BitShares Forum
Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: r0ach on September 23, 2015, 09:16:32 am
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I'm not a fan of any solution in cryptocurrency that doesn't heavily rely on game theory. Collateral is one of the most powerful solutions available to Bitshares that it currently doesn't utilize well. It can easily fix problems with voter apathy and delegate selection. Here's how you do it. Instead of having a flate rate collateral amount required to become a delegate, you let the user supply their own collateral bid. While functioning as a delegate, lock these coins from being spent. When you go to vote for delegates, it should be set to auto sort by highest collateral bids at the top and the default vote selection should be vote for top X bids so the system is basically automated unless you decide to manually vote.
The user would be able to ignore collateral bids and vote for whoever they want to avoid an aristocracy if they so desire, but for solving voter apathy, this is what it should default to. It's the most efficient in finding people who have something to lose if something bad happens to the network.
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I think your subject title goes a bit over the top, this doesn't solve ALL problems.
Anyone is free to lockup collateral voluntarily, and all accounts have the option of a public balance.
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I think your subject title goes a bit over the top, this doesn't solve ALL problems.
Anyone is free to lockup collateral voluntarily, and all accounts have the option of a public balance.
I forgot to mention a couple more points. You would make the collateral bids not rollover automatically, that way you can't get stuck with zombie delegates you need to vote out as well. The locked collateral can't be used to vote for anyone else too. This would make the system more resilient to attack. To prevent collateral bid spam from flooding the system, there would need to be either a minimum amount required and/or or a small proof of burn probably.
This solves many problems with DPoS because:
1) You have to assume the majority of voters are lazy and voter apathy will be the majority not minority. There is no current guard against this.
2) There has to be some type of automated delegate selection method to deal with the voter apathy problem, which currently doesn't exist. You can still manually vote to avoid an aristocracy if you want, so the base voting method is still preserved.
3) Due to voter apathy, there is no way to easily get rid of zombie delegates, that fixes this as well.
4) Collateral is an easy to utilize sybil prevention mechanism. A flat rate only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system is more efficient.
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I ran my idea past Smooth (of Monero) since Moneroers don't like anything involving PoS in general and his attempted criticism didn't come up with anything yet:
<@smooth> in almost all systems you can borrow stake and spend virtually nothing (borrow being a general term that describes a lot of different schemes)
<r0ach> there's no borrowing attack in this
<@smooth> how is it not possible to borrow shares?
<@smooth> who votes if my shares are on an exchange, invested in a business/ponzi/etc.?
<r0ach> the system I described would lock collateral bids
<r0ach> so if I bid 1 million, it's locked and can't vote for anyone else
<r0ach> if you put your capital on exchange in regular PoS, the exchange owner gets to vote with it just like if you put your mining power on a mining pool (DPOW)
<r0ach> but collateral bid solves that
<r0ach> since the bid is locked
<r0ach> while serving as a delegate
<r0ach> so if the exchange wanted to use all that power, they would have to lock it and customers can't withdraw
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interesting ideas!
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Just to be clear, someone I talked to thought collateral bids were burned, that is not what I meant at all. The bids are just locked while serving as a delegate.
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With tendermint a block producing node that locks up collateral gets his collateral burnt automatically if he does something wrong. I just have a rough overview... tendermint.com
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With tendermint a block producing node that locks up collateral gets his collateral burnt automatically if he does something wrong. I just have a rough overview... tendermint.com
I haven't looked at tendermint at all yet personally.
edit: Just looked at Tendermint. I think Tendermint is more of a Rube Goldberg machine approach than mine. With a collateral bid system, there is no need to do things like destroy capital if the network forks. Something like that would only be required in a flat rate system.
Monsterer asked me how this system was different than standard proof of stake, and I think I explained it pretty well in the quote below:
You still have a deterministic number of delegates. A flat rate collateral system only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system vastly increases the potential cost. If there were 101 delegates, I would need to perform a sybil and impersonate 51 units then outbid everyone else with all of them. Cost to attack becomes somewhat exponential instead of linear. If scaled to 500 delegates, even more so. My capital is also locked while running as a delegate, unusable for voting, so that locked capital can't be used to vote for each other either.
