i've been nice to you ever since you entered this thread in a big way. yet this is about the 4th time you've called me a troll despite the fact i even complimented you on your POW work.
Relax, just a joke
I dont think you're a troll, though I see I am not alone in enjoying flame fests sometimes.
instead, perhaps you might want to answer some of the real questions i've posed to you but you have failed to answer:
I guess I missed some of those, it was a long thread!
1. in the WP, you mentioned that it is possible that if a SC became popular enough, then Bitcoiners might have to move all their BTC to the SC. what about those who don't get the memo? this question is similar to the big debate we had a couple years ago about harvesting apparent "un-used" addresses. that was obviously shot down real quick in that there is no way to ever be sure exactly that the true owner was dead or had lost the privkey.
Personally I would not see anything that didnt protect all ownership, being accepted by anyone sane. What I mean is eg in the same way you keep your bitcoins as we go from 0.09 to 0.10; you'd keep your bitcoins if we went from 0.99 to 1.0 if that was a hard fork implemented and switched over to using a sidechain as the live-beta process.
2. philosopically, do you see Bitcoin as Money or as an economic "system" for trading assets of all types?
Personally I guess I see it as a kind of virtual commodity which can be used as sound money. But bitcoin is programable and as I wrote somewhere on the thread I think the programability, smart-contracts are also a big deal as well as the sound-money which is by itself awesome if thats all bitcoin could ever do.
Bitcoin has a lot to offer, and some of those things are not possible for the legacy systems to mimic. Particularly sound money, no counter-party risk, irreversable transactions (seizing and freezing basically prevent that outside of paper cash, though even that is partly relying on fungibility laws or it could have reversibility problems). Smart-contracts that are strengthened by no counter-party risk and irreversibility are one of the most interesting advantages I think. Without irreversibility and no freezability a "smart-contract" isnt smart, its just an electronic contract and we already have those. Ultimately if you combine it all you could rearchitect the financial system to largely remove systemic risk, add competition legacy systems cant react to (they intrinsically need their governance costs). This is why people gave us $21mil. Bitcoin all-in is a big deal. Sound-money is cool, but its only part of the picture.
I also wrote a kind of parable/scifi story about bitcoin as sound-money which is some kind of argument of bitcoin is special as it came first, universal equivalence of proof of electricity as the unit of bitcoin.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=911339.msg100127303. what real difference is there in forcing more transparency (as we are now doing with Merkle root audits, regulation, better VC funded exchanges) on 3rd party merchants vs. using SC's where supposedly we will be able to view the source code to ensure no backdoors (only a select few can do that)? i would argue that the former is no different than the real mechanisms we have today and therefore not experimental or as risky to the degree you're wanting to construct via an unprecedented and untested 2wp.
Matter of debate. I guess while its true as you said they are improving at governance, its also true the scammers our out in force, so its risky relying on governance alone, and merkle audits are after-the-fact. Mtgox could've had merkle audits and still lost $500m the next day.
Either way I think it is important to simplify, modularise and freeze the basic bitcoin as sound money to protect it from failure. You realise bitcoin has been lucky or the devs have been epically proficient in coding and testing the code and fixing bugs carefully for nothing to have blown up at a level that wiped out long stored coins. We want bitcoin to be here in 50 and 100 years.
Then you want people who are using bitcoin for fancier things to do it somewhere else, with a guaranteed firewall between your savings and their more complex code bases. IMO. Sidechains is one way to do that. Another one is provably secure consistency enforcing bytecode VM.
i say risky b/c i am still not convinced that separating the BTC unit from its native blockchain (MC) is a safe economic thing to do. its not safe b/c it requires all sorts of new assumptions/requirements such as no bugs in the spvp itself
Well as I wrote here:
Another way to look at sidechains btw is that a federated peg is a multi-sig (with modest parameters eg 5 of 10 and some trustworthy security competent bitcoin interested businesses) and a SPV peg is a bigger federated peg with a 5000 of 10000 multisig with dynamic membership (ie whoever is mining the chain right now). The spv peg op_code is an opcode to understand those dynamic membership multisigs. The dynamic membership multi sigs (DMMS for short) are written about in the sidechain white paper
http://www.blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf and are a different way to look at bitcoin mining, though its actually the same thing.
You can also combine DMMS sigs with regular multisigs, its just an op code so you can program with it. eg IF ( 0.5*DMMS + 0.5*multisig(5,10) ) THEN spend coin. Or IF ( hashrate > 75% AND DMMS ) OR ( hashrate <= 75% AND multisig(5,10) ) THEN spend coin can react to hashrate drops. Different people could even use different peg rules on the same chain depending on their security tradoff preferences.
so a DMMS signature is not so different from a mutlisig, and it
is just a new type of multisig, and the bitcoins never actually leave the bitcoin block chain, so I dont think its that ridiculously complex from bitcoins side, and so we can have robust confidence in the security firewall. Certainly once the sample implementation & BIP are up for discussion, we'll be interested in expert opinion on that and any suggestions to simplify or improve it.
Its also not that alien - the DMMS is just a reuse of bitcoins PoW blockchain as an opcode. Basically the only new thing is a way to compact it. As I mentioned it is nearly possible to implement it (or maybe would be with some ugly chained script) already.
unscrupulous altcoin devs that you despise
Yeah I like people who innovate, and some altcoin devs have innovated eg freicoin, cryptonote/bytecoin etc. I dont like pump & dumps nor false advertising of features that are technobabble and insecure, though along with a lot of other people.
The sidechain, 100% MM of the SC to be simply "as safe", no bugs or backdoors in the SC code written by all the unscrupulous altcoin devs that you despise of which only a few in the Bitcoin community will be able to vet via inspection of their code.
I gave examples of how the MM rate can be reactively handled in the peg script above.
The code on sidechains is caveat emptor, I wrote this somewhere too:
its caveat emptor, you shouldnt put money into a chain unless there is some assurance that security & bitcoin protocol knowledgeable people have audited it. People could certify chains (like sign them - "my name is blah and I'm a security researcher with reputation and I and my buddies audited this code and its good") or wallets could etc. Its good and a feature that people can opt to use uncertified chains. You want a situation where there is real open possibility for technical innovation & competition in chain features.
You also want no central control so no chains can get black listed.
i expect hundreds of SC's to pop up as a result of your proposal and you yourself said that there are really only a few in the community who could or would take the time to vet potentially malicious code. given this proliferation, if i'm right, how can honest devs ever keep up with this?
audit and certify and firewalled risk and dont use dodgy stuff as in quote above, plus train more devs as GMaxwell wrote about here
http://www.coindesk.com/gregory-maxwell-went-bitcoin-skeptic-core-developer/4. given that most of the real world already views a fixed supply of any currency as a liability, what feedback effects do you think a continuous destruction of scBTC from failed SC's will have on Bitcoin itself? please just don't say "it will only make our BTC go up!" i think the answer needs to acknowledge that it might be that the market views that negatively as a hopeless downward spiraling deflationary currency that continuously damages the merchant economy by encouraging hoarding. in this sense, i am drawing parallels to gold being a fairly fixed supply that for the most part nevers decreases.
I contend that widespread use of on-chain security, user controlled private keys, air-gapped hw wallets, and smart-contract business logic executed by the chain (not scam chains, but certified or written by people with competence and good intent) will reduce thefts relative to the governance model that has seen 50% failure rate and loss of perhaps $1bil to date.
About supply decreasing via mishap, another source of loss of coins is user backup failure. Happens all the time. I think there's possibility to use trustless bank/custodian where ownership reverts to you (or someone designated like your heirs or an offline key or a banking ombudsan or another bank) if they go bankrupt/freeze your assets.
will you sell SC's to govt's if asked?
My opinion is we dont need too many chains, as more asset types can be available on the same chain (its easier to write a smart-contract between assets natively on or pegged to the same chain). So I think a separate chain should be for something that cant co-exist with because its mutually exclusive or a different risk profile (say like zerocash or snark smart-contracts (very private and safe/efficient to verify arbitrarily complex contract!) with its dependence on novel crypto). I would therefore imagine it would more be to help people issue assets, or integrate an existing sidechain than to make someone there very own sidechain. I mean a chain should be a blockchain which implies decentralisation and neutrality from undue code influence etc. A company or government "owning" a chain seems like a bad idea, and probably doesnt make sense.
But I do think it would be interesting to have a government issue its electronic M0 directly onto a chain, which it would do with a secure hw signing key. The interesting part is that they could make a smart-monetary-policy eg committing to cap QE at 2%/year. Something like that might greatly improve the stability and exchange rate of a currency that is currently poorly run, because they'd be intentionally giving up control of moral hazard. Its not an alien concept to monetary policy because they often set eg mandates and limits, its just that in times of stress they break their own rules to their own currencies detriment.
Whether we'd want to consult for someone would depend on whether we think what they're proposing to do is non-evil for humans and for bitcoin.
you still didn't answer me as to why we should "trust" you and Blockstream when it goes against the very ethos of what Bitcoin is all about.
what does? modularising bitcoin and making a securely firewalled extension mechanism?
i posted above that there are several venture funds that have invested. how can they not want the std 10x return of their investment? those fund constituents do not just represent the viewpoint of their founder.
Sure I said something about profit here:
You should view blockstream as a sort of hybrid. We are developing FOSS open IP much as a not-for-profit would. But we are also aiming to make a profit by selling services, doing partnerships, advising integrators etc this is all complicated stuff and people need help to make it work. Like was said its kind of like Mozilla.
and
The quote didnt say not to make a profit it said to have a dual objective and compared the approach to Mozilla. Mozilla made plenty of profit (and is a hybrid incorporating both a for profit and a not-for-profit) and also did a good job of making the firefox browser a leading source of user ethos focussed innovation and features.
Greg Maxwell (nullc on reddit) wrote some about how blockstream plans to make profit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2k3u97/we_are_bitcoin_sidechain_paper_authors_adam_back/clhoo7dI dont think making a profit is a bad thing - to hire developers & QA and UX designers and maintain software and design protocols and figure out how to use smart-contracts and find business partnerships to make those available to users all takes money. As those are good outcomes, and require more money, you have to have a profit to fuel it, you cant rely on investors to keep putting in more rounds!
Its quite feasible to make money without being controlling, proprietary, centralising or evil. We certainly aim to try.
btw, you show your bias when you nitpick my trivial comment to tvbcof here w/o even acknowledging the disgusting, immature video he put up. i suggest it's b/c he supports your view:
Probably predisposed to side with the underdog (no pun intended:), problems with authority, libertarian you know how it goes. Nah its not for his views but cause you were trying to be rude/belittling. But chortle at the Chihuahua humping someones ankle video. Well you did kind of ask for it by saying "you're still that little dog who nips at my trouser bottoms" though, so its hard to complain
Adam
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