Innovation in the alt chains

[Gavin Andresen]

So...

I've been mostly quiet about the alternative block chains, but I have to say I'm a little disappointed.

I had hoped that they would be full of interesting experiments with different transaction types or smart contracts or different fee-setting algorithms or maybe some innovative scheme for instant transactions.

Instead, it seems like you've been too busy dealing with low hashrates and transaction-spam attacks, and have been spending all of your time re-inventing a lot of infrastructure (exchanges and block explorers and mining pool software and etc.).

I'm curious to hear what other people think:  will altchain innovation pick up in 2012?  Am I irrationally biased and just not seeing the awesome power of (insert-your-favorite-altchain-feature-here)?

I think there's an interesting dynamic, where the larger and more popular an altchain gets, the harder it is to do things like schedule a block-chain splitting-change (because you have to get all your exchanges and mining pools and etc. to upgrade). I wonder if that means the experimentation will only happen with brand-new blockchains, and if a blockchain will only really take off it the inventor manages to "get it 99% right" the very first time...

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[markm]

In my opinion a lot of the delay has been simply waiting for merged mining in order to be perceived as having any chance against attackers.

The Coin Wars Two concept I just posted is one approach to trying to work-around this by permitting trading of coins of privately mined chains or even chains that are moving all accounts out of their old blockchain implementation to get away from the "you have to give miners the minting of the coins in order to get started initially" paradigm. (For example, chains that want to "back" any coins they allow to fall into other people's hands, keeping whatever they managed to sell them for as "reserves" with which to buy them back.)

How many chains can be practically merged-mined at once? Will any fast deployment of the entire allotment of coins chains ever reach enough transaction volume to attract miners on the bassis of transaction fees alone? Unfortunately the Coin Wars Two approach loses some of the perceived / perceivable benefits of using a blockchain, but what the heck, it might yiel;d some kind of insight(s).

Coin Wars Two is being implemented using an Open Transactions server, so smart contracts are definitely on the roadmap; but currently we have not quite finished getting markets working quite the way we want them to work so fixes in the markets system have delayed some further smart-contract work a few days lately.

-MarkM-

[SomeoneWeird]

Tbh, I think most of the altchains have been created as a way for the creator to get a bit more cash in his pocket. Not a lot have had impressive improvements (imo) and that all everyone is doing is just s/bitcoin/l33tcoin/ etc. Also, the need for someone to know C++ (not saying it's bad or anything) is a drawback, as I have alot of great ideas for things, but C++ hurts my eyes so to speak.

[finway]

Me too, no idea how the alt chains catch up with OP_EVAL etc.

[sd]

The thing is BitCoin is very well designed and implemented. It's seriously hard to improve it without breaking the system in some way.

The alternative cryptocurrencies proposed so far have either been genuine but misguided attempts at improving some feature of BitCoin or cynical copy and paste jobs intended to get people rich.

[netrin]

Gavin, I agree with your sentiment, on both the potential experimentation that could be happening as well as the actual failure to truly innovate.

Having said that there have been some minor variable tweak itch scratching of note: shortening the block reward (has anyone bothered to analyze the dis/advantages?), forcing miners to use the CPU (has that broadened the miner-base, produced any social or other advantage?), and... well that's it, actually, as far as I've noticed.

While Satoshi's public, proof-of-work transaction ledger seems obvious now, it is of course revolutionary. But I can't help feeling there's got to be a better way to prevent double-spending. I would like to see an algorithm that can be done on paper; an altcoin party trick; a truly anonymous, side-channel, no electricity, post-nuclear Armageddon stone age, isolation tolerant blockchain something. I certainly don't have the answer, but I miss discussions of that level around here. Where has all the creative intelligence gone?

[GoWest]

Gavin, anyone who was truly interested in innovation would have volunteered to work with your team.  These alternative currencies are nothing more than "get rich quick" schemes.

[cbeast]

I wonder if that means the experimentation will only happen with brand-new blockchains, and if a blockchain will only really take off it the inventor manages to "get it 99% right" the very first time...

You are right that there has been little innovation on the Satoshi blockchain. Bitcoin is like concrete, it gets stronger over time. Form follows function.
Bitcoin has unique traits that fill important needs. Tools can be invented to exploit these traits. Necessity is the mother of invention.

[exahash]

I'm curious to hear what other people think:  will altchain innovation pick up in 2012?  Am I irrationally biased and just not seeing the awesome power of (insert-your-favorite-altchain-feature-here)?

Yes and yes.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin is "old" compared to the alt chains.

There will probably be lots more, with numerous small changes.  Think micro evolution rather than the big bang.

If a new chain is too revolutionary, or its founders have too much "personality" it will probably be too hard to get much traction quickly (Bitcoin itself took a while)

Patience is in order.

[BitcoinPorn]

I agree it isn't the size of your hashes, it is how you use it.      Does someone have a timeline to compare where Bitcoin was at it's conception against where Solidcoin/IXCoin/Litecoin/etc is at currently.  Like when Bitcoin was six months old, what things were going on with it compared to where Namecoin was six months in?   Userbase, coin generation, actual usefulness in the world.

[terrytibbs]

I agree it isn't the size of your hashes, it is how you use it.      Does someone have a timeline to compare where Bitcoin was at it's conception against where Solidcoin/IXCoin/Litecoin/etc is at currently.  Like when Bitcoin was six months old, what things were going on with it compared to where Namecoin was six months in?   Userbase, coin generation, actual usefulness in the world.

http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

[BitcoinPorn]

http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

Good job.  Now, links for the other coins that match that page :p

[localhost]

Tbh, I think most of the altchains have been created as a way for the creator to get a bit more cash in his pocket. Not a lot have had impressive improvements (imo) and that all everyone is doing is just s/bitcoin/l33tcoin/ etc.

I think you pretty much summed it all.

Does someone have a timeline to compare where Bitcoin was at it's conception against where Solidcoin/IXCoin/Litecoin/etc is at currently.  Like when Bitcoin was six months old, what things were going on with it compared to where Namecoin was six months in? Userbase, coin generation, actual usefulness in the world.

Even with that, it's hard to compare IMO: when it started, BTC didn't have some large cryptocurrency user base to pick in. And it didn't face a (kind of) well-established concurrent.

[BeeCee1]

I had hoped that they would be full of interesting experiments with different transaction types or smart contracts or different fee-setting algorithms or maybe some innovative scheme for instant transactions.

These things are very complicated and take a long time to understand, I doubt there are more than a few people in the bitcoin community that really understand them. I'm not even sure these things belong in the block chain instead of being handled outside of it (via Open Transactions or something similar).

Instead, it seems like you've been too busy dealing with low hashrates and transaction-spam attacks, and have been spending all of your time re-inventing a lot of infrastructure (exchanges and block explorers and mining pool software and etc.).