He then rationally states that cost to attack doesn't increase without removing manual voting. Here is my explanation for that:
My original proposal was that the system would be automated to vote for highest collateral bids by default setting. It would only revert to the current system if users exercised the ability to manually vote. If you wanted that increased cost of attack, you would have to remove the ability to manually vote. I made the proposal the way I did because I'm not sure of everyone's consensus on removing manual voting, even though manual voting is probably a negative to leave in. Due to voter apathy, the system would most likely always run solely by collateral bids. At that point you have to think, why leave voting in at all?
I feel Bytemaster is too attached to voting so I had to make the suggestion the way I did as a compromise solution. I would personally probably remove manual voting.
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I like the system where witnesses put up collateral, and then if they attack the network their collateral is
burned. If they dont ever attack the network they can later cease to be a witness and reclaim their BTS.
This makes attacks on the bitshares network costly and also deflationary to BTS.
If the system goes wrong and punishes a truly innocent delegate at some point, and the community agrees this is what has occurred, we can always vote in a worker to repay that burned BTS. The net effect would be no change in BTS supply.
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I like the system where witnesses put up collateral, and then if they attack the network their collateral is
burned. If they dont ever attack the network they can later cease to be a witness and reclaim their BTS.
This makes attacks on the bitshares network costly and also deflationary to BTS.
If the system goes wrong and punishes a truly innocent delegate at some point, and the community agrees this is what has occurred, we can always vote in a worker to repay that burned BTS. The net effect would be no change in BTS supply.
Like I said in the edit from my post above, that's kind of a Rube Goldberg approach compared to mine. There is no need for an automated punishment in a bid system, only a flat rate system needs that.
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I may not be understanding this, but how does this prevent exchanges from voting with their stake.
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Also related: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=17308.0
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In the current system, the top 51% of delegates have at least 322 million BTS (>12.88%) voting for them.
The cost of acquiring that amount of stake is substantial. (It would be hard not too push up the price even if purchased slowly) More substantial is the loss you would take trying to sell all it rapidly after having voted in your bad delegates but prior to an attack.
With 2.0 features that will make voting easier the stake required to attack BTS in this way may increase even further.
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Witnesses are people with some technical ability, demonstrated commitment too and interest in BitShares, possibly geographically diverse and mildly incentivized by $300 per month. They don't necessarily have a large stake or would they be willing to use it as collateral because of the opportunity cost.
If I were to guess the average collateral bid from good delegates could be less than 500 000 BTS, & become even less as the CAP increases. What do you think their average collateral bid would be?
So in a 31 witness system, 8 million BTS may be all that's required to get 16 bad delegates automatically voted in by apathetic voters which we know outnumber active ones.
So the initial outlay and the overall cost of the attack appears substantially less with your model?
(The amount an average new witness has to put aside would stay fairly constant in $ terms, which means it would become less and less of a BTS % as the CAP increased, meaning over time it would become relatively cheaper and cheaper to attack BTS with a collateral bid system, unless you kept increasing the amount of delegates.)
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I may not be understanding this, but how does this prevent exchanges from voting with their stake.
because they would not be able to transfer funds when customers made withdrawal requests, since the customers funds would be locked as collateral... except they are voting with only a percentage of customers funds and operating their exchange as a fractional reserve.... (not that they don't have experience on that :P)
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I may not be understanding this, but how does this prevent exchanges from voting with their stake.
because they would not be able to transfer funds when customers made withdrawal requests, since the customers funds would be locked as collateral... except they are voting with only a percentage of customers funds and operating their exchange as a fractional reserve.... (not that they don't have experience on that :P)
Exchanges usually have the majority of their funds in a cold wallet they rarely have to access anyway.
