241–250 of 289 posts
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Yet another reason why Proof of Stake is destined to outcompete Proof of Work. ;)
Proof of Stake is a perpetual motion machine. You can't safely tie consensus to something (stake) which is determined by consensus. That's circular reasoning and ungrounded.
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* Trustless time stamping to proof that you had certain information at a certain point in time without revealing it https://opentimestamps.org/ * (depending on your stance on personal liberty) censorship resistant, pseudonymous e-cash/e-gold (Bitcoin)
> censorship resistant, pseudonymous e-cash/e-gold (Bitcoin) Bitcoin not only doesn’t deliver on those claims, it’s actively dangerous because it leaves an immutable public record of your activities, as numerous court cases have shown. There’s a reason why the mob doesn’t publish their ledgers. “Censorship resistant” is also a complex claim since the network is trivially blocked as a whole, and the inability to compl…
It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
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> you just need your entire country to have a total meltdown That happens more often than one might think. There are quite a few countries, that are currenly on the brink of collapse, so it is not unlikely that one or more of them will adopt a cryptocurrency some time in the not to far-off future.
I agree, but it's a super narrow niche for most people. Definitely one much smaller than the current hype for blockchains.
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How can there be coins with $5M+ market cap where the cost of a 51% attack is $3.00 ?? In an efficient market, thieves should just immediately attack that. Or is the benefit too low?
Because the market cap isn't truly $5M. That figure uses the naive calculation of "whatever coins sold for most recently times the total number of outstanding coins". But if you tried to sell some significant fraction of the outstanding coins then the sale price would plummet, and you'd never actually reach $5M total. The actual depth of the order book at any given moment isn't close to $5M, plus a lot of outstanding…
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...
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> censorship resistant, pseudonymous e-cash/e-gold (Bitcoin) Bitcoin not only doesn’t deliver on those claims, it’s actively dangerous because it leaves an immutable public record of your activities, as numerous court cases have shown. There’s a reason why the mob doesn’t publish their ledgers. “Censorship resistant” is also a complex claim since the network is trivially blocked as a whole, and the inability to compl…
He said pseudonymous, not anonymous... It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
That's why I said it's dangerous: telling people a word which sounds like anonymous but actually means “irrepudiable proof of identity” is setting them up to make decisions under the belief that they are closer to anonymous than they actually are. Given how proponents like to proclaim benefits for people in countries with repressive governments, that's just irresponsible.
> It's censorship resistant in its use. It only becomes an issue in terms of actually cashing out -- but that's not necessarily required.
What does that even mean? A government can block it easily because the design requires you to be on the network and the lack of anonymity means that anyone who attempts to bypass those restrictions has valid reasons to fear reprisal.
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Due to probabilistic nature of most PoW protocols, you don't actually need to have the chain with the most work. Attacker can keep trying till they are are lucky, with less than 50% hashpower.
In the same way you can endlessly throw money at the craps table until you get lucky and bankrupt the casino?
> The Milky Way could crash into another galaxy way sooner than we thought
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When a president tells the governor of the central bank not to raise interest rates despite the bank board's best professional judgement, is that considered an attack?
And then the governor of the central bank doesn't because they don't take their orders from the executive branch, because they're a private entity? That's actually the whole reason they're a private entity -- to separate monetary policy from politics. Them being a private entity was what Satoshi was mad about, and yet here it is, saving our asses. What if Satoshi was ... wrong about everything?
Private entities still practice consensus. Just because one can't inspect or participate in the consensus doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
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Most proof of work coins use unique hashing algorithms and the miners are custom-designed ASICs that are extremely efficient at that one specific algorithm. If per chance, your coin uses the same algorithm as Bitcoin [ SHA-256(SHA-256(Block Header)) ], a small portion of the much larger Bitcoin mining community could turn their miners toward the smaller coin and quickly overwhelm their network to perform a 51% attack…
Doing the attack tends to drive said shitcoin's value to zero, so the incentive to do it is often not there.
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Yeah, except a good portion of the errors made in those 200k years at least had the excuse of being new. Blockchain stands apart as repeating every single problem the financial system solved over the last 300 years Forgetting then repeating the mistakes of the past is yet another long standing hallmark of human beings. In every age, in every place, the deeds of people remain the same. Turns out civil society (i. e. l…
This comment sounds like Erlich Bachman on Silicon Valley .
I've never seen SV. After I was assaulted over an iPhone project and complicated living situation, my ophthalmologist urged me to watch it. I actually stayed in a place billed as a "Hacker Hostel" when I first got to San Francisco. There is indeed a lot of fodder here for someone like Mike Judge.
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What you're missing is the process by which new blocks are added onto an existing chain. Let's say that you take the "true" Bitcoin or ETC blockchain, if you want to think of it that way, and now multiple actors are proposing to add blocks onto it, potentially multiple blocks. Which one of those additions wins? The one that's the longest and has the most work behind it - that one wins. If you propose an addition that…
> When multiple branches exist on the blockchain, some consensus process has to reconcile which of them wins. That process is that miners select the longest chain. I've been arguing that this is a design mistake, and that the following selection algorithm would be superior: - Instead of selecting the longest chain, select the longest chain which does not alter any blocks which I, personally, consider permanent. Robin…