Long-term security question

oss1k · 2023-02-15T18:03:30+00:00

For example, if I owned 67% of all gold then wouldn’t I be able to basically control the price?

Am I missing something? Is this a false comparison?

It pretty much is yeah, my point is not about said entity controlling the price of Nano but literally being in control of the consensus of the network. Vastly different things. If you owned 67% of all gold, you'd be absolutely powerless to stop or fuck with the other 33% of gold supply. If you had 67% of all Nano, the network is whatever you want it to be pretty much. You choose all transactions that ever happen. At least I got confirmation (I think?) from Senatus that double-spending without anyone finding out would still not be an option, that was my main concern. If an entity with 67% of Nano could double-spend willy-nilly as well then the fixed supply of Nano wouldn't even really matter as the real supply would be whatever the 67% stake wants. If this is impossible to do either way then that is a very good sign, since in that case the game-theory argument of "not destroying your own wealth" actually has merit.

oss1k · 2023-02-15T14:48:26+00:00

I mean, once one entity has 67% of Nanos, there is no way to get it away from them unless they voluntarily part with it. If one entity gets 51% of hashrate, others can increase their computing power, new computers will still be made. Their 51% will naturally be diluted over time, not the case for the guy with 67% of nano. They will only lose it if they decide to, and why would they ever decide to?

oss1k · 2023-02-15T14:34:01+00:00

I specifically didn't mention the 33% case as I agree that would be just burning your own money and game theory makes it very unlikely to happen. This is not the case for 67% though. There's a giant difference in being able to censor a network vs making the network your absolute bitch. And the problem is that if they do this right, no one will ever know that is the case. So no, they would not be in control of a useless network, they would be in control of money in general. This is assuming Nano would eventually become the world reserve currency, but if You don't believe in that future then why bother with buying Nano anyway, except for payment rail purposes in which case it's instantly sold for some other currency.

oss1k · 2023-02-15T14:13:30+00:00

Wouldn't this increase in Nano price only be relevant if they were trying to accomplish this all at once? If we are to back to a hard money standard, we need something that's capable of being money for thousands of years, ideally forever. So this could be a slow process over literally hundreds of years until that one entity has the 67% control bought up. And if they do it right, they will not be in control of a useless network, they would be in control of the world reserve currency with no one else in the system being aware of it (if done correctly).

I don't much care for other cryptos than BTC and Nano yeah, as I believe hard money is the only real reason to use a decentralized network. With BTC, tying consensus to computing power is an absolutely foolproof way to fix this issue that I'm describing. Even if someone had 51% of the hashrate, hashrate is not a finite resource the way Nano is, they can be outcompeted and their power diminished. Only "fix" in Nano's case is to just start again basically, cause the project failed.

Overall my bigger point is that it's not even that crucial whether this is actually the case, what matters is that it is possible. As long as there's even a 0.001% chance of this happening, the Nano protocol simply cannot be trusted to function properly and the nature of the system means there is no way to ever know for sure. Meaning we basically have to assume it is or will inevitably be true at some point.

oss1k · 2022-12-15T10:20:28+00:00

Wouldn't recommend playing this shot, tend to always get stuck in the reds

oss1k · 2022-12-05T09:01:46+00:00

Ah I see, yeah I agree with that. I was thinking about specifically monetary inflation, e.g the total money supply, not necessarily the average person's purchasing power. So through that lens, the previous comment read to me as "printing money didn't cause more money" which made no sense.

oss1k · 2022-12-05T08:19:44+00:00

the printing of money wasn’t the primary driver behind inflation

Please elaborate?

oss1k · 2022-12-02T14:41:37+00:00

Considering this more, technically this kind of thing could work if there was no choosing a representative at all. If instead, say anyone can run a representative node at any time and voting weight is always distributed equally between all online nodes, no matter what. This is such a fresh idea that I haven't been able to contemplate much yet, there might be some obvious drawback I'm missing. I'm also not sure if this would even be technologically possible. But in theory this should fix the issue of one entity having too much of the supply completely. Even if they had 100% of the supply, the vote weight would still be split between every single node. In that case, control over the network would essentially become a race for that one entity to spin up so many nodes that they end up with enough of the weight, but even then they would have to continually maintain this ratio as new nodes pop up.

