Bitcoin-NG: A Secure, Faster, Better Blockchain
hackingdistributed.com
hackingdistributed.com
and here: http://gnusha.org/bitcoin-wizards/2015-10-14.log
cross-post of https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3or365/bitcoinng_p...
I don't see Bitcoin dying unless (until?) it's discovered to have an incurable security flaw.
If people would rather use something else to trade with, bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade.
If bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade, it stops being a potentially good store of value.
If it stops being a potentially good store of value, it stops being something people want to speculate on.
If people don't want to speculate on it, the price crashes.
In other words, the whole value proposition of bitcoin rests on the idea that it is useful for trade.
In other words, that you'd rather use it than at least one of the set:
{credit cards, cash, paypal, regular wire transfers, wire transfers involving foreign currency exchange}.
That said---I have not read the Bitcoin-NG paper yet but others are saying it is highly centralized, which would make it a non-starter.
This is the key problem with moving away from bitcoin. Both parties have to accept whatever the new currency is. The real issue any of the alt coins face (and even bitcoin itself) is user adoption. People won't adopt a new currency just because it's good, it has to be popular/accepted.
Sure, if bitcoin were widely used, it would be very hard for something else to overtake it. But it's not widely used yet. We have not really reached that point. Something else can still be http and bitcoin can still be gopher.
That said, I am still speculating long-term on bitcoin becuase I don't think anybody can/will come out with something that is non-marginally better.
Bitcoin-NG is precisely as decentralized as Bitcoin. Whereas in Bitcoin, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that took place in the preceding 10 minutes, in NG, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that take place in the following 10 minutes.
How do nodes handle the sudden peaks in traffic when selected on the "round-robin" PoW scheme when load is high? How do the network handle the ever shifting connections (with TCP session setups and all), what's the topology?
Are you considering the effect of the current leader being attacked by 0-days,what do that do to the network when it gets hijacked?
What if the leader drops off or otherwise have connectivity issues?
Then again, if the lottery likelihood is a function of hashing power then maybe it's not so well distributed.
AFAIK, that's not possible. Secure hashing algorithms tend to fracture instead of completely break, so there will be some warning; to change to a new algorithm, simply more than 50% of the Bitcoin miners would have to mine on the chain that relies on that new algorithm, and it thus becomes "voted" in.
> AFAIK, that's not possible.
That's an incredibly stupid thing to say. Please don't comment on topics you're ignorant on; you're spreading misinformation.
Obviously the hashing algorithm is one of the stronger points in bitcoin's implementation; that's completely irrelevant.
"It is worth noting that there is no conflict or contradiction between NG and Blockstream’s sidechains; in fact, Blockstream’s pegs allow for moving bitcoins among chains, and such chains can benefit from improved performance using Bitcoin-NG. In future work, we plan to expand on how to incrementally deploy Bitcoin-NG on top of the current Bitcoin network."
Seems like both could be applied to Ethereum or Dashcoin? Kind of painful to think about this space these days.
Lightning network allows for off-chain transactions, so it's separate and complementary.
From the whitepaper "Miners with capacity smaller than 1/4 of the total network are incentivized to follow the protocol."
Yet, if any two of the five biggest mining pools collude, https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs they'd already be over 1/4th of the network. And if three or more collude, they could take over the entire thing.
When Ittay and I discovered selfish mining [1], we were quite worried about the size of mining pools at the time. Even though we also came up for a fix against selfish mining, the fix only prohibits selfish mining for pools <25%, and we also found that there can never be a fix to prohibit selfish mining for pools >=33%.
Things looked grim for a while, and we played a role in pushing back against GHash when they exceeded 51% around April of '14. The only tool that the community had at the time to break up large miners was just social pressure.
In part as a reaction to GHash crossing of the 51% line, we [2] and Andrew Miller et al [3] came up with techniques based on non-outsourceable puzzles. This is a cool technique that would make it difficult for miners to run large open pools. It does require a potentially disruptive change to Bitcoin, so it's good to have in one's back pocket if the mining situation gets out of hand, but it's not something you want to deploy.
Luckily, Ittay's subsequent work on the Miner's Dilemma [4] discovered an incredibly interesting result: it pays for miners to attack other miners who are running large open pools. This puts natural pressure on miners to not open themselves up to the public and accept people into their pools willy nilly. This in turn is, I think, fantastic news, as it means that the problem may take care of itself, at least when it comes to open pools.
Overall, the distribution of mining power is a point of concern for everyone in the Bitcoin space. The situation looked bleak at first, as it looked like there were few mechanisms to keep open pools from growing ever larger. But now we have a strong technical solution and a natural process that is well-characterized. Large solo miners still remain an ongoing concern.
Hope this is useful.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243
[2] http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/06/18/how-to-disincentivi...
[3] https://cs.umd.edu/~amiller/nonoutsourceable_full.pdf
[4] http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/12/03/the-miners-dilemma/
If bitcoin ever makes it big, IMO, it'll be large corporations running mining operations. Just as the general population does most of its services through huge corporations, mining bitcoin will probably be done by them as well.
What do you think of Proof of Stake systems? Are they feasible? I'm working on one, btw, with a shared spending pool and an ability to vote to spend the pool, and to change the code of the official client, thereby changing the rules of the system.
@stanga as you are one of the authors, could you give us a tl;dr as to how this is possible?
What if the leader goes down? What if 2 leaders get accidentally elected in the wake of that?
What if the elected leader is a bad agent?
I don't like non-leaderless decentralization schemes. All you're doing is adding mobility to centralization.
Keep in mind also that NG would be layered on top of Bitcoin, so everything that works in Bitcoin will work in NG as well.
every other scheme that people suggest replacing it with runs into difficulties because you can't predict the amount of time (roughly) it takes to do the work. in Bitcoin's case, you CAN predict (roughly) the amount of time it will take to roll 3 1's in a row when repeatedly rolling a 6-sided die.