Quote from: SlipperySlope on September 23, 2014, 10:21:31 PM

Quote from: hbadger on September 23, 2014, 09:34:11 PM

[Gregory Maxwell] talking about PoS too. If you have any doubts go ask him yourself. He's always in the #bitcoin-wizards IRC channel. PoS is not considered a viable alternative to PoW yet. There will have to be another breakthrough to make it workable.

I briefly chatted with Gregory Maxwell on #bitcoin-wizards last spring as I was publishing my whitepaper on Bitcoin Cooperative Proof-of-Stake. Certainly the Bitcoin core developers are skeptical that anything other than proof-of-work can solve the distributed consensus problem. He graciously wished me well with regard to my approach, and I believe that the core developers, e.g. those chatting in #bitcoin-wizards IRC channel, will have more pointed questions and comments when this project's working code is deployed into production, vs commenting on a whitepaper.

Satoshi designed bitcoin, I think, by adapting a napster style peer-to-peer network, e.g. omitting the central index server, to support an anonymous digital currency. His envisioned users were also operators who mined bitcoins using their laptops, from residential internet connections, while joining and leaving the network at will. This is the context of how core developers view distributed consensus.

In contrast, this design fits the Satoshi Social Contract into a conventional distributed enterprise-style financial network, e.g. omitting central control. Its envisioned users are wallet owners and payment processors. Its envisioned operators are non-affiliated paid system administrators who securely provision identical software containers on bare metal dedicated servers in geographically disparate datacenters. The system is innovatively managed by peer-verified software agents having no single point of failure. The nomadic mint agent builds a canonical non-forking blockchain, which is widely copied, and allows immediate transaction processing without confirmations.

Andytoshi, a core developer and mathematician here in Austin, said to me over lunch: "But this is not Bitcoin!". He elaborated to say that a single mint was opposite of what Satoshi wanted. Andytoshi was not then persuaded by my argument that a peer-verified nomadic mint solved the problem of trusting a central mint. Rather he was interested in the vulnerabilities my scheme might have with regard to attacks and network faults in which the system must come to agreement on the correct or optimal version of system state, e.g. who gets to be the mint, and what happens if there are forged blockchains. That is why this project needs to reach production for such fault scenarios to be designed, tested and reported.

I agree and have high expectations for what you are doing. You seem to know your crypto and at the same time you are one of the few who actually uses professional development techniques.

I was just pointing out a few false statements that I have seen here, like "Peercoin has never been attacked", "Nxt is [cryptographically] secure", "Gregory Maxwell was only talking about Peercoin", etc.

hbadger

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