Bitcoin mining hash rate drops as blackouts instituted in China

In the original comment I mention my project and point to resources for learning more. I don't know why you think I am "weasel-wording, pussyfooting or hand-waving" when what is in fact happening is that we are having this discussion in a place that is not exactly optimal for writing pages and pages of explanations but rather for high-level discussion (which is necessarily brief on details but may link to resources).

I will be the first to admit that what I am doing is not fully worked out yet. Then again you are familiar with research work so you know things take a while to become polished enough to stand up to the "surface level scrutiny" even if the ideas may have merit from the beginning. The fact that I am working in the open and engaging people like you in discussion should not be considered "weasel-wording" or whatever slur you come up with.

You claim I am contradicting myself yet you do not elaborate on how so. I have already given you the argument for why it is not a contradiction (global consensus happens eventually due to convergence and "lazy" in computer science is another way to say "demand driven" - i.e. we converge as much as we need to in each "neighbourhood" of the network, the sheaf reference should further enhance your mental image of what is going on).

If you want to go into details with me and discuss things more thoroughly then I suggest you join the datalisp channel on telegram. I would be happy to hear your criticism and try to understand better in which ways I may be lacking. After all, what we all want is better systems of governance and if you are intrigued by this approach (or rather; high level description of a possible approach) then from my point of view our interests are aligned.

Woah there buddy, speak for yourself, and only yourself. You may be terrible at politics, but I can assure you, not every engineer is.

Also, you are the one who's trying to make the case that the ability to make a derivative work of Bitcoin means that PoW has somehow failed. I'd say it's just the opposite -- the fact that one chain has a lot more PoW than the other is a very strong reading of the collective affinities borne by each chains' stakeholders. That's something you couldn't measure in pre-Bitcoin p2p systems. If anything, it means political shenanigans are harder to come by -- in order to legitimately claim one chain is more well-received than another other, you have to pony up actual energy. Hype, paid followers, ad blitzes, charismatic leaders, etc. only get you so far.

> You’re doing it right now by calling a specific chain a “pretender”.

Bitcoin came first. BCash, BSV, etc. are derivative works, not the original. Bitcoin has nearly two orders of magnitude of hashes per second behind it than the rest. Each project styles itself as "Bitcoin."

These are all facts. My characterization of these other systems as "pretenders" is meant to convey these facts, and nothing more.

> If PoW actually worked as advertised, none of these games would be necessary.

Bitcoin is still Bitcoin, derivative works notwithstanding, but people will believe whatever they want at the end of the day. Honestly, I don't care, because as of right now, far more people believe that the original Bitcoin is the Bitcoin, as evidenced by its significantly higher PoW.

Either party A and B decide (off-network) to vote together, or party A pays party B to vote in the same direction. I don't see a way to solve the problem. Crypto is next-generation wealth redistribution technology, but it is likely that "true decentralization" is a utopia. At the end of the day, people are gonna listen to their family and friends before anyone else, hence vote polarization and pockets of centralization.

First we take canonical S-expressions (made by Ron Rivest for cryptographic signing) as the syntax of the "language" (again it's primarily a data-interchange format meant to be used to build distributed systems).

We enforce the restriction that the csexps must have versioned operators, that is (2:op1:0...) would be a the operation `op` and version `0`, the version is a natural number.

That's it for the data interchange format, now for the semantics of the language.

As I have been saying the primary idea is to use propagator networks (propnets). The name of datalisp comes from datafun which is an extension of datalog. Datalog is something you are probably familiar with, it's not turing complete and is a constructive logic programming language that uses "relations" and postulated "facts" to infer new "facts" - i.e. it builds out a transitive closure of sorts.

Datafun takes this and tries to extend it as much as possible without becoming turing complete, so rather than being limited to the boolean lattice of normal logic it uses any lattice and monotone functions, e.g. a propnet. However it tries to do type inference and be a "programming language".

One nice property of datalog is that the evaluation semantics coincide with the shortest vector path algorithm used to do routing on the internet, except datalog is declerative rather than imperative so it's an interesting way to do routing. The idea of datalisp is to make the "XPath of canonical S-expressions" be a datafun-ish language that can then also do the routing.

Now the reason this has anything to do with cryptocurrencies is based on the claim that the internet is a propnet where each place is a "max-signal lattice". The idea being that each user tries to put the computer into a state that most aligns with their intent (`max` over a total order - in this case ordered by "signal" - is a lattice), therefore they will not choose to persist messages that are spam i.e. messaging in the network is monotone (at the limit you have security and only choose to replace information if it rewards you with higher signal).