Extending the single-purpose bitcoin infrastructures (exchanges and block explorers and mining pool software and etc.) to be multi-coin is a real accomplishment.  Sites like allchains.info, blockexplorer.sytes.net, and the multi-coin exchanges are a big improvement over having lots of coin-specific sites.  You might not consider them innovative, but you aren't giving them enough credit.

Most of attacks on the alt-chains were possible against bitcoin too, bitcoin was just lucky that no one attacked when it was young and didn't have the value it has now.  Even so, a well-funded adversary could easily spam the bitcoin block chain.  Be glad that these issues are being worked out on the alt-chains where the stakes aren't as high.

There has also been a lot of experimentation with the fundamental economic models.  No one knows if  a coin should be deflationary, inflationary, or stable-value, nor do they know the best way to accomplish the goal.  Pre-mining to provide funding for improvements versus no premine and no funding for improvements has been another area of experimentation (it looks like pre-mining lost). The economic basis for a coin can't be changed easily (if at all) so it isn't surprising that is the first area that is worked on.

Merged-mining is pretty innovative, as is namecoin,  both were developed this year.

I'm curious to hear what other people think:  will altchain innovation pick up in 2012?  Am I irrationally biased and just not seeing the awesome power of (insert-your-favorite-altchain-feature-here)?

I think you are trying to get people riled up so that they try and prove you wrong.

I wonder if that means the experimentation will only happen with brand-new blockchains, and if a blockchain will only really take off it the inventor manages to "get it 99% right" the very first time...

Your probably right on this.  It is very hard to make substantial changes to an existing block chain.

[kjlimo]

bitcoin had the luxury of a few years to establish itself before people started judging it.  All of the alternate chains need to "prove" themselves quickly which is why some of them came up with weird retargeting things.

Beyond that is where the innovation really needs to start, but I agree that faster blocks / small tweaks haven't been that much worth the market accepting a new coin, rather than sticking with bitcoin.

[fivebells]

I don't know much about it, but there is definitely one radically new blockchain under development.

[BitcoinPorn]

STOP THE THREAD EVERYONE, a big piece of no information has slipped out, contact the bloggerverse so they can put out a press release regarding the announcement of an announcement

I don't know much about it, but there is definitely one radically new blockchain under development.

[maaku]

2013 will be the year that bitcoin goes mainstream, but not a way that you would currently recognize. 2012 will be a year of transformation, the impetus of which will not come from the Satoshi client (Gavin's great work notwithstanding).

[gmaxwell]

2013 will be the year that bitcoin goes mainstream, but not a way that you would currently recognize. 2012 will be a year of transformation, the impetus of which will not come from the Satoshi client (Gavin's great work notwithstanding).

Your beliefs are nice— but where is the evidence?

Litecoin has been a little inventive responding to various flooding attacks, but nothing I could call genuine innovation.

SC has been a nice demonstration that you can break the centralization of the system completely and abuse central authority substantially while keeping a solid base of believers— a fair warning for bitcoin itself: you can't count on loss of confidence from the believers as evidence that you're doing it wrong.  But nothing really innovative there.

Namecoin brought us a real implementation of merged mining... an innovation which should not be downplayed. But what has it done for us lately?   (namecoin would be a good target for a lot of other improvements, like flipped chains— but there doesn't seem to be much interest in taking it further at the moment)

As for the rest— mostly they've just failed ... sometimes due to technical attacks from their minor changes to the bitcoin algorithim. They now stand as monuments to the general wisdom of the particular magic values bitcoin was started with.

At the moment the satoshi client is the primary basis of innovation in the decentralized cryptotoken field. This is sad considering how hard it is to innovate.

So, yea, speculate that the advancement will come from elsewhere if you want... but it's just speculation without some evidence to back it up.

[Andrew Bitcoiner]

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

[markm]

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

But the alpaca isn't a marsupial!

-MarkM-

[maaku]

2013 will be the year that bitcoin goes mainstream, but not a way that you would currently recognize. 2012 will be a year of transformation, the impetus of which will not come from the Satoshi client (Gavin's great work notwithstanding).

Your beliefs are nice— but where is the evidence?

...

So, yea, speculate that the advancement will come from elsewhere if you want... but it's just speculation without some evidence to back it up.

That's because we're not public yet.

I'm CTO of a Mountain View-based startup that is working on a number of products using a bitcoin-derived protocol. Actually when we first started a little more than a year ago we trying to solve a problem in a completely unrelated field. The primary technical challenge and the key to monetizing the product basically boiled down to building a distributed, peer-to-peer time-stamping service for notarizing changes in ownership. Sound familiar? Unfortunately none of us heard about bitcoin until the bubble over the summer when bitcoin mania spilled into the mainstream media. Naturally it was refreshing to find a ready-made solution to our problem, with most of the kinks already worked out.

So why am I telling this long, uninteresting, and self-absorbed story, you might ask? Because once we we saw that bitcoin solved our problem we wondered what else it could do. And lo and behold, just about everywhere we look, in every industry (even--especially--outside of tech and finance) there are low hanging fruit ready to be optimized or made obsolete by the introduction of products based on bitcoin P2P technology. We've set aside for now our original project and are now working on a number of products that all much easier, and many of them much larger in potential impact (and revenue)*.

It took me a while to convert (not the least because bitcoin's economic underpinnings are populist bullcrap and it will never take hold as a viable currency--but please start a new thread if you want to debate me on this), but now I am convinced that without exaggeration bitcoin is the most disruptive technology to emerge since the World Wide Web. Just not for the reasons most on this forum probably think.

In the time the truth will show itself. Now if you excuse me it's Christmas day and my present to myself is a long block of uninterrupted coding

* You'll have to forgive me for being cagy, but I'm under NDA and of course all potential businesses we've identified are company secret until we launch or decide for sure not to ever pursue.

(Oh, and before anyone cynical wonders outloud why I'm posting this (and I've said the same thing as the OP before), it's because we could actually use some competition. The potential applications are diverse enough and it'd actually validate our business in the eyes of investors.)

[Maged]

So why am I telling this long, uninteresting, and self-absorbed story, you might ask? Because once we we saw that bitcoin solved our problem we wondered what else it could do. And lo and behold, just about everywhere we look, in every industry (even--especially--outside of tech and finance) there are low hanging fruit ready to be optimized or made obsolete by the introduction of products based on bitcoin P2P technology.
(...)
without exaggeration bitcoin is the most disruptive technology to emerge since the World Wide Web.

This really brings us back to the real issue, doesn't it? The reason why you aren't yet seeing real innovation in the alt chains is because everyone is just standing around in shock trying to comprehend this world-changing technology. Less than a hundred people in the world probably understand the intricacies of Bitcoin... and only one person understands it completely. For example, not even Gavin knew that it was possible to implement OP_EVAL in a backwards compatible way until quite (relatively) recently, and he's the lead developer! How can you expect alt-chain developers to fair any better than that?

