Quote from: Traxo on June 02, 2018, 06:47:06 PM

This discussion really distills down to this point.
If 50+% of the stake has someone they trust with a live version of events and all of them have the same version of events,
then they can all choose the correct fork and the remaining minority of the stake can see the majority has decided on a fork.
Then the attacker loses.

The attacker loses if 1% of the economic weight of the network chooses not to use their fork, as I already stated. If both forks continue to exist, the value of the network is split and the attacker loses some amount of value. It is distributed back to the users of the network who have increased power at the attacker's expense.

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Yet 100% finality of epochs (as opposed to probabilistic finality of transaction confirmation) requires permissioned set of validators of which only 1/3 of them can stall the entire chain
and the only way to unstuck the (transaction confirmation of the) chain is to hardfork.

I've seen you mention 33% stalling, but I don't know what the rationale is. Could you expand on it? At least under Decrits, each validator has control of the world for his window of time. The evil validators could ignore an honest validator, but they would have to be all of the validators immediately after that validator to do so and win undisputed. If there is any honest node, he accepts it and the honest chain continues, and it distills back to grandma again - which you erroneously presume requires 50% of something, but it only requires any amount of economic weight to be behind a fork.

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The chain's protocol can't confiscate the security deposits of the non-responding validators because they may be legitimately under DDoS attack or suffering from some general failure such as Amazon or Azure outage.

This was an error in my original design that I have since rectified. Non-responding validators are only mildly punished.

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Your Decrits design apparently forces new validators to queue up and be approved by many epochs before joining or leaving, but this is in essence a permissioned system,
because then 1/3 of the validators can stop the forward movement of the chain and those queued validators never become approved.

Still not clear on how.

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Everything you wrote as quoted above is the opposite of the possible outcome that @anonymint wrote about:

https://medium.com/@shelby_78386/the-caveat-though-is-that-when-the-attacker-can-fork-the-vested-interests-of-some-of-the-users-9340dd037a61

Just because you wrote something doesn't make it true. You dismissed my point that the attackers lose, at least on network, no matter what, and presumed this fell back to some 50%+ majority when no such majority is required. The attackers *always lose*.

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But perhaps the reason you didn't think so, is because you may not have realized the point above about 100% finality is required for 100% objectivity of live observers?

Finality can be achieved without using the entire stake, or even a majority of it. There will just be multiple versions of finality, or voluntary hard forks. This gives the live observers the choice to choose which fork most closely resembles their own view of the network.

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The attacker can profit even in the presence of security deposits.
That was one of the main points of the Medium post.

In the case that the attacker can somehow manipulate public opinion in the face of grandma's trust. You can't fool all of the people all of the time, ergo the attacker is guaranteed to lose something. Network connectivity can be a thornier issue, but we will eventually have uninterruptable internet satellites and mesh networks everywhere. Unless Russia uses a space nuke or something. But there are always scenarios that you can degrade to the end of civilization to prove your point. All currencies fail there.

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Although you were probably thinking about non-proof-of-work consensus systems before most of us.

Yeah but Vitalik released his landmark blog on weak subjectivity mere weeks after the Decrits whitepaper. Surely that means a melding of minds to a common conclusion. Roll Eyes

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@anonymint was on proof-of-diskspace and then memory-hard proof-of-work ideas for most of 2013 whilst you were already designing Decrits.

And even then arguing until you were blue in the face that every other design was massively flawed and that your way was the only way. Forgive my eternal skepticism of you.