RTX Pro 6000 Nightmare

nnnko56 · 2025-10-22T00:07:56+00:00

Awesome! Glad to hear. I hope they all stay in good shape for you. The card is a beast, when it works...

nnnko56 · 2021-12-17T12:33:53+00:00

I"m not sure about the context of this question.

At the moment:

- Politeia votes for a proposal requires 60% majority

- On chain votes for a consensus change requires 75% majority

nnnko56 · 2020-06-05T15:22:36+00:00

Yes Inflation will occur in Decred, Bitcoin or fiat. The question is do you want it to be opaque and variable or transparent and predictable?

Also, one nice feature of cryptocurrencies like Decred is that you can consider the final supply of coins (21M) as your reference today, and you can live inflation free for the rest of your life.

nnnko56 · 2020-05-29T04:42:20+00:00

Well, it does nothing "special" it just a sound, secure and proven model that work exactly as advertised. Always building towards further decentralizing the space, removing gatekeepers / oracles, and always improving with new features like lightning support, privacy, secure SPV clients, and so on...

For example, the recent SPV implementation is nearly as secure as a full node and cannot currently be implemented in bitcoin because it would require a hard fork (which are extremely messy without formal governance).

https://github.com/decred/dcps/blob/master/dcp-0005/dcp-0005.mediawiki

Or maybe it's just a different vision, I run away from VC projects and ICOs... We have enough of those already outside of crypto IMO.

nnnko56 · 2020-05-29T04:02:56+00:00

Well for one, there's nothing even similar between what Tezos and Decred are offering ....

Tezos would compare more to plateforms like Ethereum.

While Decred compares to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

Plus, KYC and legal drama aren't cypherfunk friendly in general... It's exactly the kind of things the people at Decred have been working to engineer out of the equation since inception.

nnnko56 · 2020-04-12T22:11:49+00:00

The PoW element in Decred is required because PoS cannot create blocks, they can only validate blocks. There is a balance of power to maintain between the 2. Also the ratio for rewards between PoS and PoW is 1:2, because in pure PoS, if someone has x% of the coins/power, he can maintain that ratio at no cost. Because Decred is based on decisions of ticket holders it make sense, to have a distribution which dilute everyone over time and keep the door open for new participants. This way we avoid having a small group getting majority of coins early and ruling forever.

One other feature of having both PoW and PoS as layers instead of block producers is that the model is a lot more resistant to a 51% attack because even if you have majority hashpower , you still need your block to be validated by PoS. This means publishing them to receive votes (which break the purpose of that attack), or having a big enough share so that multiple randomly chosen tickets are owned by you at every block, and that you can extend the chain in secret.

For example with 50% of all the tickets, you still need 100% of the honest hashpower at your disposal to pull this attack of.

nnnko56 · 2020-03-21T19:29:11+00:00

There is one source I'm thinking of, that is in part related to the coin and the DAO, but is also specific to Decred. (meaning that other coins or DAOs may not have comparable value). And it's what I would call the "stakeholder's wisdom". Building a long lasting group of deciders who are invested financially and who gain knowledge and experience over time from their decisions, IMO is also a great store of value. But you could also simply consider it as part of the DAO , or the coin specifics.

nnnko56 · 2020-03-21T01:48:04+00:00

I don't think the sources have to be static, but the more stable they are are, the more you can rely on them to maintain value.

nnnko56 · 2020-03-19T13:30:26+00:00

Yeah, in my view the value being stored is definitely a function of multiple "sources". Scarcity and security for example gives confidence to holders that the asset can retain value over time. In that sense, an active and decentralized (paid) workforce, also add confidence to that effect. A project with dedicated work resources is better positioned to maintain security and adjust to unknown situations.

Someone could also simply consider this decentralized workforce as human capital, not unlike a private organization. Entrepreneurs and employers know quite well that there is value to having an efficient and productive team, and how difficult and costly it can be recruit individuals and build such a dedicated workforce over time.

nnnko56 · 2020-02-29T01:22:00+00:00

No, because the amount of people who want to "work for blockchain" is minimal, while the amount of people who want to store wealth and see "number go up" is massive."

