Quote from: Scumby on September 22, 2014, 03:06:31 AM

Quote from: SlipperySlope

Does KSI as you understand it somehow make replaying of the blockchain building process impossible - as I described that process above?

Here's what Satoshi says:

Quote from: Satoshi

To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.

The cryptographic proof-of-work blockchain approach used in Bitcoin inherently suffers from replayability and being determinate, which Satoshi solved by starting a computing arms race chasing an exponential function. POS has the same weaknesses from what I can tell. In KSI, the blockchain is one-way in time, and cannot be replayed by an adversary, because the complete ledger is not visible to all nodes. That's a feature, originally designed to enforce a centralized signature upon a single node's transaction, for integrity purposes. There is a hierarchical summarization by special nodes (like CPOS superpeers and nomadic mints) that broadcast digest hashes, which each end node has to sign onto its own transactions. Superpeers can be nomadic and elected (that would be an extension of KSI), and are responsible for supervising the nodes within their hash space and time. The system is still dependent upon 51% honest nodes.

By adding a chaotic parameter into the blockchain hash, I think it would be harder to "surpass the work of honest nodes" in Satoshi's parlance, because it would increase the dimensionality of the precalculation necessary, and hopefully make it harder to design an ASIC around.

Quote

I could use the daily radio flux at 10.7 cm as reported by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center, or can anyone suggest something published and archived by a more international source?

My own research indicates that the DRAO at Penticton, BC Canada is the gold standard for 10.7 cm flux, and has been tracking it since the 1950s. You could define the chaos broadcast as an average of several world observatories. I think it would be neato if the nomadic mint published the summary Merkle hash, the solar flux value that can be cross-checked, and the resulting hash value. Not even the NSA can control the Sun. I don't know how much additional security solar chaos really adds, but it just feels good, doesn't it?

Thanks Scumby for your articulate understanding of my work.

I examined the DRAO website and have written a message to their webmaster asking about why the displayed solar flux index is months old instead of current. Another potential micro-revenue service for TexaiCoin would be to wrap an API around the daily solar flux measurement and its recent archived values.

I am constrained to keep the blockchain structure unchanged so as to maximise the opportunity that my changes will someday be incorporated into Bitcoin Core. But that does not keep me from creating a parallel data structure as you describe for KSI, which I now somewhat comprehend because of your explanation. The blockchain must remain a public ledger in its entirety, but I can envision a KSI process as you describe to irreversibly record blockchain hashes at each new block.

And here is a link to a recent Ahto Buldas' paper which at first glance may be what you are describing ...

Keyless Signatures Infrastructure: How to Build Global Distributed Hash-Trees

Could you elaborate on the non-shared portion of the KSI hash tree? This appears to be the key to irreversibility. If an adversary had more than 50% of the nodes in his control, then he could out vote the legitimate nodes - right?

I believe that I can publicly publish the blockchain hash as well as the KSI top hash when each new block is created as a trust anchor. For example it would be easy to automatically publish those in a dedicated forum such as Yahoo or Google groups in append-only style where the account is administered by TexaiCoin core developers. Likewise the system could append hash value entries to an otherwise readonly Google Docs spreadsheet. Then an adversary would have to hack each of these public records to maintain integrity with his forged blockchain.