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Showing 11 of 11 results by RSchexnayder
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Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Bitcoin Proof-of-Stake
by
RSchexnayder
on 09/06/2014, 22:45:23 UTC
If the coin creation method is changed, the ASIC owners have nothing to say.

Bitcoin uses proof-of-work, and therefore the majority of the hashing power decides. Why would the current stake-holders be so stupid to switch to a system which is unproven and where there economic advantages, i.e. their capital investment becomes worthless? That makes no sense whatsoever. Coin creation in Bitcoin doesn't arbitrarily change. That's why its a solid system. If such changes were possible Bitcoins would be worthless. All of this should be obvious to anyone who wants to understand why Bitcoin works. The reason is works is that hashing-power can not possibly become worthless. And those that own the hashing power will not agree to give it up. That's the fundamental limitation as well.

Steve, I agree the above post that the Bitcoin mining community will not voluntarily give up their printing press. However, I seriously doubt that they will be collectively confronted with that decision on your timeline.

There is already at least one member of the NXT community who at least suspects that this system can be implemented in that coin. It undoubtedly can, if enough devs are charged with the task. The founding 70 odd members certainly have the capital to invest to make that happen,

Furthermore, the BlackCoin community is already aware of its potential, and you have posted your correspondence with their representative letting anyone who reads this thread know about it.

I suspect that you will have to reconsider your plan before the end of this month.   
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Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake - CPoS
by
RSchexnayder
on 08/06/2014, 20:38:54 UTC
.
Could you point me to a writeup of your algorithm? Or if this is still exploratory, then could you explain more about how proof-of-stake works in your system to create new blocks? Does your system, like Satoshi's, permit a forking blockchain? Note that any such blockchain forks could confuse the user accessing the minority branch.
Steve

I have not tried to further define the algorithm, and I do not intend to. I certainly do not want to try to compete with you.

However, I do intend to try to spread the word on the concept. What I have tried to do, and what I think I have accomplished, is to describe an algorithm in such a way that a person familiar with programming techniques can understand how one can get average transaction times much smaller than half of the block time.   
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Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake - CPoS
by
RSchexnayder
on 08/06/2014, 13:20:45 UTC

Hello Stephan
I conceived a method for how a digital PoS currency could possibly have a 10 second average transaction time, if it had a block time of 1 minute. I wrote about this on r/BlackCoin before you published your whitepaper. Adam Kryskow of the BlackCoin Foundation has since told me that my method is essentially the same is your. From what I understand of yours, that is the case. However, I envisioned a much simpler and mush less powerful implementation than your sub-second proposal.

Right. My main theme is to implement Nick Szabo's idea about agents with non-forgable logs, what an academic paper I cite calls tamper-evident logs. The proof-of-stake is used mainly to deter Sybil attacks, as there is only a certain amount of stake in the post-fork bitcoins that will be thus qualified for dividends.

The single nomadic mint is permitted by the notion of cooperating agents that do not trust the mint, but rather allow it to timestamp the incoming new transactions from clients. The peers verify the mint operations by replaying the operations themselves as they each assemble the blockchain replicant locally in canonical timestamp order. The single mint in turn permits a non-forking blockchain and definite transaction acknowledgment back to the client with sub second response time.

I think I can follow what you are saying there, but I am not sure of what exactly you are calling the nomadic mint, the cooperating agent, the client, and peers.

I have enough programming experience and knowledge of data structures that I know that the system that I came up with can work. Furthermore, no one else in the BlackCoin Foundation that I discussed the method with found a problem with it.

My only question at this time concerns the point at which a transaction is initially confirmed in your system. You do no mention waiting until 51% of the nodes with stake at the start of the block have determined that it can be in the block being assembled.

Are you saying that the simple nomadic mint is a part of your program that assembles the master ledger in timestamp order? For it to work this way, it would have to have the sole responsibility to verify that the transaction is legitimate and thus verify it to the network. Thus, it has the responsibility to stop any attempted double spends when presented with the second or subsequent ones.

