- J.C. May defined the following scale of monetary hardness. - The following is mostly his words, edited to bring them up to - date.
-| May Scale of monetary hardness | -|
| Hardness | - - |
-
| Hard | -|
| 1 | -Street cash, US dollars | -
| 2 | -Street cash, euro currencies, japan | -
| 3 | -Major crypto currencies, such as Bitcoin and Monaro | -
| 4 | -Street cash, other regions | -
| 5 | -Interbank transfers of various sorts (wires etc), - bank checks | -
| 6 | -personal checks | -
| 7 - | -Consumer-level electronic account transfers (eg - bPay) | -
| 8 | -Business-account-level retail transfer systems | -
| Soft | -|
| 9 | -Paypal and similar 'new money' entities, beenz | -
| 10 | -Credit cards | -
Observe that say stock brokerages definitely do not accept credit cards or - paypal to fund an account. They will only accept instruments that are very hard, - such as wire transfers or certified bank checks.
- - When hard money is required, only money-types with a hardness of about 5 - or better will do the job.
- - On the other hand, if you're purchasing an online subscription, or - consumer goods from a large retailer, softer money-types are more acceptable.
- - When dealing with conversions between different types of money, - generally you can only go "downwards" on the May scale.
- - Thus, for example it is very easy to accept cash-dollars, and handout - paypal-dollars in return. But it would be almost impossible to accept credit cards or - paypal-dollars,and hand out cash in return.
- -It is extremely significant that individuals tend to require harder money in their transactions.
- - Corporations and large bodies can get away with using softer money, as they have more political (in the broad sense) power to affect the outcome of dubious or revoked transactions.
- - For instance, selling you a car, I could only trust you if you pay me - with a hard money. Say, no softer than 5 on the may scale. - No-one takes a personal check when selling a car.
- - A car dealership, though, can trust you with somewhat softer money .. say up to 7/8 on the May scale (they probably would not take credit cards, though).
- - WalMart can trust you all the way through to 10 when you buy goods at WalMart. (WalMart have more political recourse if a payment repudiates.)
- - We are entering the age of the "sovereign individual" where individuals will have ever-more power. More and more, individuals will be able to behave in ways previously reserved for large government or corporate entities. More and more, individuals will be able to fulfill functions previously dominated by large government or corporate entities.
- - For instance, it would have been in inconceivable in 1900 for one individual to, say, set up and operate a stock market. That would be and could only be the work of a large, powerful, social-political-corporate group.
- - However in 2000, one individual could completely program and operate stock market with a few hours programming and a web site.
- - Money systems that are higher up on the may scale are more suitable for individuals.
- - As we move more and more into the age of the "sovereign individual", where individuals will replace many of the functions of corporate/government entities, there will be more and more demand for money systems that are higher-up on the may scale.
- -The above essay turned out to be optimistic, but a successor to bitcoin may accomplish what e-gold failed to accomplish. - -
- Original (oldest) essay, where Tim May first proposed the May Scale of Monetary Hardness:
-
- This essay was written in the time when e-gold appeared to be successful. E-gold attempted to do what Bitcoin is attempting to, and failed. Bitcoin was inspired in substantial part to fix the problems that killed e-gold. The centralized single-point-of-failure ledgers of e-gold came under attack by the state, by scammers, and by state backed scammers.
->Your question provokes us to focus on a major factor inhibiting the growth ->of e-gold – that there’s no common way now to put money into an account fast ->(as in a matter of minutes instead of hours or more likely, days and weeks). ->An ironic situation, considering that e-gold is destined for greatness as ->the currency of the internet. -
- It’s worth noting that funding – say – a trading account with your - stock broker is just as "difficult" as buying e-gold.
- - For that matter, funding a new BANK ACCOUNT is just as difficult as - buying e-gold.
- - When you open a stock broking account at etrade or whatever, you - certainly cannotget funds there instantly – your options are wire - and wait days, bank check or cashier’s check and wait a week or a - personal check and wait a couple of weeks.
