What is so interesting is, he has few choices for coins to review. And he chooses BitBay. For those that don't know, Theymos is the owner of Bitcointalk, Bitcoin Reddit and Bitcoin.org
I always figured he didn't like me as he never responded to messages a while back. Yet he has our coin on there to look at. That maybe is a good thing.
His review of ETH is pretty much identical to what I've been saying for years. But it is a gross exaggeration to give them a 1 out of 100. No matter how much I protest about ETH and it's disregard for scaling, they did do completely original and interesting code! He says solidity works like magic and gives it a 1?
I guess they don't call it "altcointalk". Why do I get the feeling he really doesn't like altcoins?
Even at this point to give Bitcoin 100 isn't really true at this point because from an unbiased purely protocol perspective, it doesn't have everything it needs to scale. That is like giving the Alpha of software a better score than the beta or release. But I understand why he did that, after all it has inspired the dawn of an entire industry!
What really I find to be wrong is that he gives Monero a 4 out of 100 and then proceeds to give Bytecoin the ORGINAL a 0 out of 100 saying Monero was worth more and thus deserving of a better score and yet he says that Litecoin is a 0 because its a clone!! So how can the clone of Bytecoin be better than Bytecoin which was responsible for the innovation in the first place?! Just because it's more popular? Is it all about money in the end? By that virtue Dogecoin is better than Namecoin? Life isn't a popularity contest.
So with that said he seems to value decentralization and scalability. Which is great! So he might truly value what we have done here at BitBay and I will explain why.
Everything I have done at this point has been to scale and keep this secure and decentralized.
Double deposit escrow does to law and agreement as to what Bitcoin did to cash. It removes the need for a 3rd party.
Two party escrow benefits almost every industry as agreement is what drives society.
It doesn't bloat the chain at all, it simply leverages multisignature.
Now on one hand he can argue that this is not anything Bitcoin can't do but that point would not be valid because I started in BitHalo and always wanted this to be cross-platform so all coins could use it. This is software, a fully immersive contracting experience totally peer to peer and there is nothing like it in the industry.
The question being does double deposit advance cryptography industry as a whole? You bet! It reveals the way crypto cash can be applied and solve real world problems. This is the first time in history a contract can be enforced without a gun as there is instant karma built into the contract.
The next feature decentralized markets he should like because we don't use the blockchain at all!! We instead use Bitmessage an entirely separate peer to peer protocol that saves messages for a couple days and passes them around groups as users decipher the messages that only apply to them.
The drawbacks to Bitmessage are that it does POW which can't be too easy or too hard so the network is somewhat possible to attack. HOWEVER...
I have proposed to use the Bitbay blockchain using checklocktimeverify to temporarily lock up coins per kilobyte for each message sent. This prevents spam completely!! It scales beautifully. And it unties two previously unrelated protocols. We don't need that yet as Bitmessage is still growing as is our markets but this is our blockchain innovation we have in our pocket.
The next drawback to Bitmessage is it's own bloat however, because networks form groups I think you can easily break the network into pieces because the data is actually trivial and doesn't need to be permanently stored. This means large nodes and server nodes can form groups, users can form smaller groups and they can just relay what is searched for on the markets by taking advantage of whitelists and subscriptions to channels. The anonymity is good because it is impossible to prove you are able to decrypt a message (plausible deniability)
Messages are sent to the markets by a payload and signed hash as well as pastebin for images to relieve bloat on Bitmessage. Thus the message is immutable and the signature outside of the message prevents malleability. But again, this is non-permanent data so it doesn't matter if it's hash is malleable.
The thing that is lovely about 2 party escrow is each party verifies their own half of the deal making hacking impossible.
It scales, it solves a problem and it keeps the ideology in Bitcoin in tact.
So as for the blockchain itself we use proof of stake and he might argue that this is easy to calculate a block in advance to attack. We know this and believe it can be solved by having a more random block selection process. Not so tough.
As for scaling I think two things are needed, first I've spoken about a combination of pruning and checkpoints. If all nodes followed the same protocol and were able to store enough data about the past to prevent spoofing I think the solution is very simple. It's not over-engineered. Maybe a decentralized checkpoint system can be added.
The POS 3 protocol allows spending the stake from P2SH and this means to stake we spend. This allowed us to add voting and by voting we can agree on forks as we did previously in our large community vote. If only Bitcoin held a vote years ago!
