Thoughts on M of N systems (competing and heirarchically nested)

[godislove]

Miners reaching agreement via POW or POS seems to be another M of N system based on competition.  This may be the best possible method of preventing "viruses" and being fault tolerant (via parallel checks) at all levels in this new technology, from individual contracts, to setting value (bidding on exchanges is a competitive M of N algorithm), to verifying the blockchain.  There seems to be no way of preventing "viruses" in computing systems that have the ability to evolve, so that core developers making unilateral and key decisions may always be needed.  They themselves are a competitive M of N system of evolving algorithms (brains).  Pattern recognition also uses a nested hierarchy of M of N competitors.  Life evolved patterns that "recognize" survival in this way from base pairs to triplets (amino acids) to proteins to cells to organs to bodies to species to ecosystems. Competitive evolution occurs at every level, not restricted to the "gene" level. Notice the lowest level stays around the longest without changing.  The mid-level changes the most rapidly.  The internet protocol has been the lowest level for copyable "public" bits and has survived well. The bitcoin and ethereum protocols for these amazing uncopyable "private" bits need to find agreement at some point (and maximum simplicity) before the marriage between the public and private bits can occur.  The ultimate goal for humans that want to engage with these systems is a better marriage between individuals and society for the benefit of both.  All for one and one for all, contractually defined, discovered, and enforced.  What else is society good for if not to reward individuals via various (crypto)currencies (political, financial, social currencies) according to various hierarchically nested competing sets of (crypto)contracts that together constitute a (crypto)governed-economy?  Each fixed-quantity currency represents the total value of the societal asset(s) that the governing set of contracts are competing to re-distribute among the citizens that have joined that governed-economic system.  Anarchic privacy may not be the most important end goal as Zerocash et al could achieve. Provable identities within the governed system might remain anonymous to others in the system, but not to the system of contracts. This might be a key to everything we want as social creatures.  Absolute anonymity is required by those wishing to profit without regard to the cost to society as a whole.  If we keep the system perfect and pure, the economic and governing systems that evolve from this internet-"bitcoin" marriage will not view humans any different from any other intelligent agents on the system. Humans are outdated. Companies are working fast and furious to replace them with machines. If our governing system becomes pure without regard to human status (and thereby eliminate many things from welfare to war), that desire to replace humans with more efficient machines can become system-wide.  Photosynthesis is 100 times less efficient than solar cells. The current 6th great extinction of episode we are in will continue as the biosphere is replaced with machines.  

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[godislove]

An M of N system is a multiple-input AND gate operation with a threshold value of M that determines activation of the gate (logical output of 1). Likewise, synapses form an M of N operation on the segments of dendrites in neurons.  Numenta is using this in their A.I. modeling of the brain.  But this "voting" (M of N gate) is not limited to segments on dendrites. The chemicals in each synapse and group-level activation of neurons are also a "voting" schemes above and below the segments.  These voting schemes are hierarchically nested not unlike city/county/state/country/world politics and work-team/department/division/company/industry/country/world in economics.  If these nested AND operations are only semantically different from NAND operations, then a complete Turing machine can be implemented by these structures. Each system has different methods of "wiring" the flow of the decision-making 0's and 1's (or the analogous analog signals) but those signals are always of finite supply and represent the finite supply of real energy or materials of the system to get the computational work done. In a corporation and government its money. In a brain it's food energy. In a computer it's CPU power.  If you are writing an evolutionary A.I. program to maximize computing power, the algorithms compete to obtain "money" that buys more CPU time.  This is the purpose of a currencies, so it should not be forgotten when working on Ethereum and Bitcoin that the importance is of a cryptocurrency is to define what the coins are referring to.  In bitcoin it is total computing power wasted. It works only because humans are making this wasted computing power a fraction of the semantic real-world value (dollars) which will ultimately be connected to transaction fees.  But POW and POS are not ideal: proof of capability is ideal, and that the actual computing resources be used to provide the ethereum-like contractual development and computations that are enforced by the associated cryptocurrency (which is a contract itself, unique in that it is what holds all the other contracts together and in some sense the top level).  The nested hierarchy of contracts is an algorithm seeking an objective in a way that distributes the coins to those agents that are best helping the system achieve its goals. Agents given equal votes in the design of the system is another currency based that helps keep the coins from being concentrating into the hands of a wealthy few at the expense of the health of the system (1950's style democracy and taxation prevented our current system of capitalistic and financial system oligarchy). In human society the goal should be to maximum median happiness per person to prevent excess polarization of happiness and wealth but also to prevent overpopulation by making it per person rather than blindly maximizing total GDP which destroys the biosphere without regard to human happiness.  

