Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

Distributed systems are genuinely hard. What Satoshi did was genuinely new and that's why it has had such an impact.

I believe what I want to do is genuinely new, as new as PoS was to PoW.

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

People seem to think that it is easy because he made it look easy. It isn't. And there is also a huge difference between coming up with a bunch of ideas -- like that paper has-- and actually producing a secure, scalable, reliable distributed system.

Put another way, every feature means more work and more risk-- every feature reduces security, scalability, reliability and coherence in the distributed system.

One of key fundamentals is that any requirements for synchrony make it very complicated to realize a robust design.

So actually the care put into the design can make a huge difference in how difficult it is to implement it in reality.

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

And that's still at the theoretical level. Actually putting things into production is another matter. When you're writing code you have inadvertent bugs to contend with as well.

K.I.S.S.

I am one of top fixers of bugs historically when I worked for others.

Bugs finding and fixing do slow everything down. And blockchains must not have irrevocable errors. I agree it is a major challenge.

DPoS was able to simplify matters significantly by making the witness set permissioned (instead of unbounded as is the case for PoW miners).

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

Cloning bitcoin and making a few small key changes is a reasonable approach-- because a lot of work went into bitcoin.

I've never looked at the Bitcoin code and I never intend to (well heck I might look, in fact I just did for example glance at merkle.cpp).

I'd lose more time messing with that fragile C++ codebase, than I would writing from scratch. Perhaps there are some aspects I could extract from the code base, if I find it helps. But as for working from the code base as whole and trying to modify it, no chance I will follow that strategy.

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

All the other ideas can be done later, on other alts, or whatever.

I do agree with getting the most rudimentary functionality working before trying to add more features.

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

I think that's what I'm trying to say. Aim low, and achieve it, before aiming high. It's harder than it looks. ;-)

Yes of course. Don't bite off more than you can chew.

Quote from: groovy1962 on March 21, 2017, 05:20:52 PM

If you are writing something new, however, from scratch, with several key changes it will take you a long time. As an individual developer, at least 3-4 years.

Not just a few changes. No code has yet been borrowed from any other altcoin project, other than perhaps cryptographic and networking libraries. We'll see going forward though...

3 - 4 years? Yes if you are trying to write bitcoin-qt node. But I'll find a way to cut corners so that only rudimentary capabilities are achieved quickly and incremental improvements can be added ongoing.