Last scaling issue preventing VISA scale is bandwidth and volume of transactions. I have seen the DPOS model where less nodes are chosen to power massive transaction loads. And it works. But it is still centralized and prone to political manipulation. That is why I have played with the idea of sharing the workload among nodes and peers in a deterministic way. As peers might form groups who share the work load similar to a mining pool. If you combine that with DPOS then I think you have something really good. Especially if a good pruning technique is added. You get your VISA scale (maybe).
So what actual blockchain innovations have we done? Well other than a few POS innovations not many. But look at what we have done to AVOID putting unnecessary bullshit on the chain?! To that I say there may be no other coin that can even touch us. We found and developed protocols that allows the decentralized markets. Two entire layers for data combined as one. Then we pioneered a contracting system that has almost unlimited use cases and solves a problem of deception and theft truly stopping those things dead in their tracks. A historical first.
And this has taken me several years to code and accomplish, it wasn't easy. Especially because the temptation to bloat the chain like ETH was there if I wanted it. And unlike Bitcoin or Zcash, I didn't have a big team of coders behind me.
There is an GREAT blockchain innovation on the way, and it is our ace in the hole. The one thing that plagues Bitcoin is the volatility!
We solve that with a DYNAMIC PEG. A "rolling" peg similar to a crawling peg. Some guy chimed in about BitUSD and how the market manipulation makes it a bad long. But with our peg we suffer no such problem because we are only controlling supply/liquidity.
The fact that our peg makes two assets frozen and liquid coins where the frozen coins are only different in speed is a frikkin awesome feature many of our communities favorites. We avoid bloat by having a separate database for tagging and tracking inputs and only report state changes to inputs where obvious liquidity changes are assumed by nodes. Fees are tracked too to avoid the loss of liquidity at a certain range. The idea is pure, simple and really can't get simpler when it comes to market pegs.
The rolling peg needs no third parties, no custodians, no political influence, is fully decentralized and isn't prone to market manipulation
It replaces the market maker with technology. If you allow unlimited changes to the supply daily and unlimited interest then you can even force a hard peg with an algorithm.
For investors we will be doing the changes in supply by voting AND algorithm. This may favor the stakers who can vote but it is going to allow a little speculation and thus interest in the tech itself where a hard peg may go unnoticed.
The peg operates by enforcing it on the time of spending. The frozen coins are not immovable, they are slowed by one month. It is not necessary to use checklocktimeverify to do so as miners will keep track anyways. The "slowed" coins allow for bond like instruments, liquidity swaps which are very similar to trustless loans and futures depending on the motive to swap. This creates in my opinion a massive paradigm shift in the APPLICATIONS of crypto.
So was my innovation a better mathematical crypto algoritm? A zero knowledge proof anon system? A codebase no derived from Bitcoin? No.
But does it revolutionize and pioneer new ideas that have true real world use case? Yes.
Serverless markets, 2 party agreements with no escrow, crawling peg applied to cryptocurrency
Solving major problems of decentralization, agreement/enforcement/contract/bloat, volatility and the ability to emulate large markets from a small market!
To protect the network you can even build a disincentive to lie about a tx because we are forcing nodes to spend to stake and have their input as collateral if they do betray the protocol. This is a Vitalik idea that I was actually fond of.
To scale proposing the following: Pruning, sharing workload, checklocktimeverify funds per byte
The lightning network can also be implemented if needed when made WITHOUT SEGWIT. We would choose not to add segwit because Bitcoin is labeling payments as "True" and thus allowing the miners to control unbelievable power of the protocol at whim. Segwit is a hack that wasn't needed for lightning. As malleability could have been solved by having users sign the txid hash requiring a fork which they were too scared to do. In turn they centralize Bitcoin to the miners and POW is a horrid waste of power, generating more power than entire countries just to generate little hashes.
Lightning network is potentially better with frozen funds like in our crawling peg because that can be used as collateral in the 2 of 2 making it more decentralized in a sense giving access to potentially more holders and links. After all why not make use of the funds not in use?
And the same goes for sharing the stake among nodes. Why not make use of the nodes that aren't doing anything? Here we would have potentially 1000s of nodes wasting their time on hashes when they should be verifying transactions!!
Now based on his (generous?) reviews of other altcoins we shouldn't expect more than a big "0" or maybe he will give us a "-1" because he might mention our past when the founders left us(which has nothing to do with what was accomplished here). And to do so would be to ignore years of blood sweat and tears poured into Halo and we can laugh it off.
Or heck, maybe he really sinks his teeth into what we are doing here and says "Hey, that is pretty cool!" ... a man can dream. It must be nice to be accepted.
