Let's go back to Satoshi's
original paper:
The problem of course is the payee can't verify that one of the owners did not double-spend the coin. A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double spending. After each transaction, the coin must be returned to the mint to issue a new coin, and only coins issued directly from the mint are trusted not to be double-spent. The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them, just like a bank. We need a way for the payee to know that the previous owners did not sign any earlier transactions. For our purposes, the earliest transaction is the one that counts, so we don't care about later attempts to double-spend. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to be aware of all transactions. In the mint based model, the mint was aware of all transactions and decided which arrived first. To accomplish this without a trusted party, transactions must be publicly announced [1], and we need a system for participants to agree on a single history of the order in which they were received. The payee needs proof that at the time of each transaction, the majority of nodes agreed it was the first received.
You have already shown Satoshi's counterfactual assumptions here were wrong. You have solved the problem of a central company controlling the mint with your nomadic mint. The payee gets proof by cooperating in electing a dynamic superpeer hierarchy and trusting it to prevent double-spend, without seeing every transaction. Instead of mining independently, the nodes can cross-check the calculations of their superpeer and shoot him if a majority discover he's a turncoat. The superpeer can in turn try to identify bad nodes to be shunned by the network, and broadcasts intermediate signature hashes for consumption by end nodes. Superpeers could be spontaneously elected for a term of office. You are inspired by what mining pools are already doing in practice, but now are incorporating it into a self-organizing cooperative system. Cool stuff!
The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote.
We now know that one-CPU-one-vote didn't work out too well once ASICs got into the action. CPOS solves the majority decision making representation problem by spontaneous election of trusted nodes/mints, and then all the other nodes watch them for misbehavior. The superpeers, in turn, need to watch out for Sybil attacks and rally honest nodes against them. This is a more biologically-supported approach than Santoshi's competitive gold mining, if you think about it (think bees and neurons).
What you say is very interesting. Satoshi designed the current Bitcoin proof-of-work system to prevent an adversary from presenting a forged blockchain as legitimate. My approach makes that difficult by having only one canonical version of the blockchain, in which the current hash is widely known, in which participants are identified by certificates, and in which misbehavior is detected by verifying peers.
...
This is a desirable property for the blockchain or agent logs. I want to understand the circumstances allowing an adversary to forge such a blockchain.
I seem to comprehend how a KSI + chaos blockchain could be tamper-evident, but the forgery attack is one in which the adversary replays transactions from some point in the history, with some change in their own favor, recalculating the merkle trees and block hashes at each step. The forged block chain is thus internally consistent with no evidence of tampering unless compared with the final block hash of the legitimate blockchain.
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:
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.
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?