[BOUNTY] 🔥🔥WINNER-GETS-ALL / PROOF-OF-TRANSACTION CONSENSUS DEBATE BOUNTY!🔥🔥

[ikealyou]

TAUcoin, has proposed a brand new consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Transactions. It proposes a fast circulation currency without inflation. Users collectively maintain the network security by doing normal economical behavior - transactions through time. With the technical innovation of "Proof Of Transaction", users are incentivized to making necessary transactions by sharing the future block reward. No advantage is given to accumulating wealth and hardware.
Learn about TAUCOIN here

We believe that Proof-of-Transaction is the best consensus mechanism when it comes to being:

•   The most secure decentralized network
•   The fairest decentralized network
•   The most environmentally friendly decentralized network

Let’s jump to the year 2040, with the assumptions that:
1.   Internet Speed has dramatically increased, from 4G to 10G.
2.   Coins (TAU) with Proof-of-Transaction mechanism are widely distributed to billions of holders
3.   TAU foundation team has successfully developed “automatic block sizes” that allows all miners to define their size and time of block generation.

The increase of internet speed allows decentralized nodes to communicate faster. With the implementation of automatic block sizes, POT network will be able to support 1000 times more transactions than today, which is about roughly 10 billion transactions every day.

By Shannon’s theory, it is impossible for one node to collect all transactions in a world-wide competitive decentralized network. Thus, there will be thousands of “mining clubs” around the world to pick up transactions from different parts of the network. They are all competing on reducing commissions and capturing as many transactions as fast as they can. Under these circumstances, it is very difficult to form a 51% attack to obtain any significant share of the 10 billion fee based transactions daily, especially when one is trying to manipulate a massive amount of transactions in a 1 year sliding window.
*Proof-Of-Transaction Whitepaper*


Rules
1.   The debate starts today. Anyone in Bitcointalk is able to participate anytime until the end of the debate. The debate ends on the 30th of September.
2.   Users are required to challenge Proof of Transaction’s consensus mechanism, with no limitation to proofs, arguments and ideas. Mathematical models are welcomed.
3.   The community votes among the top 3 best arguments/ideas/proofs, and 1Million TAU + $1,000 worth of BTC are being awarded to the highest vote.
4.   The vote will happen in TAUcoin’s telegram group on 1st October, and the result is finalized on the 24th hour.
5.   The arguments/ideas/proofs are defined to be the first user to propose it under TAU’s bitcointalk thread, with supported evaluations.
6.   TAU foundation team’s arguments will not participate on the result voting. The winner of the debate can be anyone else, but TAU.
7.   TAU foundation team will reward users that propose an interesting point of view or idea. This is purely defined by the TAU foundation team; an act to encourage everyone to share their thinking.



Update:
Here is the finalist for our Debate bounty
- Akosipepot
- Lodyman
- Rexxarofmoknathal

Click to vote for your favourite debater, and help him win 1M TAU + $1000 worth of BTC!!!



Updates:

Upon further analysis, it has become our decision to disqualify Lodyman based on Rule No,2 "Users are required to challenge Proof of Transaction’s consensus mechanism, with no limitation to proofs, arguments and ideas. Mathematical models are welcomed."

All votes for Lodyman will not be counted and the debate vote will end on the assigned date.



Final update: Congratulations to Akosipepot for winning our debate bounty! Please get in touch with us to claim your rewards!

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[bobthegrownup]

Its the first time ive ever seen a Debate bounty. Too bad I can't participate 

[Parodium]

1 MILLION TAU! AND $1,000? Now that's a generous challenge. Can't wait to see the innovative arguments and discussions people bring to the table, there's a huge amount of intelligent members here, so no doubt somebody will be able to rise to the challenge.

[tronghoa]

This is really new to me - debate bounty. Hope you will get many debate from good member here. Good luck guys.

[bobthegrownup]

This is really new to me - debate bounty. Hope you will get many debate from good member here. Good luck guys.