- - A stock broking account, like buying e-gold, is a very HARD form of - money. Whenever you are trying to buy a very HARD form of money, - using a softer form of money. -
-- Here is the "May Scale" of money hardness (comments invited) -
---hard-- - 1 street cash, US dollars - 2 street cash, euro currencies, Aus, japan - 3 egold - 4 street cash, other regions - 5 interbank transfers of various sorts (wires etc) - 6 checks - 7 consumer-level electronic account transfers (eg bPay in Australia) - 8 business-account-level retailer transfer - --soft-- - 9 paypal and similar 'new money' entities - 10 credit cards - --ludicrously soft!-- -- It is not meant to be definitive (eg, 6 and 7 could perhaps be - swapped; I left out cash on call at your stock broker, which is - probably around "2", etc) but gives a framework to think in.
- - Now if you're a retailer and you're selling VCRs, sure, you can take - poxy money around the May Scale of 8, 9 or 10.
- - But if you're a "retailer" and what you're selling is money itself - – ie, you are selling e-gold, or you are Quick & Reilly – it - is EXCEEDINGLY DIFFICULT to accept anything with May Scale > about 5.
- - (Note that at coconutgold, we simply only accept wires! All the exchange providers for e-gold who accept money on the May Scale of 9 or 10 are very brave, tough, and quite understandably have to charge fairly high premiums to do so!)
- - Again the point --- it’s no surprise or horror that it is somewhat DIFFICULT to get e-gold, to fund e-gold .... it’s for exactly the same reason that you can’t instantly fund a stock broking account.
- - Observe that at Bananagold, we TAKE IN #3 and PUT OUT #8 .. so that’s a very 'secure' transaction. The #3 transactions is essentially not reversible, whereas the #8 transaction is a joke, we could reverse it anytime with a short argument on the phone.)
- - What a surprise! that banks will only accept money that is at the 1 to 4 end of the May Scale, and they are only really happy giving you money on the 6 to 10 end of the May Scale!
- -These documents are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
- - diff --git a/docs/blockdag_consensus.md b/docs/blockdag_consensus.md index 9e2d919..2f19616 100644 --- a/docs/blockdag_consensus.md +++ b/docs/blockdag_consensus.md @@ -3,13 +3,16 @@ title: Blockdag Consensus ... +Not ready for publication. "stake" is currently used in a different sense on blockchains, and this describes +a system in which wallets are peers and peers are wallets, which is a pretty bad idea. + # The problem For the reasons discussed, proof of work is incapable of handling a very large number of transactions per second. To replace fiat money, we need a consensus algorithm capable of a thousand times greater consensus bandwidth. There are plenty of consensus algorithms that can handle much higher consensus bandwidth, but they do not scale to large numbers of peers. They are usually implemented with a fixed number of peers, usually three peers, perhaps five, all of which have high reliability connections to each other in a single data centre. In a decentralized open entry peer to peer network, you are apt to get a very large number of peers, which keep unpredictably appearing and disappearing and frequently have unreliable and slow connections. -Existing proof of stake crypto currencies handle this by "staking" which is in practice under the rug centralization. They are not really a decentralized peer to peer network with open entry. +Existing proof of share crypto currencies handle this by "staking" which is in practice under the rug centralization. They are not really a decentralized peer to peer network with open entry. ## The solution outlined @@ -70,9 +73,7 @@ there is for a prong of a fork. ### Sampling the peers So we have to sample the peers, or rather have each peer draw consensus -from the same representative sample. And then we implement something -similar to Paxos and Raft within that small sample. And sometimes peers -will disagree about which sample, resulting in a fork, which has to be resolved. +from the same representative sample. For each peer that could be on the network, including those that have been sleeping in a cold wallet for years, each peer keeps a running cumulative @@ -83,6 +84,16 @@ On each block of the chain, a peer’s rank is the bit position of the highest bit of the running total that rolled over when its stake was added for that block. +*edit note* + +Here I propose making the weight in any block $2^rank$, but perhaps a better rule is that exclusive or of the previous and new value of the running total is the weight, which obviates the need for multiple peers to sign on to resolve draws. + +And also I propose a running limit on the rank. A better solution is that in the event of deep fork, where several blocks differ between the two branches of the fork, you prefer the branch that has the greatest median weight on all the blocks that differ multiplied by the total weight, rather than the total weight. If there are an even number of blocks, he takes the average of the two median weights. There is a limit on the number