My understanding was that a balance based model opened up some pretty serious security problems, which is why bitcoin didn't use it. I'm dubious of a new coin as complex as this.
Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have the text for the dagger page?
Dagger appears to be inferior to the Cuckoo Cycle proof of work system I recently developed; see https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo Cuckoo Cycle is a new proof of work system with the following features 1) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph, so that verification only requires computing 42 hashes. 2) the graph size (number of nodes) can scale from 1x2^10 to 7x2^29 with 4 bytes needed per node,…
What creates that upper limit of 7x2^29?
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dagger appears to be inferior to the Cuckoo Cycle proof of work system I recently developed; see https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo Cuckoo Cycle is a new proof of work system with the following features 1) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph, so that verification only requires computing 42 hashes. 2) the graph size (number of nodes) can scale from 1x2^10 to 7x2^29 with 4 bytes needed per node,…
What creates that upper limit of 7x2^29?
the naming convention that allows it to be named cuckoo729.
the program could be rewritten not to use bit 31 as a flag, and then you could use as many as 2^32-1 nodes, but that's not neatly expressible as MULT*2^SHIFT with few digits.
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#74Site is down. How do they manage to go down with probably static content, I have no idea.
With the availability of free CDNs (CloudFlare setup is 30 seconds max) I'm not sure why static sites have issues with bandwidth these days...
cloudflare do not cache html/php/etc stuff and as a result all these request still going to the hosting server, sometimes killing it.
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#75The page doesn't say who is behind it, but the wiki is edited by user "vbuterin". So maybe it's Vitalik Buterin, one of the more interesting cryptocurrency thinkers out there. Hmm. http://about.me/vitalik_buterin
This is indeed Vitalik's project, you can read the whitepaper on his website: http://vitalik.ca/ethereum.html
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#76I don't know if the Etherium people are looking for comments, but here are a few.
I think that Dagger has serious issues. First, the spec is buggy: the text says that eight bottom-level nodes are hashed together, but the pseudocode only uses four. Second, it does not require 512MB per thread; it requires 512MB of write-once, read-many-times memory, shared by all threads; this property seems to be asking for a rather large ASIC (or a smaller ASIC backed by some multi-port SRAM) to have a huge advantage.
Also, what's up with the choice of secp256k1? It's at least less likely to be backdoored by evil choice of parameters than, say, P-256, but there are many better choices out there (e.g. curve25519 or some of its larger variants). Those better variants have the big advantage (especially in this application) of having faster verification operations.
(The fastest-to-verify option would probably be plain ol' RSA, but signatures are rather large.)
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#77Ripple is also working on the same thing and is supposedly releasing them "soon": https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts
Unfortunately, Ripple is a worst-case example of pre-mining. I would really hate to see it take off.
I would rather see an actual, functional product take off (even without miners). The resistance to Ripple just enables an endless series of me-too fundraisers.
The ethereum proposal is the most technical yet. Hopefully it sets a new minimum bar in the market for crowd-funded vaporware (I'm highly skeptical of them all).
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#78I'm most curious about cryptocurrency algorithms that can be optimally run on FPGAs, but not ASICs or GPUs. Is there anything along those lines floating around already?
What's so wrong with ASICs? Litecoin don't have them, and now they are plagued by a botnet who mines on infected PCs.
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#79I'm most curious about cryptocurrency algorithms that can be optimally run on FPGAs, but not ASICs or GPUs. Is there anything along those lines floating around already?
I think any chip image that you put on an FPGA will run faster if you turn it into an ASIC. Are you thinking self modifying code?
Precisely. I would expect that the algorithm itself would change over time, with modifications based partially on the state of the network.
Edit: maybe the modification strategy could provide some 'proof-of-steak' protections, without burdening the system with excessive early adopter advantages.
Re: Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
#80I'm most curious about cryptocurrency algorithms that can be optimally run on FPGAs, but not ASICs or GPUs. Is there anything along those lines floating around already?
What's so wrong with ASICs? Litecoin don't have them, and now they are plagued by a botnet who mines on infected PCs.
Nothing wrong with ASICs at all, but I would prefer to invest in general purpose infrastructure. It seems like a system favoring FPGAs wouldn't be as attractive to botnet owners either.