Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: ☷ [ANN] ☷ BITTREX ICO ☷ CLSTR ☷ ClusterCoin ☷ the Future of Money ☷☷ 7 DAYS LEFT
by
Essex343
on 17/08/2014, 20:25:13 UTC
I am trying to understand the innovation this coin brings but having some trouble. You are essentially creating centralized points (clusters) from which to source the blockchain according to geographic location in order to speed up block confirmation times. The question then becomes how often do these clusters sync with each other. At one end of the spectrum if your clusters sync at the same rate as bitcoin there will be no appreciable difference in confirmation times except you will have potential centralized points of failure. Syncing less often will decrease block confirmation times but pushes the problem of forking on the blockchain from a single transaction level to a higher level where an entire cluster full of hundreds of thousands of transactions could be on the fork. Then when one cluster doesn't match all the other clusters during a sync those hundreds of thousands of transactions on the fork cluster will be invalidated.
Block confirmation time across clusters shouldn’t be compared with bitcoin block confirmation time, as within a cluster transactions will flow quickly regardless of this time. Transferring funds across clusters might take longer, but we don’t see this as a problem.  Current financial system works in a similar vein and we used it as a model for ClusterCoin.  Analog of a cluster would be a network of local banks (local payments are processed by local banks with a prompt transaction); across cluster transactions (served by sync blocks) correspond to SWIFT transactions.
Regarding fork risk of sync blocks – it is not clear that these blocks (which contain more transactions than an average block) pose more risk than any other block. What are you basing your claims on?



Also your statement from the ANN about sync blocks

"Synchronization blocks will be generated by pools located all over the world. In order to maintain high speed of block generation, those polls will maintain a direct connection to each other and coordinate each synchronization block generation. There will be no reward for this kind of blocks."

Not only is this extremely centralized but with no reward no one is going to mine sync blocks which are the most important block in your system.


I am sorry for this confusion; this was the part of old FAQ which was corrected in the White Paper but not in the thread. Sync blocks will be reward with a higher reward rather than zero reward. Sync block reward is still an open question in terms of how much rewarding it should be relative to a regular block.
 

EDIT: Also wanted to add the almost cavalier nature in which you treat the geolocation data that will be collected from all clustercoin users is troubling. In fact there will be very little difference between wireless carriers that use GPS to send your cell phone signal to the nearest base station and Clustercoin's geo-clusters. So the same tools of surveillance will be built within this coin from its inception and surveillance agencies can make easy use of it.
Clusters will not be managed by a central authority but rather by wallets themselves. Whether or not a cluster should be generated will be based on a voting by miners/pools. Comparison with wireless carriers seems farfetched.