Is POW systematically doomed to get a huge monster in its midst?

[Wind_FURY]

If it is not an "attack", what would you call it?

A defense.

Because I respect your point of view, I will say "ok" and leave it. I hope your network will be successful, good luck.

Another question, what do you believe its ticker should be if listed by an exchange?

Regarding naming, IMO honesty and proper disclosure is what rational humans would expect. Since Core must eventually become a hard fork because of the game theory which forces Satoshi miners to defend the security as I explained, then BTC should have remained BTC and Core should have chosen a new name and ticker as Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was forced to do by the community.

That is according to your point of view. I will show respect, continue to listen, say "ok", but I will make an argument for the sake of my point of view.

The only reason that Core was able to fool the community into letting it abuse the naming is they tricked everyone into believing that if the soft fork becomes a hard fork, it is because Satoshi’s protocol is reviving itself from the dead. But that is not the economic reality which I have explained. There is no rational conversation I can have with individuals who just proclaim that my reasoning is incorrect without providing a cogent argument as to why the economic reality is not such as I have explained it.

Blame all the people in the community who has reached social consensus in the matter.

Putting in more simple terms, Core is an attack on Bitcoin which they’ve cleverly hidden from the community with a political propaganda and placing their protocol changes into an “anyone can spend” soft fork which must become a hard fork as it forces the Satoshi protocol to defend itself against 50+% reversal attacks financed by the “anyone can spend” booty.

Only from your point of view again. Ok.

We have debated on that before and we will never agree who is right. Mining nodes and non-mining nodes are the same because the all validate fully.

There has been no cogent rebuttal.

But from my point of view there was no cogent statement from you.

I think the bottom line is that you really want Ethereum, not Bitcoin. See the bottom of this post. I respect meritocracy and economic reality whilst disrespecting social consensus. You respect social consensus whilst disrespecting meritocracy and economic reality.

I hope the "Satoshi miners" will start their chain split as soon as possible. I cannot wait to see what would happen in practice. Good luck on your chain split.

Plus who are the "Satoshi miners"? Was there an announcement on who would support TRB?

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[minefarmbuy]

Why would you POW change or fork when bitcoin is gaining momentum? You put everyone back to zero. Those that spent $3k on an asic in early 2018 now you want them to buy more hardware? Who does this benefit? Manufacturers, players like those who you want to dismount as adoption rate plummets. Poor chess playing.

Like wow it's nostalgic to go and play vanilla but it's never the same. Players need to do more than play, they need to compete. Like sidehack will preach (sorry for bringing you into this), design and efficiency. For us (mfb), it's price regardless of market. As manufacturers in this arena have no wholesale price. Seems communists are the greatest capitalists
(satire?).

For all us normals it's the same as always: get gear, grind, get better gear, grind. Or hash how you say. The more we bring into mining the better but then mining is a competition, where someone already wants an edge, an advantage. So a POW change? Who has the edge here? Not those who have nothing more.

Mining is math, and should stay consistent for everyone. Changing it rips decentralization form us all, at once. The playing field isn't even, nor was it ever. The thing is, it is known and that is easier to combat than the alternative.

[Last of the V8s]

...
Btw, I entirely disagree with Mircea Popescu’s following blog post. He and no one else can propose any changes to Bitcoin. In fact, the following blog post is idiotic, foolish nonsense:

http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol/

Miners will provide non-mining full nodes as necessary if the community does not provide them for free. Because they have the economic incentive to do so. The proposal to enable non-mining nodes to hold mining nodes hostage changes the game theory of Bitcoin in ways he does not fully understand! For example, this will reduce the anonymity of miners and flexibility for jurisdictional arbitrage by miners because much more data will have to be transferred between full nodes and miners:

It’s not just the fees. It’s the I/O cost of moving all those shares over the network. For example, right now a mining farm can easily remain anonymous, but your proposal would make that more difficult. Also the cost of change in data center infrastructure and ASIC hardware to accommodate this change.

Also it increases latency. And besides it will not accomplish anything good because miners will just end up running their own full nodes, so one full node per mining farm is not an improvement. Also this will start the slippery slope of breaking the immutability of Satoshi’s protocol. Besides this change would be defeated by the mining cartels and economic majority. Satoshi was much smarter than Mircea Popescu.

Also I have been told by someone who has a ~5 SD IQ that Popescu is at most ~3 SD.