of blocks permitted since the alleged time on the last identical block. However a block with great block weight is allowed to be produces faster than a block with little block weight, so a higher weight branch can also have more total blocks. + +Which gives the same outcome, that on average and over time, the total weight will reflect the total weight of peers online and actively participating, and the total weight of a branch of a deep fork will reflect the total weight of the peers on that fork, so that in the event of a long network bisection, the group that has the most peers is likely to win when the bisection is fixed. + +*end edit note* + So if Bob has a third of the stake of Carol, and $N$ is a rank that corresponds to bit position higher than the stake of either of them, then Bob gets to be rank $R$ or higher one third as often as Carol. But even if @@ -541,7 +552,7 @@ And bitcoin consensus is slow, because the way a fork is resolved is that blocks that received one branch fork first continue to work on that branch, while blocks that received the other branch first continue to work on that branch, until one branch gets ahead of the other branch, whereupon the -leading branch spreads rapidly through the peers. With proof of stake, that +leading branch spreads rapidly through the peers. With proof of share, that is not going work, one can lengthen a branch as fast as you please. Instead, each branch has to be accompanied by evidence of the weight of stake of peers on that branch. Which means the winning branch can start spreading @@ -676,7 +687,7 @@ We intend that peers will hold no valuable or lasting secrets, that all the value and the power will be in client wallets, and the client wallets with most of the value, who should have most of the power, will seldom be online. -I propose proof of stake. The stake of a peer is not the stake it owns, but +I propose proof of share. The stake of a peer is not the stake it owns, but the stake that it has injected into the blockchain on behalf of its clients and that its clients have not spent yet, or stake that some client wallet somewhere has chosen to be represented by that peer. Likely only the @@ -726,4 +737,4 @@ and, when executed, cause a change in mutable total state, typically that a new unspent coin record is added, and an old unspent coin record is deleted. -A thousand times as expensive turns out to be quite economical. \ No newline at end of file +A thousand times as expensive turns out to be quite economical. diff --git a/docs/contracts_on_blockchain.md b/docs/contracts_on_blockchain.md index fa2550a..4c41e41 100644 --- a/docs/contracts_on_blockchain.md +++ b/docs/contracts_on_blockchain.md @@ -145,7 +145,7 @@ flexibility is likely to bite people. # Atomic Swaps on separate blockchains -A proof of stake currency is like a corporation, like shares in a +A proof of share currency is like a corporation, like shares in a corporation. So we are going to have many corporations, and individuals will want to exchange shares in one corporation, with shares in another. We would like to do this without direct linking of diff --git a/docs/crypto_currency_and_the_beast.html b/docs/crypto_currency_and_the_beast.html deleted file mode 100644 index 6f3ed69..0000000 --- a/docs/crypto_currency_and_the_beast.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,109 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - -- -We need blockchain crypto currency supporting pseudonymous reputations and end to end encrypted communications where an encrypted communication can carry money, rfps, bills, invoices, and offers.
- -We also need one whose consensus protocol is more resistant to government leverage. Ethereum is alarmingly vulnerable to pressure from our enemies.
- -The trouble with all existing blockchain based currencies is that the metadata relating to the transaction is transmitted by some other, ad hoc, mechanism, usually highly insecure, and this metadata necessarily links transaction outputs to identities, albeit in Monaro it only links a single transaction output, rather than a network of transactions.
- -Thus we need a pseudonymous, not an anonymous, crypto currency.
- -The intent of this technology is to liberate the reputational information that makes transactions possible, currently largely siloed by Ebay and Amazon, to secure it not by a record in centralized databases, but by secret keys held by unknown individuals who cannot be grabbed by cops or beaten up by antifa.
- -These reputations will make it possible for an anonymous use-once identity to perform an instant on the spot transaction secured by the reputation of a large and long established peer on the blockchain with a pseudonymous reputation, the transaction being with an identity secured by a secret held by an anonymous individual, also secured by the reputation and secret held by someone who controls a large and long established peer with a pseudonymous reputation, whose physical servers are located in a data center in a nation state distant from the nation state and local authorities where the actual transaction takes place.
