Okay I've digested the white paper. I appreciate john-conner providing more details. That was the honorable and helpful action.
Unfortunately afaics, there are elementary attack vectors that he has not addressed in this white paper:
- No cost to being a peer, thus a Sybil attack on nodes in general. The adversary could insert a unlimited nodes if he wants to in order to dominate voting.
- How to squelch DoS attacks on the vote? A node which always votes against consensus can't be distinguished from one voting honestly since lock conflicts result in an indeterminate vote.
- He employs a Bellagio Algorithm to avoid gaming the selection of which nodes to poll for votes, so this removes the reputation weights of Skycoin's consensus, but it doesn't address the spamming of total node count nor the spamming of the lock conflict.
- Nodes are not paid for voting. If they receive bribes from the double-spender, the algorithm has no defense other than it hopes that 50% of the nodes in the network are not on-the-dole.
- Lock request spamming or DoS attacks. Are transaction fees hardcoded for the entire network?? Preset constants are anti-decentralization.
Also this algorithm requires the entire network to see all the transactions which of course won't scale without centralization, so if he is trying to enable real-time microtransactions (1 second confirmations) which could explode transaction volumes up to the 100,000s or more per second then he has a problem. Refer to the GavinCoin fork debate.
He's solving Bitcoin problems thought impossible to solve while you are a troll on a forum.....hmmm who to trust.
I suggest not scoffing at what he wrote. I'm not a good programmer, so I had to "learn as I go" about the framework of cryptocurrency design by soaking up the posts here. I don't know much, but I do know that failing to take account of Sybil attacks and DDOS attacks means "back to the drawing board." Unlike li'l ol' me, TPTB_need_war really
does know what he's doing.
At a very minimum, the flaws he saw demand a detailed rebuttal from john_connor: the more technical, the better. I'm only at the amateur-dabbler level programming-wise, but I've been around the echo-chambers block enough times to no longer believe in the "Galileo trope" - namely:
- Galileo was an innovative genius who was attacked and persecuted by the Establishment.
- X is being attacked and persecuted by the Establishment for his "innovations."
- Therefore, X is a world-changing innovative genius like Galileo!
Formally, this bit-o'-flattery is an instantiation of the
fallacy of the undistributed middle.
Myself, I'm taking TPTB_need_war's criticism quite seriously.
John Conner already gave a rebuttal to his last erroneous conclusions. Why should he keep having to deal with this troll?
The fact is he has created something, produced a detailed white paper, he has set up a test net and offer a bounty to someone who can break it. Plus he is publishing the code next week. Seriously these guys are trolls, they don't want to know what's true.