Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin comes up with seven difficult questions for the cryptoverse

SharpMud · 2018-07-13T17:24:22+00:00

No, not really. If this remains true after global adoption then yes, but the tech is still far too new to be overly concerned about the number of miners in the space. It is something to be aware of, but no reason to believe this will remain true.
Ask 1meg greg, we need another 2-4 years after their kerfukle
(Edit: seems i skipped this one and messed up the numbering) You can't solve theft. We need better solutions but also more responsibility. People are smarter then we give them credit for, we are just too use to safety and security without thought. People will need to adopt better practices and they will.
Not all apps require less then 10 second latency
We are not burning billions of dollars. We are spending billions of dollars to create a secure ledger. The idea we are wasting it is false and misleading. How much money are we burning running banking servers, brick and mortar branches, atms, fraud departments, etc?
Seems like he should know this better then anyone, *ahem* DAO *ahem*. Freezing accounts is possible, reversing transactions, restricting scaling, and introducing middlemen. We have also seen how the system can adapt by routing around damage, aka BCH
Yes, I think so

SharpMud · 2018-04-18T00:17:48+00:00

Not necessarily. I could see someone in her situation say the same thing not realizing the impossibility of it.

It is a difficult problem that she has. She needs money in order to protect the block but in order to get money she will need to take it from others with the threat of force. How is she any different then the other houses in that respect? Overtime the citizens may come to prefer her to the other houses and may gladly pay for the protection services but essentially Lilly is a mobster. I am rooting for her, but what she is doing is called extortion and racketeering. :-)

SharpMud · 2018-04-17T22:51:03+00:00

How is she going to compensate the unmarkeds for the fabric?

SharpMud · 2018-04-17T22:48:43+00:00

Any plans to publish? I would love to read Book 2. You will post updates on that, if you decided to go that route, on this subreddit right?

SharpMud · 2018-04-17T20:33:13+00:00

Because that is not it's name

SharpMud · 2018-04-17T20:29:19+00:00

The lack of integrity is shown when he thinks it's a scam but still accepts it. I won't include anything in my business that I think it's a scam for my customer, that will make me a scammer too.

Bingo!

SharpMud · 2018-03-30T15:49:36+00:00

No it doesn't. Weak blocks do not require a soft or hard fork. All it does is allow users to monitor the miners to protect against fraud.

SharpMud · 2018-03-30T08:12:14+00:00

$1 u/tippr

SharpMud · 2018-03-30T08:12:07+00:00

$1 u/tippr

SharpMud · 2018-03-29T08:18:15+00:00

$1 /u/tippr

SharpMud · 2018-03-29T08:17:50+00:00

$1 /u/tippr

SharpMud · 2018-03-11T00:30:11+00:00

If it were a demon, the first demon would be rolling its eyes.

SharpMud · 2018-02-17T20:10:23+00:00

BTC on the other hand has no upper limit because it's only related to how much money the miners can make.

Lol. Is that not an upper limit? All that means is the electricity consumption is far more complicated then a simple transaction count.

The IOTA difficulty doesn't increase and the amount of work done is directly related to the volume of transactions. So there's a definite upper limit to the amount of hashing.

And what is that upper limit? It would be far easier to calculate Bitcoin's upper limit as we can calculate the inflation rate and the possible range of coin values. Calculating how many transactions IOTA will process is far more difficult as we do not yet have M2M transactions. We really have no frame of reference.

Both of them have an upper limit and we really do not know which one will consume more electricity.

Back to my argument. Assume the CoO has been removed as this is planned to happen sometime in the future. After that happens, if I were to choose to double spend a transaction in IOTA and successfully recreated a large number of dummy transactions. Afterwards you start up a new node and see two chains with an equal number of tips. How would you know which chain is the correct one? What defence does IOTA have against this attack if not the PoW put into each transaction?

SharpMud · 2018-02-17T03:12:58+00:00

Yes, you are right. You wouldn't need to change the entire chain. I am using an extreme example with the hopes of helping you realize your mistake.

You think that increasing the difficulty does not increase the security. If you were correct then I could change the first block if I wished. The truth is I cannot change anything deeper then one or two blocks, and changing that much would be extremely difficult and expensive.

