FTC's future
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0% PoS will work just fine xBT when the time comes so there’s no need to debate about it here.
Aren’t we supposed to be sticking to the current inflation/coin production rate?
I’ll finish up my reading on PoS and come back with an idea.
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https://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/wiki/Whitepaper:Nxt
In the Proof of Stake model used by Nxt, network security is governed by peers having a stake in the network. The incentives provided by this algorithm do not promote centralization in the same way that Proof of Work algorithms do, and data shows that the Nxt network has remained highly decentralized since its inception: a large (and growing) number of unique accounts are contributing blocks to the network[6], and the top five accounts have generated 35% of the total number of blocks[7].
The more tokens that are held in the account, the greater the chance that account will earn the right to generate a block. The total reward received as a result of block generation is the sum of the transaction fees located within the block. Nxt does not generate any new tokens as a result of block creation. Redistribution of Nxt takes place as a result of block generators receiving transaction fees, so the term forging (meaning in this context to create a relationship or new conditions[8]) is used instead of mining.
The security of the blockchain is always of concern in Proof of Stake systems. The following basic principles apply to Nxts Proof of Stake algorithm:
- A cumulative difficulty value is stored as a parameter in each block, and each subsequent block derives its new difficulty from the previous blocks value. In case of ambiguity, the network achieves consensus by selecting the block or chain fragment with the highest cumulative difficulty. This is covered in more detail in .
- To prevent account holders from moving their stake from one account to another as a means of manipulating their probability of block generation, tokens must be stationary within an account for 1,440 blocks before they can contribute to the block generation process. Tokens that meet this criterion contribute to an account’s effective balance, and this balance is used to determine forging probability.
- To keep an attacker from generating a new chain all the way from the genesis block, the network only allows chain re-organization 720 blocks behind the current block height. Any block submitted at a height lower than this threshold is rejected. This moving threshold may be viewed as Nxts only fixed checkpoint.
- Due to the extremely low probability of any account taking control of the blockchain by generating its own chain of blocks, transactions are deemed safe once they are encoded into a block that is 10 blocks behind the current block height.
Peercoin uses a coin age parameter as part of its mining probability algorithm. In that system, the longer your Peercoins have been stationary in your account (to a maximum of 90 days), the more power (coin age) they have to mint a block. The act of minting a block requires the consumption of coin age value, and the network determines consensus by selecting the chain with the largest total consumed coin age.
When Peercoin blocks are orphaned, the consumed coin age is released back to the blocks originating account. As a result, the cost to attack the Peercoin network is low, since attackers can keep attempting to generate blocks (referred to as grinding stake) until they succeed. Peercoin minimizes these and other risks by centrally broadcasting blockchain checkpoints several times a day, to freeze the blockchain and lock in transactions.
Nxt does not use coin age as part of its forging algorithm. An account’s chance to forge a block depends only on its effective balance (which is a property of each account), the time since the last block (which is shared by all forging accounts) and the base target value (which is also shared by all accounts).
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http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdf
Proof of Activity: Extending Bitcoin’s Proof of Work via Proof of Stake
The PoA protocol seeks to decentralize the power that synchronizes the transactions in a quite pronounced
fashion. To monopolize the block creation process, an attacker needs to control a substantial fraction of the
total amount of coins that have been generated thus far. We argue that in likely scenarios the cost of an
attack would be much higher with the PoA protocol than with Bitcoin’s pure PoW protocol. Furthermore,
the PoA protocol is likely to accomplish other benecial properties, namely an improved network topology,
incentives for maintaining full online nodes, low transaction fees, and a more ecient energy usage.
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PoS Strengths and Weaknesses
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/
If it can be implemented correctly, in theory proof of stake has many advantages. In particular are three:
- It does not waste any significant amount of electicity. Sure, there is a need for stakeholders to keep trying to produce blocks, but no one gains any benefit from making more than one attempt per account per second; hence, the electricity expenditure is comparable to any other non-wasteful internet protocol (eg. BitTorrent)
- It can arguably provide a much higher level of security. In proof of work, assuming a liquid market for computing power the cost of launching a 51% attack is equal to the cost of the computing power of the network over the course of two hours â€" an amount that, by standard economic principles, is roughly equal to the total sum of block rewards and transaction fees provided in two hours. In proof of stake, the threshold is theoretically much higher: 51% of the entire supply of the currency.
- Depending on the precise algorithm in question it can potentially allow for much faster blockchains (eg. NXT has one block every few seconds, compared to one per minute for Ethereum and one per ten minutes for Bitcoin)
Note that there is one important counterargument that has been made to #2: if a large entity credibly commits to purchasing 51% of currency units and then using those funds to repeatedly sabotage the network, then the price will fall drastically, making it much easier for that entity to puchase the tokens. This does somewhat mitigate the benefit of stake, although not nearly fatally; an entity that can credibly commit to purchasing 50% of coins is likely also one that can launch 51% attacks against proof of work.