- -But it is awfully close to, and very similar to, the profoundly oppressive technology of the Prophecy of the Beast. It is a dual use technology, that can be used by individuals to free themselves from centralized control, and could be used by powerful centers to enforce centralized control.
- -The free and pseudonymous end to end encrypted messaging is intended to undermine the officially unofficial state religion of progressivism, making the worship of Gnon possible and safe, but could easily be repurposed to the heavily censored messaging scrutinized by global databases belonging to the beast that today we see with Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail, which enforce the officially unofficial State Religion of the Beast.
- -For example, this technology can be used to publish data obtained by the Scientific Method, secured by reputations for faithfully adhering to the scientific method, but Google Docs censors such information and downranks such reputations in search results in favor of data concocted by Peer Review, which are priestly truths established by the priestly method of Holy Synods, of the priesthood of the Beast. - -
- -The Beast with seven heads establishes a false, state enforced religion, which converges all other religons to it and:
- -16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
-17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
- -What the Dark Enlightenment calls the Cathedral is The Beast with Seven heads, no single will but a consortium of several conspiracies, rather too many conspiracies, each contending for power and status, each composed of several individuals, rather too many individuals, each contending for power and status. The Cathedral is not a single individual, and lacks a single will, but it is not a very large number of individuals either.
- -Everyone today is tracked by their cellphone, which is necessarily continually triangulated by several cell phone towers, and necessarily reports its distance to anything pretending to be a cellphone tower, and everyone’s face is recorded in numerous facial recognition databases.
- -If these databases get integrated with your social security number or tax file number, which increasingly they are, that is the number of the beast.
- -So, everyone does have that number, but the prophecy of the beast is not yet fullfilled unless everyone, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, needs that database integration to buy and sell.
- -The prophecy, in today’s context, means you would not be able to buy and sell except your face and phone links the transaction to your social security number, and this system would be applied throughout the American Empire with a global database of tax file numbers.
- -To buy and sell, your phone would need to contain a local copy of a recent extract from the Beast’s global database, digitally signed by a recent digital signature from the Beast, which extract contains a recent photograph of your face, or recent face recognition parameters, or you would need a card with a chip on it, containing a recent extract with recent face recognition parameters.
- -Deliveries would only be delivered to a name and address registered to a social security number or tax file number in the Beast’s database, and paid for from an account registered to that that social security number or tax file number. In person transactions over the counter transactions would require your face matching the Beast’s database, a face that can be beaten in by antifa.
- -If you can use cash, gold, silver, tobacco, anonymous crypto currency, or small calibre long rifle ammunition to buy and sell, then the prophecy of the beast has not yet come to pass.
- -Crypto currency has the great advantage that you can use it to perform -transactions over distance and time, secured by the blockchain, and -rhocoin is designed to also allow instant in person on-the-spot -over-the-counter transactions, intended to be a complete replacement -for fiat money.
- -It is increasingly the case that low, poor, and bond, face considerable risks in using cash. For example black people, mainly black people who do not have jobs or families, are using bottles of laundry powder as cash, because a low person with a lot of cash is apt to have his cash seized by police. The advantage of using laundry powder as money is that its inconvenient bulk makes the police reluctant to seize it.
- -Crypto currency passphrases are also inconvenient to seize, since they need to beat up the holder of the secret, and he likely has more than one such secret, but low, poor, and bond find them a bit difficult to use. It is has to pass that low poor and bond are using laundry powder to do transactions without the number of the beast, and high, rich, and free are using crypto secrets.
- -It is very difficult to exchange fiat money for crypto cash, except you record your face and data integrated with the database of the beast with the exchange.
- -Every major crypto exchange is integrated with the beasts databases, linked to your social security number or tax file number, and with a recent photograph that will be used for facial recognition, to the number on your hand and on your forhead.
- -The capability of rhocoin for instant in person transactions is intended to -make exchanges of fiat cash for rhocoin difficult to centralize, and the -capability of rhocoin for communication secured by pseudonymous reputations is -intended to make it possible for the scientific method to be practiced, as the -true worship of Gnon requires.
- -The capability for public communications securely connected to a pseudonymous reputation is primarily intended to free the reputational data currently siloed by Amazon and Ebay, used to exchange value over time and distance, but also intended to be used for other reputational purposes, to liberate scientific reputations from academic silos.
