1. He condemns pumpers whilst pumping vaporware himself.

Because we are just fools:

Thanks for the explanation.

I'll refresh your memory.

It was after I had announced Zero Knowledge Transactions and it was clear that Monero had a competitive solution RingCT and I was shopping ZKT around to potentially BBR and also I approached Bitshares briefly. Thus that must have been roughly Aug or Sept. There is a post from AnonyMint user name at the Bitshares forum as evidence.

I was discussing with you in private about the merits of ICOs and making money from launching a coin in what ever means. And you were trying to tell me that there is basically no money in it and that is why Monero's plan is the best, because the XMR devs just do it as a hobby or labor of love and don't take it too seriously as a way to generate income. You were always in general coaxing me away from any concept of making money from developing and launching CC, and to the open source hobbyist Monero way.

And I mentioned Bitshares as an example with their significant marketcap which had been as high as $40 million at one point for afair the ProtoShares. And had also mentioned Dash. That is when you instructed me about how all the mcaps are fake and you made me aware that insiders buy from themselves to make it appear that the volume is real.

I said okay maybe for Dash, but Bitshares seems to have legit technology and theirs might be real. And you said that look how Bitshares is trying to sell services (at that time in 2015) because they are basically cash strapped and aren't earning hardly anything from creating CCs.

In short, you were trying to discourage me from pursuing making a CC if I expected to earn any $ from doing so. That is not to say you were discouraging me from creating a CC if not for expectation of a payday. That is not to say you were wishing for me to fail if I did attempt to. I think you felt you were just giving sound feedback.

To be fair, you were aware of my illness and perhaps you were concerned and felt I might be better off to take employment, get medical insurance, and have a more stable and less risky source of potential income and funding for health care.

But I just know that before that discussion, I never thought about the altcoin market as being one giant scam and being entirely fake. I really bought into your take on that. But now in hindsight, I think you are not entirely correct. Seems people who have produced less technology than I am working on, having reaped some significant paydays.

Waves raised ~$15 million and referred to IOHK's open source without apparently having developed anything at all. It was apparently purely a marketing campaign. Heck I never expected even a $million, so with better tech than they have, why shouldn't I be able to get my $500,000 and also do some good for the CC community.

When I respect someone, it means I listen intently to what they have to say.

Let me try to unpack those points a bit for laymen:

1. Full nodes in DPOS are elected delegates. With Satoshi's PoW, we don't know which node will win the next block. So an attacker wouldn't know which node to jam with a DDoS attack. Any node attacked would simply not participate in competing to produce the next block, but this wouldn't harm the system at all. Whereas, when we designate the node that will decide what goes into the next block, then an attacker knows which node to attack. As well, a node knows when it will control the next block, and thus it can attack the network by withholding (although it would probably get voted out of being a delegate node soon, although it might be difficult to prove when it was a legitimate network hiccup or when it was intentional). I believe Bitcoin-NG may have an analogous weakness.

2. For me, this is the other huge weakness. With DPOS, the set of nodes which process blocks is static until the next voting. And even after voting, standing up a full node is not something an individual can choose to do by himself. There is always politics and centralization involved. The ideologically great thing about Satoshi's design is that anyone at any time can go standup a full node and process his/her transactions on any block he/she wins. The problems of course with Satoshi's design is that it doesn't scale and also that PoW economics of SHA256 means an individual can no longer win a block nor prevent the centralization of mining over time due to it being 100 to 1000X more profitable for the ASIC farms and because scaling can't work without centralization. So DPOS doesn't really gain anything that we can't get by centralizing Satoshi's design other than saving electricity.

I have another solution which I think is a better compromise than both of those. But I won't describe it, because surely others will start to figure out my design if I describe it further. I need to release it asap, so the discussion of its merits can be open sourced.

3. If one full node's block period is say 5 seconds, but the propagation to another of the full nodes is 10 seconds, that latter node will not be able to receive the new block from the former and produce another new block within its 5 second allocation. Thus the block period has a lower bound which is dictated by the slowest propagation on the network of full nodes. And 5 seconds confirmation is too slow for certain types of microtransactions. Imagine you want to start listening to a song, and you have it set to pay a microtransaction automatically, but you have to wait 5+ seconds everytime you want to click to listen to a new song you have not yet paid for. Or similarly when using microtransactions instead of a CAPTCHA. Even 1 second might be too slow! Vcash's Zerotime can't even get close to being fast enough. Probably Lightning Networks won't be fast enough either, not to mention it doesn't scale well.

5. DPOS (delegated proof-of-stake) is still POS with all its flaws. My desire is to attain Satoshi's security model, but with 100% decentralization, massive scaling, 1 second confirmed transactions, and no economic trend towards centralization!


Edit: Steemit is pioneering combining PoW and DPOS in another way, and do take note that this doesn't seem to fix the issues I enumerated above although it mitigates somewhat issue #2 except doesn't solve the economics of centralization of PoW issue: