Quote from: iamnotback on April 16, 2017, 07:23:22 PM

Quote from: dinofelis on April 15, 2017, 03:53:04 PM

In other words, the main difference in opinion between @iamnotback and me is that I think that bitcoin was simply badly designed, and that all the bad things we see are simply due to "stupidity" (everything is relative). @iamnotback thinks that instead of stupidity, it is evil genius.

@dinofelis, the guy who argued in an Altcoin Discussion thread (about Dash) that there is no such thing as a 'scam', because everything is a free market (even fraud).

You misunderstood me there. It is not because it is a free market, it is because crypto takes as an assumption, trustlessness. Now, scam is a violation of trust. In a trustless environment, there cannot be scam. But that was more to illustrate the inappropriateness of crypto, than to say that scam is great. Scam is NORMAL in a system where the basic starting point is trustlessness. Whether that's a good starting point, is simply the (rethorical) question.

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And now he changes his philosophy and duplicitously decides that the criteria for "desired design properties" is not determined by the goals of the designer even if the design matches perfectly to a diabolical plan.

This is not what I'm saying either. I'm simply saying that there is no "diabolical plan", just clumsy design. This is not the first time, and it will not be the last time, that people with overblown egos think they've solved a world problem with a "solution" that doesn't live up to the plan, and then goes awry. There's no need for conspiracy if stupidity can explain the thing. Of course, *after the fact*, when the ugliness of the solution, despite its earlier hype, is becoming obvious, one can always explain this as an evil plan by an evil genius that foresaw this, and designed it that way. But most of the time, if not always, one simply has to do with mistakes and errors. Yes, you can think that
Jean Nicot introduced smoking of tobacco in France and then in England, with an evil plan to bring big business and cancer to people, and enslave them. Most probably that was NOT his plan.

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@dinofelis everything you've written is incorrect. And I think it is pointless to refute you again, because you refuse to acknowledge that which was already written.

If your "refutations" consist in repeating that you refuted me, to lead back to a non-rational handwaving argument in which you vent your opinions that you take as evidence against my technical arguments, then there's no need. I refuse to consider anything else but a rationally and clearly explained argument (and no, your long post in which you just put together your handwaving opinions which I shattered to pieces, does not count as "rational argument").

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You repeat the same incorrect technological errors over and over again. And thus you continue to willfully lie.

Until you can bring in a rational argument, I consider them not refuted. Saying that "I'm wrong" and that you already told me that I was wrong, and vague opinions, are not accepted as rational arguments. I can't learn much from them so I don't consider them.

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Lol, you don't even understand that PoS and Byzantine agreement fundamental distill down to a generative essence of stake based voting, no matter how you try to obfuscate that fact from your blind eyes.

No, they aren't. There is no vote to be taken, because there are algorithmic specifications of the "right" answer. The vote only consists in wanting to cheat the system or not. NOT in having to make an open choice. If all nodes are "honest", that is, if they all follow the algorithmic specification of how to act, then a unique consensus does arise and no choice is to be made, if we can place upper bounds on propagation delays in the network (or if we have to work with unbounded potential delays, but with infinitesimal probability, a high probability of consensus arises).

The only "vote" is to try to game the system, and NOT act according to the algorithmic specifications, in other words, to be a dishonest node. Being a dishonest node is perfectly normal if there are rewards to be won, because then the algorithmic specifications are not necessarily those that bring in most rewards: we now have a "double contradictory incentive": maximize profits, or follow the rules.

If there are no rewards, there's no primary incentive to be dishonest apart from the gain from dishonesty itself and the will to break the system. If there are rewards, then strategies that not necessarily want to break the system, but could end up doing so, in order to maximize rewards, will potentially develop and then you have a "vote".

But if you blindly follow an algorithmic determination, there is no "vote". There's simply the outcome of an algorithm. And there's no reward incentive to deviate from that algorithm, unless trying to game the whole system and hence break it.

In other words, there's a distinction between:
- trying to develop strategies that maximize rewards without trying to explicitly break the system (like selfish mining for instance)
- trying to game the system by breaking it (everyone will SEE it even though one cannot avoid it, like double spending, rewinding a transaction, etc...).

If there are no rewards, the only reason to not follow the specified consensus algorithm, it by trying to break the system. There's nothing wrong with that. If it works out, the system is simply broken and will not do any harm any more (I don't consider losing your holdings in a crypto as "harm" - this was the game you played and you lost) OR people will accept this kind of inconsistency and system breaking, and continue to use it, in which case, this kind of breaking becomes a standard accepted procedure in the system (for instance, there are maybe tricks to systematically double spend).