Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Transactions as Proof of Stake White Paper
by
AnonyMint
on 04/12/2013, 07:04:29 UTC
This proposal appears to be flawed, unless I am missing something. I have only read the first 4 pages thus far.

1. You propose to decrease the coin rewards as coin-days-destroyed volume increases, so this makes it less costly for an attacker to obtain > 50% of the hash rate assuming the attacker includes all the transactions. You apparently are attempting to imply there is no useful attack to do if the attacker is including the most coin-days-destroyed? Please confirm or deny then I will dig into more analysis of this vector.

2. Also how do you choose between someone who generates a proof-of-work hash with lower coin-days-destroyed several times sooner than the network propagation delay versus another who generates it that much delayed with a higher coin-days-destroyed? If you choose the latter, then you've killed the proof-of-work incentive because it means it will always pay to be later and wait for more transactions to arrive.

3. You claim to defeat my Transactions Withholding Attack, by blacklisting those who send blocks with transactions that were not recently seen by all miners. I retorted against this recently. This centralizes the network (all for one and one for all outcome) by requiring every miner to be responsible for the incoming network connectivity of other miners. And it centralizes the network in other ways, such it can't tolerate a temporary partitioning of the network due to connectivity outages.

P.S. By coin-days-destroyed, I assume you mean coin value x days, otherwise you would motivate proliferation of dust.

After some consideration I have decided to replace proof-of-work all together and use transaction fees to regulate block production.  A new block is produced once enough transaction fees have been accumulated.  The node that generates the transaction with sufficient fees broadcasts it.

As far as I can see, the problem will always remain the preimageable entropy because you are relying on factors that can be adjusted deterministically by the participants, e.g. propagation, transaction fee amounts and timings. For example, there is no way to converge to consensus over conflicts over who was first in this design.

It is rationally better for you have critical feedback sooner than later.

3. Does not centralize the network, it is a local calculation performed by all nodes relative to their peers.

There is no way to escape the fact that senders of data can't be responsible for the receipt of data. Nor can the recipients of data be responsible for the senders of data to send.

The genius of proof-of-work is that it eliminates those impossible responsibilities.


I'm very hopeful that this solution proves workable as I would like to see it used in Freicoin.  I will bring it to the attention of our lead programmer maaku and possibly Luke-Jr too.  We have long desired a solid PoS system which would allow for a decentralized distribution of the demurrage fee, but we have always been stymied by possible PoW attack vectors that our designs were vulnerable too.

How is demurrage different from inflation?   In the case of bitcoin, there is 12% inflation per year that is masked by appreciation.   Demurrage would just make the inflation more obvious, but if Bitcoin were to switch to using 'PERCENT OF MONEY SUPPLY' as the basic unit of account then Bitcoin would technically be implementing demurrage.   All you are achieving with your coin is to make it more obvious.  

Conflating inflation with M in the Quantity Theory of Money is a fundamental error.

You can also see the following linked discussion between Impaler, CoinCube, and myself:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342007.msg3788782#msg3788782
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342848.msg3789022#msg3789022

Also you can see that Bitcoin can not agree with Austrian economics definition of money:

Gary North who is allied with Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, the Mises Institute, and Austrian economics, says Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History.

Follow-on discussion of that:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342007.msg3781517#msg3781517
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=342007.msg3788271#msg3788271