- -When high, rich, and free gets his gold and cash seized, and the secret key to his crypto extracted by rubber hose cryptography, when integration of crypto currency to the databases of the Beast is complete, or dangerous to avoid, when the blockchain records your every transaction forever and connects them to a face that can be beaten in, and places where that face is likely to be found, then the prophecy of the beast has come to pass.
- -As a blockchain scales up to full commercial scale, running a full peer -becomes costly and burdensome, so with bitcoin we have alarmingly few -miners, and power over the blockchain is concentrated in very few miners. -The reason for rhocoin -to use the paxos protocol rather than the mining protocol is to ensure that -when that when concentrated power comes to pass, the concentrated power is in -the hands of wealthy people who want to use its transaction service, who -probably do not want all of their transactions exposed to hostile scrutiny. -The design aims to ensure that when power gets concentrated, as with scaling -it -inevitably will, it gets concentrated into peers whose underlying identity -secrets can easily vanish off to another jurisdiction, and whose power depends -on having lots of wealthy clients, many of whom are unlikely to want full -scrutiny of all their transactions, lest envious people find some excuse for -beating in their faces. Paxos protocol means that the system operates -effectively like corporate board, and since "votes" are proportional to bitcoin -of clients, a "board" that we may hope that, when scaling inevitably produces -centralization, is in effect composed of a large number of rich and powerful -people who prefer banking in secrecy and do not trust each other all that much.
- -These documents are -licensed under the Creative -Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
- - diff --git a/docs/crypto_currency_launch.html b/docs/crypto_currency_launch.html deleted file mode 100644 index e8c178a..0000000 --- a/docs/crypto_currency_launch.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,64 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - -- - The total value held in the form of gold is ten trillion. But gold has problems – if you try to transport it through an airport, security will likely take it from you. Hard to travel with it hidden.
- - Hard to transfer it from one person to another, or from one identity to another. Hard to do international transactions in gold, hard to pay for oil with gold, or be paid for oil with gold, because transporting large amounts of gold is slow and dangerous.
- - So, something better than gold, more transportable, more hideable, people would probably keep more than ten trillion in that form.
- - The current value of bitcoin is about three hundred billion. Arguably crypto currency, if it works, if safe against the state, should be rather more than ten trillion. Say thirty trillion. This provides an upside of another hundred fold increase in value. On the other hand, the bitcoin is traceable in ways that gold is not. People are waiting to see what happens when the government cracks down.
- - A crypto currency needs to be totally traceable and totally untraceable. Ann wants to be able to prove to Carol that she paid Bob, and that therefore her debt to Bob is cleared, or Bob has an obligation the Ann. But Ann and Bob likely do not want a powerful hostile party to be able to discover that Ann made a payment to Bob. Existing crypto currencies suffer from total traceability.
- - Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a measure of value. Gold sucks as a medium of exchange, because of transportation risks and costs. Crypto currency is very good as a medium of exchange, better than anything else, because banks are so remarkably incompetent, inefficient, and lawless.
- - As a measure of value, gold has immense and ancient history, which makes it the best for long term measure of value. If you graph the prices of something, such as oil, over decades and centuries, you get far saner and more plausible data when you graph in terms of gold than in dollars, or even supposedly inflation adjusted dollars. Gold is the best measure of value over time. Inflation adjusted dollars give results that smell of politics and propaganda. Bitcoin, because of volatility and extremely rapid deflation, is really bad as a measure of value, but time will slowly fix this.
- - The current price of bitcoin reflects a substantial possibility that it replaces the dollar as the currency of international transactions, in which case the dollar finds itself on the bitcoin standard, like it or not.
- - To attract a significant portion of the wealth of the world, we do not want to have any mining, since this basically a fee against large accounts. We want a per account fee, because every account results in accountancy costs, and a transaction fee, because every transaction results in transaction costs, but not a charge against holding enormous amounts of wealth in an account. Mining is a charge against the value of accounts, which is a bad idea if we want wealth holders to hold their wealth in our crypto currency.