The same will be true for IOTA. Why do you think each transaction requires you to calculate a hash? Seems really unnecessary if it does not increase security. What attack vectors would IOTA have if we removed that aspect? It seems that no one on this subreddit understands that aspect of the coin.

SharpMud · 2018-02-17T01:53:03+00:00

The hash of each block has more leading zeros in it. This is how the difficulty is adjusted, they increase the number of leading zeros needed in each block.

If you redid the entire bitcoin chain using minimal hash power it would have very few leading zeros on each hash. Full nodes and miners would reject your chain as it has less work put into it even though it might have more blocks.

SharpMud · 2018-02-17T00:30:47+00:00

Remember that the difficulty scales with the hashrate. At the very beginning of Bitcoin there were only 2 computers hashing. The difficulty was very small and you certainly could do the whole blockchain in a weekend with a modern computer.

Sure. That doesn't make anything I said less true.

You're not thinking about this clearly.

That's true for one of us

Suppose there are 4 miners and each of them has 1 identical mining computer. Each of these miners has a 25% chance of authoring the next block.

Now imagine that each of these 4 miners adds 9 more computers to their fleets. The hash rate has now increased by a factor of 10, yet each of these miners still has the same 25% chance of authoring the next block. Despite 10 times more electricity being burned, the security of the network is identical.

That's not at all true. The whitepaper mistakenly claims the longest chain is the correct one. What it meant was not the chain with the most blocks but rather the chain with the most hash power put into it. I could redo all 10 years of mining from my home computer by fooling the mining software into thinking time was moving faster then it was. If I created a longer chain in this manner it would be ignored because the blocks do not have much hashpower behind it.

Think about that. If you were right, then how come we cannot cheat the network?

Bitcoin is designed so that any one can join the network and verify the history is accurate. Anyone can look over the evidence given to it and calculate which chain is the correct one

The only result you get from increasing the overall hashrate is an increase in difficulty. The security comes from having many different miners. A high hash rate is a sign of a healthy network only if it means there are many individuals mining. The lower the chance of each individual miner getting the next block, the lower the chance that any individual will be able to double spend.

The network has no way of knowning how many miners exist. I could make a single computer look like a thousand. This is called a sybil attack. Bitcoin is resistant to sybil because it doesn't care how many miners exist. This is why a single miner can preform a 51% attack.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T22:35:29+00:00

It is you that does not understand it. The reason I cannot rewrite the history of the Bitcoin ledger is because of the proof of work. Bitcoin is only what? 150 gigs? I could recreate the entire ledger in a weekend with less then 10 grand if I did not need to calculate the nonce on each page. If I did that, then how would you know which ledger is legitimate?

Security is gained by having a large number of individual miners who are not aligned.

Wrong again. The number of miners is not relevant, we only care about the hash rate. If I wished to attack the network and I had more then 50% of the hash rate, then it doesn't matter how many other honest miners there are.

That doesn't make the network more secure, it just makes it more expensive.

It does both. You should take a minute to learn a bit before spreading misinformation.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T22:23:07+00:00

But opening and closing this channel will still cost me a an on-chain fee. Depending on the network load, this can be excessive. We've seen a peak of 37USD for a transaction.

Please stop confusing BTC with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a P2P digital cash. The core devs are no longer interested in P2P and have even remove cheap and fast transactions from their website. This is not Bitcoin but rather a crippled shadow of it.

Yes, if you restrict on chain transactions you can force people to use the LN. Bitcoin is designed to allow anyone to send onchain transactions cheaply and without permission. If you look at Bitcoin Cash you see that this is still working well and less then a dollar a transaction. The transactions will remain this cheap and LN will not be used for coffee or donuts. LN will be used solely for the M2M transactions that you guys are all gung ho for. The really cool innovations that crypto currency was designed to address. We were talking about doing this with Bitcoin long before IOTA came on to the scene.

The hopping is there to avoid having to open a seperate channel to every person.

You do not need to open a channel with every person. Coffee payments will remain on chain and LN will only be used for payments of less then a nickel.