The current finance and banking systems are a 51% attack on the flow of currency in democratic countries. They have control of the core developers who were voted into place (the government).

So yes, it is great Ethereum is Turing complete so that it allows the above. But there should be an awareness by those implementing contracts on top of it that  there should be an ecosystem of contracts, that M of N is possibly ideal, and that the fixed-quantity of currency should be normalized to the total capability of the contract ecosystem to compute.

* Notes: Although more complicated with inhibitory (NOT inputs) and other things, the segments of the dendrites and dendrites can be logically restated to an equivalent Boolean operation of NAND if not AND gates, because the difference between NAND and AND gates might be a semantic definition of "NOT" on the inputs.

[godislove]

In summary, I have felt some regret that M of N methods may be the only way to tie the syntax of Ethereum, etc to the semantics of the outside world, and in particular to our main interest, human society.  However, bitcoin is already based on a competitive M of N method. M of N forms a logic gate that is Turing complete when M of N "contracts" are "wired" together in a minimally sufficient way, which at least requires feedback and memory states before being provably capable of being a complete "computer".  But by not being as simple as a 2-input universal NAND gate, having more inputs, it is also fault tolerant and used extensively in recognizing patterns as in the brain, economics, evolution, and artificial intelligence.  (note for A.I. readers: Bayesian networks, Numenta's CLA, and Neural Networks are logically reducible to M of N and can be made Turing complete when feedback wiring is included. )  When tied to a currency that represents the total available resources falling under the jurisdiction of the legal system that the system of M of N contracts represent, the network of M of N contracts can be designed (via politics affecting the legal system) to evolve on its own to make more efficient use of the system's resources to make more agents behind the M of N contracts .  At the risk of off-putting the reader with an overly-grand suggestion, this might be the "meaning of life" or the "definition of intelligence".  The M of N contracts need to be enabled to competitively evolve, fed by the legal power over the real resources (represented by the currency) in order to make imperfect copies of themselves. I'll say more on this negative-entropy generation idea later.

In at least some of these intelligent networks of M of N of operations, the currency is not the only distribution of power.  There are also usually mechanisms to prevent the currency from being concentrated into the hands of a few M of N agents, which could act like viruses or cancers.  In society we use functioning democracies (arguably this does not include the U.S.) or advanced vote-like communism (arguably like China, whose government is economically empowering the people out of a fear of a USSR-like breakdown and real fear of the people themselves) to prevent kings and oligarchies. The purpose of 1 vote per person is to prevent legal power from being accumulated in the hands of a few white Christian wealthy men, as occurred in the past. By giving more power to women, blacks, non-Christians, and the middle-class (via progressive tax of the 1950's), democracy is able grow faster and overthrow other systems of governing via economic power.  In evolving artificial intelligence methods this is seen as a redistribution of computing resources if a few agents are acquiring too much computer power and thereby settling on a specific solution that may not be the optimum solution. In biological evolution species-diversification is regarded as healthy in finding future solutions to the survival puzzle.  The puzzle is really about acquiring as much energy as possible to make as many DNA-base pairs as possible.

Getting off the track of a summary in order to address something I've left out....