Don't be shy, you could be the first! Either you agree that Proof-of-Transaction is the best consensus or you can share your disagreement and win big!

[legendster]

All hands on deck, this could be a great marketing stunt or a great dud if not enough people show up. Let's try to get some of the heavy hitters on the forum interested in here. I'll take part for sure.


For anyone interested. I still haven't decided whether I would speak FOR Tau or AGAINST it. Even though I support the idea.

[freepellent]

I welcome this project , first of all as search for an alternative to POW and POS. The need for consensus alternative is well outlined at the start of the whitepaper.  That is , I do not want to be a trader or speculator to earn POW reward.  I do not want to collect or stake coins, I just want use crypto instead of fiat.

[bobthegrownup]

I welcome this project , first of all as search for an alternative to POW and POS. The need for consensus alternative is well outlined at the start of the whitepaper.  That is , I do not want to be a trader or speculator to earn POW reward.  I do not want to collect or stake coins, I just want use crypto instead of fiat.

This guy gets it 

[imorpheus]

Dear Ubiubi18, thank you for the nice analysis and introduce ubi space. Regarding Sybil attacks on universal basic income,ubi crypto project, Taucoin is not an ubi project but requiring user effort or money to secure coins. Accumulating transation weight needs holders pay fees and compete to be packed up in next block. One part we soon put into whitepaper is miners need to pack higher transaction fee to increase own likelyhood to generate next block, which is randomness x fee in block. Therefore, holders transfer numerous coins among own addresses will have to pay attractive fees to be recogonized. These fees collected by miners will be distribute to club members according to the history transaction weight or transaction fee weight, between these two we have not decide.
I am in line with you on not doing centralized KYC and replacing pow/pos.

-iMorpheus

[rexxarofmoknathal]

Hi, I'm excited about POT and the challenge TAU raised against - I think it is a great, innovative project.

However, I have a few remarks I'd like to share.
The first remark is about the harvest club, in particular the club leader. I understand you provide incentives for club leaders and empower the 'poor' to take part in the mining process, but the issue I see is around the idea of shifting full reward control to the club leader, who first sets aside its own reward while the rest of the reward is split among the renaming club members via the club wiring protocol.
The way I see it, this opens a manipulative window for the club leader over the club members, which could be a great concern.
The way, I'd go around this issue is by calculating harvest power percentages from each member and allocating the reward accordingly and automatically, while allowing for +5-10% extra for the club leader as added benefit.

The second remark is based around the scalability issue. While I agree that there shouldn't be an 'upper bound for block size', I fail to see how the proposed solution ('...to let harvest club leaders (full nodes) determine their optimal block size') would work given that its all dependent on future block chain technology for bringing more bandwidth and shorter delays. Here, you have to decide on your balance between decentralized and security vs scalability and centralization.

Also, the whitepaper may need revisiting, there are a couple of typos.

[imorpheus]

Dear Rexx...
Very happy to receive the two points and encouragement. The first point of setup auto payment percentage to club members to reduce club leaders manipulation is very good idea. We will do something in that fashion. The 2nd point, we are actively researching how to achieve auto size or auto time interval to increase transaction speed. We found potentially using transaction fee accumulation in the transaction pending pool to replace the time element and let size to be adjustable seems to achieve ideal scalability on chain.

[imorpheus]

Exciting to debate the Sybil attack on Tau econemy. There are two types of participants: club member and club leader(miner). For members, the future reward to the essential transactions is a good to have bonus. In POW/POS, you need to pay for transacton without reward, because it is an essential transaction anyway.
When someone wants to benifit from transactions, they have to be miner or club leader. I will argue due to market compeitition to be leader for receiving profit is so intense, the overall profit will nearly equal to the cost of being a miner just similar to online stock brokers fee merely covering their cost. Even more, lead may have to subsidize the club for attract transactions. The business model of miners is not  from profittng on transaction reward but from other value add services as “reputation and brand” of leader is higher than members. Through leader reputation, you can issue credit, derivatives or insurance.
Another antiSybil layer in TAU, we use accumulative history transactions as weight rather than short time window, this creates additional difficulty in time horizon for attackers to build up weight.
Thanks to your suggestion, we do plan to switch using transaction fee than transaction numbers for weight accounting.