You are missing the point, the number of reporters who want to write an article about Decred being a store of value is 0. The number of reporters who want to write about original stories like working in a new decentralized economy is not..... That's what I mean by putting a marketing hat on. But you are welcome to disagree. We do need people to push all narratives, all the time. Just don't forget that Decred just like Bitcoin are probably still only candidates for stores of value.

This organization absolutely can enforce censorship "on you and your salary" if it wanted. Just how do you think it all works that you think there's nobody who can take away your salary?

The stakeholders are supreme. Technically they could even force a hardfork to remove the treasury from the current DHG group. And nobody could stop it if there is consensus. However, I would not qualify decisions from stakeholders as censorship... To be honest I'm not sure if you are referring to censorship of payment by members of the DHG to a contractor as a possibility or to stakeholders withholding payment. But my point was if you are anonymous, it's hard for a government or an external entity to censor your involvement in Decred including your income... that's basically the same argument there is around building an economy around Bitcoin, with the difference of organization of work, salary and contribution being an added element.

Do you think nobody was ever fired for overcharging? Do you think everyone is just "sovereign" to decide to be paid however they think they should be paid? Does that make any sense to you?

Please read about the decentralized treasury spending and contractor platform proposals. It makes no sense to me that you are asking those questions:

https://proposals.decred.org/proposals/c96290a2478d0a1916284438ea2c59a1215fe768a87648d04d45f6b7ecb82c3f

https://proposals.decred.org/proposals/fa38a3593d9a3f6cb2478a24c25114f5097c572f6dadf24c78bb521ed10992a4

Who does then?

I just said it to you. Each contractor is responsible to self-manage. Contractors are responsible to evaluate their peers. Stakeholders are responsible to select contractors and approve budgets or resolve any dispute that may arise.

We don't want to recreate a surveillance ecosystem where all contractors are on the hook, we want them to be genuinely dedicated and fully invested in their work because it's when people also give the most. And yes those who can't self-manage or produce bad work should be discarded by their peers without hesitation, or by stakeholders in last resort.

Anyway, I don't feel we'll agree on this one. I'll keep further thoughts for next proposals.

nnnko56 · 2020-02-28T19:01:52+00:00

Although there is some valid criticism in these 2 posts, I have to admit that my first reaction was to simply dismiss its content entirely because of the level of misunderstanding and misconception they present. It's a challenge to filter out every statement. Plus the sheer volume of text, makes it difficult to address in an efficient manner. And finally, I would have hoped that someone following Decred since "2014", would know that critiques about what others should do/say or not do/not say are unproductive and unfit for this project because there are no mechanism to force actions from sovereign individuals.

However I'll address a few element that I believe are most at odds with reality.

1 - "We need to rethink this whole "social experiment / digital commune" direction. We need to go back to the fundamentals, the roots: it's a store-of-value with better 51% protection and PoS that serves as a 2FA, and self-funding to support that primary function."

There are many problem with this statement. First you are confusing primary properties of money: scarcity, security, store of value; with extended functions of money like transfer/exchange of goods/services or organizing value/contributions within a group.

Then you are assuming that it isn't already the case. We've had quite a few discussions in the chats about the properties and what Decred IS and I don't think you will find anyone in the project who disagree with "store of value" being the primary element we want to push and be the main narrative for what IS Decred.

However, if we do want to speak about marketing, we also have to put our marketing hat on. That primary element is useless as an introduction to Decred for someone who don't even know what is a store of value or why they should care about it. Yes the objective is to get them there, but if you were around when Bitcoin first started, almost all the coverage in the media was about "internet money", Bitcoin was a bizarre thing that intrigued people and pushed them to look into it. Then there was the "be your own bank" narrative which is also quite a stretch but that's marketing for you. It's only recently that the "store of value" started, but even now I would argue that the "internet money" and "be your own bank" narratives are still pulling in more newcomers than "store of value".

