Quote from: monsterer on February 06, 2016, 08:48:28 PM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 06, 2016, 08:46:24 PM

I explained upthread that the math is incoherent and there is no bound with profitable proof of work either due to k. I will formalize the argument in a white paper, not now.

There is, but not in a chain with blocks. You need one transaction per block for this.

edit: if you have blocks, you have to make assumptions about k in order to bound the acceptability.

Agreed on the edit.

So we can see that profitable PoW is not bounded either if k is unbounded, but you can argue that UNprofitable PoW is not bounded at any k > 0. But the retort is that difficulty in my UNprofitable PoW design will not be limited to a difficulty which makes the cost of mining precisely equal to the block rewards, and thus the difficulty the attacker is facing is unbounded which is not the case in Satoshi's PoW design where difficulty is bounded by profitability of the marginal miners. Wink

I asked you wait for the white paper, but there is a hint to you for you to chomp on interim time.

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 10, 2016, 04:59:26 AM

...the fact is the math models are often myopic[1]...

[1]

Meni Rosenfeld's myopic math, and note Meni is a widely respected academic:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13633504#msg13633504

And my explanation of the myopia:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13797768#msg13797768
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13819991#msg13819991
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13763395#msg13763395
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13647887#msg13647887