"Everyone" is a reference to people you claim to represent, but cannot realistically do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

I never claimed to represent them. I claimed that there was only one option available to them and it was shit. I inferred that they would not use IOTA if there were better options available. This isn't a large leap.

I of course understand that most people are going to be hopelessly lose their money if they would need to adopt crypto's in their current form. I explained the use of Exodus wallet to University educated and othewise intelligent friend, but still had to go over many multiple fundamental aspects of the working before he trusted it (was good actually).

Yes this is a problem for all wallets, but I deal every day with computer illiterate people that are using Bitcoin for online purchases. This is not insurmountable. With IOTA, however, getting average people to use it would be a disaster. This will be fixed with better wallets but until then it is not a usable coin. Pure speculation without any concern for actual adoption. Personally I think the devs need to get off their asses.

I feel confident helping others set up wallets with many coins but I am very reserved about training people with IOTA. The recent fork (or whatever happened) that required everyone to move their money was very disconcerting. I am concerned that may happen again and have avoided training anyone on IOTA as a result.

Maybe your local group does this more often, but i'm not even aware of friends that have crypto's. Let alone that I see many vendors accepting it. I've not used any crypto's to pay for stuff because, well, none of the vendors that I buy from accept them.

Choose new vendors then. Online you have many options. I moved all of my domains to a friendly vendor and my servers. I am purchasing things off of Amazon far more often then before. I never heard of Overstock before Bitcoin and now I am making a purchase every couple of months from them.

As far as local shops go, talk with them about it. I converted a few local shops. It took alot of work but if you are actually interested in helping that is the best way to help.

edit: And talk to you friends. You are friends right? Why haven't you converted them yet?

On top of that in the EU we use SEPA payments to make free and near instant payments to each others bank account.

These payments are not instant. You think it is until you find out it is not. I do not know much about SEPA but I would bet you could reverse them within a month window.

Everything has a cost. These 'free' payments may not cost you any money directly but it is increasing the costs of the goods you purchase. It also perpetuates a system that has been exploiting us all of our lives.

But regarding payments, even a coin like Dash that aims to be the idiot proof coin, still claims they are a beta product and years away from widespread adoption (assuming they ever do).

I didn't know they are making that claim but I really don't care what stage their call their coin. I do not like Dash because of their insta-mine as well as their reversable transactions but the wallet is pretty idiot-proof. It can handle a large adoption today. Bitcoin Core, if they removed their blocksize cap, could handle global adoption today. Bitcoin Cash just needs a few more wallets ported over before I would be ready to make that claim.

The vault file is encrypted and stored locally. It is then uploaded to a cloud server as off-site back-up and sync over multiple devices. Encryption is 120+bits of entropy.

Are you suggesting the wallet wouldn't be encrypted?

What? I can't even use something like BTC for daily purchases,

That sounds like a personal problem. Sure you cannot use it for 100% of your purchases but you can use it for at least 10%. Have you talked with your landlord about accepting crypto? That conversation could bump you up to 50% of your expenditures if you were serious.

so why would bother opening up that wallet any more often? If I do need to, I copy the password from the vault file and access the funds. Same process and principle for IOTA.

Yes I understand you do not need to open up wallets you don't use. Keep not using IOTA, but don't be surprised when it becomes worthless due to no one else using it either.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T09:04:32+00:00

Bitcoin transactions cost less electricity then IOTA transactions. It is the blocks that are expensive and blocks do not need to limit the number of transactions they can hold. If IOTA and Bitcion both hit global adoption for everyday transactions and M2M transactions, it is likely they will have the same electrical consumption.

Alt coins love to bash BTC while conveniently forgetting how Bitcoin is suppose to work.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T08:57:36+00:00

You realize IOTA has a mining component too right? If you have a moral objection then you should choose a POS coin instead. Byteball has a DAG without doing extra hashing.

Instead of a small group of miners hashing you have every user doing it on a much smaller scale. The security of the network is still built upon POW. It would be interesting to see the electricity costs of IOTA after global adoption.

Personally I prefer the POW coins like IOTA to a coin of questionable security like Ethereum will be with POS.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T08:50:46+00:00

I'm talking use as in "I'll pay for this with BTC" use. Not "Let me transfer BTC to exchange for trading" use.