The thing that you need to realize is that Bitcoin, in its current state, shouldn't have existed for at least 10 more years. Had ANYBODY else invented Bitcoin today, fairly major things like the scripting system would have simply not existed. THAT is something an alt-chain would have invented. However, Satoshi beat them to it.

When it comes to innovation in the alt-chains, instead of the phrase often used to describe plots in TV shows - "The Simpsons did it" - we have a case of "Satoshi did it".

[maaku]

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I take issue with a few of the details. Satoshi is an interesting case in that he clearly thought out many of the advanced use cases of bitcoin, and took baby steps toward implementing/enabling them before releasing the client into the wild. As an example, all of the contracts/scripting code was not necessary for bitcoin to do what bitcoin did at launch, and indeed some features were clearly untested as they did not work as advertised. However Satoshi was either very rushed or not a very competent programmer by industry standards, and that shows up in his code. Much of the work Gavin and others have done is just in cleaning up that mess. Also, Satoshi demonstrates an ignorance about the state of the art in academic computer science, unnecessarily cutting off valuable future enhancements. Finally, while Satoshi had the foresight to imagine complex use cases in the future, he lacked the imagination to think up many applications outside of tech and finance, which the current implementation unnecessarily hinders.

I have the utmost respect for Satoshi. He single-handedly took anonymous crypto-cash, which we've been talking about since the 90's, from concept to practicum. Beyond my respect as a fellow engineer, my company hopes to profit greatly from that. But... deification doesn't help anybody. It only obscures existing flaws and potential for future improvements.

The other aspect is that the economic underpinnings of bitcoin are fringe and esoteric, and the in practice application of it as a currency is clunky and, well, not very practical (I'm being honest and stating my informed opinion--not trying to start a flamewar!). Don't underestimate how much of a turn-off that is for the vast majority of developers and business people, who probably have real-world experience using e-payment solutions like Braintree, WePay, Stripe, or Square, or were trained in Keynesian economics. To these people (I count myself among them), the bitcoin project is seen as a combination of childish optimism and inexcusable ignorance. From that standpoint, the people bitcoin attracts are either 1) the fringe intellectuals (Austrian-school economists, extremist libertarians, etc.), 2) engineers who recognize the significance and disruptive nature of this technology, 3) those with something to hide (tax evasion, drugs, money laundering, general profiteering), and 4) the ignorant and/or naïve. While I of course count all the good sirs I have conversed with here in the first two categories, unfortunately bitcoin has attracted predominantly #3's and #4's, and in this subforum that is more true than others.

[cbeast]

The other aspect is that the economic underpinnings of bitcoin are fringe and esoteric, and the in practice application of it as a currency is clunky and, well, not very practical (I'm being honest and stating my informed opinion--not trying to start a flamewar!). Don't underestimate how much of a turn-off that is for the vast majority of developers and business people, who probably have real-world experience using e-payment solutions like Braintree, WePay, Stripe, or Square, or were trained in Keynesian economics.

You are accusing Satoshi of not having your 20/20 hindsight? So it seems like your basic criticism is that Satoshi is not a Keynesian. Check out the the genesis block that contains:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Time will tell if Satoshi was right. The disruptive part of the technology is not that it is Austrian-based, it really is not. Bitcoin has emergent properties unlike any of your aforementioned examples or anything previously tried. Sure there are alternative experiments and I hope they succeed, but they won't take anything away from Bitcoin's simplicity. Besides, Bitcoin has a ways to go until v1.0.

[finway]

That's because we're not public yet.
I'm CTO of a Mountain View-based startup that is working on a number of products using a bitcoin-derived protocol. Actually when we first started a little more than a year ago we trying to solve a problem in a completely unrelated field. The primary technical challenge and the key to monetizing the product basically boiled down to building a distributed, peer-to-peer time-stamping service for notarizing changes in ownership. Sound familiar? Unfortunately none of us heard about bitcoin until the bubble over the summer when bitcoin mania spilled into the mainstream media. Naturally it was refreshing to find a ready-made solution to our problem, with most of the kinks already worked out.

Can't wait to see your products.

[BitcoinPorn]

maaku, is the start up you mentioned back in the day here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20292.msg499698#msg499698 still in the works or has your focus turned to this new project?  Or, are they one in the same?

[steelhouse]

1) Use the existing bitcoin chain for a new coin. Despite it all bitcoin is the fairest of the chains.  Millions of dollars worth of coins have been bought, sold, and used in commerce.  One thing solidcoin did do is before the release of SC2 is compress the chain to very small size.  It would be nice if this could be automatically be done somehow like on the 1st of the year.  It might be good to eliminate all addresses with less than 1 btc.
2) 2% transaction fee.  1% deleted, 1% to miners.  Thus a sale of 300 DC would result in 3 DC Being deleted with 3 DC going to miners.  The sales tax in California about 9%, and a 2% fee will help the miners and the savers of coin and should not hurt economy.  I would really like to test this with a 10% transaction fee with most deleted to see what would happen (possibly moving most transactions to exchanges and wallets).
3) minimum fee 0.01, auto-adjusting  There has to be a minimum fee to prevent chain bloat attacks.  However it would be nice never to have to worry about deciding this but have it change automatically.
4)1 mining reward. Although mining rewards would end a small block reward would be added to prevent number of coins going to zero.  This should be less than 1% annual inflation.  Using the existing bitcoin chain will result in about 1% inflation.

[caston]

Fractional reserve banking also destroys money in a similar method to how it creates it. That is just as creating $1000 in a new loan will end up creating more $1000 loans then destroying $1000 end up with more lots of $1000 being destroyed  If we go through a period of rapid deflation it would be interesting to see how alternate currencies play out. Coins with inflation may in some ways be desirable. Alternately we may need coins with even faster deflation than fiat is being deflated at. The race may be on to make a coin with very fast deflation that is still attractive to both miners and investors.

[maaku]

@BP, yes it's the same company, but that post is not representative of our current projects.

[markm]

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

I haven't any complaints so far about Unthinkingbit's management of the DeVCoin project.

Maybe a get rich quick mentality tends to drive a lot of altcoins into rush rush rush, I rather like the more relaxed / sedate pace that DeVCoin has been progressing at, and wonder if the lack of hype might be part of why it has been sailing along so smoothly so far.

-MarkM-

[caston]

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

I haven't any complaints so far about Unthinkingbit's management of the DeVCoin project.

Maybe a get rich quick mentality tends to drive a lot of altcoins into rush rush rush, I rather like the more relaxed / sedate pace that DeVCoin has been progressing at, and wonder if the lack of hype might be part of why it has been sailing along so smoothly so far.