[akosipepot]

it is very difficult to form a 51% attack to obtain any significant share of the 10 billion fee based transactions daily, especially when one is trying to manipulate a massive amount of transactions in a 1-year sliding window.

Proof-of-transaction incentivizes users from an early stage to join a harvest club with the most harvest power. Because of this, it is unlikely that by the year 2040 there will be several thousand separate harvest clubs, as it is likely that one of the early large harvest clubs will become a majority pool, sucking up most of the new users that enter the network. In my estimation, by 2040 there will only be a few very large harvest clubs.

Potential resolution: Limit the number of members per harvest club to ~5,000.

Potential resolution 2: Require a physical authenticator for transactions.

Therefore, holders transfer numerous coins among own addresses will have to pay attractive fees to be recogonized. These fees collected by miners will be distribute to club members according to the history transaction weight or transaction fee weight.

I notice that later you state that you'll be using weighted transaction fee, rather than relative transaction number to determine the odds of who gets to mine the new block and receive the reward. However, this does not resolve the Sybil attack, it simply changes the nature of the attack. You assume that the the purpose of the sybil attack is to manipulate the network for financial gain, however, it can also be used to discredit the worth of the TAU blockchain and poison it from within. For example, if a bad actor with particularly deep pockets were to exclusively send high fee transactions in the scope of the 1-year window, then he would have the greatest chance of mining the new block. If the discrepancy between the transaction fees of the bad acting harvest club, and average harvest club is high enough, then they could mine and perhaps manipulate a significant fraction of the market, producing a situation where small, or poorly funded clubs simply cannot compete, and reducing the utility of the TAU blockchain for these individuals. A sudden increase in the transaction fees of one of the larger harvest clubs would also

Potential resolution: Limit the rate of change possible between the largest harvest clubs to ensure no club can suddenly (out-fee) the rest of the network.

We found potentially using transaction fee accumulation in the transaction pending pool to replace the time element and let size to be adjustable seems to achieve ideal scalability on chain.

Why not just fix the scaling to the relative change in transactions each month, or three months? And the relative change in the number of miners on the network.

For example if there was a 50% increase in number of transactions (A) in a 1 month period, and 50% increase in number miners (B), then there will be no scaling required. However, if either side of this is unbalanced (A /= B), then the percentage of block size increase can be calculated as A / B, if the number is below 1, then the block size is scaled down proportionally, if it is above 1, then it is scaled up proportionally

You also mention that TAUcoin is the fairest blockchain because it uses normal transactional activity in order to determine who has the highest chance of mining the next block and hence receiving their deserved fraction of the reward. However, this doesn't truly fit the definition of fair, as TAU essential inherits the biases in the users spending power. For example, a wealthy user and a poor user both start using TAU for their daily activities, the wealthy user is able to send more transactions as they have more disposable income and can afford to pay higher fees, whereas a poorer user will typically make fewer transactions, of smaller size and hence smaller fee. This system is therefore biased towards high net worth and high spending individuals.

Potential resolution: Rather than using simply the velocity of money as the main determinant of harvesting power, instead implement a second associated measure called transaction power. High power transactions would be those sent between high fee harvest clubs, and can hence be associated with high net worth. The true harvest power would be a ratio between the transaction power and transaction velocity, with transaction power acting to reduce harvest power, and transaction velocity acting to increase it. Though, overall this might incentivize network spam with low fee transactions.