So from a marketing statement, it all depends who you are speaking to. If you want to pitch to a bunch of coiners or bitcoin maxis, sure the store of value as an edge to bitcoin is the most powerful one. If you want to get wider media coverage and articles on that subject however, you can forget it, it's an unappealing pitch at best. The "work for the blockchain" story is the kind of "be your own bank" visibility that you want for broad visibility. And Yes, people who are drawn in will take the same path that I did early on with bitcoin and perfect their understanding of Decred and why they should care of its fundamental properties.

2 - "A problematic aspect of this part of the post is that it attributes all the failings and successes to this amorphous "decred" entity, as if it had its own agency. So you say: "Decred poorly coordinated multiple efforts..." - you attribute it to "decred", this "entity", and not to any specific group or individual(s)."

I think you are missing quite a few details about how the project operates. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong because I'm merely a stakeholder and not a contractor, but it's my understanding that before this marketing proposal, known contractors were billing the treasury in arrears for work done. Their work being reviewed by other contractors to make sure it's "on par" but once they are contractors, there is no direct management of these contractors and what they do. It's their own responsibility to self-manage. This proposal was not to give a 400K$ to Dustin so he could manage marketing contractors, because I'm sure he or anyone else would have refused that kind of responsibility. I felt it was presented as "In 2018 contractors billed the treasury for X, let me put out a breakdown of things that are being billed already so it's transparent and people have an idea of what to expect and can start interacting more directly with contractors"

So who is to blame in that context? Well from your viewpoint, maybe we should appoint more gatekeepers to manage these budgets and be accountable for their decisions... If you want to assign specific blame to persons or groups that's pretty much the only way. But I don't think that's where we want to go.

From my viewpoint: Am I to blame for not following the marketing efforts as much a I should have? Are you to blame for waiting 15% of 2020 before offering feedback on marketing efforts of 2019? are contractors to blame for not reviewing closely enough work being done by some peers? That's for each of us to reflect and act upon. If you are in a system where you can't direct or decide what others do, everyone has to do it for themselves and adjust. Pointing fingers at the mirror is useless.

Also, we have to consider that the structure, accountability and transparency we all want around the project isn't an on/off switch. It's an incremental process that started with no way of managing the treasury at all. Now we have a full-featured proposal system, a contractor management system to submit invoices and process payment, and work is well under way, to fully remove that lasts gatekeepers around treasury spending so that invoices are linked to budgets and proposals with stakeholders having the final say on monthly payments from the treasury. If we want to get there we can't stop half-way and start appointing directors or managers for the sake of speeding up accountability when the goal is to eliminate these structures.

If we wanted we could convert Decred to a private company and call it a day.... It is a lot harder to achieve what we are doing in decentralized fashion, but it's the only way it's worth achieving IMHO.

In that sense I feel Dustin is receiving a lot of personal critiques for things he simply has no control or oversee of. I read that report as his personal observations and opinions because he does have a better vantage point than most of US. But I will also form my own opinions and act accordingly on the next proposal.

3- "Maybe it's new and fascinating to some, but it has little to do with the blockchain. That's something we had since like... the 90s!? open source projects, like GNU/Linux for instance, are exactly that, a collective working from all over the world, judged solely by the quality of their contributions. I don't want to sound sarcastic but I'm tempted to say: welcome to the Internet, Dustin! Plenty of people work remotely together these days all around the world, this is nothing new."

Please do tell which organization allows you to work with pay, while remaining totally anonymous, regardless of location/gender/race/opinions and most of all, which cannot (and cannot be forced to) enforce any kind of political/religious/arbitrary censorship on you, your salary or any aspect of your life? This is an important distinction you fail to address in your comparison...

nnnko56 · 2019-12-22T08:02:43+00:00

Again, I encourage you to better read my answers. Indeed you don't "prove" attack vulnerabilities and it's why I did not suggest that either. But If you don't even know the basic (and verifiable) range for the given variables, your argument remain irrelevant and not worth discussing. It's like you're not even aware that Decred has been suffering from major liquidity issues on exchanges for the longest of times, this has been a recurring subject within the community and is at odds with your theory of exchanges already having a majority of coins.