IMO the two methods accomplish the same thing, but are slightly different in execution

The method that I came up with does not require a centralized mint. I am not trying to argue that one is better than the other, because I have not thought about it. I have no desire to try to start programing either one.
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Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [ANNOUNCE] Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake - CPoS
by
RSchexnayder
on 08/06/2014, 02:36:37 UTC

Hello Stephan
I conceived a method for how a digital PoS currency could possibly have a 10 second average transaction time, if it had a block time of 1 minute. I wrote about this on r/BlackCoin before you published your whitepaper. Adam Kryskow of the BlackCoin Foundation has since told me that my method is essentially the same is your. From what I understand of yours, that is the case. However, I envisioned a much simpler and mush less powerful implementation than your sub-second proposal.
I did this shortly after I became interested in BlackCoin. I came up with the idea of how to implement it after I read the Follow the Coin article at the link below were rat4 and Soepkip are interviewed, and the 10 second transaction time of BlackCoin is prominently mentioned in that article dated April 4th 2014.
http://www.followthecoin.com/interview-creator-blackcoin-bc/
Since BlackCoin has a 1 minute block time, the minimum average transaction time should be 30 seconds.
The methodology that I foresaw is made possible by the fact that all of the nodes are cooperating, which is not possible with a PoW coin like Bitcoin. Therefore, whenever nodes with 51% of the stake at the start of a block have eventually confirmed that a transaction can be in the current block, it can be confirmed to the entire network that it will eventually be in the block. If an attempt at a double spend is occurring in the block, then the first node that subsequently becomes aware of the attempt should immediately ensure that second spend will not be added to the current block by sending an immediate alert that a double spend has been attempted. Each node receiving this alarm should verify that it is accurate. If it is a false claim, the offending node should be blackballed.
I assumed that this method was being programmed by rat4 when it was announced on r/BlackCoin that he was working on PoS 2.0 based on the Peercoin protocol.
It had never been adequately explained to me why Soepkip and others who should have known better had allowed the 10 second fiction to continue after the big pump and dump occurred shortly after the article came out. The 10 second claim was certainly used during that pump. I have tried on several occasions to get an explanation, but I have not tried recently to get one directly from Soepkip because all of my earlier attempts had been brushed aside by him. 
I subsequently found out that that is not what rat4 is working on. That is when Alan told me that your scheme is a more sophisticated version of mine that assumes that the master nodes are sitting astride the backbones of the internet.
With regard to jubalix’s question, it is my understanding that NXT, as it is written now does not incorporate this methodology. However, I could be wrong. Nevertheless, the cat is now out of the bag. IMO it will not be long before the NXT community understands how to modify their protocol and set out to do it. I would think that their first step would be to implement a simplified, bare bones version like my proposed version to determine in practice what kind of actual average transaction times can be achieved. The next step would be your Internet backbone version. 
What Alan refers to as our internal discussions at the Blackcoin Foundation has just been within one relatively small committee where there is much resistance to rocking the Bitcoin boat and a realization that we do not have the ability to properly fund such a project at this time. However, I am sure that NXT does, if the initial investors  think it is worthwhile, which I do not see why they would not.
RSchexnayder   
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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD
by
RSchexnayder
on 19/05/2014, 10:19:24 UTC
McKie, I have PMed you on reddit with the contact info on the MIT Bitcoin Club.
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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC/BLK) | PoS | No Premine - No IPO - ONLY OFFICIAL THREAD
by
RSchexnayder
on 19/05/2014, 08:57:51 UTC
Boeing987, I was PMed by Rodolfo from CoinKite about the MIT Airdrop.

They will provide a 20% educational discount on their product. I think this is in addition to the volume discount, if we can put together a buy from the nearby MIT merchants.

I have given an Airdrop update on this reddit thread.   

http://www.reddit.com/r/blackcoin/comments/25wdr4/blackcoin_price_prediction_for_june/
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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | PoS | No premine | No IPO
by
RSchexnayder
on 06/05/2014, 10:58:28 UTC
This is a working draft of a press release intended to be distributed by the Blackcoin Community. It has already been edited based on some proofreading comments as well a new information that has become available, which may have introduced new proofreading error.

Blackcoin has two outstanding features.

Blackcoin is 6 times faster than Bitcoin and requires at least an order of magnitude less additional electricity to run. Its blazing speed makes it more suitable for brick and mortar merchant. Its cooperatively produced blockchain ledger pages make it the environmentally friendly alternative to the renewable energy gobbling Bitcoin.