-MarkM-

Well if you end up with 1 billion DVC and their worth 0.1 cents each then theoretically you have a million bucks.

[kjlimo]

None of the alt chains have had a serious commitment to project management.  Perhaps Gavin should write an O'Reilly book "Encrypted P2P Transaction Systems" (and with a picture of a marsupial on the cover).

I haven't any complaints so far about Unthinkingbit's management of the DeVCoin project.

Maybe a get rich quick mentality tends to drive a lot of altcoins into rush rush rush, I rather like the more relaxed / sedate pace that DeVCoin has been progressing at, and wonder if the lack of hype might be part of why it has been sailing along so smoothly so far.

-MarkM-

Well if you end up with 1 billion DVC and their worth 0.1 cents each then theoretically you have a million bucks.

if...

[kjlimo]

1) Use existing bitcoin chain for a new coin and stop the block rewards. Despite it all bitcoin is the fairest of the chains.  $100,000 of coins have been bought and sold, $10,000s have been used in commerce.  One thing solidcoin did do is before the release of SC2 is compress the chain to very small size.  It would be nice if this could be automatically be done somehow like on the 1st of the year.  It might be good to eliminate all addresses with less than 1 btc and square root the number of coins.
2) 2% transaction fee.  1% deleted, 1% to miners.  Thus a sale of 300 DC would result in 3 DC Being deleted with 3 DC going to miners.  The sales tax in California about 9%, and a 2% fee will help the miners and the savers/owners of coin and should not hurt economy.  I would really like to test this with a 10% transaction fee with most deleted to see what would happen (possibly moving most transactions to exchanges and wallets).
3) minimum fee 0.01, auto-adjusting  There has to be a minimum fee to prevent chain bloat attacks.  However it would be nice never to have to worry about deciding this but have it change automatically.
4) merged mining or consensus to protect from 51% attacks.
5) 1 mining reward. Although mining rewards would end a small block reward would be added to prevent number of coins going to zero.  This should be less than 1% annual inflation.

How much longer are you going to keep suggesting these ideas with no action on them?  Go  make your own coin and stop flooding the forums with the same ideas...

[DeathAndTaxes]

How much longer are you going to keep suggesting these ideas with no action on them?  Go  make your own coin and stop flooding the forums with the same ideas...

The worst part is he has never responded to analysis the first dozen times posted.

Like
a) how do you have a fee based as a % when the network has no idea the transaction size?

b) how do you encourage mining if that mining is a negligibly amount of money?

c) what does sales tax have to do w/ a rational on the fee cost?  US Income tax is up to 38% so is a 38% fee a good idea too?

d) why would anyone want to use a blockchain w/ a 2% fee?  Paypal isn't much more.

[caston]

So are people more comfortable with the idea of alt-chains now?

I remember when namecoin first came out some people (probably just those that held a lot of bitcoin) were protesting about that. IXcoin created an obvious shitstorm then Solidcoin even more so.
By the time LTC had come out people were mostly pretty chilled. Now we have a lot of different coins. I guess they all need to find their niche markets.

[DeathAndTaxes]

So are people more comfortable with the idea of alt-chains now?

I remember when namecoin first came out some people (probably just those that held a lot of bitcoin) were protesting about that. IXcoin created an obvious shitstorm then Solidcoin even more so.
By the time LTC had come out people were mostly pretty chilled. Now we have a lot of different coins. I guess they all need to find their niche markets.

I think it just has become obvious this alt-coins aren't going to fragment Bitcoin.  None have gotten more than 1% of the support Bitcoin has (not just hashing power but exchange volume, developer support, alternate clients, mechant acceptance, 3rd party services, etc).

Personally I think any coin which is "based" on
a) shorter blocks
b) you can't use a GPU (until someone eventually makes a GPU w/ enough cach rendering the GPU hostility futile)

has any niche to fill.  Other than namecoin none have done anything else. 

There is this belief that a silver is needed to Bitcoin's gold.  The reality is Bitcoin is Bitcoin's silver.  Silver (and Copper) was used in coinage because discrete units of gold smaller than a gram are very cumbersome.  Small units of Bitcoin aren't cumbersome.  Transactions in bit pennies work just as well as transaction in thousands of Bitcoins.

[caston]

Problem with faster blocks though is that you end up with a very high inflation rate. Remember what it was like when TBX/FBX/LTC first came out and you were getting blocks every half minute? Well when BTC first came out it took an hour or so on a standard PC to find a block. The problem is the amount of coins minted is so fast that you can't find investors to buy them all. SC2 dealt with this by cutting the miner subsidy which was a gamble but it appears to have paid off. The other coins that still have the same subsidy have been going down in value. Unless they can find a niche that causes people to buy them up they will just become worth less and less over time. The other problem is of course botnets. Botnet owners don't pay for electricity and just dump the coins.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Problem with faster blocks though is that you end up with a very high inflation rate. Remember what it was like when TBX/FBX/LTC first came out and you were getting blocks every half minute? Well when BTC first came out it took an hour or so on a standard PC to find a block. The problem is the amount of coins minted is so fast that you can't find investors to buy them all. SC2 dealt with this by cutting the miner subsidy which was a gamble but it appears to have paid off. The other coins that still have the same subsidy have been going down in value. Unless they can find a niche that causes people to buy them up they will just become worth less and less over time. The other problem is of course botnets. Botnet owners don't pay for electricity and just dump the coins.

Block time has nothing to do w/ inflation.

[Mousepotato]

2) 2% transaction fee.  1% deleted, 1% to miners.  Thus a sale of 300 DC would result in 3 DC Being deleted with 3 DC going to miners.  The sales tax in California about 9%, and a 2% fee will help the miners and the savers/owners of coin and should not hurt economy.  I would really like to test this with a 10% transaction fee with most deleted to see what would happen (possibly moving most transactions to exchanges and wallets)

With only 8 decimal places, wouldn't this eventually lead to 100% eradication of all coins operating under this fee system?

[maaku]

Guys, let's stay on topic. If you want to debate that, start a new thread.

[fivebells]

Maaku, are you guys still working on blockchains using folding@home etc.?

[maaku]

yes.

[Mageant]

Sometimes I wonder Satoshi is an ET, he is/was so far ahead of everybody else.
 

[markm]

Blockchains seem as if they ought to be just the kind of thing that robust distributed storage systems should be good media for. Like GNUnet, Freenet, stuff like that. Systems that let the data reside in a decentralised cloud...

I don't mean a berkely-DB version of a blockchain though, I mean the blocks, retrievable by hash, height, addresses and so on.

-MarkM-

[finway]

Gavin said innovation like OP_EVAL would be implemented in the alt chain first, but nothing happend, sadly.

[steelhouse]

How much longer are you going to keep suggesting these ideas with no action on them?  Go  make your own coin and stop flooding the forums with the same ideas...

