Im very shocked that you as a former supporter of permissionless, proof-of-work, have apparently become hoodwinked and think that (necessarily permissioned) Byzantine agreement is adequate. Must be the lucrative sneakymine that changed your technological mind? Or am I just misinterpreting what you wrote?technological mind.
You're overgeneralizing. I'm responding to your narrow point about the DPoS being down. That didn't happen, which isn't even to say that it can't happen, but it hasn't yet (except as I noted earlier by bugs in the first few months of deployment).
I'm pretty skeptical about Steem/it (or EOS) ever becoming a decentralized permissionless system. It's at best semi-centralized in practice certainly and by design to some extent too.
Okay thanks for the clarification. Note I had been editing that part while you were writing, so it is good to see I was just misinterpreting your intent and we are on the roughly the same page w.r.t. to that narrow point (not all my comments).
Im happy that I do not have to conclude that @smooth lost his objectivity, because now I know you did not. I was feeling queasy (as if I had
entered The Twilight Zone) if you have gone to the darkside of money over truth.
EDIT: but as of yet no one has shown how to design a permissionless consensus system
that does not end up necessarily centralized unless it remains highly inflationary (specifically
this research link).
Block producers have to take incoming data from the outside thus they must be contactable from the outside.
No, they do not have to be
contactable. They only need to be
connected in some manner to the p2p network. That can be through a combination of known and unknown nodes. It could be by passively listening to a broadcast signal and transmitting their signed blocks by (fast) carrier pigeon. The asymmetry favors the defender here because an attacker has to cut off
all communication (and to effectively attack the network has to do this to most of the block producers), the defender only needs to maintain
some minimum communication. Even then if the node is completely cut off, the defender can switch to a completely different node. I don't see the resulting whack a mole as a serious threat, more of an annoyance.
I did not write anything otherwise! I said the perimeter keeps the IP addresses of the block producers secret. Youre going in circles in your argumentation.
You seem to think I was implying the block producers/generators could be attacked directly but I never wrote that.
My point is that the (webserving portion of some portion of the) P2P perimeter went down. And it ostensibly did. I consider that part of the blockchain system, from the perspective of the bringing it to the masses goal.
I also made the separate point that the block producing nodes and the secrecy of their connections to the others (surely not pigeons if we want fast transactions) can be threatened as the economic value of the system grows.
Also there is the point that the delegate block producers operating independently (i.e. so they do not need to connect to many other nodes) is only possible because as Vitalik pointed out, there is no verifiable objectivity in the consensus. It is all trust based shit. Which means indistinguishable from attack when the block producers start fighting each other one day.Really DPoS is all about obfuscating what it really is. We might as well just ask Visa to provide servers and be done with it. Why obfuscate it what it really is in the end game? (Oh so we can shill some FOMO bags to n00bs)
Permissionless, decentralized, scalable consensus algorithms are an extremely difficult problem to solve. Vitalik and separately myself (and others) have been working on this problem nonstop for the past years. DPoS is a very simplistic way to cut corners and not actually solve the problem at all.
DPoS was an expedient semi-centralized solution for scaling and proving a use case like Steem. For that reason, I supported it. But then when that same centralized ledger technology is repackaged and resold in a $200+ million no rights token sale, I realized there is no intention of actually solving the most difficult and fundamental technological problems. They presumably have enough money already and in my ethics they could have spent that first on research before entering the market to take more money from n00bs.
I wanted to see that money from Steem go to a solid technological research effort. Its a shame that so much resources are being presumably squandered on who knows what. All I see is he realized there was all this n00b ETH for the taking. Speculation focus, not technology focus. Turns me off. And ditto on the user adoption marketing and business model development as well. Instead of focusing on that hard work, appears to me the focus is on selling FOMO bags.