Unwise to be disrespectful to someone you yourself recognise is so powerful.
Unwise not to take on board the implications of footnote 3 in the very essay you quote http://trilema.com/2016/the-necessary-prerequisite-for-any-change-to-the-bitcoin-protocol/#identifier_2_64828
Looks like you have 27 months of catching up on the logs to do. Not least.

[aliashraf]

...
... Please I hope M.P. will stop this and stop thinking that Satoshi was inept. He is just hasn’t yet realized that Satoshi did everything for a reason and everything was exquisitely mapped out and the future was perfectly anticipated.

WTF? And we should buy this shit?

Satoshi nakamoto got a brilliant idea, coded it in a rush and disappeared in shame when he found how crazy things work in the real world and his alpha version of a Proof of Work consensus based electronic cash is vulnerable to centralization because of its obvious variance flaw (and the more sneaky proximity advantage flaw), he had no clue how to fix it. This is what happens when you are miles ahead of your contemporaries, you become exhausted and you stop progressing more.

Plus, he was so dumb to choose a small memory footprint algo like SHA256 which turned out to be vulnerable to ASIC attack.
I mean it! how dumb a designer (who wishes to have a one cpu-one vote BFT system) should be to choose the most vulnerable algorithm to an attack like ASIC that has an even older history than cpus? Heh? Seriously? It was the most foolish option one could ever pick.

And now Satoshi Nakamoto is kinda god?

Software is no Bible, it is just one of human's disposable products. It should be maintained and improved and thrown away and  redesigned regularly. Satoshi was missing this fact completely, he had nothing to say about governance.
His proposal for an electronic cash system being decentralized and autonomous was flawed inherently because he had no idea of how the protocol (and not the code alone) should improve and evolve and after less than two years with the most critical problems popping up, centralized exchanges centralized pools, ... well I would disappear too.

[mu_enrico]

So, after reading all these posts, I'm struggling to get facts from opinions (and off-topic debate). Anyway, here are the "important" points from an Average Joe:

• POW leads to oligopoly, then perhaps monopoly
• POW > POS in case of cryptocurrency as the international reserve currency
• POS might be better for the transactional currency (still waiting for better POS though)
• Use P2PKH instead of P2SH address because of the mentioned vulnerability

[aliashraf]

So, after reading all these posts, I'm struggling to get facts from opinions (and off-topic debate). Anyway, here are the "important" points from an Average Joe:

• POW leads to oligopoly, then perhaps monopoly
• POW > POS in case of cryptocurrency as the international reserve currency
• POS might be better for the transactional currency (still waiting for better POS though)
• Use P2PKH instead of P2SH address because of the mentioned vulnerability

Congratulations: You won the SSE (Shittiest Summary Ever) prize which is sponsored by @anunymint. 

• PoW leads nowhere other than network security by objective consensus, financial oligarchies are facts of modern society and not a consequence of monetary systems (yet no crypto currency is a monetary system right now).
  On the contrary, PoW can be used as a leverage to improve the situation with oligarchies by giving a voice to people in monetary section. The problems with current implementations inherited from Satoshi Nakamoto's original version is not inherent to PoW.
• PoW based coins are designed for being both a store of value and a transaction device. Ideas regarding forgetting about bitcoin as a transactional device are propagated by different parties who have two things in common: lacking vision and being disappointed.  
• PoS is a joke! We have PoS right now: USD and Federal Reserves and JP Morgan are part of it.
• SegWit sucks but is safe and remains safe. @anunymint is getting to your head just for fun. A fork is necessary but not for getting revenge of Core by rolling back to "Plain Old Satoshi Addresses". Satoshi version of PoW failed resisting pools, ASICs, exchanges, Network congestions, ....
  A fork is necessary to fix the problems that SW proponents deliberately chose to ignore.  SW is nothing, just a distraction of the real problems, ignore it.

[aliashraf]

ʿAlī Bābā admits proof-of-work allows oligarchies therefore according to ʿAlī Bābā, we should store our Bitcoins in SegWit addresses that begin with a 3 so that when the oligarchy hard forks Bitcoin we end up only with Core tokens and not both real Bitcoin and Core tokens.

I'm Alī Bābā?
I got an alias, cool.

I didn't admit anything like that ever and referencing to your own claims (your another weird habit) won't change this.
My position here is crystal clear:
Oligarchies are pre-bitcoin phenomenons, they are NOT symptoms or consequences of Bitcoin. It was supposed to improve the situation with them tho and failed to do so because it was launched premature and transited from an experimental project to an operational one, overnight.