- - We want it to be impossible to find who holds a large account if he does not want to be found, so that he is safe from rubber hose cryptography. We want it to be easy for him to keep control, and hard for anyone else to get control. He should be able to take the wallet that controls the bulk of his money offline, so that it cannot sign anything, because he has the signing key on a scrap of paper hidden somewhere, or on several such scraps of paper.
- - And then, bringing together the scraps of paper that are the secret number that controls his account paper, he can sit down at a computer anywhere in the world, and send that money hither and yon.
- -Gold has problems as the medium of international exchange, because of the problems of moving it. So everyone left their gold in Fort Knox, and moved ownership of that gold around, but it gradually became more and more obvious that America has embezzled all that gold.
- -Because of problems with gold, people wound up using the US$ as the medium of international exchange. Which works fine if the US Government likes you, but from time to time it decides it does not like someone, for reasons that grow increasingly capricious and unpredictable.
- -Bitcoin is moveable. Big advantage over gold.
- -Bitcoin is governed by consensus, which has serious problems because it is a consensus of miners, rather than a consensus of people who hold large amounts of bitcoin, but it has the advantage that the miners are rational, self interested, and competent, and are therefore predictable, while the US government is increasing crazy, self destructive, and criminal, and therefore unpredictable.
- - -The coin to invest in needs to be able to scale all the way to wiping out the US$ as a world currency. But it also needs to gain initial critical mass.
- - -How do we start up the coin?
- - -Bitcoin got started because everyone and his brother and his brother’s dog could mine, thus getting the software and and a small amount of coin into the hands of a large number of interested people. But a coin that relies on weight of stake, rather than weight of processing power, does not have mining. Instead, the coin is effectively shares in the startup. Founders, investors, and initial employees get the coins. But for the coins to be useful, have to get them into the hands of a wider circle of people.
- -At the core of a crypto coin is a mechanism for determining and globally witnessing a global truth. That is a service that needs to be available on a for profit basis
- -This document is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
- - diff --git a/docs/crypto_currency_new_index.html b/docs/crypto_currency_new_index.html deleted file mode 100644 index 3058cec..0000000 --- a/docs/crypto_currency_new_index.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,66 +0,0 @@ - - - - -- -It is possible to have a crypto currency similar to bitcoin where though there is one global ledger recording what public keys own what, there is no way to tell which human actors know the private keys corresponding to those public keys.
- -The downside of Chaumian e-cash is very simple. You need a single centralized trusted server holding a small number unshared secrets. At two in the morning Mueller kicks down your door and demands you alter the behavior of your server in ways that make it profoundly untrustworthy. While he is at, holds a gun to your head and takes the secrets, charges you with tax fraud, money laundering, etc, and puts you in solitary confinement pending trial so as to make it impossible to organize your defense.
- -A crypto currency needs to be centerless – it needs to able to survive the seizure of key servers by a hostile powerful party.
- -Trouble with bitcoin is that it is not centerless – proof of work winds up being centralized in a small number of extremely powerful and extremely expensive computers.
- -Thus we need a system with proof of stake, and not only proof of stake, but proof of client stake – the power over the system needs to reside with peers that have a lot of wealthy clients – and it needs to be hard to find who the clients are, and where they are keeping their secrets, so that even if Mueller seizes important peers on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, does not thereby gain control.
- -If the system handles an enormous number of transactions, peers are going to be big and expensive, thus vulnerable to people like Mueller armed with vague and open ended charges of tax evasion and money laundering. Hence the power of peer over the currency needs to be proportional to the wealth controlled by the secrets held by that peer’s clients. And that peer’s clients need to be free to move from one peer to the next, and apt to move to peers that make it difficult for Mueller to find their clients.
- -Need a crypto currency where Bob can prove to the whole world that he paid Ann such and such amount, in accord with such and such a bill, but no one else can prove he paid Ann, nor that there ever was such a bill, except he shows them. Bitcoin is far too traceable. We need controlled traceability, where the parrticipants can prove a transaction to third parties and the world, but the world cannot. And Bob needs to be able to prove what the payment was about, that it was part of a conversation, a meeting of minds.
- -The reason we have end user demand for crypto currency is the same as the reason we have end user demand for gold.