In order to tie the votes and thereby economic health to people in these M of N contracts, the individual agents behind the contracts (people) to which I assume all readers of this post ultimate care or should care about, it is necessary to prove the existence of specific people who are behind the contracts.  This is not only needed for voting, but for enforcement of the contracts.  This does not mean identities should be public, but only that the contract system itself should be aware of individual "IP addresses", unless a physical force needs to be applied (incarceration).  Some will want at least a portion of their cyber-identity (not necessarily their complete cyber or any of their physical identity) to be public in order to build trust as in name brands, selling stuff on ebay, getting a job, and dating.  In order to do all this, a physical device(s) is needed. It should be capable identifying a physical individual based on multiple bio-signatures before they can interact with the system of M of N contracts, including the currency which is in a sense a top-level M of N contract that runs parallel with intelligent and hierarchical voting M of N contract (but I do not advocate democracy as ideal) as a check and balance if not optimization process on the distribution of the currency, to not only see if the system is achieving its goal of maximum happiness per median person, but to optimize the process.  Competing, non-compatible systems of M of N contracts with different currencies would struggle for more citizens to leave other systems to join their own. Instead of fighting to keep citizens out or locked in, these "socio-economic-politico" governments would fight to provide the most benefits to the best and brightest.  There would be local competing governments like this that still fall under a more regional government, leading up to world government.  Without world government limiting the competition, we should be prepared for real war and more brutal economic competition for happiness and food. The world government would not let us be too lazy or local "viruses" and "cancer" will develop. Utopia is now technologically possible with world-wide communication to prevent war and reach agreement, even optimum agreement for all.

Getting back to a summary...

The ultimate goal of life is to extract energy to make copies. Although this increases entropy system-wide, the copies are a local increase in real physical and informational order (negative entropy) that is the foundation of what we perceive as "good" about life (a la Schrodinger's paper "What is life?).  Energy is converted to copies instead of being locked up in potentials or converted to waste heat. This is a rapidly growing re-interpretation of evolution.

The system needs an agreed-upon goal that the core programmers need to be thinking about if they want to avoid enabling just as many bombs as benefits.  This is arguable since nuclear weapons did not destroy us and the blindness of the internet protocol has served us well. But by being intrinsically capable of bombs much more than the internet, the acceptance and legitimate use of Ethereum or Zerocash -like methods may get backlash.

These are the highest-level ideas concerning where this technology is going, or should go, that I do not see written elsewhere, including Nick Sabo and Wei Dai.    

[kjj]

But POW and POS are not ideal: proof of capability is ideal

I didn't read your wall of text, and I doubt that anyone else will either, but this jumped out at me.

The proof of capability is work.  If you prove that you did work, you have proved that you had the capability of doing that work.  Nothing else is necessary, nothing else is sufficient.

[kolinko]

Yeah, didn't read that either. Wall of text, and hard to read. Take a writing class, or read a book on writing well, if you want to be heard.

And I'm interested in anything M of N.

[godislove]

The amount of information in each sentence I wrote is a lot, approximately equal to a whole thread of conversation I see in this forum. I encourage both of you to put on your thinking caps and try harder with more patience.  My English is very clear.  The problem is that I am trying to convey too many ideas in a very small amount of space, even as it is a wall of text.

[kolinko]

The amount of information in each sentence I wrote is a lot too high

ftfy.

Good to see that you know what your problem is. Once you're a well respected member of the community, you could probably get away with writing unclearly. But until that time comes - nobody will care.

Just explaining why nobody bothered to read you and reply to you. You wasted your time writing all this.

[coinsolidation]

Financial agents do not need to be human, many benefits come from automated agents bearing keys.

Competition between development teams brings evolution to the technologies involved.

Technologies from other sectors such as nymi can be used to tie human agent identities to assets.

It is nice to build a system based on ideals, but if it does not model or account for reality, it will be abused.

PoW replaces the human cost of automating a ledger with a computational cost. As the ledger grows so does it's cost. It's cost is required to mitigate attacks. It's cost would be higher if it was a human process.

Blockchain/crypto based solutions allow computational agents to do a trust-based human task, freeing humans to do other things.

If we can apply this to all aspects of "work", life will improve for all.