The worst part is he has never responded to analysis the first dozen times posted.

a) how do you have a fee based as a % when the network has no idea the transaction size?

b) how do you encourage mining if that mining is a negligibly amount of money?

c) what does sales tax have to do w/ a rational on the fee cost?  US Income tax is up to 38% so is a 38% fee a good idea too?

d) why would anyone want to use a blockchain w/ a 2% fee?  Paypal isn't much more.

a) The network should know the fee.  Blockexplorer shows the transaction, fee, and size.  The fee would charged based on the smallest of the to (amount).

b) 1% fee transactions are very large compared to 0.01 fee transaction which the bitcoin network is eventually going to have to deal with.  By making this comment you are saying in the long run bitcoin will never work since the mining fees will be too small in the future.  This is nonsense, as owners of large amounts of coins have vested interest to protect the network.

c) When you buy an item say alpaca socks for 5 btc.  The owner is already going to have to pay income tax on that sale.  A 2% sale would show up as a familiar sales tax.   5 btc plus tax or 5.10 btc.  Or the seller will most likely just say tax included.

d) Because the currency is not a fiat currency that is stolen at a rate of 10% a year by congress every year so Obama can fly to Hawaii denying 5000 workers of the U.S. the same trip and Gingrich can give a $1.6 million history lesson to Freddie Mac.  The tax is not wasted it goes to miners and deflation which should attract more people to the coin.  Current owners will advertise for more businesses so the value of their coins go up.  Miners will advertise for more business so they can get more mining fees.

[netrin]

I think a sufficiently innovative altchain wouldn't be recognizable as a bitcoin derivative. For example, a crypto-currency that doesn't use a blockchain at all, or a currency based on per-demand computational power, storage, bandwidth and credits.

[DeathAndTaxes]

a) The network should know the fee.  Blockexplorer shows the transaction, fee, and size.  The fee would charged based on the smallest of the to (amount).

So if I send if I have 100,000 coins, I send you 99,999 and I send 1 coin to change address then the fee is 1 * 1% = 0.01 coin?

b) 1% fee transactions are very large compared to 0.01 fee transaction which the bitcoin network is eventually going to have to deal with.  By making this comment you are saying in the long run bitcoin will never work since the mining fees will be too small in the future.  This is nonsense, as owners of large amounts of coins have vested interest to protect the network.

1% of a tiny transaction volume = tiny fees.  So the network large enough to avoid 51% attack will be paid from a negligible amount of transaction fees.  You seem to forget the subsidy exists for a purpose.  It allows the network to be large enough to avoid attack while the transaction volume is too small to support a strong network.  Today Bitcoin could have a ~10TH network with no block rewards.  Of course it would require a ~7% transaction fee.  However it is a catch22.  A 7% transaction fee would prevent the transaction volume from growing to ever reduce that fee to a modest sum.  The subsidies (which you seem to have blind irrational hatred of) bridge that gap. 

c) When you buy an item say alpaca socks for 5 btc.  The owner is already going to have to pay income tax on that sale.  A 2% sale would show up as a familiar sales tax.   5 btc plus tax or 5.10 btc.  Or the seller will most likely just say tax included.

No reason to comment because it has no relevance.

d) Because the currency is not a fiat currency that is stolen at a rate of 10% a year by congress every year so Obama can fly to Hawaii denying 5000 workers of the U.S. the same trip and Gingrich can give a $1.6 million history lesson to Freddie Mac.  The tax is not wasted it goes to miners and deflation which should attract more people to the coin.  Current owners will advertise for more businesses so the value of their coins go up.  Miners will advertise for more business so they can get more mining fees.

Neither is Bitcoin.  Also if you think inflation rate is 10% a year in USD well that explains a lot in your failed macro economics.

[SomeoneWeird]

Maaku, are you guys still working on blockchains using folding@home etc.?

yes.

Orly? That'd be interesting to see.

[markm]

Gavin said innovation like OP_EVAL would be implemented in the alt chain first, but nothing happend, sadly.

OP_EVAL will probably be coming to DeVCoin (and GRouPcoin) along with the update to the current bitcoin codebase.

-MarkM-

[cunicula]

1% of a tiny transaction volume = tiny fees.  So the network large enough to avoid 51% attack will be paid from a negligible amount of transaction fees.  You seem to forget the subsidy exists for a purpose.  It allows the network to be large enough to avoid attack while the transaction volume is too small to support a strong network.  Today Bitcoin could have a ~10TH network with no block rewards.  Of course it would require a ~7% transaction fee.  However it is a catch22.  A 7% transaction fee would prevent the transaction volume from growing to ever reduce that fee to a modest sum.  The subsidies (which you seem to have blind irrational hatred of) bridge that gap.  

Let f(x) be the reward from an attack as a function of network value x.
It should be obvious to anyone that f'(x)>0. However, the second derivative of x is not so obvious.
Death&Taxes argument depends on this second derivative.

He assumes that f''(x) < 0, so that attack rewards are a concave function of network value. f''(x)<0 implies that the network security - txn fee relationship becomes more favorable as the network grows. However, I have not seen any empirical evidence or cogent theory supporting the claim that f''(x)<0. If f''(x)=0 (a linear function seems probable to me), then the size of the network does not affect the network security-txn fee relationship at all. In this case, a 7% txn fee (or something similar) will be necessary forever.

If f''(x) >=0, proof-of-work is a poor choice of technology. In this case, proof-of-work will eventually be supplanted by either pure proof-of-stake or a proof-of-work/proof-of-stake hybrid.

Anyone implementing an alternate chain should consider this carefully.  

I can't code at all, so don't tell me to put up or shut up. Off-hand rejection of the views of outsiders is idiotic.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Let f(x) be the reward from an attack as a function of network value x.
It should be obvious to anyone that f'(x)>0. However, the second derivative of x is not so obvious.
Death&Taxes argument depends on this second derivative.

He assumes that f''(x) < 0, so that attack rewards are a concave function of network value. f''(x)<0 implies that the network security - txn fee relationship becomes more favorable as the network grows. However, I have not seen any empirical evidence or cogent theory supporting the claim that f''(x)<0. If f''(x)=0 (a linear function seems probable to me), then the size of the network does not affect the network security-txn fee relationship at all. In this case, a 7% txn fee (or something similar) will be necessary forever.

That's silly.  Transaction fees (and subsidy currently) buy the network we have today.   

Imagine today there was no subsidy and thus all transactions had a 7% fee.   Annual transaction volume is ~40 mil BTC ($160 mil USD).  7% of today's transaction volume is ~$10M.  $10M annual revenue buys us the ~10TH network.   It doesn't matter if it is $10M in subsidies or $10M in transaction fees or a mix of both.  Now the nominal value of the network isn't that important.   In 3 years $10M in annual revenue will likely buy a 30TH network (due to Moore's law) but it won't be any stronger than today.  In today's dollars (and today's computing hardware) it costs about $1M in annual fees to rent 1TH of hashing power.

