Adam Beck: bitcoins with homomorphic value (validatable but encrypted)

[bytemaster]

Actually BitShares allows anyone to validate, but only 101 may PUBLISH.    There is a HUGE difference between the meaning there.

After a brief overview of the homomorphic math we believe that such a feature could be added to BTS once they mature the library. 

[Permie]

Remember bitcoin is trustless, and BitShares is low-trust

The speed that consensus can be reached among 101 peers is going to be faster than among an unlimited amount of untrusted nodes.

Actually trust has very little to do with the block time. The limiting factor is the number of forks. If you reduce the number of forks, you reduce the block time.

I meant that the 101 BitShares witnesses can be better connected and prepared to validate blocks as efficiently as possible.
Bitcoin allows any network participant to join in with validation so does not have the ability to prepare and coordinate in such a way

[monsterer]

Remember bitcoin is trustless, and BitShares is low-trust

The speed that consensus can be reached among 101 peers is going to be faster than among an unlimited amount of untrusted nodes.

Actually trust has very little to do with the block time. The limiting factor is the number of forks. If you reduce the number of forks, you reduce the block time.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

I actually think the approach is brilliant. The transaction amounts are what everyone wants private. Perhaps Bytemaster can figure out how to implement this solution because if Bitshares is to ever become something important then no one is going to want it to be so transparent that criminal people know exactly what you buy and how much money you have.

You mean like now how criminal people know exactly what you buy and how much money you have? :) .. By criminal people you mean..

[Permie]

IMO bitcoin and all it's side-chains will forever be dogged by the awful confirmation times. Not sure what satoshi was thinking when he designed that part, tbh.

Remember bitcoin is trustless, and BitShares is low-trust

The speed that consensus can be reached among 101 peers is going to be faster than among an unlimited amount of untrusted nodes.

[monsterer]

IMO bitcoin and all it's side-chains will forever be dogged by the awful confirmation times. Not sure what satoshi was thinking when he designed that part, tbh.

[Permie]

Team Bitshares is going to have some stiff competition.

How many years away is this from completion?

Personally, I've never liked the idea of sidechains. Maybe I simply don't understand why the bitcoin community won't one day decide, "No sidechains for you!".

To anyone : Is that a real possibility or not? How do you know? Did you predict Gavin Andresen would decide to fork bitcoin without developer consensus? If not, how can I trust your opinion?

Reading over the reddit thread of this blockstream announcement it seems that bitcoin still has the scalability problem of ~7tx/s
Petertodd + others commented that sidechains do not solve the scalability problem, anyway.

From how I understand sidechains to work, there are 'gateways' that are trusted to facilitate trade between side chains.
I'm not convinced this system can match up to the performance of BitShares, or come close to 100,000 transactions per second for quite some time.

Still there are plenty of calls of the death of altcoins!

[Tuck Fheman]

Team Bitshares is going to have some stiff competition.

How many years away is this from completion?

Personally, I've never liked the idea of sidechains. Maybe I simply don't understand why the bitcoin community won't one day decide, "No sidechains for you!".

To anyone : Is that a real possibility or not? How do you know? Did you predict Gavin Andresen would decide to fork bitcoin without developer consensus? If not, how can I trust your opinion?

[luckybit]

I actually think the approach is brilliant. The transaction amounts are what everyone wants private. Perhaps Bytemaster can figure out how to implement this solution because if Bitshares is to ever become something important then no one is going to want it to be so transparent that criminal people know exactly what you buy and how much money you have.

[luckybit]

Bytemaster was concerned about privacy. In the new Side Chains release they have a pdf which has a gem:

"Confidential Transactions
• Prior work focuses on the transaction graph...
– What if you make transaction amounts private?
• Amounts are usually more important to keep private
• 8-byte amounts become 33-byte commitments – like a hash
• The blinded commitment preserves addition
– Thus the network can verify that the amounts add up
• Originally proposed by Adam Back in 2013: "bitcoins with
homomorphic value" on bitcointalk"

https://www.blockstream.com/developers/
https://people.xiph.org/~greg/blockstream.gmaxwell.elements.talk.060815.pdf
https://github.com/ElementsProject/elements
Team Bitshares is going to have some stiff competition. There is serious brainpower in the Blockstream camp. Perhaps it's not an accident that they made their announcement on the same day Bytemaster made his?