I'm not suggesting about how and where you store your coins, don't care and as I've mentioned it clearly, the whole SegWit/LN thing is a distraction from the main problems.

ʿAlī Bābā has this delusion that he will remove the undesirable invariants of proof-of-work with the magic words “open sesame”, yet all we will ever see come that is talk and delusion, never reality because he is simply incorrect.

I, Alī Bābā (seriously, I love it), hereby announce:
I've already suggested a detailed specification for an alternative implementation of PoW and I'm busy with further design/implementation issues. Everything is ok, exciting improvements and a lot of fun ahead, you and other guys of 40 thieves are welcome to join.  

[Wind_FURY]

ʿAlī Bābā admits proof-of-work allows oligarchies therefore according to ʿAlī Bābā, we should store our Bitcoins in SegWit addresses that begin with a 3 so that when the oligarchy hard forks Bitcoin we end up only with Core tokens and not both real Bitcoin and Core tokens.

Yes, it is much better to put your cold storage coins in a legacy address. Ali Baba should read about "Pascal's Wager". I believe the same argument would apply in this situation.

ʿAlī Bābā has this delusion that he will remove the undesirable invariants of proof-of-work with the magic words “open sesame”, yet I expect that all we will ever see come from that is talk and delusion, never reality because he is simply incorrect.

What is there to remove? But that does not mean that the threat of a POW change should not be there. I believe the economic majority would agree to it as a last resort. But careful planning must be done.

He will likely blame his failure on me, accusing me of killing the interest in his magic designs.

a detailed specification for an alternative implementation of PoW

Corrected link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4438334.0

Why you? What did you do?

[aliashraf]

Yes, it is much better to put your cold storage coins in a legacy address. Ali Baba should read about "Pascal's Wager". I believe the same argument would apply in this situation.

It is insane. If somebody took kinda pill and got a bit more delusioned than @anunymint to make prophecy about an upcoming fork that will disregard/scize all odd wallets, you would transfer your deposits to even wallets? Why? Because of "Pascal's Wager"?

Who is Ali Baba by the way? 

[Wind_FURY]

Yes, it is much better to put your cold storage coins in a legacy address. Ali Baba should read about "Pascal's Wager". I believe the same argument would apply in this situation.

It is insane. If somebody took kinda pill and got a bit more delusioned than @anunymint to make prophecy about an upcoming fork that will disregard/scize all odd wallets, you would transfer your deposits to even wallets? Why? Because of "Pascal's Wager"?

I believe you do not understand the situation? If the "Satoshi miners" start their "attack" there would be a chain split to Bitcoin and TRB. In the Bitcoin chain, everything will continue as normal. In the TRB chain, your coins stored in a Segwit address can be taken from you. I do not want that. I want to dump my TRB for Bitcoins as an extra bonus from the split, the same as my Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold bonuses. Hahaha.

Who is Ali Baba by the way? 

I believe you.

[WanguiWudong]

I do not think so

[aliashraf]

Yes, it is much better to put your cold storage coins in a legacy address. Ali Baba should read about "Pascal's Wager". I believe the same argument would apply in this situation.

It is insane. If somebody took kinda pill and got a bit more delusioned than @anunymint to make prophecy about an upcoming fork that will disregard/scize all odd wallets, you would transfer your deposits to even wallets? Why? Because of "Pascal's Wager"?

I believe you do not understand the situation? If the "Satoshi miners" start their "attack" there would be a chain split to Bitcoin and TRB. In the Bitcoin chain, everything will continue as normal. In the TRB chain, your coins stored in a Segwit address can be taken from you. I do not want that. I want to dump my TRB for Bitcoins as an extra bonus from the split, the same as my Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold bonuses. Hahaha.

I believe you are brainwashed.

Dude, wakeup, there is no TRB fork.

[vapourminer]

I believe you do not understand the situation? If the "Satoshi miners" start their "attack" there would be a chain split to Bitcoin and TRB. In the Bitcoin chain, everything will continue as normal. In the TRB chain, your coins stored in a Segwit address can be taken from you. I do not want that. I want to dump my TRB for Bitcoins as an extra bonus from the split, the same as my Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold bonuses. Hahaha.

I believe you are brainwashed.