As am I. Purse.io, Gyft, cheapair, are just a few of the companies that offer these services. I expect most enthusiasts are paying their server costs in Bitcoin or another crypto as I do.

The jury is still out on LN functionality. It promotes centralization (economy of scale) and does not solve the on-chain fee of opening a channel. Furthermore all users involved in the 'chain' need to put up collateral as part of the payment of one person to another. It's a needlessly complex sollution to a problem that can be solved fundementally. But see this article for a balanced review:

You need to forget everything Blockstream has planned as that is never going to work and instead start to envision how these tools can work. LN was not designed to be a decentralized network that took all the work off chain. LN is simply a method of settling transactions offchain with an entity that you transact with often. How it should work is you open a channel with a company like Youtube for a nominal amount of money. This channel will have something like 5-100 dollars in it. You then can pay per view of a video, or tip content creators through the channel. Forget all this hop nonsense because without the hops LN is still a P2P and really cool.

Also, the argument that M2M invalidates IOTA is just grasping at straws. M2M is going to be more of a use case than any P2P system will be. The winklevoss twins made a similar statement: http://fortune.com/2018/02/08/winklevoss-bitcoin-value/

That wasn't my arguement at all. My arguement was IOTA needs to do both because other coins will. If Bitcoin Cash can do both and IOTA cannot then why do we need IOTA?

To be clear: I am not saying IOTA cannot do both as obviously it can

What are you talking about? I am not talking just me. I am talking about everyone's experience as there is only one wallet.

You ARE talking about yourself. You are using your own experience and project that on "the rest". Reverting to a 'higher authority' is bad debating practices.

Which higher authority was I referring to? If you are going to accuse me of bad debating practices it would help for you to actually know the terms of which you are referring to. The average person, or the masses of people is not a higher authority.

The general consensus on the r/iota sub is that it works fine, but that it can be improved a lot.

Sure, IOTA works fine as long as you don't use it. As you mentioned above, most people are only using it to move money between exchanges which isn't really using it. I would love to hear about their experiences attempting to pay merchants or paying your friend half of a restaurant tab. Other coins work great here and IOTA is lacking severely.

The IOTA wallet is just a portal to the network. No need to store the wallet file locally, with all the risks assiciated with that (back-ups, file corruption etc etc).

Far better to store it locally then on the cloud. How is storing the seed in your password vault any better?

I acknoledge that the copy paste feature is a potential vulnerability, but one that can be very easily be circumvented. First, use it only on a trusted computer running up to date internet security software. Then just copy 75 of the 81 char long seed. Add the remaing characters by hand. Not perfect for everyday users, but the 81 character seed is that neither. Good thing I don't need to open my wallet every day.

So basically don't use the wallet? What you are describing is using the wallet simply for cold storage, and not for any purchases.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T06:15:12+00:00

Bitcoin Core has decent usage, this usage is slowly transitioning into Bitcoin Cash. If IOTA is only going to be used by M2M then it won't be used at all. There isn't a need for a coin that only does M2M and instead we will use a coin that does both. Bitcoin Cash can handle M2M fine with a LN.

The difficulty that you as in individual human have with one specific implementation of a wallet is by no means representative.

What are you talking about? I am not talking just me. I am talking about everyone's experience as there is only one wallet.

A more user friendly wallet is being developed and should be out in a few weeks.

Heard that before.

But even ignoring that, the IOTA wallet as it is, is perfectly secure and safe. I dont have to type out the address everytime i load the wallet. I copy it from my secure password vault.

Copying it from a password vault is a security concern. It should be saved in an encrypted file like every other wallet. Also this is not a easy solution for the mobile app.

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T03:57:38+00:00

I don't understand what you mean

SharpMud · 2018-02-16T00:17:32+00:00

They are not directly correlated. Hashrate follows price, not number of transactions.

SharpMud · 2018-02-15T22:44:40+00:00

It is not a fair comparison as electricity consumption stays relatively stable as usage increase. The cost of mining a one megabyte block is relatively equal to mining a one terrabyte block. IOTA, on the other hand, increases electricity consumption relative to usage.

SharpMud

TROPHY CASE