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Bit-thereum

gavintech.blogspot.com

43 pointshachiya8 comments

Hah, just this morning we published a whitepaper explaining such a solution in greater detail:

http://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper

There is also a basic implementation of such a system that we've been preparing for the past week, and a website that will host a list of oracles: http://oracles.li/

What is the progress on sidechains right now?

I'm hoping we can stop the madness of forking the power of currencies and rather extend the core chain with new functionality. So many new currencies are dying because they don't have the required participants to survive attacks.

If ethereum and zerocash concepts could be merged with Bitcoin, it looks like it'd be an awesome platform for everything distributed...

Well, sidechains will always be useful. Even if zerocash and ethereum were to be included in Bitcoin, we'd still use a playground for testing experimental features.

When it comes to updating the Bitcoin protocol, there's a need to be very conservative and very cautious. The core dev team is working on a 2 billion-dollar running train over there. You wouldn't want to push changes too much.

And even when sidechain support gets implemented back into Bitcoin, the sidechains will have to conform to a very specific standard. Otherwise bitcoin scripts will not work with them. On the other hand, sidechains based on distributed oracles ( like Orisi - http://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper ), can have any kind of form. If you want to make an alt-currency that sends you a chicken for each bitcoin you burn, and gives you back a bitcoin once you eat the chicken in front of the camera... You can do that with distributed oracles :)

> Bitcoin already provides a global currency and distributed ledger-- there is no need to re-invent those wheels.

Yeah, at a cost of several million dollars per year of burned power. You'll find the less BTC someone owns the less likely they are to bring up non-arguments like "more hashes = more security!" Let's stop pretending there isn't room to innovate.

I wouldn't say those are non-arguments, just not conclusive arguments. Vitalik of Ethereum brings up the nothing-at-stake problem, in the context of proposing a solution:

http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof...

"more hashes != more security" is true even if POS does not work (or rather, security scales sublinearly with hashes - economies of scale + diminishing returns on value of security). Nothing-at-stake is solved by DPOS, the ethereum team lags behind POS development by a few months it seems (they just mentioned using TAPOS a few weeks ago when the inventor has moved past it a few months ago).

What are DPOS and TAPOS?

DPOS = Delegated Proof of Stake. Owners of the majority of the stake (stake = all the coins) designate a limited set of servers to handle the blockchain operations.

Thanks to this, there can be just 100 nodes interacting very quickly with each other and yet just as trustworthy - if not more - as the current bitcoin system.

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