More Bitshares Greed

[StanLarimer]

This is just a space holder answer...

While we are waiting I'd like to add few words to the discussion above.

The humankind knows several ways to counteract Sybil attack and all of them can be categorized into two distinct groups - centralized certification and resource testing. BitShares uses an interesting approach, it's an alloy of the both, people can do their own certification and trust becomes a resource here. Quite often alloys have better qualities than their separate components, you guys should spend more time on formalization and analysis of your method to get rid of big part of accusations voiced upthread. Perhaps you could borrow some stuff from http://www.math.cmu.edu/~adf/research/SybilGuard.pdf, that paper sounds similar to BitShares delegates without bells and whistles.

Bytemaster asked me to post this for him (since I have a keyboard right now and he has an iPhone).  He thought your metaphor of an alloy was quite good.  He admits that he is "an engineer and not inclined to academic rigor", so his approach is to stand on the shoulders of giants, innovate empirically, watch to see how it works, and adapt.  

I know engineers, they LOVE to change things.
-- Commander Leonard 'Bones' McCoy, M.D.

This is an opportunity for someone who is inclined toward rigor to step in and become famous by laying the underpinning theory for everybody.  It would probably be more generally accepted if somebody from outside the BitShares community did it anyway.
  

The most important thing to remember is that
the source of the decentralization is not in the 101 nodes but in how they are selected.

I envision that a deep thinker with suitable academic credentials could write an award-winning paper with a title something like,

Engineering design principles
for distributed, fault-tolerant, self-organizing, trustless systems
using a continuously reconfiguring ring of transparently auditable signing agents
selected and monitored by reputation-based stakeholder consensus
in a fully-decentralized delegated proof of stake network.

We would certainly study such a paper if someone were to produce it!

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[Daedelus]

So Bitshares chose 101 nodes so the network with two chains would always have a majority, 51 to 50.

When asked "What if we get [three chains of] 34 + 34 + 33?" the answer is...

He [Bytemaster] admits that he is "an engineer and not inclined to academic rigor",

It seems you are saying there is no mechanism for regaining consensus in Bitshares for when there are more than two competing chains? If you don't have an answer to "what if we get 34 + 34 + 33?", then it would follow that there can't be a mechanism to resolve it in the protocol?


If that is true, how would any consensus ever be regained?





(hadn't planned to expand on my previous 'yikes!', but the mods didn't like just that on its own)

[bytemaster]

So Bitshares chose 101 nodes so the network with two chains would always have a majority, 51 to 50.

When asked "What if we get [three chains of] 34 + 34 + 33?" the answer is...

He [Bytemaster] admits that he is "an engineer and not inclined to academic rigor",

It seems you are saying there is no mechanism for regaining consensus in Bitshares for when there are more than two competing chains? If you don't have an answer to "what if we get 34 + 34 + 33?", then it would follow that there can't be a mechanism to resolve it in the protocol?


If that is true, how would any consensus ever be regained?


(hadn't planned to expand on my previous 'yikes!', but the mods didn't like just that on its own)

The academic vs engineer was in regards to the B. Generals problem.

If there are more than 2 forks then the delegates cooperate to resolve it.  We could automate it for most cases by picking the chain with the highest total shareholder approval where you sum the approval of the delegates producing blocks on each chain.  This would resolve the tie in almost all cases.   In practice, delegates in the smallest group would pick one of two largest groups.  IE: the 33 group would want to pick a horse as soon as possible so they can start getting paid again.   Eventually you would get 50/51 and then the losers would have to join the majority.   

There is no reason for a delegate to produce blocks on a minority fork unless he believes the majority fork is "bad" and is hoping the shareholders will vote new delegates to support his fork. 

[StanLarimer]

TURNING A NEW PAGE

Thanks largely to the recent professional example set by Come-from-Beyond, this thread has taken a decidedly more civil tone and therefore may be a candidate for us to engage in serious discussions with a community other than our own. Having read some of our sincere responses above, perhaps some of the many repeat viewers of this thread are a bit more inclined to engage with the BitShares community as potential friends.  We hope so.