Now imagine the transaction volume increased by a factor of 10.  Transaction volume is now $1.5B.  To pay for the same 10TH network would require only $10M / $1500M = 0.7% not 7%.

Alternate method (transaction volume in transactions)
It is entirely possible the network will ignore transaction size (because due to the anonymous nature it is impossible to know the intended size of any transaction).  Instead the network would require a fee only on transaction physical size (kb).  For simplisity sake we will look at the cost for average transaction.

Today the network has roughly 0.1 tps that is ~3 mil transactions annually.  To support a network costing $10M would require a per transaction fee of $3.33 with smaller (physically smaller) transactions paying less (maybe down to half price) and larger transactions paying more. 

The same $10M results in a falling transaction fee as volume increases
0.1 tps (3 mil annually) - ~$3.33
1.0 tps (31 mil annually) - $0.33
10 tps (310 mil annually) - $0.04
100 tps (3 bil annually) - 0.4 cents (roughly paypal network sized)
4000 tps (126 bil annually) - 0.01 cents (roughly VISA network sized)
 
Now one can argue a larger network is necessary to protect a larger transaction volume.  While that is true there are a couple points to consider.
1) The network today is significantly oversized.  10TH is very powerful distributed network.  It is the larger and most powerful computing network in the world.

2) There is a non-linear relationship between transaction value and network necessary to provide security.  If the network was 40,000 times larger (in terms of transaction value) we would hope the network would be stronger but it is unlikely it needs to be 40,000 stronger.

If f''(x) >=0, proof-of-work is a poor choice of technology. In this case, proof-of-work will eventually be supplanted by either pure proof-of-stake or a proof-of-work/proof-of-stake hybrid.

I agree a hybrid of proof of work & stake would be more efficient however Bitcoin has first mover advantage.  It doesn't have to be superior to newer alternatives simply "good enough".   Good enough w/ sufficient critical mass has won out over technically superior a multitude of times.

[cunicula]

2) There is a non-linear relationship between transaction value and network necessary to provide security.  If the network was 40,000 times larger (in terms of transaction value) we would hope the network would be stronger but it is unlikely it needs to be 40,000 stronger.

This is only place where you discuss incentives to perform an attack. Again, you are saying f''(x)<0. I'm saying that there is no reason to be so sure. It could be f''(x)=0 

The other stuff is irrelavant.

[DeathAndTaxes]

2) There is a non-linear relationship between transaction value and network necessary to provide security.  If the network was 40,000 times larger (in terms of transaction value) we would hope the network would be stronger but it is unlikely it needs to be 40,000 stronger.

This is only place where you discuss incentives to perform an attack. Again, you are saying f''(x)<0. I'm saying that there is no reason to be so sure. It could be f''(x)=0 

Really?  How large of an economic impact do you think a double spender could make.  The only way that is true is that as the network gets larger the economic value of any double spend grows perfectly with the size of the network. 

Network today is $150M in annual transactions,  $10M in cost to perform 51% attack.  There is a 15:1 multiple between annual transaction volume and cost of an attack.

At the multi-million dollar scale, there is a finite amount of double spend targets.  Even if the annual transaction volume was $1.5B a year and cost to perform a 51% attack was "only" $50M (30:1 ratio instead of 15:1) how many places do you think one could perform a double spend to cover your costs ($50M).  To cover $50M in costs would require $100M in double spend value ($50M in attack cost + $50M in capital to "double").

Just because the network is that large doesn't mean the economical attack space is that large.

There are very few areas one could economically attack the network at that scale.  One would need
a) irreversible goods
b) untraceable goods
c) convertible goods (doubt someone wants $51M in alpaca socks)

Finding >$100M in targets would be much harder than finding $10M in targets.  Remember the window of attack is relatively small.  One can't slowly attack the network over the course of a year.  Finding sufficient "target goods" to cover the cost becomes increasingly difficult despite the economy growing.  So as long as the "viable double spend targets" grow at a smaller rate than overall economy the capacity necessary to make 51% attack uneconomical will shrink as a % of transaction volume.

[cunicula]

Network today is $150M in annual transactions,  $10M in cost to perform 51% attack.  There is a 15:1 multiple between annual transaction volume and cost of an attack.

The numbers result from the current subsidy equivalent to a 7-10% tax on each send. These fees are not sustainable and thus the current numbers are irrelevant.

Instead of going over these red herrings again, let me discuss the substantive issue.

Like you say, capture of a large share of currency value through double spends is implausible. The value of the currency would plummet shortly after network control passed to the attacker. Most of the network value would be destroyed rather than passed to the attacker.

However, this statement has nothing to say about f''(x) at all. Really the point you are making with this statement is that a txn network does not need to be very secure in general. Size is not relevant to this argument. I have no idea why you think the ratio between 'viable double-spend targets' to network value would decrease as the network grows. The lack of a need for security against double spends might hold just as much for a small network as for a large network (in fact I expect this is the case). For example, one year ago, there would have been very few attractive places to double-spend. Now there are people selling gold bars and such. I agree you couldn't make much doublespending these places, but you could not of made anything at all double spending one year ago. Are you sure that the ratio of double-spend opportunities to network value has gone down?

More importantly, I strongly doubt that any attack would be motivated by double spending profit. In other financial markets, it is possible to take short positions with valuations larger than those of the underlying asset (via derivatives). Why are you sure that an attack won't be motivated by a speculative play like this? Furthermore, an attack might be carried out by the owner of a competing txn technology. Paypal, for example. A competitor's motivation to attack the network would likely be directly proportional to the amount of txn business captured by bitcoin, i.e. f''(x)=0.

You might be right about f''(x). It is really an empirical question. However, the confidence you express with statements like "Really?" and "Seriously?" is rooted in ignorance and bluster rather than logical reasoning.

I tire of this discussion, see you in other threads.

[steelhouse]

a) The network should know the fee.  Blockexplorer shows the transaction, fee, and size.  The fee would charged based on the smallest of the to (amount).

So if I send if I have 100,000 coins, I send you 99,999 and I send 1 coin to change address then the fee is 1 * 1% = 0.01 coin?

b) 1% fee transactions are very large compared to 0.01 fee transaction which the bitcoin network is eventually going to have to deal with.  By making this comment you are saying in the long run bitcoin will never work since the mining fees will be too small in the future.  This is nonsense, as owners of large amounts of coins have vested interest to protect the network.