Blackcoin has 1 minute block times with 10 confirmations recommended for certainty resulting in a 10 minute maximum waiting time for large transactions. In contrast, Bitcoin has 10 minute block times with 6 confirmations recommended resulting in a 1 hour waiting time. This makes Blackcoin 6 times faster than Bitcoin. As more brick and mortar merchants throughout the worlds develop confidence in crypto currencies, the fear of a massive worldwide crypto scams will hopefully fade and these technical details will become less relevant.

However, what is important to brick and mortar merchants as well as restaurants is the actual transaction time experienced in cryptospace. These are compared among the top ranking coins and reported graphically over time on bitinfocharts.com. The Blackcoin average rate has now dropped down to near the theoretical minimum of 30 seconds with a 1 minute block time target. Of course, the actual average block time does not necessarily track the design value. This also has to be actually be measured in practice. Based on these results, some will experience a transaction time around 1 second and others will be delayed 1 minute or more. The chance of experiencing any one time between 0 and 60 seconds should be equal for any one transaction. 

The electrical consumption required to maintain Bitcoin’s current security is gobbling up irreplaceable, renewable-energy resources in areas where they provide the less expensive options bar none. A recent study cited in the Wall Street Journal shows that the hash rate required for Bitcoin’s security last fall was one sixtieth (1 / 60) of what it is now. This hash rate inflation has been fueled by the tremendous profitability of large scale corporate mining operations and the mining technology explosion.

The largest known corporate Bitcoin mining operation is reported to be housed in a warehouse in Central Washington State where it can take advantage of the US’s lowest electricity rates bar none. The Spokane Review recently reported that a handful of additional competitors are about to pop up.

The New York Times reported on a similar setup in Iceland, which may have the least expensive electricity of any country in the world. It is powered by hydro and geothermal resources. This trend will continue as the Bitcoin mining technology improves at breakneck speed driven by the profitability resulting from the squandering of these irreplaceable resources. This will continue until the environmental community wakes up and learns about Blackcoin, the green coin, after it makes its Wall Street debut.  

These corporate mining operations compete against each other for the right to enter the next ledger page into the blockchain about every 10 minutes. The startups that produce the otherwise useless mining equipment are forced to make outrageous claims for their latest drawing board designs to get preorder payments to finance their production as has been well documented by CoinDesk in numerous articles. Are we about to repeat the environmental disasters that followed the 1849 California Gold Rush and the Spindletop oil gusher?

Blackcoin was formed by the marriage of Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain with Sunny King’s proven Proof of Stake (PoS) source code. This allows existing, multitasking computers like desktops and even laptop owned by Blackcoin stakeholders to cooperatively produce the next ledger page for its blockchain about every 1 minute. Thus, the additional amount of electricity required to maintain Blackcoin consists of what is required to run those computers that are online at any one time to maintain the blockchain when they would otherwise be off the grid.

Sunny King produced Peercoin as the first hybrid PoW/PoS coin in 2011. Bitcoin exclusively uses the PoW (Proof of Work) system, while Blackcoin has already finished its initial PoW phase. Since Peercoin was launched many exclusive PoS coins have successfully tested Sunny King’s source code.  

What these other PoS coins all lack is the killer application recently featured on CoinDesk that will facilitate the wider adoption of crypto currencies.by the less digitally informed. This invention puts everything needed onto a plug and play Black Card Wallet implemented on a USB stick. Plug it in and everything pops up on your screen, and off you go into cryptospace. It is the best advancement in cryptospace since the launch of Dogecoin.    

The Black Card Wallet will make its Wall Street debut in late May when 50 beautiful ladies will parade through the financial district giving out Black Card Wallets and a fact sheets.

More information on Blackcoin can be found on its official website, the Blackcoin Forum, and especially on its subreddit, where informed members of the our community will answer your written question


A press release eh?
Is this going to New Scientist? If not, its too long and too geeky.


I had not thought about New Scientist.
Valarmor on r/blackcoin said it is unfocused.
It covers what IMO are the two main features of BC.  I suggested to him that it could be ripped in two.
He said he would try to rewrite it.
If it were ripped into two one could be geeky and one focused on the environmentalists.
The two shorter press released could then be targeted by PR Newswire to the the two lists for the two subjects.  
Thanks for noticing it.
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Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | PoS | No premine | No IPO
by
RSchexnayder
on 05/05/2014, 23:53:29 UTC
This is a working draft of a press release intended to be distributed by the Blackcoin Community. It has already been edited based on some proofreading comments as well a new information that has become available, which may have introduced new proofreading error.

