wildbunny

You don't need to 'claim' anything. It's written into the rules of the blockchain. You cannot change the rules like that and expect to have your blocks appended to the canonical chain.

I suppose you might argue that the amiga paved the way for the architecture of the PS2 - the copper chip ran a rudimentary display list, the blitter hardware accelerated graphics operations. But I wouldn't say there is a direct relationship... wait you're not talking about the CDTV, are you?

The GS (graphics chip) in the PS2 had a great hardware bug whereby if you turned off the z-test, it would never come back on again. You had to change the z mode to always pass to get around it.

It's gone down

404

Some more discussion on the topic over here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4459113.0

Agree completely. Nice paper, utterly useless in practice due to sybil attack.

edit: not only that, but it will be vulnerable to all kinds of history attacks for bootstrapping nodes

Can't read it due to their pay-wall, anyone post the copy?

It requires a majority of trustworthy nodes to be online - it cannot deal with a force majeure, such as a massive power cut.

Sorry, no it is not. There is no nash equilibrium in PoS at all. The only thing preventing it from collapsing completely is hidden centralisation in all the PoS protocols.

Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken.

You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive:

Quoted from my post linked below:

o) Network hashrate is the overall power of the network - in bitcoin, this is the computing power needed to generate a block.

o) Bitcoin employs a mining reward which creates a competition between miners to produce a block and claim their reward for doing so. Slower miners lose out to faster miners, but they still participate in the competition to produce a block because they stand a chance of winning occasionally.

o) This mining subsidy provides a positive incentive to miners to play by the rules, and encourages them not try to double spending, because they might as well claim the mining reward instead of trying to double spend which is often much more difficult than producing a single block.

o) The mining subsidy also encourages all miners to participate in the mining process, which gives an overall metric for total network hashing power, which you can then use to give an estimate of when it is safe to accept a transaction of a given size, as confirmed, because (on average), the block reward is equal to the electricity cost of mining that block. That means that when your transaction has been buried under enough blocks that the mining subsidy equals the transactions size, it is more or less safe to accept that transaction as confirmed.

Now, imagine the situation with no mining reward.

o) Instead of participating in a competition to win the block reward, miners have no positive incentive to participate anymore. They now are left with the negative incentive to try and double spend.

o) Since these miners are not contributing their hashing power to the network anymore, the overall hashrate of the network in unmeasurable, since these miners are quite likely to leave their ASICs in sleep mode until they want to double spend

o) With the network hash rate unmeasurable, there is no way to put an estimate on when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed.

When there is no way to estimate when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed, that currency is now useless because any transaction can potentially be reversed.

This is why both byteball and iota use trusted third parties to secure the network, but at that point, you might as well be using VISA.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1799665.msg20108439#...

Isn't stellar's consensus still the 'consensus' of one node owned by the company due to the fact that the design is totally broken?

I found that proof of burn actually was exactly equivalent to proof of stake in terms of overall security. I.e. not good enough.

I did a bunch of analysis on proof of burn, and came to the conclusion that it cannot work in practice because it relies on transactions in order to burn, which themselves are subject to consensus.

You can read my detailed analysis here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1182677.0

Cheers, Paul.

The easy way to express this is: cryptocurrencies are true, digital cash

Very narrow minded. Tens of thousands of games rely on flash, along with many movies and general history of the internet. Open souring it will preserve countless hours of lost work.

Bitcoin hasn't solved the scaling problem. All these BIPs are just short term fixes which don't address the core problem. I opened a discussion thread on bitcointalk hoping to catch the attention of the core developers, but it seems they don't read that forum anymore.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2036368.0

It has no countermeasures for Sybil attack. Therefore, the only trusted nodes in the Ripple network are owned by Ripple labs, making the entire currency much more like Visa than a real blockchain.

That's fair enough.

You are correct. However, this field is so new and so potentially disruptive that there are a lot of so called 'blockchain developers' inventing new cryptocurrecies which are unworkable, or essentially no different to VISA in terms of trust, who are convincing unwitting investors to part with large sums of cash because they don't understand the basics of what a cryptocurrency is. We don't need more of them. We need understanding.

Indeed. But there is a lot of talk about bitcoin and blockchain in general lately, and a lot of existing cryptocurrencies which are unworkable, created by people who want to get rich quick.

When you're talking about people's money, just following tutorials and piecing something together does not cut it.

In a p2p environment, timestamps are totally useless at proving when I sent you bitcoins. However, when I sent you bitcoins is fundamentally important when it comes to ordering transactions, because I can send you bitcoins, but also send them to myself after you accept them. If I can forge timestamps then this attack is trivial to pull off.

You need an analogue to elapsed time to solve this problem. Hashes in bitcoin are probabilistic, there is an expected number of hashes required to solve the PoW (on average). Each hash takes an amount of time that cannot be made faster, so you suddenly have an unforgeable, easily provable analogue to elapsed time.

Again, that's how it works, but not why it works. It bitcoin it is used as an unforgeable proxy for elapsed time.

This worries me. Bitcoin solved the double spend problem by using the LCR with PoW. That is the novel aspect which allowed cryptocurrencies to come into existence.

If you remove the LCR and PoW, all you are left with is a toy example which cannot work in practice.

What is needed is education about censensus design and bitcoin's implementation of the solution, rather than a 'how to guide' for building a basic linked list under the guise of 'blockchain'.

Cheers, Paul.

I'd like to direct interested readers to a thread containing a link to a draft paper I wrote about addressing these issues in a blockless DAG based cryptocurrency:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1992827.0

Cheers, Paul.

On the contrary, this is the major strength of the system.

If miners chose to mine on a chain that no-one wants, then everybody has to grudgingly go along with it, or cease to transact.

The longest chain is always the most valuable.

He misses the point that the developers do not control bitcoin; the miners control bitcoin. The developers suggest improvements which will only be adopted if the miners support those improvements.

The miner's interests are purely profit based, so they will not adopt changes which reduce their chance of profit.

This is interesting - but how can a browser serve incoming connection requests?