Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] SpreadCoin | True Decentralization (No Pools) | Testing New Masternodes
by
gjhiggins
on 05/04/2015, 00:09:08 UTC
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but there is no need surely to make the whole shebang decentralised. Could the example you gave be achieved by using the MN network as a consensus mechanism for choosing the locus/loci, then let that selected MN/those selected MNs do the things that need a central control point?

That's broadly what I meant by recruiting the services of an oracle primarily for the opacity it brings. But great care must be taken not to create holes in the abstraction that have security implications. I doubt I need to outline the potential for eclipse attacks on an altcoin that relies on just one hard-coded DNS seed node IP address. Eclipse attacks use the comparatively easier route of exploiting weakness in the architecture, not the cryptography. Hence my preference for a cryptography-based solution over one based on modifications to the architecture/system.

Quote
The processing doesn't need to be completely distributed.

For it to be credible, I think it must be distributed (not sure what “completely distributed” means). Otherwise, it's a compromise that weakens the architecture to a (usually incalculable) degree, so I prefer to view pseudo-oracles as stopgap solutions that are best avoided if possible.

I should note that I'm using coins101's 3B (Blockchain-Based Business) context to frame this (and my thinking), i.e. how might it work?

Cheers

Graham