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bachbackon Ethereum White Paper

I would suggest to run a simulation where nodes are globally distributed and have various latencies with high variance, and then study this problem of non-uniform distribution of information. with GHOST nodes would cluster in physical locations (say Iceland). the latency between those heavy nodes would be very low, and the latency to say Australia very high. the heavy nodes could then co-opt the network. it does not help if the authors proves a bound of latency, because this imbalance would destroy the network. with geographically skewed distribution of information, one can imagine all kinds of weirds effects and attacks. perhaps I'm wrong and will find out this actually works, but even then robustness requires safety over the longterm in very unexpected cases.

bachbackon Ethereum White Paper

how does one node know what other nodes are doing if latency between the messages could be anything between 50ms and 5000ms? if one node has a good position in the network it would know more than other nodes and outpace the network. which is exactly what would happen with ghost. the ghost authors have bound estimations on latencies, overlooking the possibility of information arbitarge. somebody would figure out where the most information comes from and arbitrage the network. so besides hashing attacks there are "latency attacks", but they don't even appear in Bitcoin, because blocks solve that issue. latency is negligible vs. the 10-minute block time. this could be shown with a timing attack on an alt-coin with < 60 sec blocktime.

Lamport's work make this connection obvious. He invented the Byzantine Generals Problem and wrote this paper: "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", Communications of the ACM 21, July 1978 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/t...

logical broadcast means: every node has the same state (time invariance). the only thing that matters is hashing power.

bachbackon Ethereum White Paper

anyone who thinks GHOST is a good idea, has not understood Bitcoin at all. the whole point of the blocks is that nodes can work on the global state in a chain. so the idea that nodes should work on greedy subtrees is about the worst possible idea. Bitcoin solves not only the Byzantine generals problem, but a latency variance problem, to achieve logical broadcast. anyway, the author of this paper also believes that "anyone with reasonably high intelligence could have invented Bitcoin by random luck" [1]. well, no. there are many hidden problems which Bitcoin solves. the literature on quorum systems, distributed applications, etc. is very deep.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20oyes/brilliant_an...

bachbackon The Fall of Hacker Groups

isn't if funny how PG bridges the gap between true hackerdom and pure commercialism/capitalism? I too want to be a ruling VC /ruling hacker when I grow up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDA0t49AaZ4

bachbackon Dai/Nakamoto emails

it worked pretty well. one way to think about it: did Nakamoto want to be known? then reason from there. then consider the negation. the deeper point in all of this: why do we trust people in the first place?

bachbackon Dai/Nakamoto emails

the citations of the paper is incomplete also, in that it does not mention finney's RPOW from 2004: http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/

quoting from there: "Security researcher Nick Szabo has coined the term bit gold for information objects which are provably costly to create"

bitgold as it was publicly described in 2005 was different than bitcoin in that there was a market for the tokens. bitcoin uses an agreement mechanism to establish the difficulty.

bachbackon Dai/Nakamoto emails

very unlikely. all the code is written uniformly. all the posts carry one style. it looks as if at the time there was only one person in the world who was crazy enough to think this could actually work.

bachbackon Dai/Nakamoto emails

the b-money paper is very well worth reading even today. appendix A hints at what we call today proof of stake. the property club in b-money is more of a political organization than the participants in the Bitcoin network:

"community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange"

"I hope this is a step toward making crypto-anarchy a practical as well as theoretical possibility." http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

amazing how mute Wei's reaction was and still is. b-money was a nice idea, but it seems he was never too much interested in impelementation. the request is obviously fake. Nakamoto was clearly well versed in the history of this topic and was very likely to be around in 1998.

other than that, gwern is still the authority on Bitcoin. "What’s wrong with Bitcoin is that it’s ugly."

http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better

bachbackon U.S. stock markets are rigged, says author Michael Lewis

great. here is the new exchange they are talking about: http://www.iextrading.com/

next step: build an investor exchange opensource based on bitcoin. take over the world. if you're into this kind of thing let me know.

bachbackon Auroracoin – Forked and Game Over

yeah, roughly. but also you have the effect that if you know precisely why some red bills pop up you can start a new fork for the green bills. so a 51% attack is by no means terminal. if an attack is terminal all coins on all chains are worthless, because the remaining network can be attacked again.

bachbackon Ethereum

spend 5 seconds reading that post. moving on.

bachbackon Toward a better programming

Leibniz wrote in 1666: "We have spoken of the art of complication of the sciences, i.e., of inventive logic... But when the tables of categories of our art of complication have been formed, something greater will emerge. For let the first terms, of the combination of which all others consist, be designated by signs; these signs will be a kind of alphabet. It will be convenient for the signs to be as natural as possible—e.g., for one, a point; for numbers, points; for the relations of one entity with another, lines; for the variation of angles and of extremities in lines, kinds of relations. If these are correctly and ingeniously established, this universal writing will be as easy as it is common,and will be capable of being read without any dictionary; at the same time, a fundamental knowledge of all things will be obtained. The whole of such a writing will be made of geometrical figures, as it were, and of a kind of pictures — just as the ancient Egyptians did, and the Chinese do today. Their pictures, however, are not reduced to a fixed alphabet... with the result that a tremendous strain on the memory is necessary, which is the contrary of what we propose" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

bachbackon Stripe: Bitcoin Sign-up

I wonder whether this something to do with Wells Fargo's stance, which is positive: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/14/us-wellsfargo-bitc...