1% of a tiny transaction volume = tiny fees.  So the network large enough to avoid 51% attack will be paid from a negligible amount of transaction fees.  You seem to forget the subsidy exists for a purpose.  It allows the network to be large enough to avoid attack while the transaction volume is too small to support a strong network.  Today Bitcoin could have a ~10TH network with no block rewards.  Of course it would require a ~7% transaction fee.  However it is a catch22.  A 7% transaction fee would prevent the transaction volume from growing to ever reduce that fee to a modest sum.  The subsidies (which you seem to have blind irrational hatred of) bridge that gap. 

c) When you buy an item say alpaca socks for 5 btc.  The owner is already going to have to pay income tax on that sale.  A 2% sale would show up as a familiar sales tax.   5 btc plus tax or 5.10 btc.  Or the seller will most likely just say tax included.

No reason to comment because it has no relevance.

d) Because the currency is not a fiat currency that is stolen at a rate of 10% a year by congress every year so Obama can fly to Hawaii denying 5000 workers of the U.S. the same trip and Gingrich can give a $1.6 million history lesson to Freddie Mac.  The tax is not wasted it goes to miners and deflation which should attract more people to the coin.  Current owners will advertise for more businesses so the value of their coins go up.  Miners will advertise for more business so they can get more mining fees.

Neither is Bitcoin.  Also if you think inflation rate is 10% a year in USD well that explains a lot in your failed macro economics.

a) So you solved it.  Don't change addresses.

    1VayNert3x1KzbpzMGt2qdqrAThiRovi8: 36.226

    1VayNert3x1KzbpzMGt2qdqrAThiRovi8: 32.226
    1FBtYpdAm4YhEFW4Upb3LE2wVRHVMEbZZs: 4
  
As long as you send it back to address, no fee charged.  Fee above would be 0.08

b) The fees will be large and growing.  BTC might be $15 by now resulting in 10x the transactions.  A CPU algorithm would spread the mining around.  Possibly even pool-less share based mining to protect network to prevent it being concentrated.

c) You are still going to have to pay 38% income tax even with bitcoin.  Those are federal/state/country laws.  With a 2% tax, 1% is given back to the public as deflation.

d) A definition of inflation is the increase in money supply.  All national debt has a dollar behind it.  When the postal worker received his check was that real money?  There is a reason why M3 closely follows the national debt.  Price inflation if you compare the Year over Year change in revenues at Walmart and Exxon-Mobil you come to over 8%.  If you subtract out population growth and productivity gains you might have 5% price inflation.   However, you must also consider without subtracting those out we could have 5% price deflation.   Many economist use a 18 month lag in M1 as a predictor of inflation.  The zero month lag in m1 is about 18%, and the 12 month lag is about 8%, and the 18 month lag is about 5%.  

[jancsika]

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I take issue with a few of the details. Satoshi is an interesting case in that he clearly thought out many of the advanced use cases of bitcoin, and took baby steps toward implementing/enabling them before releasing the client into the wild. As an example, all of the contracts/scripting code was not necessary for bitcoin to do what bitcoin did at launch, and indeed some features were clearly untested as they did not work as advertised. However Satoshi was either very rushed or not a very competent programmer by industry standards, and that shows up in his code. Much of the work Gavin and others have done is just in cleaning up that mess.

What does "not a very competent programmer by industry standards" mean?

[ArtForz]

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I take issue with a few of the details. Satoshi is an interesting case in that he clearly thought out many of the advanced use cases of bitcoin, and took baby steps toward implementing/enabling them before releasing the client into the wild. As an example, all of the contracts/scripting code was not necessary for bitcoin to do what bitcoin did at launch, and indeed some features were clearly untested as they did not work as advertised. However Satoshi was either very rushed or not a very competent programmer by industry standards, and that shows up in his code. Much of the work Gavin and others have done is just in cleaning up that mess.

What does "not a very competent programmer by industry standards" mean?

Tight coupling between UI and core (somewhat reduced with 0.5), Horrible OO design in parts, data members being public in lots of places instead of having accessors, sometimes outright WTF-worthy approaches to doing things. I wouldn't say incompetent, just lazy/messy.

[maaku]

ArtForz hits my main complaints. As I said, either very rushed or not very competent. Given that we don't know the facts I'll be polite and assume it was the former. Maybe he really rushed to meet that new years deadline three years ago.

[DeathAndTaxes]

While I generally agree with your sentiment, I take issue with a few of the details. Satoshi is an interesting case in that he clearly thought out many of the advanced use cases of bitcoin, and took baby steps toward implementing/enabling them before releasing the client into the wild. As an example, all of the contracts/scripting code was not necessary for bitcoin to do what bitcoin did at launch, and indeed some features were clearly untested as they did not work as advertised. However Satoshi was either very rushed or not a very competent programmer by industry standards, and that shows up in his code. Much of the work Gavin and others have done is just in cleaning up that mess.

What does "not a very competent programmer by industry standards" mean?

Tight coupling between UI and core (somewhat reduced with 0.5), Horrible OO design in parts, data members being public in lots of places instead of having accessors, sometimes outright WTF-worthy approaches to doing things. I wouldn't say incompetent, just lazy/messy.

The tight coupling is "bad" but acceptable for a proof of concept.  However IMHO today the daemon and client should be two completely different projects.  Sadly the legacy of that tight coupling is w/ us today and it increases the innovation and development cost.

I was working on a high security smartcard key manager (private keys would never exist outside of smart card).  The tight coupling between the satoshi client and the daemon would have required massive rewrites to accommodate a wallet w/o private keys.  Far more than I was capable of willing to do.  Not only the work now but any breaking change to the daemon or wallet would require never ending modification.  No thanks.

I have recently revived the idea using electrum.  Since the "server" (essentially just a remote copy of daemon) can be completely decoupled from the client I can write a custom client which talks to electrum server.  This server could be running locally to provide "fat client" functionality.  It is a step in the right direction but results in a lot of work duplication.

[localhost]

The tight coupling is "bad" but acceptable for a proof of concept.  However IMHO today the daemon and client should be two completely different projects.  Sadly the legacy of that tight coupling is w/ us today and it increases the innovation and development cost.

Indeed, I understand it can be troublesome later, but at least it prevents BTC from being headless like NMC...

[jancsika]

ArtForz hits my main complaints. As I said, either very rushed or not very competent. Given that we don't know the facts I'll be polite and assume it was the former. Maybe he really rushed to meet that new years deadline three years ago.

It'd be more fun if you'd assume the latter so that I can ask this question: if an incompetent programmer writes a piece of software in which "entire classes of security bugs are missing" (according to Kaminsky) then what does that say about your conception of programming competency?  Or, is it the case that Gavin et al crushed whole classes of security bugs that were in Satoshi's early clients?

[miscreanity]

... once we we saw that bitcoin solved our problem we wondered what else it could do. And lo and behold, just about everywhere we look, in every industry (even--especially--outside of tech and finance) there are low hanging fruit ready to be optimized or made obsolete by the introduction of products based on bitcoin P2P technology.