- -When quasi governmental entities started freezing the accounts of "Nazis", "racists", "Russian trolls", and suchlike, a lot of "Nazis" and "Russian trolls" moved to crypto currency, shortly thereafter followed by a great many very wealthy men who were worried that when they needed their wealth in a hurry, they would suddenly become Nazis and Russian trolls also, and their wealth would suddenly become inaccessible or worthless.
- -For a long time the big demand for crypto currency has been wealthy Chinese evading currency controls, but with the recent crackdown on hate speech, we are seeing massive American and European demand, which directly resulted in the recent spike in crypto currency values.
- -Another substantial source of demand for crypto currency, which has been around since the beginning, is buying steroids and suchlike over the internet, but the really huge move in crypto currency demand came during the recent crackdown on political activists.
- -Obviously political activists do not in themselves have enough wealth to cause such a huge move in market value, but when you go after political activists, you are going to make a whole lot of wealthy people reflect that they are none too popular either. If you are a rich man, makes sense to put a significant chunk of your wealth in crypto currency in case you suddenly become a refugee. For example, if, as is looking increasingly likely, there is a pogrom against whites in the USA, a whole lot of rich people will flee to Singapore, China, Russia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Dubai with nothing but the clothes they stand up in, and the master secret controlling their crypto currency in their heads.
- -So that Bob can contract with Ann without the transaction becoming visible to the world, the crypto currency needs to embed an encrypted overlay network, a method for people to have forbidden conversations about forbidden things. Contracts imply conversations, and secret contracts imply secret conversations. Untraceable payments imply untraceable conversations.
- -Full bore totalitarianism sufficient to shut down crypto currency is not far from full bore totalitarianism sufficient to shut down the internet.
- -Full bore totalitarianism sufficient to shut down the internet is going to strangle your economy. If your enemies are markedly wealthier than you are, it is likely to be a problem. North Korea is poor in substantial part because it dares not allow something like the internet to exist. Any contact with the west is used by the state department as a vector for subversion and color revolution.
- -North Korea wants to open up, and has repeatedly attempted to open up, but wants it to be safe for it to open up. If it does open up, expect a lot of North Koreans to buy crypto currency.
- -To create an internet where I cannot send arbitrary packets to an arbitrary machine, you are going to have to license every hub that is allowed to accept packets. Expect some serious disputes as to who gets to do the licensing.
- -Turning the whole world into one big North Korea is not going to be feasible, and attempting to do so is likely to result in a large part of the world glowing in the dark.
- -However, turning the US into Venezuela is entirely feasible, might well happen. We have a potential Democratic Party president who proposes to do exactly that.
- -Which is exactly why wealthy Americans are buying crypto currency, so that they can run to those parts of the world that do not turn into North Korea or Venezuela.
- -The best example of repression which does not bother people too much is China, and the great firewall of China. And until recently, the major demand for crypto currency came from Chinese evading currency controls.
- -So, to accomplish the goal of shutting down crypto currency requires world wide internet repression at levels considerably more repressive than China, which is likely to be disruptive and damaging within a single nation and a single economy, and apt to lead to conflicts if attempted globally.
- -These documents are -licensed under the Creative -Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
- - diff --git a/docs/crypto_currency_on_wide_area_distributed.html b/docs/crypto_currency_on_wide_area_distributed.html deleted file mode 100644 index 5ccff49..0000000 --- a/docs/crypto_currency_on_wide_area_distributed.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,69 +0,0 @@ - - - - - - -- - -Much of this material is shamelessly plaigarized without attribution.
- -Bitcoin has dangerously few miners, subject to dangerously few political authorities, and miner interests are insufficiently aligned to currency user interests.
- -The solution is to create a crypto currency that relies on weight of stake, rather than weight of processing power. Such a currency is equivalent to a crypto corporation, or rather the easily traded shares of a crypto corporation. And independently of whether we need yet another crypto currency, we need crypto corporations.
- -Hence my interest in threshold signatures that do not require a "trusted" dealer.
