Quote from: gendal on November 11, 2013, 09:12:17 PM

Quote from: bluemeanie1 on November 11, 2013, 05:49:16 PM

Quote from: gendal on May 30, 2013, 12:11:30 PM

Am I missing something? Is this something that one would expect to be covered in the legal agreements that "link" a real-world asset to a particular set of colored coins? Something else?

youre not missing anything, Color Coins[1] are going to be a nightmare in practice. They seriously distort the economics of mining.

...

It's these very problems, and a few other revelations that led to my development of Confidence Chains.

Confidence Chains has none of these problems. It doesnt use mining at all.

[1] and presumably Mastercoins

Thanks for the comments - I'll take a deeper look at confidence chains. When I first read about them, I must admit I was unconvinced. In particular, your paper (link below so you know which one I'm talking about) lacked any analysis of the potential attacks and didn't give me much insight into how the confidence values for nodes would be set (and evolve) over time. e.g. what happens if different nodes assign different values to the confidence they have in other nodes? Surely everybody would have a different view as to which the most confident chain was?

that is a good point and it's very possible to have this kind of configuration. Each node might have different perspectives on which nodes are more important. Just like in real life. One member of a social group might favor the statements of certain people. There's no centralized document that says this particular person is more credible than another. This does not effect the basic operation of the algorithm though. Not only can nodes have different views on who is important, they can actually employ different strategies for building chains, and these strategies can exploit various aspects of the financial ledger, ultimately though consensus is the thing on which a ledger is accepted. With complex financial instruments there is quite a bit of interpretation involved.

Quote from: gendal on November 11, 2013, 09:12:17 PM

No doubt these issues have already been discussed (probably on here somewhere) but my sense is that if you're going to throw out the proof of work system (and I see why it could be attractive for some scenarios), there probably needs to be a reasonably rigorous analysis of how the system could be gamed, etc.

that's certainly fair to say. To understand what Confidence Chains means you have to revisit some of the initial design goals of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was meant to be a currency without backing and without ownership. Color Coins and other related technologies have a different purpose: digital vouchers(although Confidence Chains does much more than that). Thus, you've removed ZERO TRUST. You must trust the backer. The idea of leaving in Proof Of Work anyway is just meaningless really and reflects a lack of vision as to why it was there in the first place. The core oversight is that the block chain is a free database that anyone can insert information for any purpose. You'll find this assumption is a standard amongst the Color Coin people. It is here that Color Coins breaks down. We saw this unfold with the COIN_DUST issue.

Confidence Chains does not have any of the security problems of Bitcoin. Initially the system supports a STATIC distribution, as in the nodes are predetermined. There are other possibilities which have not been conceptually explored at this point. The first basic app will be a Distributed Exchange which offers a some really great value to the sorts of peoples who come here to this list. Keep in mind people are interested in Confidence Chains who don't have anything to do with Bitcoin. Wouldn't you rather trade bitcoin on an exchange that cannot be biased by any individual participant or owner? the exchange has no owner, and that the key difference.

Quote from: gendal on November 11, 2013, 09:12:17 PM

Very interesting concept, in any case.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&srcid=MDg1Nzc2MjYxNDE2NDcyMjk2NDcBMDQ4MDMyNzQyMDY2MjExMDkyNzEBNU81RURra1djcHdKATQBAXYy

There are two more whitepapers posted to this forum showing some other applications of Confidence Chains. There will be more publications in the future. One of the advantages to CCs is that the architecture is very flexible. Im a very conceptual high-forehead kind of person so I think the strength of this is how many different things you can do with it. Im not going for low-hanging fruit at this point. People can easily work in their own ideas and financial instruments, build wealth and capital without much knowledge. The code base will be relatively simple.

thanks for the input. I will post a few progress milestones to here when it is relevant. The http://www.altchain.org site is coming very soon.