bachbackon Hostile AI: You're soaking in it

DAC => https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Distributed_Autonomous_Community_...

bachbackon Laterpay – Buy digital content, pay later

missed the bitcoin train.

bachbackon Bitcore Core v0.9.0 release overview

alternative implementations would mean you need consensus between different groups of developers holding the keys to the software. unlikely to be a good idea.

bachbackon Can the Bloomberg Terminal be "Toppled"?

the big underlying question: why does financial data cost so much? why does it cost 20.000$/year to subscribe to the NYSE feed? because banks and exchange build their own network and profited from standing in between. this will change. new structures will replace large parts of banks and exchanges. it starts with payments but it doesn't stop there.

bachbackon Namecoin

the number of people contributing is extremely small compared to the people who know about it/make money of it/are enthusiastic about it/could contribute. There is not a deep bench of developers. Many open issues which don't get solved because the 3-4 main devs (laanjw, sipa, gavin) are to busy. look at coinbase: they get rich of it, take 1% fees and add nothing back whatsoever.

bachbackon Namecoin

strangely enough there are a million people who know about this project and 1-2 actually participate. it's a wiki and opensource project, so everyone in the world is free to contribute. same with bitcoin. roughly 5 active developers at the moment, working mostly in their spare time.

bachbackon Namecoin

well, at the moment there is not much reason to use the system. if you register a ".bit" then you have to get your users to install complicated software and in the end what you are getting is very similar to ".com". There are major benefits, which are not explored yet. rolling out a world wide nameservice is not trivial. at the moment it's not even used by the underground. onename.io is the first application I have seen.

bachbackon Namecoin

in the original thread, which I linked above, this possibility was discussed. however it would have meant tying bitcoin to a project which has a lot of uncertainty and is not the core use case. miners/stakeholders have to agree with (major) changes so it's up to them making decisions. so the devs are really very much constrained to the original design. how this will play out is not quite clear. advanced features (payment protocol) are pending for quite a while. technically the integration is easy to do. the namecoin source has very few original lines of code. it is rather a question of consensus I think. Mike Hearn discussed this here: https://medium.com/p/b64cf5912aa7 "It’s not a bad idea, but it’s not practical for our needs right now because it has no users. "

bachbackon Namecoin

silicon valley found out about it. several tweets of major figures last week.

bachbackon Namecoin

it does in some sense. look up merged mining. however putting namecoin into bitcoin would have implied major changes for bitcoin (much larger blockchain for instance). because namecoin is barely used such an integration would have made not much sense.

bachbackon Namecoin

no, money supply is fixed. changing money supply like doge did is possible, but risks destroying the network.

bachbackon Namecoin

There are currently 1-2 developers working on Namecoin (mostly Khan, another core developer died recently). Namecoin itself has quite a few issues. The design is only the beginning.

bachbackon Namecoin

http://namecoin.info

This is where it started: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0

satoshi's comment on the matter, posted 4 days before he left the forum.

"I think it would be possible for BitDNS to be a completely separate network and separate block chain, yet share CPU power with Bitcoin. The only overlap is to make it so miners can search for proof-of-work for both networks simultaneously.

The networks wouldn't need any coordination. Miners would subscribe to both networks in parallel. They would scan SHA such that if they get a hit, they potentially solve both at once. A solution may be for just one of the networks if one network has a lower difficulty.

I think an external miner could call getwork on both programs and combine the work. Maybe call Bitcoin, get work from it, hand it to BitDNS getwork to combine into a combined work.

Instead of fragmentation, networks share and augment each other's total CPU power. This would solve the problem that if there are multiple networks, they are a danger to each other if the available CPU power gangs up on one. Instead, all networks in the world would share combined CPU power, increasing the total strength. It would make it easier for small networks to get started by tapping into a ready base of miners."

"@dtvan: all 3 excellent points. 1) IP records don't need to be in the chain, just do registrar function not DNS. And CA problem solved, neat. 2) Pick one TLD, .web +1. 3) Expiration and significant renewal costs, very important."

bachbackon Ask HN: new cryptocurrency?

thanks, I know those. the problem is that the current venues for discussion new concepts are suboptimal. too much noise. so I thought somewhere, somebody is working on really new stuff.

bachbackon Ask HN: new cryptocurrency?

well, there are ca. 100 clones. here are the current top ones, measured by value. from these only nxt has its own codebase.

bitcoin 7600M$ litecoin 400M$ peercoin 70M$ dodgecoin 50M$ Nxt 45M$

bachbackon [dead]

1. It could be possible that Satoshi Nakaomoto does not exist or Bitcoin does not exist.

2. Therefore no one has invented Bitcoin or someone has invented Bitcoin.

3. Because each part of the proposition is equally likely we have to infer that we don't know whether Bitcoin was invented.

Further reading, Betrand Russell's on denoting http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Russell/denoti...

bachbackon Understanding IP, TCP, and HTTP

you made some very interesting posts. what I'm missing from this is 0mq. I believe it introduces layering mechanisms, so that one can re-use patterns to build cool stuff (anything really), without knowing specific details. do you have a email where I can reach you?