We are often, correctly, criticized for not vetting ideas here on bitcointalk.  This is primarily because others were nice enough to set up a dedicated forum at bitsharestalk.org and we wanted to support that generosity by spending a lot of our time there.  But I'll admit, part of the reason has been the same reason people learn not to touch a hot stove.  After getting burned a few times, the natural reaction is to stop touching it!

While this thread started out as an unfortunate attempt to inflict damage, it has thankfully now turned into something else entirely.  After 3500+ views it has become a nice little cross-pollinating mini-forum of its own where some good exchanges are beginning to take place.  We want to support that.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and post an article for discussion that Bytemaster just released.   The article is intended to share some the author's insights on a somewhat neutral topic in an edifying and professional way.  We hope you find it worth your time.  We would value all serious comments.   Those who have asked for a way to comment on Bytemaster's blog directly, you now have a test case before you:

Is Fractional Reserve Banking a Ponzi Scheme?

Who knows?  If this works out, maybe we can continue to honor this community with useful content you can review on your own home turf!   I certainly would enjoy that.  

[DecentralizeEconomics]

[brekyrself]

What makes BitShares attractive is that you have a developer who actually understands economics.  The blog posts are quite refreshing and serve as a reminder about the immense potential this experiment has.

I do not see many other crypto dev's that combine immense economic understanding with the ability to code.

[bytemaster]

Looks like a false flag attack to me.

[Daedelus]

A flase flag isn't needed. You fellas are doing a fine job on your own  


An aeronautical engineer of a new airplane design was asked "How do you know it will stay up if one of its three engines starts to malfunction?"

"I don't." came the reply. "When it comes to flight, I prefer to innovate empirically. But if you could work it out, I would be very interested to know. You could be famous.."


I can't imagine Come-from-Beyond will be back until someone has worked it out and it is documented, backed with analysis and not analogies or hand waving. It would be a waste of his time.


I will leave you guys to it.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I can't imagine Come-from-Beyond will be back until someone has worked it out and it is documented, backed with analysis and not analogies or hand waving. It would be a waste of his time.

I'm not a fan of whitepapers and math, I prefer modelling.

[StanLarimer]

Indeed, modeling is a key component.

Here is a picture of a very small portion of the F-16C flight control system.  I spent a lot of time modeling it myself.

I can assure you that every gain, filter, and look-up table function was derived empirically by adapting earlier working designs, modeling them with experimentally determined wind tunnel data, observing the results, tweaking the design to remove undesirable artifacts, dropping in ad-hoc feedback loops and gain schedules, and iterating with tens of thousands of hours of simulations until everything was tuned up just right for first flight.

Over the next several years of flight testing, more and more experimental results were collected as the flight envelope was gradually expanded.  More and more ad-hoc experimentally derived changes and upgrades were introduced to tune the system.

In the history of manned flight I have never seen a Flight Readiness Review Board say, "Sorry son, you ain't a flyin' that thing until you get me a scholarly paper with an elegant closed form mathematical proof that fits on a single sheet of paper and has reached consensus on at least three different internet forums."

 

[Daedelus]

Unless you want run the risk of some seriously p!ssed people later on, it may be wise to inform your investors that this is the approach you take in crypto.

Then they can't say that you didn't warn them.

[Newmine]

Since this is way of topic, I changed the title to better reflect my sentiment and the preceding posts.

[StanLarimer]

Unless you want run the risk of some seriously p!ssed people later on, it may be wise to inform your investors that this is the approach you take in crypto.

Then they can't say that you didn't warn them.

Every step of the design and development and testing process has been an open book and subject to intense scrutiny at bitsharestalk.org.  We take the aerospace industry approach not the ivory tower approach.

Warnings about the developmental nature of the product are present in the software agreement everyone approves when they first load the software.  Similar warnings are permanently pinned to the top of the General Discussion thread at bitsharestalk.org.