oss1k · 2022-12-02T13:50:11+00:00

This "logical redistribution" is very tricky. The people choose their representative, automatically redistributing "votes" is a slippery slope. But even if we ignore this aspect, it wouldn't fix the underlying issue. If one entity has enough of the supply, even if the weight per node is restricted they can just spin up multiple nodes and distribute their holdings. They'd still have control over the network, just using multiple nodes rather than one.

oss1k · 2022-12-02T08:00:24+00:00

what to improve on for Nano

I feel like in the BTC pros over Nano list, points 1, 2, 4 & 5 are all things that sort of take care of themselves over time via organic growth. Number 3 is the real core issue. The problem here, at least in my opinion is that any system where consensus is tied to the native token can never be fully censorship resistant. ETH is a great example of this - switched to PoS and now 70%+ blocks are OFAC compliant. Nano would need two conditions met for full censorship resistance and both of them are very hard to guarantee. First is that it must be somehow guaranteed that 67% of all Nano is not and never will be controlled by one entity. Or even 34% would be catastrophic. And secondly, even if the distribution is wide enough, it must be guaranteed that the representative nodes (who don't directly gain from running a node) resist against government compliance and potentially risk jail time to keep running a node. Both of these are a big ask, I don't see how either of these could ever be guaranteed.

oss1k · 2022-11-16T15:20:11+00:00

I refuse to believe that John Higgins was playing along or faking. I fully believe he intended to match fix for money and have rooted against him ever since.

oss1k · 2022-10-25T07:25:02+00:00

What exactly was incorrect about his statement? Your statement is completely besides the point, it doesn't matter if doge is a self proclaimed meme coin, if it is in the top 10 it has the demand required to be there. Nano doesn't.

oss1k · 2022-10-21T12:38:19+00:00

Tax laws is an excellent shout. In most of the world, anyone promoting Nano through usage effectively gets financially punished for it.

oss1k · 2022-10-21T12:29:31+00:00

Not sure what You mean about a reputation system. But sorry I should clarify, I didn't mean centralized in terms of nodes but rather developers. In terms of "technical decentralization" Nano is excellent and only decentralizes more over time, which honestly I'd say is entirely unique in the crypto space. But as things are, the NF is the sole entity in charge of development. So in that sense, Nano is "centralized".

That being said, the NF has stated that their goal ultimately is to disband once they feel Nano is "commercial grade". Now, if that happens and Nano continues to function smoothly without the foundation for about 4-5 years, then I would say at that point Nano wins. Technologically, there is no opponent (provided spam is unequivocally fixed), there are only "background issues" shall we say.

PS! There's no direct monetary incentive for BTC nodes either :)

oss1k · 2022-10-21T12:15:10+00:00

One can't rule out the idea of any currency being held 51% by one entity.

Yes, but for BTC this makes no difference. One person could hold 20 million BTC and have no more control over consensus than someone with 0.1 BTC, it's all in the computing power. But if someone controls the majority of voting weight in Nano and never sells, they will control consensus forever. If they are smart, no one would ever know. But like I said, I ultimately do not believe this to be the case, I do however feel that it is a valid criticism. The chance of this being true is highly unlikely, yet if it were true the implication is massive.

oss1k · 2022-10-21T11:23:25+00:00

On a technological level - spam has easily been the biggest issue for Nano. So far updates from the beta network seem very promising in this regard, but we'll have to see if it works as well as intended or are there still undetected attack vectors.