Please dont mind me. I’m just grabbing bits from here and there and putting in this once place so i look over them all a bit more thoroughly.
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I’m interested in seeing a debate over PoA and NXT’s PoS model.
Maybe we can do a variant of one of em or tweak one or the other or both or something.
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What about block selection could we use coin age or just number of coins staked.
As for security peercoin has ACP nxt seems to limit reorgs to 720 blocks and etherum has proposed a solution that could punish miners for staking on two chains. (Which sounds a little too late)
I think the argument about no one staking may be incorrect I’d be happy to stake for the good of the community and the coin. Its the good Samaritan PoS. Plus you could have the chance of tx fees.
But this works in our favour on the security front as with little or no incentive attackers won’t see the benefit of attacking via pos.
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This may be off piste a little but I’ve been looking at the latest implementation of bitcoinj which has support for deterministic addresses. Bit30? Or some thing. With the new core could we support this as well?
I would like to try to fork it directly to Feathercoin rather than use a old litecoin version. But they seem to have changed the structure somewhat between version 9 we have and the latest version 12. They also have a very cool javaFX sample wallet which would be nice to implement.
I know I keep banging on about java. I just think we could have more people involved in the development if we had a stable java platform.
Anyway tell me what you think and I’ll continue to look into it.
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Link you to the code you need to write? Or did you expect me to write a whitepaper on the solution for you?
Here’s the thing, you are smoke and mirrors. 100% PoS is bad, your ideas are bad and you know it. You assume that people are ignorant so you can mislead us into a terrible situation. It is sad to see you corrupting people with ideas you know do not work out. When suggesting a change you need to prove to the Feathercoin community that something works but you say you will not even provide Feathercoin to any working code, because the code does not exist or work and you will never actually commit any coding for this project. The 100% PoS coins out there that use zero confirmations on stake blocks are very poor and give the impression of being produced by people who are reckless and do not care about the coin’s long term future.
Here’s an example of one…
Another example of how you try to steer us to death, your suggestion to set the blocking of reorgs in the client to five instead of doing so by ACP. This idea was well accepted and people were running with it until Ghostlander said how terribly dangerous it was. The result of your idea would have been “forks everywhere”, your words when I asked you why that idea was stupid on Slack instant messaging. I was checking to see if you actually knew why it was dangerous and wanted us dead or you actually do not understand the tech. Turns out you knew exactly how dangerous that idea was but you pushed it on people anyway.
You are not a friend of Feathercoin, you are a bully and try to divide the community and try to sell terrible ideas.
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The immediate future is clear in my opinion, we get Feathercoin 0.9.3 working with SX and ACP. This work is almost complete and it should not be hard to polish it off and close the remaining issues. Lizhi reports that there is a conflict with SX and ACP, I am setting up a testnet with new genesis block and will run it with an ACP node and trial some SX TXs to see where the issue lies. This to me is the last hurdle for release.
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I wish FTC to remain true to its main goals, an open source coin that encourages distributed production. I agree with Bush we should stick to our our original PoW methodology.
However, I think crypto currency is moving to the next stage where the stability and longevity of FTC will be a significant factor.
It is no longer possible to keep up on all the developments in crypto currency, so we do need to concentrate on our core values, maintaining the block chain network and supporting members by information and developing wallet and mining software. Members are then free to use that technology to use for value transfer, projects like Hull coin, or other uses of this advanced technology we are supporting. I see this as how open source will work for all projects in the future.
I would advise collaboration of a web site update. To include those that arn’t into the software testing, I think that including a re-branding / publicity campaign for the 2nd anniversary. I advise Feathercoin to be re branded as FTC. It is a more professional brand and easier to make a good logo.
By using Github, (as Chrisj has shown with the world passport), any project (like the web site) can be easily controlled and contributed to in an open way.
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Having just read through the entire thread I think one fundamental issue has not been raised or discussed. You are missing the commercialisation piece.
We are cut off from our customers, i.e. the people who are actually going to USE the coin. Correct me if I’m wrong, but transactions have fallen significantly, and no amount of theorising about the economics or inventing new technical solutions is going to change the fact that people aren’t using FTC for anything. You want to solve the problems with the world economy, great, who is going to use PoS, PoA, or PoW? As a consumer, I don’t have time to read around the topic to understand the solutions being suggested in real terms, and nor should I.
