On 17/01/2016 10:13 am, travis+ml-rbcryptogra...@subspacefield.org wrote:
I'm embarrassed by the long, rambling post. It was notes to myself,
which I then circulated to my friends and forwarded without editing.
I should summarize.
0) Bitcoin is amazing technology. Truly neat. Many related ideas,
must have taken a long time to develop. Impressive. Caught
me way off guard back when it was posted here.
1) Can we use SAT (or another NPC problem) as a POW?
If I'm not mistaken doing hash preimage attacks is a SAT solver.
2) Can we efficiently enumerate the aforementioned NPC problem space
and map to and from ordinals?
3) Would there be any problems in allowing people to solve a problem
defined in advance, rather than having it vary based on the current
block?
Not in the current design because each block refers by hash to the
previous. Also, the design of the lottery is based on surprise to try
and get everyone starting at the same position.
4) Would it be useful to decouple any of the aspects of the block chain
from each other? Could one decouple the financial impacts from the
cryptographic operations from the persistent, distributed storage?
It turns out that Bitcoin is incredibly well balanced in its
interlocking assumptions. Although it looks like a grabbag of tricks,
it is actually carefully interconnected.
The key assumption(s) is that all are equivalently anonymous. Therefore
anyone can pretend to be as many as one likes. Hence the vote on
control is required to isolate over some unforgeable differentiating
thing, which ends up being energy (PoW) in Bitcoin's case (proof of
stake is also popular).
Energy costs money so it has to be paid for somehow, so we need the
money creation to empower the mining, and we need to provide a payment
system so as to encourate people to demand the money to incentivise the
miners to produce otherwise worthless leading-zero hash numbers.
If you drop the "equivalently anonymous" assumption then every other
aspect collapses. Hence the anti-school of "private or permissioned
blockchains," oxymoron.
5) Would it be useful to create hash lattices rather than a single
chain for some purposes? What other structures might be useful?
So back off a bit and ask what you are trying to achieve? Tinkering at
the edges is fun, but pointless.
There's some thinking about sharding the blockchain because that's the
only way to go massively scaled to say IoT levels. Also a lot of
thinking as to what happens when you relax the anonymity condition.
6) Could we create markets around the various services required to
implement the block chain in a way that creates incentives that
align with the overall goals? In other words, can the design
be a game-creating-game which serves a higher goal. The
work product of mining can be polished and resold in jewelry,
perhaps in other markets. This could pay for running the chain
storage.
One of the problems in markets is that it is terrifically hard to get
specialisations up and going by planning, because you need to coordinate
multiple groups at the same time. In this sense, bitcoin started out as
"everyone was a node" and then it bifurcated to miners and payments
nodes and then again to full nodes and SPV nodes. Evolution worked, but
if you planned it to bootstrap like that you'd likely fail because of
chicken & egg mechanics.
7) Can that goal include more efficient software and hardware?
Mine for great good.
The doctrinal argument is that if there is another purpose to the
mining, then the security is weakened because it comes for less money.
This goes back to Gresham's observation that money with multiple
purposes has strange artifacts. Popularly "bad money beats out the
good" although that is only a popular saying, it's different in the
analysis. So in the bitcoin world of today there are multiple issues
going on with the money source - i.e. the power costs vary which causes
those artifacts to kick in and impact back into the ecosystem.
So ideally we would look for a more perfect distribution of the lottery,
which would hopefully replace the PoW. E.g., instead of using PoW to
designate the winner, use the hash of the last block to appoint the
decider of the next block. If you can get the hash to be truly
unpredictable (e.g., I can't frontrun myself by pre-predicting myself as
the winner) then a more perfectly distributed lottery would remove the
need for energy burning at all.
8) Other than this list, where else might I find influential
people who know more than I about this stuff, to pick their
brain? I am in SF/BA, IRL, if that matters.
There are meetups in that area.
9) I'm sure there are problems with this idea. If you would kindly
correct my inadequate understanding I would much appreciate.
On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 01:21:38AM -0800,
travis+ml-rbcryptogra...@subspacefield.or