Blackcoin has two outstanding features.

Blackcoin is 6 times faster than Bitcoin and requires at least an order of magnitude less additional electricity to run. Its blazing speed makes it more suitable for brick and mortar merchant. Its cooperatively produced blockchain ledger pages make it the environmentally friendly alternative to the renewable energy gobbling Bitcoin.

Blackcoin has 1 minute block times with 10 confirmations recommended for certainty resulting in a 10 minute maximum waiting time for large transactions. In contrast, Bitcoin has 10 minute block times with 6 confirmations recommended resulting in a 1 hour waiting time. This makes Blackcoin 6 times faster than Bitcoin. As more brick and mortar merchants throughout the worlds develop confidence in crypto currencies, the fear of a massive worldwide crypto scams will hopefully fade and these technical details will become less relevant.

However, what is important to brick and mortar merchants as well as restaurants is the actual transaction time experienced in cryptospace. These are compared among the top ranking coins and reported graphically over time on bitinfocharts.com. The Blackcoin average rate has now dropped down to near the theoretical minimum of 30 seconds with a 1 minute block time target. Of course, the actual average block time does not necessarily track the design value. This also has to be actually be measured in practice. Based on these results, some will experience a transaction time around 1 second and others will be delayed 1 minute or more. The chance of experiencing any one time between 0 and 60 seconds should be equal for any one transaction. 

The electrical consumption required to maintain Bitcoin’s current security is gobbling up irreplaceable, renewable-energy resources in areas where they provide the less expensive options bar none. A recent study cited in the Wall Street Journal shows that the hash rate required for Bitcoin’s security last fall was one sixtieth (1 / 60) of what it is now. This hash rate inflation has been fueled by the tremendous profitability of large scale corporate mining operations and the mining technology explosion.

The largest known corporate Bitcoin mining operation is reported to be housed in a warehouse in Central Washington State where it can take advantage of the US’s lowest electricity rates bar none. The Spokane Review recently reported that a handful of additional competitors are about to pop up.

The New York Times reported on a similar setup in Iceland, which may have the least expensive electricity of any country in the world. It is powered by hydro and geothermal resources. This trend will continue as the Bitcoin mining technology improves at breakneck speed driven by the profitability resulting from the squandering of these irreplaceable resources. This will continue until the environmental community wakes up and learns about Blackcoin, the green coin, after it makes its Wall Street debut.  

These corporate mining operations compete against each other for the right to enter the next ledger page into the blockchain about every 10 minutes. The startups that produce the otherwise useless mining equipment are forced to make outrageous claims for their latest drawing board designs to get preorder payments to finance their production as has been well documented by CoinDesk in numerous articles. Are we about to repeat the environmental disasters that followed the 1849 California Gold Rush and the Spindletop oil gusher?

Blackcoin was formed by the marriage of Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain with Sunny King’s proven Proof of Stake (PoS) source code. This allows existing, multitasking computers like desktops and even laptop owned by Blackcoin stakeholders to cooperatively produce the next ledger page for its blockchain about every 1 minute. Thus, the additional amount of electricity required to maintain Blackcoin consists of what is required to run those computers that are online at any one time to maintain the blockchain when they would otherwise be off the grid.

Sunny King produced Peercoin as the first hybrid PoW/PoS coin in 2011. Bitcoin exclusively uses the PoW (Proof of Work) system, while Blackcoin has already finished its initial PoW phase. Since Peercoin was launched many exclusive PoS coins have successfully tested Sunny King’s source code.  

What these other PoS coins all lack is the killer application recently featured on CoinDesk that will facilitate the wider adoption of crypto currencies.by the less digitally informed. This invention puts everything needed onto a plug and play Black Card Wallet implemented on a USB stick. Plug it in and everything pops up on your screen, and off you go into cryptospace. It is the best advancement in cryptospace since the launch of Dogecoin.    

The Black Card Wallet will make its Wall Street debut in late May when 50 beautiful ladies will parade through the financial district giving out Black Card Wallets and a fact sheets.