I would rather fly in an aircraft designed by engineer than a theoretician, but that's just me. 

[Daedelus]

I would rather fly in an aircraft designed by engineer than a theoretician, but that's just me.  

Why do you think you have to chose one or the other? Sorry, I changed my mind  I'm not that interested in the answer.

[EvilDave]

I'd like to have 'Gun Compensation' built into NXT, actually.



Stan,  if you get a moment.......

On the question of 'better' tech.....this is something that only time and exposure to the real world can truly decide.
No matter how tightly engineered, mistakes and exploits are always going to be present in any new code.


 

[StanLarimer]

Agreed!  We're all just having fun here.

Crypto is a rapidly advancing field and there are many paths to success.  I would never want to discourage someone from trying to make an advancement that benefits everyone.  (I remember Copernicus and Galileo had a little trouble with that nonsense about the earth revolving around the sun.)

As I've said before - Our challenge is who can put together a reliable system that customers like and that provides a profitable return for investors.  There is room for many such systems.   Other's seek systems that meet other philosophical objectives.

So we all don't even have the same objectives - how can we expect us to agree on a single solution?

In school we argued over whether electrical engineers or mechanical engineers were the Highest Life Form.

 

[StanLarimer]

I'd like to have 'Gun Compensation' built into NXT, actually.

That's an excellent example of an ad-hoc design that doesn't really have an elegant closed form solution.
When you fire the gun there was an annoying tendency to pitch up.
So some clever engineer figured out a little ad-hoc cross-feed to deflect the elevator channel to compensate.

This would be comparable to us tweaking the market rules to require speculators to cover their shorts within 30 days in order to aid liquidity for sellers of bitUSD in a young market.

There are dozens of such examples that can only be tested in live action.  Just like you never really know how that artificial heart is gonna work till you try in on a real person - or what's going to really happen when you fire the Apollo's third stage engine for trans-lunar injection.

[Crestington]

Arguing about which is better, NXt, Bitshares or Nubits/Nushares?

I like all of them! and I also like BlackCoin, HoboNickels, PeerCoin, ShadowCoin, PandaCoin, CryptoNote, and even DogeCoin!

Some are more profitable in the long-run than others, a Coin can have good tech or do good things but still be a bad investment. Only way to really tell if something is going to work long-term is to run with it in a live environment, no theory can match actual market conditions.

[ArticMine]

Arguing about which is better, NXt, Bitshares or Nubits/Nushares?

I like all of them! and I also like BlackCoin, HoboNickels, PeerCoin, ShadowCoin, PandaCoin, CryptoNote, and even DogeCoin!

Some are more profitable in the long-run than others, a Coin can have good tech or do good things but still be a bad investment. Only way to really tell if something is going to work long-term is to run with it in a live environment, no theory can match actual market conditions.

The more I look at proof of stake the more I see banks and wall street under a different name. Something tells me the regulators will eventually reach the same conclusion. So I will stick to proof of work coins. If one wants to diversify into proof of stake one can always buy shares in a bank. I like XBT, XMR and NMC right now.

[Crestington]

Arguing about which is better, NXt, Bitshares or Nubits/Nushares?

I like all of them! and I also like BlackCoin, HoboNickels, PeerCoin, ShadowCoin, PandaCoin, CryptoNote, and even DogeCoin!

Some are more profitable in the long-run than others, a Coin can have good tech or do good things but still be a bad investment. Only way to really tell if something is going to work long-term is to run with it in a live environment, no theory can match actual market conditions.

The more I look at proof of stake the more I see banks and wall street under a different name. Something tells me the regulators will eventually reach the same conclusion. So I will stick to proof of work coins. If one wants to diversify into proof of stake one can always buy shares in a bank. I like XBT, XMR and NMC right now.

I like Monero's anonymity but dislike the amount of Bloat created, I mentioned Cryptonote over Monero due to liking the underlying idea of the tech over the specific Coin. Why NameCoin? I haven't heard anything on NameCoin in forever.