Quote from: StinkyLover on February 13, 2016, 02:57:12 AM

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 12, 2016, 04:57:00 PM

It was the following linked post where I linked to the post I had made on Vitalik's blog about the Consensus-by-betting plan for Ethereum's future version named Casper:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/42rvm3/truth_about_ethereum_is_being_banned_at/czcpoez

I explained at the linked post above that Consensus-by-betting is essentially a proof-of-stake/share algorithm in the sense that the financial penalty mechanism is based on deposits (stakes). And PoS has failure modes which don't have a Nash equilibrium (some of which Vlad is not aware of!) and here follows I described how longest chain rule does have a Nash equilibrium:

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on February 11, 2016, 03:27:54 PM

Thus I have explained there is no Nash equilibrium in Monero's penalty feature (unlike for Satoshi's longest chain rule where there is indeed a Nash equilibrium because if miners don't converge on the longest chain then all their chains are invalid/orphans and worthless without consensus). ArticMine is probably thinking that since miners have different costs, the equilibrium point for transaction fees will be the weighted average but I have explained the holistic economics by which this weighted average is driven by the costs of the largest hashrate miners until they control all the hashrate[1].

Greg Meredith talks technobabble for 15 minutes about the design of Casper.

Greg is talking about the math that says if the bets are rationally motivated by the penalties, then it should be possible to get them to converge on a consensus as to which block from all the validators (i.e. verifiers) is correct and chosen, i.e. that convergence of consensus can be mathematically guaranteed.

Vlad Zamfir had a video presentation and an audio presentation about Casper. I had also seen a video presentation by Vitalik which explained more about sharding and an overview.

But what all three Vitalik, Greg, and Vlad are failing to grasp is a MORE FUNDAMENTAL INSOLUBLE FLAW which is what I wrote in the prior post that consensus requires the the underlying state transformations for contracts are/is bounded on recursion, otherwise the partial orderings diverge and it is impossible to unifying them into one block chain ordering. Bob McElrath explained on Vitalik's block the consensus requires fungibility of contracts. By fungibility what he is really wanting to say is commutativity of ordering, which is achieved (other than a double-spend) in Bitcoin by the UXTO history having the directed acyclic graph property.

Edit: Vlad's conceptualization of the CAP Theorem at the 15:17 slide of his video presentation is incorrect! Once you allow Partitioning of the block chain state, it is then impossible to regain both Consistency and Availability. Vlad seems to think you can regain Consensus consistency after waiting for a vote, but that is incorrect because the partitioned state is then irrevocably in conflict and can be reconciled any more! Also Vlad makes many other errors as well.

These three guys are clueless. They are making so many mistakes.

I hear you, honestly I do, but my laptop isn't perfect (it sometimes grinds to a halt at 100% disk usage), my super duper new flat screen sometimes pixelates, my old CDs used to jump and skip, and 'always on' is sometimes 'off'.

There are well known discussions about bitcoin and it's suitability as a financial tool. It is just too slow and bloated!

The point I'm making here is that tech is NEVER perfect. It's all about the best tool for the job at the time that particular piece of tech comes into public usage. ETH is not perfect and it never will be. Once the issues in ETH are addressed in the next big thing in crypto, the next big thing in crypto will have its own flaws exposed, and so on.

With all the flaws of bitcoin, people still believe in it. It is the same for ETH.

Personally, I see complementary blockchains on the horizon. App execution, storage, network interactions, accountability/trust/auditing etc, all contributing to the global network concept (conspiracy theorists please insert 666 aka 'The Beast' here) rather than the one size fits all model.

Imperfect blockchains working symbiotically to simulate the perfect blockchain (with downtime due to hackers on public holidays - fixed by Monday morning after an outcry in the national press!).

Nothing in this world is perfect.

The problem with analogies is category error. Your laptop doesn't fail for everyone. It fails only for you, then you reboot it and learn not to overload its systems. That is decentralization. Whereas when a block chain fails, up to millions of people are impacted.

I have seen many speculators in this forum use this line of reasoning, which basically is "nothing is perfect, pragmatism is how business gets done in the real world".

I am all for pragmatism, but that reasoning does not apply in this case of comparing say Ethereum to for example Monero or Bitcoin, because when a project fails on its fundamentals then it crashes and burns, e.g. the fork of Stellar's consensus algorithm (which was copied from Ripple) before SCP was invented nearly destroyed the Stellar project. That argument about pragmatism does apply in other contexts obviously. I used pragmaticism when I created CoolPage. It in fact never did import HTML but yet it was very popular as an HTML editor because people liked the easy-to-use pixel perfect WYSIWYG placement of photos and text.

Bitcoin's promised Nash equilibrium has never failed (well there was a bug once or twice that required centralized intervention). It was always specified that the 51% attack is a threat. We can say that the 65% of the hashrate that the Chinese miners allegedly control has enabled them to veto the adoption of any block size increase and they effectively have 51% attacked Bitcoin presumably so they can drive transaction fees higher so they can increase profits for the oligarchy they have controlling Bitcoin (and I read yesterday they are also blocking Classic's doubling to 2MB).

So therefor and also including the scalecopalyse ongoing, that Bitcoin is not perfect. However the salient distinction is that Bitcoin has performed exactly as the white paper said it would. Even Satoshi had admitted that Bitcoin would likely become centralized over time in order to scale.

So Bitcoin has been basically perfect to its specification. Bitcoin has been reliable to the specification and I for one have been working on how to solve the issues that Satoshi did not attempt to solve w.r.t. to scaling and centralization. I think I have that solution and I am working on specifying it formally and implementing it (if I can stop foruming!).

Whereas, so many of the alt-coins have either no or insufficient specification (e.g. VanillaCoin, Ethereum, MaidSafe) or their specification is flawed and can't ever work at all (e.g. Ethereum, Storj, Filecoin, etc). There is another class of specifications that is very thorough and will work but only with centralization that they do not fully admit in the specifications (e.g. Ripple, Iota, Stellar's SCP).

Click the links in the prior paragraph for the gory details.

In my next post in this thread, I will try to further explain why Ethereum can't adhere to its implied specification (and I write 'implied' because afaik there is no coherent specification for Casper, one has to piece together the puzzle from presentations by the developers).