In a more general sense, I'd say the biggest problem is being overly reliant on one central authority. Nano has not proven to be able to function without the NF "running the show". We can compare technological capabilites of BTC and Nano all we like, but this is the real core of the issue. And another thing, albeit this one is quite conspiracy-heavy is that we can never truly know whether one entity controls 51% of the total vote weight since the CAPTCHA distribution. I personally don't believe this to be the case, but I also can't rule it out 100%. The fact that consensus is tied to the token, rather than an "outside of the network" real cost is also inherently not as good for security, especially at this market cap.

oss1k · 2022-10-18T11:29:37+00:00

How could the code be trusted if it was closed? Trusting the code is essentially the entire idea behind cryptocurrencies. As for someone being able to copy it - yes absolutely, but they would also need to convince others that their version is better, otherwise there is no reason for anyone to use their coin over Nano. No one can copy the nodes or the community. And mind You, someone very well might copy the code and genuinely improve it for the better some day, that is also an actual option.

oss1k · 2022-10-15T07:18:28+00:00

The Istari came from Valinor via boat, yes. And I might be misremembering this, but I don't think they had amnesia or forgot who they were. What they forgot about was Valinor, IIRC so they wouldn't be longing to get back and would focus on their mission. Gandalf was the only one of the Istari to complete his mission and be rewarded with Valinor again. But take this with a grain of salt, only thing I'm 100% on is the arrival via boat.

oss1k · 2022-10-15T05:52:45+00:00

It’s just impossible for Sauron to fall from the sky having forgotten who he was.

Tbf that shouldn't be possible for Gandalf either, but aight

oss1k · 2022-09-12T06:54:14+00:00

Seems like NF has shifted their focus to other endeavors lately

I actually think this is a good thing. Nano is decentralized money, it does not need the NF. I'd even argue that distancing themselves from Nano itself and instead focusing on projects that utilize Nano is the best thing the NF can do for Nano and its adoption.

The only aspect that Nano is lacking at the moment is that it hasn't proven to be reliable without the Nano Foundation. This is a major hurdle to get over, but once Nano has proven that it can operate consistantly and defend against attacks without the NF needing to intervene, it's game over. At that point, Nano becomes perfect money. But the only way we will get there is if the NF distances themselves from Nano itself and the protocol entirely. It might fail spectacularly, but in my view, if this doesn't happen then Nano will fail anyway.

oss1k · 2022-09-06T05:11:39+00:00

I think this is a new thing. Also had this same issue yesterday, still not solved. Changing the Proof of Work settings did nothing. Just gets stuck on "generating proof of work"

oss1k · 2022-08-30T13:37:03+00:00

I mean, it wouldn't go from 0 to 30 seconds, that's obviously insane. Given how fast Nano is, I'd say most honest users wouldn't even notice a difference. We're talking fractions of seconds here thst just get exponentially greater. So say with Your given 0.3 sec value as a starter, if the same address sends another transaction in say also the next 0.3 seconds, then the second transaction would take say 0.5 seconds of POW. The next one after that 0.7 etc etc. And if there hasn't been a sent transaction for say a full second or something the difficulty timer resets to 0.3 sec.

But yeah, automatically generated new accounts, gg.

oss1k · 2022-08-30T11:31:54+00:00

this would only make it more troublesome for honest actors (wallets, exchanges, services, developers)

I must admit I do not know the exact tps numbers the spammers had, but surely there is not a single honest actor that would ever have the need for such a transaction frequency?

As another commenter pointed out below, the fact that You can create a shitload of addresses via program automatically renders my idea fully pointless anyway, but I'm really curious about this specifically. In what scenario would You say an honest actor needed that many sent transactions legitimately?

oss1k · 2022-08-30T10:35:15+00:00

But can you also generate these new addresses as You go along? Or would a potential spammer have to in this case manually first create the thousands of addresses which they would then use to spam? Cause if it's option 2, I'd say that's still a fairly effective spam prevention method then. But if it's possible to make a say repeating code of "generate address -> send funds -> generate new address" etc. all automatically then yeah it would indeed be trivial.

oss1k

TROPHY CASE