- -Because of shareholder ignorance, and scaling law problems with enormous thresholds, I envisage that ordinary shareholders, or rather the laptops and cellphones of ordinary shareholders(wallets), would grant their voting rights to a rather small number of board members (massive server farms in the cloud). Every time you do a transaction through some web server, the recipient of the shares(currency) by default revocably grants his voting rights to whatever web server the recipient uses, thus reducing the scale problem to a moderate number of large entities with adequate connectivity and processing power. From time to time one board member (server farm) is elected CEO (leader for the Paxos protocol) If it goes down, loses connectivity, loses too many packets, or engages in Byzantine deviation from the Paxos protocol (possibly as a result of being raided by the cops for money laundering), they elect a new one after twenty seconds or so.
- -“There is only one consensus protocol, and that is Paxos” -Mike Burrows, “all other approaches are just broken versions of Paxos. The Paxos protocol, conceived by Leslie Lamport, is famously subtle and a bit difficult to understand.”
- -The Paxos protocol is not actually a solution to the consensus problem. Rather it is a tool, a necessary step in the larger solution to any one particular consensus problem, one step of a great many.
- -The blockchain is a DB, as are modern Big Data NoSQL and NewSQL DBs. They re all distributed. Distributing a DB by making a full copy on every node scales extremely poorly. Distributed DBs need a consensus algorithm and the Bitcoin consensus algorithm is a horribly broken variant on Paxos.
- -We need a sharded bitcoin, that can scale to arbitary sizes.
- -Bitcoin is a database that sacrifices consistency for availability. Suppose Sam the Scammer double spends the same money to Alice and Bob:
- -Immediately afterwards the database might tell you that Sam has not spent the money, or that he has spent it on Alice, or that he has spent it on Bob, or that he spent it on Alice, and then attempted to spend it on Bob, but the attempted spend on Bob was disallowed, or that he spent it on Bob, and the attempted spend on Alice was disallowed.
- -After an unpredictably long time, it will eventually reach a consensus in favor of Bob, or in favor of Alice, but the consensus is unpredictable, the time required to reach consensus could be quite long, and you can never be entirely sure that you are looking at the final consensus.
- -The Paxos protocol can potentially do better than this, in that it can definitively announce the final consensus, though there may be large delays in getting to it.
- -The solution is Paxos, sharding, and sidechains. Sidechaining is visible to the user and explicitly organized by the user with some formal and explicit organization with a website, while sharding happens automagically and invisibly. No one has figured out how to sharding automatically in the background without it being possible for some shards to cheat on others.
- -You can shard within a group where the nodes trust each other to fail only in a non byzantine manner, and we will need such sharding to handle arbitrarily large numbers of transactions. There is no obvious way of sharding without a shard being potentially capable of cheating either some people in the shard, or else other shards.
- -This suggests a system where nodes belong to an indentifiable entity, and nodes belonging to the same entity trust each other to only fail in a non byzantine manner, while suspecting nodes belonging to a different entity of potentially byzantine failure.
- -Google bigtable uses chubby, which uses Paxos. Bigtable does pretty much what a currency database would need to do.
- -The variant of Paxos you need is Generalized Byzantine Paxos (nearly all operations commute) You probably also want semi stable leadership and a distinguished learner (normally the last guy to resolve a dispute resolves the new dispute.)
- -Sharding is grouped by payments made, rather than payments received, since receiving a payment always commutes
- -To reduce coordination costs, we would like the global hash to be unchanged under commutative transactions. The global hash should reflect the presence, absence, or failure of transactions, not their precise order.
- -We need consensus on generating a bounce, which is a rare event. What about the problem of attributing a time bucket to a transaction. I guess we generate the checksums for a time bucket sometime after that bucket, and transactions that do not make it into the appropriate bucket get discarded by consensus with a recommendation to retry.
- -Each shard should be an accounting entity, tracking the total transferred between each shard – which should follow from commutativity – should be a detail of optimizing for commutativity.
- -See also failure detection – we would like to know what entities are currently responsive and who was leader and designated learner last time.
- -This document is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
- - diff --git a/docs/cypherpunk_program.html b/docs/cypherpunk_program.html index 049a0bd..f0978a0 100644 --- a/docs/cypherpunk_program.html +++ b/docs/cypherpunk_program.html @@ -172,4 +172,4 @@ a very small amount to accept messages from people not one one’s white list. The fee would be refunded if one does not classify the message as spam. -