TR Forums

Glorious wrote:

How do I know the balances?

What randomness?: Sybil says hello.

Glorious wrote:

JBI wrote:

I still take issue with the assertion that blockchain is somehow inherently "too complex" though; it's certainly less complex than many other things that power our digitally connected lives, and the underlying mathematics/cryptography is well-defined and well-understood.

Yeah, it's a really simple data structure and the basic concept is used (with more actually complexity, not chains but trees) in plenty of commonly used already existing things: ZFS completely pre-dates bitcoin, for one example.

DPete27 wrote:

That's what I see. If things pan out, we could be looking at a perfect storm for a big pullback.

ptsant wrote:

either everyone has all copies of all transactions or the system loses its properties. If only some entities have all records then these entities become the equivalent of "banks". If all people have some transactions then the network is no longer truly redundant.

Adam Rogers, Wired wrote:

32.71 terawatt-hours consumed by the bitcoin network—or 0.15 percent of the total world consumption of electricity. More efficient hardware won’t sove that problem. Power consumption went up, and bitcoin miners are now building ASIC clouds in places where electricity is cheap, like... China (where electricity is underwritten by the government and bitcoin is a good way to speculate without regulation). Because that’s where they can bring more servers on line to mine more Bitcoin. Miners took advantage of faster, more efficient hardware not to use less electricity but to do more mining.

Digiconomy estimates that the entire Visa credit network uses about a three-thousandth the total energy of Bitcoin. Google—all of Google, the whole Google—used only 5.7 TWh in 2015 and went completely renewable in 2017.

All right, then, let’s take a different tack. Right now, the hash algorithm is useless work, intentionally. It’s burned. How about making it do something useful? It’s a p2p network doing collaborative computation. What about making it find signals from aliens, or figure out how to make proteins useful to medical science, or solve real-world crypto problems and prime factorization? And but no. “I’ll tell you why that didn’t happen, and it’s perverse,” Sirer says. “Had bitcoin been mined by doing something useful, then there would be a correspondence between useful work and the number of bitcoins you get…That creates a mental anchor point in people’s mind for how much a bitcoin should cost.” See, right now, the cost of a bitcoin floats arbitrarily. It’s socially determined. True, but it also has the something-for-nothing vibe that makes physicists nuts. It also requires building a whole new infrastructure around ASIC clouds, even though everyone knows that mining hardware improves and changes. The fact is, the cheapest, highest-density energy comes from climate-change-causing fossil fuels, and the Bitcoin mining system incentivizes the cheapest energy.

Right now, bitcoin looks increasingly like a tool for speculation rather than a viable, mainstream currency. And one scientific law that math, physics, and economics all share is this: Bubbles pop.

meerkt wrote:

ptsant wrote:

either everyone has all copies of all transactions or the system loses its properties. If only some entities have all records then these entities become the equivalent of "banks". If all people have some transactions then the network is no longer truly redundant.

What do you mean? The number of active full nodes on the Bitcoin network is in the low 10000s, and possibly below 10000.

Captain Ned wrote:

Yan wrote:

anotherengineer wrote:

Mining?

Open pit or U/G?

I see you're really in Northern Ontario.

Sudbury has that effect on people.

ptsant wrote:

I ran a full node. Still have it actually. If I am going to trust my money to another entity, what's the point of a decentralized system?

meerkt wrote:

Ah, right. It would also require a distributed UTXO set. I've read some ideas about that, but I don't remember where it was.

meerkt wrote:

Currently you already download and trust the block headers chain, and the blocks. Here you just don't download all blocks.
If someone has full control over your connection, couldn't they just as well send you fake top-of-chain instead of messing with the middle of it?.

DPete27 wrote:

In just the past couple weeks of crypto price movement I've found myself saying "how are these gains even possible?"

DPete27 wrote:

This has stemmed rampant price run-ups from typically unsubstantiated rumors (IOTA for example is up 10x on the back of a rumor that they were partnering with Microsoft, was recently found to be false, but the price has been slow to return to previous levels)

DPete27 wrote:

The CME futures are still set to launch on 12/18, which could be good or bad. Coincidentally Bitcoin is forming a pennant that intersects almost the exact date of the CME futures launch, and we could be looking at the potential for a triple top around that same date.

DPete27 wrote:

That's what I see. If things pan out, we could be looking at a perfect storm for a big pullback.

meerkt wrote:

The number of active full nodes on the Bitcoin network is in the low 10000s, and possibly below 10000.

meerkt wrote:

I don't know if the percentage of full nodes in the network was higher in recent history, but I don't think a high percentage is required to keep the decentralization aspect.

meerkt wrote:

Pruned mode is just as secure.

Glorious wrote:

Again, if any those "ideas" worked, you've just invalidated the very premise behind having a blockchain.

If they can "fake" that, they just *practically* broke SHA-256 into *triviality*: fake *your* blockchain?

The centralization of miners means, unavoidably, that they can do things like censor certain addresses by simply never including them in the blocks.

meerkt wrote:

Some altcoins are more overall-balance-oriented rather than trace-whole-history. Maybe Bitcoin will evolve into that as well.

meerkt wrote:

Just the top few blocks. Pointless to do on most people, but on the right target...

meerkt wrote:

The "full nodes" mentioned earlier was about blockchain storage and serving, nor mining. But yes, it would be good if mining was still doable by small players.