If you want me (as a new customer of the coin) to use your product, I’m going to need to be convinced it has benefit without having to understand the technology behind it. Give me a 2 line value proposition for these ideas!
Enough with the intellectual wanking; it is of the utmost importance that we start to re-engage with our potential users. I remember a time when our VP was that you could buy beer with FTC. It sounds simple, but that was such a key selling point to many people… where are we headed now? If I come to the forums and read the news, its way out of date. We need a new ChrisJ to keep the outside world up to speed with developments and to engage with customers to find out what they want. Customers --> requirements --> idea/solution --> technical development. That is the order of things and we don’t have customers right now.
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Great point.
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Having just read through the entire thread I think one fundamental issue has not been raised or discussed. You are missing the commercialisation piece.
We are cut off from our customers, i.e. the people who are actually going to USE the coin. Correct me if I’m wrong, but transactions have fallen significantly, and no amount of theorising about the economics or inventing new technical solutions is going to change the fact that people aren’t using FTC for anything.
This is what sxtx and multisig is for.
It will allow us to create a ftc replacement for paypal.
More details to come soon we hope.
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I’ve been burying my head in the code of coin projects for a while now and I have come to some conclusions.
Before we do that I have one question: Who’s doing the Hitler Finds Out Kevlar Is Posting Again video?
Big wave to K and B. I hope you find ways to work together. Calem, looking forward to the FTCpal.
Ahem.
The coin is not the center of the universe.
Coins are going to die soon because:
Conclusion 1: they did not build an internal market.
Conclusion 2: their short term benefits have passed.
Conclusion 3: short term changes undermine planning.
Conclusion 4: they provide the same potential security.
The internal market: Personally, I am not interested in any new changes unless it helps us connect together.
An economy that does not enable people to get on with their daily lives is bad enough. The world economy prevents most people from having any life at all and that’s why many of us want off the train. Our frontend makes it difficult to track what people are talking about or doing. Unfortunately there’s not a lot to track or differentiate.
Solution: replace the market with market communities which share a payment interface. Who’s up for FTC Book Club? FTC Car Parts?
Short term benefits: I wouldn’t call those coins failures, but rather performing to potential.
They served their purpose. Most people in there are big holders and big miners. The rest are nanosecond holders flashtrading to BTC and fiat. We might learn from them, but they won’t be around long.
Solution: generalize their positive aspects and inhale their users into our marketshare. FTC Random Number Generator for people who used to play with Luck Coins.
Long term planning: People want to use money to do something that takes time to set up.
If you want to buy a house, then you need the value to be dependable while you’re saving up. The same goes for loans and votes and smart contracts. If the contract changes while you’ve been saving up, you will lose the value of all that time and effort. Imagine you vote on something and where you needed a few people to secure that vote now you need many.
Solution: do not play games with inflation or deflation, supply and hoarding. People will drop you into the multimining pit where no one actually wants your coin.
Identical Services: The difference in value of the coins is superficial because they do the same thing.
I don’t see anyone rushing to buy drinking straws made of gold. There is no justification for coins having much lower or much greater value. They do the same thing. Also the security they offer is questionable because a larger network could if they wanted to wreck the smaller blockchain.
Solution: don’t try to offer the same services or cover all the features. Instead use a common format for expressing the services but differentiate on the ones that are built in.
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In summary:
It’s hard to see what people are working on here.
Fly by night coins and changes are generally bad.
Separating the market from the coin improves the market.
Connecting the market to the coin gives value to the coin.
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This is what sxtx and multisig is for.
It will allow us to create a ftc replacement for paypal.
More details to come soon we hope.
Now this excites me! As for what SxTx and multisig are, I have no idea (but that isn’t important). What are the benefits over Paypal? How will this make our customers lives better/faster/cheaper etc.
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Now this excites me! As for what SxTx and multisig are, I have no idea (but that isn’t important). What are the benefits over Paypal? How will this make our customers lives better/faster/cheaper etc.
SX and multisig are vital for creating decentralised and uncensorable escrow service
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SX and multisig are vital for creating decentralised and uncensorable escrow service
Mirrax is correct.
Its the foundation for something bigger.
Sorta the intention of the BC to begin with. Decentralised Trust to the highest degree.
Just needs smart contracts and ftc is complete… well. who knows. tech moves so fast…
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Viele danke fur ein wundershone video Kevlar, es ist punktlich!
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I think the argument about no one staking may be incorrect I’d be happy to stake for the good of the community and the coin. Its the good Samaritan PoS. Plus you could have the chance of tx fees.
I dont have much to contribute to this discussion but I agree with this statement. I, as well as others, already keep wallets open 24/7 just to keep then up to date as well as relay transactions for no real benefit.