[imorpheus]

Harvest club concentration is a potential problem. I am not sure 5000 limit could resolve it, since concentrator could run many nodes under one control. I wish the freedom for users to switch club can metigate the leadership risk. Physical authenticator is very centralized.
Sudden transaction fee massive increase is a problem for non-economical person. This is an area to dig into. Thanks for that.
Regarding to use transactions to replace time interval, most protocols such BTC and ETH have target block time interval to fit the network latency and allow information to arrive most of the nodes. Transactions missed past block has to wait until new block comes. This reduce the speed of the blockchain progress and cause traffic jam like red lights. In fact, the blockchain growth is  counted in block numbers rather than time. The content of a block is mostly transactions record. We propose using transaction numbers threshold to replace time interval for block generation. Transactions does not have to wait new time comes to be packed up. It just wait until the threshold, such as 5000 transactions packed. When there are lots of transactions in the pool, this will speed up the block generation. If there is less transactions, we use a bottom line time interval to allow the block to be generate.

- iMorpheus

[genie854]

Proof-of-transaction incentivizes users from an early stage to join a harvest club with the most harvest power. Because of this, it is unlikely that by the year 2040 there will be several thousand separate harvest clubs, as it is likely that one of the early large harvest clubs will become a majority pool, sucking up most of the new users that enter the network. In my estimation, by 2040 there will only be a few very large harvest clubs.

Potential resolution: Limit the number of members per harvest club to ~5,000.

Potential resolution 2: Require a physical authenticator for transactions.

Very deep insight into the mechanism.

I'd like to mention that the harvest power of the club you join doesn't affect your expected harvest reward, as long as the club is always harvesting. Harvest power and reward is exactly in linear proportion to transaction count. For this reason, putting limit on a single harvest club probably will not work, since splitting one harvest club into two will not change its combined harvest power (exactly the same chance of generating new block).

[imorpheus]

I agree there are always possibility on Sybil attack especially when the powerful Sybil purpose is to destroy network rather than making economical profit. This is the same as POW and POS 51% attack. Assuming the purpose is to destroy by 51% attack, the TAU foundation is always monitoring network and do best to counter 51% behavior. TAU has a bounty program and ICO program potentially runing for 20 years, during that process, TAU foundation accumulated massive transaction numbers and coins to resist 51%. I agree that for long period of time, TAU foundation itself has the power of 51% to destroy the network. But the goal of creating TAU by the foundation is not to destroy it but to promote it. There are certain trust has to be there to the foundation not destroy network by themself.
For recaptcha human verification, i think that is more for dAPP. On mainnet, we need to support programmable coins wiring API, it will cause huge infliction to enforce recaptcha onchain.
Thanks UBI18.

[bobthegrownup]

Potential resolution: Limit the rate of change possible between the largest harvest clubs to ensure no club can suddenly (out-fee) the rest of the network.

Reminds me of Grin coin and Cuckoo cycle POW. Nice recommendation

[akosipepot]

I agree there are always possibility on Sybil attack especially when the powerful Sybil purpose is to destroy network rather than making economical profit. This is the same as POW and POS 51% attack. Assuming the purpose is to destroy by 51% attack, the TAU foundation is always monitoring network and do best to counter 51% behavior. TAU has a bounty program and ICO program potentially runing for 20 years, during that process, TAU foundation accumulated massive transaction numbers and coins to resist 51%. I agree that for long period of time, TAU foundation itself has the power of 51% to destroy the network. But the goal of creating TAU by the foundation is not to destroy it but to promote it. There are certain trust has to be there to the foundation not destroy network by themself.
For recaptcha human verification, i think that is more for dAPP. On mainnet, we need to support programmable coins wiring API, it will cause huge infliction to enforce recaptcha onchain.
Thanks UBI18.

How will TAU intervene if a potential 51% attack is suspected? What mechanisms do you have in place to prevent a Sybil from disrupting the network if it manages to gain a majority share of the blocks or harvest power? Perhaps you could include a selective network rollback feature?