Dude, wakeup, there is no TRB fork.

for want of a better term, there are two coins existing in the current core chain. legacy coins (trb/satoshi/whatever you want tot call them) and segwit coins. sooner or later there will be a split to separate legacy coins out. no matter which wins, and no matter which you support, the fact remains you can sell the ones you dont like for coins that you do like. and legacy addys are the lowest common denominator. legacy gives coins on each. segwit on one. even if you just plan to sell the satoshi/trb/whatever coins for core coins, you still get more coins to sell by hedging your bets and using legacy for long term hodl. so it seems an easy strategy to hold long term hold coins in legacy at this point.

hedging bets is part of crypto, or at least thats my stratagy and it has served me well to this point. we are in a new space, running beta software, and splits happen. trusting no one is the whole point of bitcoin. and its up to the individual to take the security of their coins seriously. each must make that decision based on their own criteria. there is no hand holding here. #DYOR

[aliashraf]

Dude, wakeup, there is no TRB fork.

for want of a better term, there are two coins existing in the current core chain. legacy coins (trb/satoshi/whatever you want tot call them) and segwit coins. sooner or later there will be a split to separate legacy coins out.

It is absolutely nonsense! Why should anybody suggest such a two-in-one perception at all? Why not n-in-1?.

And why should such a split occur at all and how is it going to convince people, economic majority or even a noticeable economic minority about stealing funds from SW transactions by miners for the god sake?

I'm smelling kinda conspiracy or something here: spreading words to run another ridiculous fork.

Am I right?

If so, why don't guys like you consider a meaningful, real fork to support a more ambitious  and equally useful agenda?

Just leave SegWit and its junior hackers alone.

Think bigger. Segregated Witness is a joke, a trick, kinda cobbling up heterogeneous things,  I admit, but just leave these guys alone with their lifetime achievement, build yours.

[spartacusrex]

Dude, wakeup, there is no TRB fork.

for want of a better term, there are two coins existing in the current core chain. legacy coins (trb/satoshi/whatever you want tot call them) and segwit coins. sooner or later there will be a split to separate legacy coins out.

It is absolutely nonsense! Why should anybody suggest such a two-in-one perception at all? Why not n-in-1?.

And why should such a split occur at all and how is it going to convince people, economic majority or even a noticeable economic minority about stealing funds from SW transactions by miners for the god sake?

Totally. For the God Sake!

Just leave SegWit and its junior hackers alone.

Think bigger. Segregated Witness is a joke, a trick, kinda cobbling up heterogeneous things,  I admit, but just leave these guys alone with their lifetime achievement, build yours.

Lame. Someone who has contributed so little doesn't get to shit on those who have contributed so much. I defy you to find a group of users more knowledgeable, experienced and intelligent than the bitcoin-dev nerds.

--------------------

Liking the thread. You're a smart chap aliashraf. Doing well with Anony. I think of him as the Kurgan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kurgan )

Back to POW.

If you are referring to POW as the beautiful objective unit that we can all independently verify - the answer is no.

But if you are referring to it as the POW FEE-BASED MINING industry, and so that question is - does FEE BASED MINING centralise, the answer is yes.

I see your POCW as a way of spreading the mining out into an ever thinner sheet over the users, but at the end of the day mining centralises. no matter how you wrap it up.

You have to get rid of the fee. That is what everyone fights over and that is what causes the centralising pressure. Then I think you could have POW mining that didn't centralise. (Of course as IOTA shows that brings up it's own set of interesting challenges)

[spartacusrex]

You’re ostensibly out of your pay grade and do not even comprehend the technological issues deeply. If you think you’re capable of matching wits with me in terms of consensus systems technology, let’s have a test. Start any time you want. I’m game.

Life's too short.

You prefer to compare me to bitcoin-dev (aka Core more or less) when I’ve been obliterated by Tuberculosis and cysts on my liver and spleen that destroyed my productivity for the past several years, because you see them busy producing code. But that is an ignorant way of forming a comparison. The quality and outcome of the code matters. And comparing a horrifically ill person’s productivity to those who are not ill is inane. I will remember your fairness when I come storming back healthy with code that is not incorrect like the shit Core produces. Everything they have proposed is insecure including LN, SegWit, and Side-chains. They’re are breaking Bitcoin, but they will fail and those who are smart will still have their secure real Bitcoins in the end.

I am being utterly fair. step up or shut up. No one is having a go at you, you deluded psychopath. Jesus chill out. Anyone says anything you bring up your bloody TB.   

You have to get rid of the fee. That is what everyone fights over and that is what causes the centralising pressure. Then I think you could have POW mining that didn't centralise. (Of course as IOTA shows that brings up it's own set of interesting challenges)

The sign of a Dunning-Kruger mode is when non-experts hand-wave generalities that aren’t even technologically correlated as you are doing here.