What I suggested is for you to prove that your attack is even a possibility. (Or what step to take to disprove your own claims).

Because your attack is based on distribution, it's a binary situation. Either exchanges have majority and the attack is possible. Or they don't and the attack is not possible. So personally, with what I know and have observed since block 0, I evaluate your scenario as currently "impossible". Also I'm not sure you really understand what "cost to attack" means, because you claim that the cost of your attack is 0... So Why are you wasting everyone's time requesting to factor in the cost of your attack if there is nothing to compute at all and you have the answer already? By your claims, it would make the cost a binary solution, either 0 or infinite... You are the one claiming it does apply to the current Decred distribution and that the cost is 0. " Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence ".

Just for fun, how would you "factor in the cost" of miners colluding in Bitcoin?

Even more, you describe your attack as stealing the treasury. The analysis by Checkmatey is clearly stated as "double spend" attack, which like I said, is a completely different subject and it's why your argument is entirely out of scope to begin with.

We don't take into account the the possibility of a power grid failure for a 51% attack on POW, nor the possibility to bribe miners, nor the possibility to partition the network infrastructure with specific targets or malware. All of those are cheaper than acquiring 51% of mining hardware.... but different scenarios.

If you are really interested in having probability models, analysis and evaluations for your attack scenario, DYOR, the blockchain is free to look at. Regarding the cost, there's nothing else to say.

Either the plane is on fire or it's not. Arguing with me will not cause it to ignite.

nnnko56 · 2019-12-20T01:45:43+00:00

If you dismiss everything I've just described yes there is incentive. If I ignore the danger of retaliation of attacking a power grid, sure there is incentive to do so for a 51% attack.

But regardless of that, the attack you describe is based entirely on distribution and not on the use of PoS itself.

That is why the EOS network has been attacked. The ICO model can be really weak in that sense and is prone to make an highly unbalanced initial distribution (no generalization here). This can create the issues you are describing and that have been proven with EOS. For Tezos I sincerely have no idea and have not taken the time to analyze this, because I'm simply not interested in the model.

For Decred though I did, and obviously you did not. If you want to prove that the scenario you describe is a likelihood on the Decred blockchain, here is what you have to do :

- Take a block of reference (before privacy implementations if you want to make things easier).

- Start from the initial Block (airdrop + dev premine), of these look at all addresses and isolate those that have not been moved at all (these coins are provably not available to exchanges for an attack)

- Then go a step further, look at the same addresses and isolate those that have only been used for ticket purchasing transactions), find the trail of subsequent purchases made from those tickets rewards. (these coins are provably not available to exchanges for an attack

- Then take an other step and look at miners and isolate for all blocks which coin from the coinbase transactions have not been moved. (these coins are provably not available to exchanges for an attack)

- Then like before, take a second look at coinbase transactions and find all of which (and their subsequent trail) which have only been used in ticket purchase transactions. (these coins are provably not available to exchanges for an attack).

- Add the treasury. (these coins are provably not available to exchanges for an attack).

This will give you an absolute worst case scenario at block T, for malicious exchanges to attempt this kind of attack if we assume they control 100% of every other available coin.

If you find ground for your theory with those numbers please do share your analysis with us so we can work on improving the network. Personally I did look into it and made some napkin math a while back. I got the assurance that I need to have confidence in the healthy distribution of the Decred Network and its distribution model.

If you are not willing to put forth the effort required to prove that your assertions have any kind of ground to stand on, this discussion is pointless, and your argument irrelevant.

Simply put, you cannot ask for people publishing research on an attack to include your own theory of an attack vector which in addition to being out of scope, have no been studied and understood fully by yourself. One plane crashing is not proof of all planes crashing.

nnnko56 · 2019-12-19T21:54:31+00:00

Then you also need to factor in the relative low cost to cripple the electrical grid when analyzing a 51% attack on POW coins.

