. But I don't think I need to read the paper to understand that peers vote by signing and appending to the directed graph. Any form of voting can fall victim to the Iron Law of Political Economics.

OTOH I will grant the possibility that you've some how obfuscated such that political organization and gaming the voting is impossible. But I would need to see how. I doubt it.

[iamback]

I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).

I studied machine learning in the 1980s, so some of this is familiar to me.

Afaics bottom-up, cascading trust relationships are not always going to be able to reach global consensus. If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge. Or you can accept that the network will converge on non-global groupings that don't agree with each other, e.g. a double-spend and they don't agree on which spend was first (because you said you don't want to depend on a delegated timestamp server). Perhaps I am wrong because I am not going to take the time to read and understand every detail of the paper (check the math, etc), but conceptually I am nearly certain I am correct.

And that is not even getting into the peers colluding due to game theory and/or political economics.

[peri1224]

Gold price wont increase. Bitcoin wont increase. By the time this starts, the capital flows get cut off and there will be no money or capital inflows left to pump into the assets...

Why can't you understand the difference between disagreeing that capital flows will get cut off in every nook and cranny and agreeing they will get cut off for Westerners??

I'm not making trouble with you. Just took your own words at face value, namely that you disagree with the above quote. The above quote says that capital flows will get cut off. Ergo, according to you, capital flows will not get cut off.
If you agree that capital flows will get cut off, then you shouldn't have said that you disagree with the above quote. But you did. So does one have to read your mind to know that when you say disagree, you still agree, but not in every nook and cranny, and only for Westerners. If you had made that clarification when you disagreed, it would have been clear. But you didn't. Your disagreement was blanket, without exception. Period. So don't come now and say I misunderstood or quoted you out of contexct with your own statement when you really meant your disagreement to be only partial. Sorry I don't read minds yet.

By the way I'm not (yet) agreeing with either of you. I just wanted that question discussed in more detail, without having it haughtily dismissed because you said so.
When, how and under what circumstances would capital flows get cut off? By whom? That deserves at least an explanation by the one who brought it up.

[iamback]

Your disagreement was blanket, without exception. Period.

Incorrect. Read more carefully what I wrote the first time:

What you wrote is true only if we collapse into a Dark Age, where only food becomes money as was the case in Western Europe after the fall of Western Rome and also in Japan.

It is very unlikely we will collapse into a global Dark Age, because as I have explained, Asia is not burdened by large government liabilities and thus the wealthy will shift their capital there. Ditto during the fall of Western Rome, the Byzantine Empire rose.

I don't think there is an example of a global Dark Age in the history of mankind?

...

There will be a decline in the rule of law and ability to enforce property rights. If you can generate income from real assets, you will be limited in your ability to keep that income.

Agreed that will become increasingly the case in the West, but Asia is headed the opposite direction.

I understand the elite in China and Russia have an incentive to align with the elite in the West in terms of creating a Technocracy slave model. But I want you to understand my model is the "bottom up is rising"[1].

Apparently you read one sentence and ignored the rest of what I wrote below it.

I clearly indicated that I my disagreement was that capital controls would not be global and would instead be focused on Westerners, and I clearly pointed out that Asia was headed the other direction.

[skycoin]

OTOH I will grant the possibility that you've some how obfuscated such that political organization and gaming the voting is impossible. But I would need to see how. I doubt it.

It's possible, of course. We assume a byzantine failure model thus any behavior is possible.
Nodes can even collude to commit attacks to mislead the consensus or prevent the whole network to reach consensus.
From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.

[skycoin]

I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).

Note in page 5 of the paper: Note here even we follow the same naming convention with traditional mathematical optimization techniques, the meaning is totally different, instead, it’s only the driving force to producing emergent phenomena of a complex network.

If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge.