I bet you someone comes up with a fee-less POW based chain that doesn't centralise the mining. That'll be our little contest.

[aliashraf]

Just leave SegWit and its junior hackers alone.

Think bigger. Segregated Witness is a joke, a trick, kinda cobbling up heterogeneous things,  I admit, but just leave these guys alone with their lifetime achievement, build yours.

Lame. Someone who has contributed so little doesn't get to shit on those who have contributed so much. I defy you to find a group of users more knowledgeable, experienced and intelligent than the bitcoin-dev nerds.

I rather prefer senior programmers (20+ years of professional experience, minimum) to nerds. Nerds typically are busy proving themselves and do not care about the cause.

It was how we ended to this situation with bitcoin, being overtaken by pools and ASICs while our super genius lads were playing SegWit shit. I just don't take them that serious. Juniors are ok until they have been put in charge.

I see your POCW as a way of spreading the mining out into an ever thinner sheet over the users, but at the end of the day mining centralises. no matter how you wrap it up.

You have to get rid of the fee. That is what everyone fights over and that is what causes the centralising pressure. Then I think you could have POW mining that didn't centralise. (Of course as IOTA shows that brings up it's own set of interesting challenges)

As far as I can see, without fees, any system would be vulnerable to DoS attack. Got any reference to prove me wrong?

[aliashraf]

I rather prefer senior programmers (20+ years of professional experience, minimum) to nerds.

I’d prefer that level of experience with the capability to do PhD-level provable research.

I claim 40 years of programming experience and the latter ability also although much less accomplished at the latter.

Contradiction!
Devs don't research! Research sucks. There exists really a Tao for programming. It creates and doesn't wait for never ending show off in academic research.
By seniors, I don't mean researchers. I mean masters of the art who are primarily focused on the cause and the spirit and are not obsessed with being genius and do not ruin the code base to make it their own territory.

Plus, 40 years is too much, time to retire  

[Wind_FURY]

I believe you do not understand the situation? If the "Satoshi miners" start their "attack" there would be a chain split to Bitcoin and TRB. In the Bitcoin chain, everything will continue as normal. In the TRB chain, your coins stored in a Segwit address can be taken from you. I do not want that. I want to dump my TRB for Bitcoins as an extra bonus from the split, the same as my Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold bonuses. Hahaha.

I believe you are brainwashed.

Dude, wakeup, there is no TRB fork.

for want of a better term, there are two coins existing in the current core chain. legacy coins (trb/satoshi/whatever you want tot call them) and segwit coins. sooner or later there will be a split to separate legacy coins out. no matter which wins, and no matter which you support, the fact remains you can sell the ones you dont like for coins that you do like. and legacy addys are the lowest common denominator. legacy gives coins on each. segwit on one. even if you just plan to sell the satoshi/trb/whatever coins for core coins, you still get more coins to sell by hedging your bets and using legacy for long term hodl. so it seems an easy strategy to hold long term hold coins in legacy at this point.

I believe he has not understood what the situation is fully, and that there are 80% of total nodes that are Segwit compatible enforcing the rules that would make the TRB chain the minority after the split. But it would be good to store some coins in a legacy address to get some bonus TRB coins.

Pascal's Wager - what do you have to lose if you store your coins in a legacy address?

hedging bets is part of crypto, or at least thats my stratagy and it has served me well to this point. we are in a new space, running beta software, and splits happen. trusting no one is the whole point of bitcoin. and its up to the individual to take the security of their coins seriously. each must make that decision based on their own criteria. there is no hand holding here. #DYOR

It is not a "hedge". TRB coins will be a "bonus" the same as Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, etc.

[aliashraf]

Devs don't research! Research sucks.

There have been very prolific programmers who also do important research which they implemented as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanov (created the C++ Standard Template Library)

                  There never was a C++ paper design; design, documentation, and implementation went on simultaneously. Naturally, the C++ front-end
                       is written in C++. There never was a “C++ project” either, or a “C++ design committee”. Throughout, C++ evolved, and continues to
                       evolve, to cope with problems encountered by users, and through discussions between the author and his friends and colleagues    

                                   -Bjarne Stroustrup: An overview of C++. ACM Sigplan Notices, Special Issue. October, 1986
Stepanov went to Stroustrup for his idea regarding generic programming, his colleague in Bell Labs,the same develop-first atmosphere, all the same story.

I'm not against anything called research, my current occupation might be called research. I just don't believe in formal, academic research.