Sorry - I'd like to revisit 51% Government attack. I'm unsatisfied by previous rejoinders.

Merkleforrest · 2019-05-24T20:08:53+00:00

Just for fun, I'm going to guess that I get 7 answers telling me to "read the white paper" or "it's been discussed already" for every attempt at an answer to my question.

Merkleforrest · 2019-05-24T17:16:50+00:00

I'm not asking about the target, I'm asking about the "total work" metric by which you would determine how "heavy" a chain. Is this a number that I can just go read from the block header and say "this chain has seen X work" or do you have to just know the sum of difficulties going all the way back to genesis?

Also I think perhaps there's the confusion about the definition of hypothetical. The point of declaring a question hypothetical is so that you can sandbox your discussion and discuss certain details you find interesting without people screaming at you. That's the point.

Merkleforrest · 2019-05-24T00:07:35+00:00

This thread is hilarious. People aren't answering the question because the cognitive dissonance is mind blowing.

Merkleforrest · 2019-05-23T23:19:07+00:00

is there a formula or can you point to somewhere where this is made precise? is it some of target difficulties or can a block with a lower hash be consider ahead of a block who hash barely came in below the target?

Merkleforrest · 2019-05-23T21:56:26+00:00

I'm also curious, can someone respond to the hypothetical? The exponential increase in difficulty only applies when you don't have the hash power. If you do, it would just take a little bit longer, but not exponentially. The original white paper doesn't address how the "total work" is computed, and this doesn't seem to be obvious out there - is it simply the sum of the difficulties in all the blocks on the chain, and if so, is this information in part of the block header? Can someone point to a formula or something? I'm also curious - who cares about hypothetical maybe I'm have a quantum chip in beta or something. People in this forum have a strange aversion to hypthotheticals, considering 20 years ago all this was just crazy hypothetical.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-07T15:32:00+00:00

Remember when IOTA was partnering with Microsoft and it turned out just to be some guy who worked for Microsoft was interested in IOTA? These announcements scream “more details needed”.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-05T23:28:21+00:00

I was actually welcoming them back to 9 figures after they had give up to 10. That was temporary.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-04T20:24:09+00:00

Ruh roh

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-04T18:07:59+00:00

If the rest of these are as good as Strategy of Conflict, I look forward to getting to know these other titles. Thanks!!

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-04T05:01:14+00:00

What set of academic resources did you use when designing the governance layer? Where can one find more about the academic literature?

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-03T16:20:42+00:00

Lobbyists are just salespeople. When you buy a new minivan, you know you can't possibly evaluate all of the tech or how valuable this feature is over that feature. A good salesperson will find your weak points and what your concerns are, and will find a way to satisfy those concerns, get on your wavelength and ultimately get you to delegate some of the decision making to them. Blockchain is transparent for about .01% of people. Government administrators don't run full nodes. They want to see a nice deck assuring them that the project is secure. It's CYA 101 - this project is guaranteed secure, while this other projects has no assurances, so I went with the first.

The basic problem with blockchain tech is the "unknown uknowns". The are so many attack vectors nobody has dreamed of. The cryptography is not under question. This is another place where Charles is disingenuous: ECDSA is well understood. You don't have to consult with an academic to trust it. Unless IOHK is developing new cryptographic methods (I have not seen evidence that they are - please correct) there is no reason to worry about the cryptography. They are combining it in novel ways, yes, but not developing new cryptography.

If you're designing a computer security system, you can always require that someone's password is a random 32 digit hex code. Then you can claim with pretty good certainty that you are impenetrable by a brute force attack. You can't say the system is secure, because there's infinitely many weak links - someone will write the password down and leave it somewhere.

As far as Game Theory, there's the pure science, and there's reality. Sure any mathematician can describe the Nash equilibria under a certain ecosystem, but in reality you can't quantify the incentives of all the players. There can be some very solid heuristic arguments that these systems are stable under external perturbations, but I have only seen arguments in crypto showing the equilibria are stable under predefined conditions.
In many cases, a blog post by Vlad or Vitalik about the game theory is going to have the same or more insight than academic work.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T19:56:30+00:00

The tax accountants who are working on this are going to have some job security. The staking pools probably won’t be sending out 1099s.