Did you check the mathematical model? Actually, our final algorithm is a *compound* algorithm consists of the greedy and they simulated annealing algorithm.
(note we just use the same naming convention)

And even with *pure* simulated annealing alone, your assumpution is still incorrect. Mathematical model(also confirmed by simulation) tells that "oscillate indefinitely and never converge" will only happen when indegree/outdegree is not small e.g. degree>30. If degree=10, then it will still converge rapidly.

[iamback]

From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.

I had read that. Isn't that much less % than a 51% attack?

I understand we can't precisely compare the two, since your model is a different structure from PoW. The complexity here is beyond my comprehension at this moment.

[iamback]

I started to skim (actually read most but very fast) the whitepaper and on page 6 it explains that the simulation did not globally converge so you added simulated annealing (random jumps to escape from local minima).

Note in page 5 of the paper: Note here even we follow the same naming convention with traditional mathematical optimization techniques, the meaning is totally different, instead, it’s only the driving force to producing emergent phenomena of a complex network.

If you insist on simulated annealing, then it can just oscillate indefinitely and never converge.

Did you check the mathematical model? Actually, our final algorithm is a *compound* algorithm consists of the greedy and they simulated annealing algorithm.
(note we just use the same naming convention)

And even with *pure* simulated annealing alone, your assumpution is still incorrect. Mathematical model(also confirmed by simulation) tells that "oscillate indefinitely and never converge" will only happen when indegree/outdegree is not small e.g. degree>30. If degree=10, then it will still converge rapidly.

You are correct I will need to spend more time studying this before I can argue or discuss constructively with you about the model.

My oscillation assumption was based on my assumption that localized consensus is not overruled by global majority in your system, i.e. I don't understand how the local trust capitulates to some global aggregation of the majority. Does the model allow a minority opinion to be overruled such that the minority adopts the majority opinion (e.g. for disagreement over which transaction was first in a double-spend)? My concern is that the minority would continue to uphold their autonomous disagreement because the consensus process appears to be local trust and not global overrule, and thus not global convergence. In PoW, the minority submits to the majority opinion, else it is a fork which the majority ignores.

Counting votes won't work, because that could be subject to Sybil attack.

Does the local trust morph as the majority emerges holistically? In other words, are the peers allowed to change their opinion? I couldn't see this mentioned prominently. It is a crucial point.

In my opinion, the explanation of this should be more prominent in the white paper. You jump straight into math and model details without giving an overview of how you've solved the problem.

[skycoin]

Does the model allow a minority opinion to be overruled such that the minority adopts the majority opinion?

Exactly. But there is a detail you might did not noticed previously, for each node the algorithm works like this: round #1: deciding-->round #2: deciding-->....-->round #50: **decided**.

A node only makes its finial decision after enough rounds, and before that, they are just deciding and decding and deciding, called "opinion synchronization".

Counting votes won't work, because that could be subject to Sybil attack.

Thus we need the trust relationships. Sybil nodes has no honest nodes following them and thus has no impact to the opinion synchronization process.

are the peers allowed to change their opinion?

It's YES, during the *deciding* rounds, but each node has exact one chance in its last round to give its *final* decision.

[skycoin]

From simulation under the strongest attack, our alg can tolerant attack committed by 2% top influential nodes or 15% random nodes.

I had read that. Isn't that much less % than a 51% attack?

I understand we can't precisely compare the two, since your model is a different structure from PoW. The complexity here is beyond my comprehension at this moment.

For bitcoin, its performance is actually considerabley poorer than our algorithm.
Top mining pool is parallel to top influential node in our algorithm.
So for the currently bitcoin network with 8000 nodes, it can't tolerant collude by 4 top pools(actually, many ppls suspect that GHASH put its computing power in the shadow to hide the fact it controlls over 50% of the total computing power), the fault tolerant is 0.05%.

Another big advantage is that when some node is suspicious, honest nodes can just unfollow it and then it loose the power.
But in PoW, top nodes can do anything and you have no measure to reject them.
So even after a successful attack, they can attack again and again.