The goal of the datalisp network is to make this intuition concrete. There is a lot of details but this is the general gist.

So the anti-sybil mechanism in the network is called "proof of trust" we make participants in the network sign their messages and include a prediction of the signal-vs-noise of their message. Peers in the network will have a prior how much to trust the self-evaluation of this key that they then use to order the message.

Second order byzantine fault tolerance is a class of problems and the representative problem we try to solve (i.e. a "second order decentralization complete problem") is deciding whether to merge a patch and rebuild your system in a byzantine setting. If you can do that then you can of course also do a ledger that simulates some formal language. This is a fancy way to say we want a way to do updates in a distributed system with no single source of truth.

The consensus mechanism is based in lattice theory, we have "join consensus" which is a race of sorts, that is you can always merge a patch ahead of the network if you like (stay on the "bleeding edge" so to speak) and then there is a "meet consensus" which is based on the avalanche algorithm and is used to move up the bottom and collapse all patches (or more generally; metadata) into its state.

So the semantics of datalisp end up being something similar to "probabilistic datafun" if you are familiar with semi-naive datalog evaluation semantics then it's a bit like that except we also have a cutoff w.r.t. how much confidence we are willing to tolerate to use a fact / inference. Instead of programming datalisp in a text editor it is more like a graphql of sorts, it /is/ the internet, or rather it reifies the propnet datastructure. The reason we care so much about canonicality and consensus is so that we can take advantage of content addressing.

I have some ideas about building on top of this framework mixnets and simulations of different political systems, then the idea is to do composition via constant function market makers since they are convex and therefore solve the tragedy of the commons (local optimization is global optimization). Since the network is decentralized you can be byzantine, that is you can make your own identifiers in datalisp (each operator has an infinite namespace due to versioning, we use the probabilistic logic programming and metadata gossiping in the network to find out what schema the data is supposed to fit, if there is a namespace clash we form a local consensus to re-version one of the clashing names to the first unused version).

The properties of lattices allow you to "zoom out" of such echo chamber bickering.. this is how anti-sybil works...

There's a lot of ideas basically, I hope you can see the general picture of what I am planning.

The comparison with illegal mj grow operation breaks down because long-term profit margins on mining collapse to very small percentages, so risking prison for that would be idiotic, especially as legal operators (that eg. enforce some government blacklists) would have lower running costs due to not having to pretend they are something else. In addition, contrary to a mj grow op, you have to order asics from Taiwan/China at least once every few years which would be very hard to hide (gpu mining is going away).

This even assumes that you can order profitable asics at all, indefinitely in the future. The market is structured in such a way that really big mining companies are incentivized to make their own asics - the design of a sha256 asic is relatively trivial (compared to pretty much all other chips) and ordering directly from TSMC or Samsung would save them a fortune. For all we know, it's already happening - it's not like any mining op has an incentive to tell.

The deciding factor is that in PoW a majority can force anything on a minority - smart regulation would enforce blacklists via orphaning once compliant miners achieve a comfortable hashrate majority, totally killing the non-compliant operations. Legal miners would have an enormous financial incentive to comply: orphaning a minority of hashrate directly increases their revenue. In the most extreme case, states could start mining themselves to take control of the industry - something that's borderline impossible in PoS, because they would have to buy the staking tokens from the market, and there's simply not enough supply available at any reasonable prices.

Then there's the defense issue: assume a PoW chain has been captured in such a way. If the PoW algorithm relies on asics, users could fork to a gpu PoW, but there's no second move - nothing can be done to fork away hostile gpu miners, short of going away from PoW entirely. Potentially, this could be used to kill _all_ PoW blockchains - a state first makes enough asics to obtain a majority, then kills the chain by exclusively mining empty blocks and orphaning everything else, then repeats the process with gpus. The victory would be absolute and the cost would be in the low XX billions of dollars. Right now there's really no reason for any state to attack as non-speculative use is very limited - but imagine that Iran somehow switches to bitcoin for all external trade and relies on its bitcoin stash to function. Suddenly an attack becomes a very realistic possibility.

Even if somehow some state controlled enough stake in a PoS system to censor everything, the defense fork can be repeated indefinitely - by deleting deposits of a hostile majority staker(s) on a community fork. For this reason, I expect decentralized PoS networks (those that can be run on home machines and without on-chain governance, not cloud-run DPoS or PoS networks with governance) to never be attacked in such a way - there's no way to truly win, short of total global surveillance I guess.