... I am convinced that without exaggeration bitcoin is the most disruptive technology to emerge since the World Wide Web. Just not for the reasons most on this forum probably think.

This, in spades.

Blockchains seem as if they ought to be just the kind of thing that robust distributed storage systems should be good media for. Like GNUnet, Freenet, stuff like that. Systems that let the data reside in a decentralised cloud...

I don't mean a berkely-DB version of a blockchain though, I mean the blocks, retrievable by hash, height, addresses and so on.

-MarkM-

That sounds like an arbitrary size payload for a decentralized wallet. The data volume would probably be unwieldy, though.

What I've noticed so far is a singular focus on monetary and technical aspects. That's all well and good, just somewhat limiting in regard to applicability of the whole concept.

The Bitcoin community seems to have finally come down from its honeymoon high and is regaining credibility. Awareness is the first hurdle, then a thorough understanding of what the blockchain is. Finally, the ideas start flying as to how it can be applied elsewhere. The real power, when abstracted to the blockchain's raw potential, is the system's capability of self-management.

I think innovation will come when either academia takes notice and/or when private, commercial interests pick up the ball and run with it (which seems to be the situation with maaku). That does seem to be picking up, two-guys-in-a-garage style, but still mostly focused on financial aspects. The concept can be made general, like the wheel - it just has to build up that gradually-accelerating adoption cycle.

Namecoin appears to be the most innovative so far, although there are plenty of applications involving resource management that could be handled by a blockchain system. I've been pushing the potential for blockchains effectively being applied as decision machines, similar to the threshold trigger of an action potential. That could form the foundation of a machine memory/intelligence at a larger scale and in a completely different class than existing paradigms. Difficulties in starting that lie with incentive for participation and logistic overhead - feasible at experimental scales but not workable in the global setting that Bitcoin can support yet (due to financial incentive).

The more freedoms and privacy are eradicated by central authorities, the greater the incentive to explore other options. It's only a matter of time before further dots are connected - 2012 will be more impressive than the last couple of years, I'm sure.

[markm]

It looks like it is premature to waste time "innovating", we should first just clone as many identical chains as merged mining can practically handle, get them all up to difficulty matching bitcoin's and only *then* worry about which ones to make which changes to to develop various innovations or changes.

Until we actually have a whole string of secure chains to innovate with, speculation as to what innovations might prove good is kind of moot. First lets actually secure some chains. If we can do that, fine, we can look into varying them from each other. If we can't its a doomed route anyway.

Most of the people who were looking forward to merged mining as a proof that innovation might have some chance of having a point or usefulness are seeing so far that, sorry, merged mining is no help, any attempt to innovate is going to have to wait until some other way of solving the terrorist / religious fanatic / mad bomber attack scenarios before there is any point wasting thought on it.

-MarkM-

[gmaxwell]

It looks like it is premature to waste time "innovating", we should first just clone as many identical chains as merged mining can practically handle, get them all up to difficulty matching bitcoin's and only *then* worry about which ones to make which changes to to develop various innovations or changes.

Until we actually have a whole strign of secure chains to innovate with, speculation as to what innovations might prove good is kind of moot. First lets actually secure some chains. If we can do that, fine, we can look into varying them from each other. If we can't its a doomed route anyway.

Most of the people who were looking forward to merged mining as a proof that innovation might have some chance of having a point or usefulness are seeing so far that, sorry, merged mining is no help, any attempt to innovate is going to have to wait until some other way of solving the terrorist / religious fanatic / mad bomber attack scenarios before there is any point wasting thought on it.

People who didn't do their work in secret have been told that simply going merged had these kinds of risks.  It is not everyone elses fault that you didn't talk to people or realize this for yourself.

Merged mining namecoin has worked out really well, because namecoin already had value— the economics were different.

You could achieve acceptable security in a new merged mining chain at its valuless birth in quite a few ways... off the top of my head:

* Pre-announce it and build excitement well in advance, convince people of its values, make sure it scratches their itches— and then when it switches on there will be a lot of people supporting it and it will be well decentralized.  (Litecoin did a bit of this, but it could be better done than that)

— but doing this will require some real value from the start.  Beating the bitcoin developers out of the gate in deploying new functionality they invented and coded probably won't cut it.

* Start with an initially high difficulty, so that the system doesn't do much (and thus can't be attacked much) until it has a reasonable amount of decentralization.   (bitcoin itself did this, though it could have done more of it— while diff 1 sounds low today, computers and esp. software of _a lot_ faster, though the big MMed hash concentrations make this harder)

* Reduce decentralization initially— program it require frequent signed checkpoints (or something like SC2's alternative blocks) _until_ the system has a high enough difficulty to stand on its own (enough is easy to figure out for a merged chain, since you know how much hash power is out there), or until a certain number of blocks pass.

or

* Raise some BTC and pay existing miners on the merged chain to cooperate, until your chain is big enough and worthwhile enough to survive on its own merits—  setting up a new merged chain has a cost, a fairly high one right now because the support is not well integrated. Your own system didn't work with a lot of popular software. You can't expect disinterested parties to just mine your coin because its easy to do so, — hell, for most pools mining it requires writing new code. So you get only the interested parties and with that comes good and bad.

The last is probably the most interesting, simply because for any decenteralized system which doesn't claim to be a deflationary (or at least effectively deflationary for early adopters in the short-medium term) currency, externally paying miners to support it is probably the only way to bootstrap.

Though, you may note that all of these tactics reduce the ability to pump and dump new clone-coins.  I consider this a ecological feature, rather than a bug.

(To be clear— I don't have reason to think _you_ were trying to build a pump and dump altcoin scam, I don't know what you thought you were doing— but _other_ people in the altcoin community were super eager to participate in one, and I think the evidence is basically clear enough on that. It just turns out that they care so little about doing so, or are so greedy about it, that they won't put in the resources to undo the attack against coiledcoin)

[markm]

I don't like the pump-and-dump actually. One of the key problems of creating value in blockchains is the mining of coins by miners problem, which is what leads to the dumping. It puts the thing you are hoping to use as value in the hands of those who basically seem to do their best to devalue it, which is kind of counter-productive.

-MarkM-

[finway]

I think _making_merged_mining_possible is much easier than innovation.

Do _merged_mining firstly !

[markm]

I think _making_merged_mining_possible is much easier than innovation.

Do _merged_mining firstly !

That has been the plan of many groups. If and only if merged mining does prove to work as a way of securing additional chains is there any point in exploring the potential of such secured chains. It is all pie in the sky if in fact merged mining is not an effective approach. Some other method, possibly such as sticking to a centralised system until transaction volumes generate enough fees to make the huge expense of mining start to seem budgetable, will have to be found if merged mining cannot do the job.

-MarkM-