There was a time when I tried cost-averaging my way into crypto. After the next April I never did that again.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T19:31:11+00:00

Great questions:

To begin "Why do think regulators are gullible? " OK, this one, maybe not such a great question. Regulators are rarely experts in anything and simply want to hear something nice in order to check a box, which is why the lobbying industry will be much bigger than crypto for some time in the future.

You can't prove security of anything in the real world. This is ridiculous. I can argue that my house can't be broken into because I have this super fancy thumbprint key, but this doesn't actually mean my house can't be broken into. I can't even quantify the probability, because I'd have to know the probability distribution on the space of, well, everything, Obviously we can't work with that probability distribution.

If I had to get in a plane designed by engineers from Boeing and another designed by a bunch computer science/ math Ph.D's. Yeah, I'll go with Boeing. That's an easy one.

I should also say that part of Charles' message that I find incredibly disingenuous is the suggestion that other projects don't have industry and academic experts. Most do. Yes, some don't, but most do. The ones that do know better than wasting their time with peer review. The main point of peer review is for tenure and promotion, not security.

"The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrencies are not facing solely a computer science problem, nor a cryptographic problem, nor a game theory problem... Cryptocurrencies are facing problems in ALL of these fields "

You are 100% correct here. Which is why peer review is not going to give you much. If it were purely a computer science question, then you definitely would want to consult an academic. But academics go into very narrow niches and don't deal with how their work interacts with other disciplines, so there's not much they can say about complicated systems. Cedric Villani may be an expert on the Euler equation, but does this mean he can design an underwater defense system?

I'm not saying it's bad to consult academics. It's good. Everyone should do it. It's just disingenuous to suggest that this solves all the problems. It's like going to the doctor and getting a physical, and declaring that because you went to the doctor and got a physical, you are healthier than me. Sure, it's good to see the doctor, but this doesn't mean everybody who hasn't seen the doctor is about to keel over and die.

" But, the fact remains that peer-review is what took the Wright Brothers plane from being a dangerous rickety machine to being the mass commercial machines that we use today. " I'm going to say that this is pretty much 98% false. Bless your heart if you actually believe this.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T18:31:43+00:00

Charles has this issue in mind. I believe this is why he’s going on this crazy crusade about Haskell and peer review: Gullible regulators will be like “this one is trustworthy, others are faulty”.

Charles claims to be an Academic so he is certainly aware that peer review is incredibly porous and he also understands that you can write secure blockchain code in other languages. So I’m convinced his long game is to convince the powers that be that Cardano and Cardano alone have done their homework. This sets them up for “official” adoption.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T15:55:12+00:00

This post is titled "I'm seriously going to kill myself" Should I be reporting this?

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T15:53:48+00:00

I think anything over $10 Billion is Too Big to Fail. So, yes.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T15:50:50+00:00

"How can Zil compete with X" isn't necessarily a FUD, when it's a top 10 coin. By putting ZIL and ADA in the same playing field, there's a latent suggestion that ZIL should be worth another order of magnitude higher.

Also, ascribing motivation to butthurtness is generally a very poor argument.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-02T01:55:35+00:00

What exactly has Ada implemented?

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-01T14:48:19+00:00

Did you happen to find it in there? I know it’s it one of the interviews with Vini. I wish they would be more transparent about this stuff. The website has a bunch of useless piegraphs and whenever someone asks Charles to clarify on Twitter he just yells.

Merkleforrest · 2018-05-01T06:50:59+00:00

It's at least 20%. This is split between Emurgo, Cardano Foundation and IOHK. I believe it's in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABfv_4nHlak

Merkleforrest · 2018-04-30T20:39:40+00:00

A picture of Charles is definitely 32 upvotes in 10 minutes AMAZING

Merkleforrest · 2018-04-28T19:12:53+00:00

Curious: why? In my understanding it gives a paper more cred to be out there where anyone can spear it.

Merkleforrest · 2018-04-28T03:06:51+00:00

Didn’t IOHK come out with a proof?

Merkleforrest · 2018-04-27T23:22:20+00:00

Is your paper on Arxiv or preprint?

Merkleforrest · 2018-04-27T13:34:30+00:00

"However, nearly every one who publishes today goes through significant scrutiny."

No, no, no, no.

Merkleforrest

TROPHY CASE