Glorious wrote:

Could you give me an actual example?

Glorious wrote:

meerkt wrote:

Just the top few blocks. Pointless to do on most people, but on the right target...

... insanely infeasible, but as I stated, would equally endanger the integrity of the actually legitimate chain

Hence, yes, a high percentage of full nodes is necessary, especially as the entire "decentralized" concept is already thoroughly embattled.

meerkt wrote:

There's Iota's snapshots, which is a halfway solution. I recall one of the rising cryptos of recent times (== the last week or two) also tracked balances differently, but I'll have to search more to figure out which one it was. If Bitcoin moves to some form of distributed UTXO set, depending on how aggressive it is, yes, it might make the blockchain mosty or completely unneccesary.

Iota Whitepaper wrote:

For the same reason, a “large weight” attack would also be much more efficient on a quantum computer. However, capping the weight from above, as suggested in Section 4, would effectively prevent a quantum computer attack as well. This isevident in iota because the number of nonces that one needs to check in order to find a suitable hash for issuing a transaction is not unreasonably large

meerkt wrote:

The large miners today each control 10-20% of the hash rate (though, not sure if large pools could be steered to do arbitrary work by the pool operators). If they had a way to benefit from targeting someone with 100M$ in BTC, and were inclined to do so, they could afford to spend a few hours to build a new top-of-chain just for that target.

meerkt wrote:

Whether that means downloading the complete blockchain is less vulnerable than just the blockchain headers plus random blocks in the middle or end... I'll have to ponder some more.

Glorious wrote:

To be clear, I've seen those sorts of "ideas" too: they're handwaving nonsense suggested by utterly clueless people. There are a ton of people talking about this "problem" with bitcoin without (seemingly) any of them realizing it's the same exact, with a capital-p even, -Problem- that bitcoin solved. Which. Is. Very. Frustrating.

Iota wrote:

we have taken precautionary measures to safeguard funds residing at specific addresses to an IOTA Foundation controlled address

Sunny Aggarwal [10:12 PM]
@come-from-beyond Are you suggesting that there will only be a *single* global mesh network for
all IoT devices in the work? (edited)
Micah Zoltu [10:12 PM]
Sure, I go to some spot on earth drop down a radio transmitter and a supercomputer. I tell all my
neighbors, "I'm connected to a billion neighbors behind me."
[10:12]
No node can disprove that I am not actually connected to a billion neighbors.
Come-from-Beyond [10:12 PM]
> Are you suggesting that there will only be a *single* global mesh network for all IoT devices in
the work?
It depends on level of detalization
[10:13]
> Sure, I go to some spot on earth drop down a radio transmitter and a supercomputer. I tell all my
neighbors, "I'm connected to a billion neighbors behind me."
You cannot do it physically

Iota Whitepaper wrote:

On average, it is around 3^8.

Iota Whitepaper wrote:

More importantly, the algorithm used in the iota implementation is structured such that the time to find a nonce is not much larger than the time needed for other tasks that are necessary to issue a transaction.

INSANE PERSON wrote:

Curl-P was created by following the idea of simplicity. While de-jure I can say that it was me who created Curl-P, de-facto it was created by a primitive AI created by me.

WE NEED MEN IN WHITE COATS wrote:

IOTA was created to be immune to quantum computer attacks, today I have revealed that it was also created to be immune to attacks from an AI.

meerkt wrote:

I haven't examined the technical details in depth, nor am I qualified. But Iota has become a widely used network in recent months, with more public scrutiny and I assume more attack attempts.

Too early to tell, but even if they had or have other problems, and never mind marketing, politics, honesty, some technical ideas might end up having merit.

Official IOTA blog wrote:

IOTA was designed to enable transactional settlement at scale. Since consensus is parallelized, and not done in sequential intervals of batches as in Blockchain, the network is able to grow and scale dynamically with the number of transactions. The more transactions are made, the more secure and the more efficient the Tangle gets.

meerkt wrote:

The beauty of the Tangle is that you can fluidly branch off and back into the network.

NovusBogus wrote:

I hadn't heard of it until you guys started talking about it. So is it really that widely used, or just widely hyped amongst alt-currency enthusiasts? In any case, I have to go with Glorious on this one...an altcoin with some shadowy central authority picking winners and losers is no better than fiat which can at least be spent at normal stores. Someone will probably manage to make money with it though.

Glorious wrote:

Less than two months ago and more than once, the network was unusable due to a "spam" attack.

Widely used? There's less than a transaction per second on their network

It's both. Relatively new, but already "established" in cryptocurrency standards (hey, about a year!). Whether a $10B market cap and a few $100M daily trade volume mean much? Maybe a bit, combined with being around for a year. It at least seems more legit than Tron.

Having temporary, or less temporary, centralized parts is a crutch various altcoins use.

Glorious wrote:

It's not legit.

meerkt wrote:

Glorious wrote:

It's not legit.

Never mind absolutes. Surely you will agree it's more legit than Tron?

meerkt wrote:

Widely used, as in, enough monetary value and public interest for people to invest time in studying it and trying to attack it.

meerkt wrote:

If the above two, one year from release, are enough to discredit them, what would you say about Bitcoin in its 9th year?

meerkt wrote:

It's to a large degree unusable for a whole month now, and currently peaks at 3-4 TPS.

meerkt wrote:

Never mind absolutes. Surely you will agree it's more legit than Tron?