More information on Blackcoin can be found on its official website, the Blackcoin Forum, and especially on its subreddit, where informed members of the our community will answer your written question
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Topic
Board Press
Re: [2014-01-20] China is heading towards a default. Potential good news for Bitcoin
by
RSchexnayder
on 20/01/2014, 10:45:38 UTC
I have been watching this development for a few hours since i saw a link to a Forbes article on it.
Google News now has abut three others. I agree, this is serious and will probably lead to a pop in price, if it is allowed to happen. However, it appears that the market is assuming that there will be some kind of bailout. Nevertheless, from what i can tell, one of these shadow banking deals will not be able to be averted and it will have the major affect that you foresee for the price of bitcoins.   
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Board Economics
Topic OP
There is evidence that Coinbase is selling on Bitstamp
by
RSchexnayder
on 19/01/2014, 20:38:50 UTC
The trading charts on BitcoinWisdom indicate Coinbase is disposing of its bitcoins on Bitstamp. I reached this conclusion by comparing the trading charts of Coinbase with those of Bitstamp, BTC-e, Mt.Gox, BTCChina, and OKCoin. It really does not matter which one you use from the 6 hour chart to the more frequent ones even down to the 1 minute graphs. However, it is not as obvious on the 1 and 3 minute charts as it is on the longer ones. There is no reason to use the 1 week to 12 hours charts because the Coinbase history does not go back far enough on the website. I load the charts of all six into browser windows so I can flip back and forth quickly between them to compare the patterns.
You can also tell this by comparing the actual trades on the BitcoinWisdom webpages on the two. For instance, at this time both exchanges are showing transactions at $824.75.
This explains why the price shown on The Genesis Block for Bitstamp is usually slightly lower than for BTC-e and BTCChina as explained further below.
The price charts on all of the above exchanges are quite similar indicating that there are active entities engaged in arbitrage between all of them as one would expect given the collective worth of the bitcoins being exchanged. Loading the six charts with the same time spacing into 6 browser windows as described above gives a real clear picture of the price discovery process between these leading exchanges. 
As any knowledgeable Bitcoiners is aware, Coinbase has to exchange bitcoins for fiat, so that merchants are not exposed to currency risk in an online transaction. They also have to be able to offload them somewhere, so they do not accept the risk either. As long as this pattern persists, bitcoins buyers should consider buying on Bitstamp and selling somewhere else. Hopefully, the competitors of Coinbase are using different exchanges for offloading.   
The only evidence that I have found so far that someone else has noticed this correlation between Coinbase and Bitstamp is found at this link to the Online Casino Archives, which states that both exchanges were trading at $814 at the time. If there is evidence that someone else has discovered this relationship before, please let me know. 
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Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Topic OP
Evidence of a Million Dollar Bitcoin
by
RSchexnayder
on 19/01/2014, 09:43:37 UTC
The BitcoinWisdom website is showing evidence of a million dollar purchase that occurred over a five minute period between 17:10 and 17:15 GMT on the BTC-e exchange on Saturday January 18th. Trading volume surged to over 1000 coins during the five minute period. The website shows that normal five-minute volume during the first 19 hours of that day was about 20 coins, which makes this five minute period standout for explanation. The largest volume occurred in the first and fourth minutes, but it was significantly higher during each of the five minutes than during the five minutes in the hour preceding and following. The spread between the high and low price during each minute surged to about 20 coins against a background of 5 or less. The price surged from about $810 at the start to $839 during the fourth minute. The low price during each of the five minutes never exceeded $820. The high price fell to around $820 in the sixth minute and then fell to around $815 for the next hour.
Normally a $30 move in price on either of the Bitstamp, BTC-e, Mt.Gox, BTCChina, or OKCoin exchanges would be mirrored on all five. However, there was no evidence that what occurred on BTC-e affected price discovery on any of the other four. This anomaly is clearly explainable by the fact that the spread on BTC-e widened during the period from about 5 to about 20 as noted above.
The simplest explanation for the episode is that someone or some group purchased around 1000 Bitcoins worth around a million dollars on that exchange during that period. The evidence indicates that the episode had practically no lasting effect in the next hour on that exchange and no discern able affect whatsoever on the other four. If this was an attempt to manipulate the market, it failed miserably.