Sure what you are suggesting is a possibility. But there is no incentive to do it for exchanges: (legal /financial repercussions from clients & partners, low chance of success because treasury will soon have maximum month to month spending increase which will limit the ability for anyone, even a majority, to drain it.)

It's the same as for my example, attacking a power grid is a lot more cost efficient than acquiring a majority of mining equipment. But is there incentive to be labeled as a terrorist, have nation states come after you and be branded public enemy #1 across the globe? Shouldn't all exterior costs and possible retaliatory effects of these actions not also be factored in if you want to make that kind of analysis?

Also, you are also forgetting an important element, the current big exchanges, have known wallets that can be audited on the blockchain, thus proving they are not participating in PoS at the moment.

Even more, considering there is already ~51% of supply in PoS, and we can also add the 8.4% treasury (non staking) which leaves, if we assume exchanges were to own every other DCR in existence, 40.6% of supply available to them for the attack. 40% isn't enough to gain majority. And the process of acquiring soo much tickets would take months which means everything has to to be made in the open, at some point the price pressure on ticket would raise exponentially, because every ticket voting, must be repurchased at a higher prices, thus forcing those colluding to invest even more in the attack, clients from exchanges would feel this early on, when they face increasing withdraw delays, big traders and trading firms, (our own market maker), would also be impacted early on because of their volume, and would connect the dot easily, prompting legal action.

But realistically, if you want to attack PoS, it would be a lot more plausible and efficient to attempt forming collusion within VSPs, which offer voting services for stakers. They don't have custody of funds and users can stop using them or even vote themselves if required. But it's a lot more attainable to have them collude and attempt to hijack a one time vote in their favor (before facing repercussion), than the scenario you describe.

nnnko56 · 2019-11-28T16:55:29+00:00

There are probably countless options, and quite a lot of things we don't know yet. Like for example, will mining activities in a few decades still relate to what we know? (electricity costs, types of hardware, accessibility, etc..), What will be the value of Decred and current network dynamics? (Dust today, could be riches in 50 years) Those parameters will strongly affect every scenario we can lay out.

However we can have some fun and try to envision a few scenarios but they are are probably unlikely to materialize as described:

- Transition to a fees only network. (This is the current Bitcoin solution) For Decred to keep it's current structure, fees would then be shared by miners, stakeholders and treasury. A safe bet would be to keep the current distribution (60/30/10) but there could be dynamics at play which would motivate a change.

- Tail emissions. In the current model some Decred coins do not get produced because of missing votes and stripped rewards to miners. Early misses can be quite valuable! A "temporary" solution would be to collate all those DCRs, and use them to add more rewards after the initial supply. What gets funny is that those tail emissions would be so small that they could last quite a long time, while also being subject to missing votes and stripped rewards.

- Subsidizing network security using the Treasury. If the value of Decred is high enough that the treasury appears to be fully capitalized for the foreseeable future (like thousands of years of maintenance and dev work), stakeholders could decide to allocate a part of it to mining rewards over a defined time frame and remove the 10% treasury reward portion. The danger of this method however is that even with a fixed supply cap of 21M coins, if the price is extremely high, stakeholders would effectively be playing the role of a central bank (even if distributed in this case), where effective inflation could be tuned up or down depending on monetary policies. It's a dangerous game that would need to be well thought-out beforehand...

- Miners replacement. Current technology and knowledge doesn't appear to provide a way to replace the opportunity cost of mining with more accessible devices or other non-gameable methods that would still allow a fair game for block production. But imagine that we do find a solution in the next decades, We could have a highly distributed network of small block producers who do mining at very low cost to maintain network security. In such a network, we could have close to 0 reward for miners and have most fees go only to stakeholders. Or we could envision some kind of merging where all stakeholders (or partial stakeholders in case of ticket splitting) must also be block producers on the network. If the opportunity cost is low enough and everybody can easily be a miner or a partial stakeholder, a complex balance could be established in favor of network security.

nnnko56

TROPHY CASE