[godislove]

Blockchain/Crypto technologies are not fixing the "trust" problem.  They are enabling the tying of contracts to enforcement via currency without the cost of lawyers, bankers, and sheriffs.  The problem in not achieving trust always comes down to getting the external world to merge with the blockchain contracts.  In other words, there is "trust" only inside the cyber system, not in the real world. Take the example of a crypto-currency. It is a specific and special type of contract that is between the blockchain and its users, whereas all the other contracts may not involve a fixed rule that is married to the blockchain protocol. The non-currency contracts are just interested in using the blockchain "protocols"/language to execute contracts.  Even when setting aside the problems of 51% attacks, inherent errors, lazy core developers, and rollbacks by core developers with or without consent of the community, we can't trust the value of bitcoin over time due to there being no external connection except users perception of its value on exchanges.  Even across space the value is not stable because a "dollar" is not worth the same in all places (purchasing power parity, McDonald's hamburger standard, etc).  This is not a problem the blockchain can solve without resorting to an M of N system that resorts to trusted oracles such as a basket of commodities as measured and reported by large exchanges, which is only a higher degree of trust rather than absolute, but still subject to political, technological, hacking, or financial influence affecting the oracles or the exchanges they are looking at in London, New York, Chicago, and Hong Kong.  

The trust issue can be solved if the cost of verifying transactions can be hard-coded into the blockchain protocol as a fixed percent of the value of the transactions.  The Fed thinks 2% annual inflation is a good thing, and actually since debt erasure has always been the solution to broken economies, 2% inflation as a slow debt erasure may not be a bad idea. Jews used "Jubilee" to do this every 50 years. New Kings usually came to power as a result of economic crises and immediately erased all debts to get rid of old power structures (like BANKS and existing GOVERNMENT, aka "lords"). It worked well for everyone at the end of WW2 and not doing it at the end of WW1 is what caused WW2.

OK, so 2% annual value of the total amount of transactions on the blockchain could be the "tax" imposed by the blockchain to support it's computational and security costs.  Not taken out of transactions, but new money created.  Transactions are free, but wealthy coin holders are taxed if they are just hoarding and not participating in the economy, as it should be.  Bitcoin idealism is a dream of the wealthy and a nightmare for the poor and indebted.   "Tax" is the right word because the ultimate goal is for the blockchain to replace government, banks, and enforcement personnel with a much smaller group of computer technologists, as is occurring in all other sources of employment because brains are the last remaining foot-hold humans have as useful entities in the free market.

2% inflation is actually a fixed value for the money if the transaction weighted volume increases 2% per year, as the economy improves, or adoption of the currency increases to a larger marketplace.  This assumes hoarding as a result of speculation in an big increase in future transaction volume is not occurring (as in bitcoin's history so far). This increase use of the currency by the marketplace has been the key to U.S. success since WW2, and its impending nightmare if all those dollars come home in a sovereign debt crisis due to our abuse of that power (ability to "enslave" other countries at a lower cost, thereby losing our real-world useful employment and switching to non-productive employment such as services, banking, military, and government).

Server node operating payments could be more or less than 2%, fixed to the expansion of the weighted transaction volume, so the technologists win or lose if the "economy as measured by transactions" wins or loses, and there would be no inflation or deflation.  This keeps contracts valid in terms of value for all future time, but this rigid enforcement of the "debt" of past blockchain contracts does not have any good historical precedents as I explained above.  To solve the problem of having to choose between inflation and lords, the measurement of the transaction action volume would need to be multiplied by happiness per median person, so that if happiness goes down, the wealthy lose. So they should spend their money on investments that increase the happiness of all.  The measurement of happiness would be another M of N system of contracts and oracles, that somehow strongly guards against political (money) influence.  In the real world we use a separate currency called 1 vote per person to try to make this happen. The only way I see to make this happen is for a biometric security device to lock each person's DNA to the awareness of the blockchain system of voting if not a wider range of contracts.  Voting would merely be saying if your happiness or unhappiness increased or decreased since the last vote, or by joining a separate DAO (local, regional, or state government).  In the nested hierarchy of competing governments, those improving their citizen's happiness the most could be copied, or expand in citizens directly.

Trust will be achieved if the median happiness per citizen of the DOA on the blockchain is increasing. Not if the wealthy are made more powerful as in the bitcoin and gold systems. Not if there is inflation such that wage and price contracts are invalidated over time (or space as in other countries).  Not if stable value is achieved at the expense of monopolies and externalities or an increasing wealthy class.