There are also some issues with TAUcoin being the fairest decentralized network, though it does depend on your definition of fair. According to Google's definition, fairness means "impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination." However, by using the number of transactions, or average fee of transactions per window time (e.g. 1 year), you inadvertently favor tholse who either have more money to spend, or are more actively engaged in crypto spending. It could be argued that the differences in opportunity for these TAU users means the distribution of block rewards will never be fair. Rather than favoring those with investment power such as POW or POS coins, POT instead favors those with spending power. Although you could argue that that they fairly earned these coins as per the rules set out in Proof-of-transaction, the truth is the distribution inherits the inequalities found in life.

You also mention that TAUcoin is the most environmentally friendly blockchain, this means that the effects of its operation must be smaller than any other blockchain currently operating. However, because TAUcoin requires harvest club leaders to run a full node, there is an additional carbon footprint associated with its operation, which may not be necessary. There are a number of other blockchains that do not require specialist hardware to operate nodes, for example, using mobile devices instead. Until TAU can move to a similar system, without requiring the production of additional dedicated hardware, it cannot claim to be the most environmentally friendly.

I also suspect that the TAU network will be unusually vulnerable to denial of service attacks, by requiring only the harvest club leader to run a full node, the reduce the number of attack points to just a few. Even if we have 10,000 harvest clubs each with 100,000 members (total 1B users by 2040), there would still only be 10,000 points of attack. This means that a particularly large harvest club could instigate a DDOS attack on its nearest competitors to quite easily achieve a 51% share of the network harvest power. I think this could be potentially resolved by having only the harvest leader require a full node, whilst also having 3-5 oracles per harvest club run a partial node to achieve majority consensus if the club leader gets taken down. The IPs of these oracles should be masked to prevent a DDOS. Ideally, these oracles should be running a partial node on a mainstream device, perhaps being built into the wallet application on iOS/PC/MAC and Android. It would be quite simple to implement a centralization attack on a network with so few nodes, as the harvest club power will automatically lead to users gravitating towards the clubs with the largest harvest power, hence leading to just a few very large harvest clubs by 2040.  

I recommend limiting the size of harvest clubs to prevent centralization attacks, whilst adding a backup to the club leader in the form of 3-5 oracles running a partial node.

[imorpheus]

Tau foundation has not fixed up plan to control minging club to operate under 51%. One potential way during mean time is simply keeping foundation nodes to stay above 40% transaction mining power, this makes it very hard to achieve 51%. (Our current labor is focusing on mainnet, balance system, wallet, signal voting and removing time. )
It is our goal to have PC be able to intermittently run full nodes since there is no heavy computing neither storage work engaged. PC is getting more powerful everyday.
The way I understand TAU fairness is not by equalizing everyone, but reducing the entry barrier to common people. Both tau technology and coin econemy address fairness in following way: we are running bounty program for very long time to allow mininum effort to get on board TAU, hope 20 years from my perspective. We keep coin out of inflation. We reward common people essential behavior, spending money for living, rather than rich people racing on hardware and asset hoarding. I would claim we are more fair than POW and POS, but never want to claim the best and abosolute, even thought that is our long term mission.
For DDOS resistance, our mining signal system can easily allow mining leaders to randomly delegate to different address to avoid DDos. Here it is, mining club leader rent 1,000,000 IP addresses, each address associate to one TAU wallet address, then using TAU signal system randomly assign mining power to one of those 1,000,000 address, because DDos never knows club randomness to find IP to attack. I always trust randomness algo, which bitcoin is designed around, than oracles. It is our design purpose use TAU onchain signal system efficiently resist DDos and many other cool things.

[rudox]

I believe it good to be forward looking as TAUCoin is already planing ahead for the what will happen when the internet speed will be improved upon as regards speed, the project is taking a proactive action by introducing POT which will match the upcoming technology and have the client of TAUCoin benefit therefrom.