So I don't think this prevents much there.
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The algorithm should place more weight on the length of time that the funds are locked up for.
For example:
Poloniex signs up to be a witness and locks up 10,000,000 BTS in a smart wallet that is inaccessible for 1 month (before transferring automatically to a wallet accessible to them).
I sign up to be a witness and l lock up 10,000 BTS for 30 years (similar smart wallet).
The default, apathetic, non-vote goes to me and not them.
Dig?
The risk is not only money but time. Someone who locks up 10,000,000 BTS does not deserve to get the default apathetic votes unless it's for a long time.
There should be a floor, or minimum (time and money), Like you must lock up at least 100,000BTS for 2 years in order to even be eligible to get the apathetic non votes. Because if you do go through with this, then these "money witnesses" will get substantial votes. I hope you realize this. In fact, we might want to put a limit on the total number of witnesses that these money votes are automatically applied to (certainly not 100%), such as 25% or 50%. That way the money votes have influence, and power, but can't take over the system entirely.
This logic is very similar to the "burn your BTS for more voting power" discussion.
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The algorithm should place more weight on the length of time that the funds are locked up for.
For example:
Poloniex signs up to be a witness and locks up 10,000,000 BTS in a smart wallet that is inaccessible for 1 month (before transferring automatically to a wallet accessible to them).
I sign up to be a witness and l lock up 10,000 BTS for 30 years (similar smart wallet).
The default, apathetic, non-vote goes to me and not them.
Dig?
The risk is not only money but time. Someone who locks up 10,000,000 BTS does not deserve to get the default apathetic votes unless it's for a long time.
And if someone locks up 1000 BTS for 1000 years?
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Why wouldnt you lock as long as you are witness? You remove witness status to get collateral back.
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And if someone locks up 1000 BTS for 1000 years?
The algo curve drops off after the length of a lifetime. Draw the curve to fit the process. Simple.
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Why wouldnt you lock as long as you are witness? You remove witness status to get collateral back.
Because you don't have any idea how long you are going to be a witness. When we say lock, we mean locking it in an unacceptable smart wallet that is programmed to only give it back after a certain amount of time that you decide prior to locking.
If you lock 1000 away for 6 months, then I can lock 1000 away for 7 months, and I get the votes. This promotes political activity, and healthy competition. Now you must lock more away to compete with me for the apathetic vote.
Maybe the apathetic vote should only apply to 50% of the total number of allowable witnesses!?
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Good witnesses won't want to post a lot of collateral due to either not having it or opportunity cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
For example you might want to loan that BTS out on Poloniex/internal market instead.
The $300 per month isn't a big incentive relative to costs and work a witness puts in, so the only people who will see significant opportunity in tying up a lot of collateral to become a witness may be people that wish to harm BTS.
(Possibly profit from a highly leveraged short elsewhere for example or simply be a .gov)
So I'm not a fan of the collateral bid system yet.
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correct, there is a sweet spot, and if we set these as voting parameters, then we will surely find it, in the same manner that we will find the sweet spot for total witnesses.
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Good witnesses won't want to post a lot of collateral due to either not having it or opportunity cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
For example you might want to loan that BTS out on Poloniex/internal market instead.
The $300 per month isn't a big incentive relative to costs and work a witness puts in, so the only people who will see significant opportunity in tying up a lot of collateral to become a witness may be people that wish to harm BTS.
(Possibly profit from a highly leveraged short elsewhere for example or simply be a .gov)
So I'm not a fan of the collateral bid system yet.
Exactly. If we do this we'll just have to raise witness pay enough to act as interest on the average witness collateral also.
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Bytemasters response on the mumble was basically:
* Witnesses are posting their reputation as collateral. If you don't htikn a person has enough reputation for you to trust them, dont vote for them
* Requiring large collaterals, as with the proposal where the highest collateral posted gets autovotes, turns DPoS into normal PoS, where large holders stake to secure the network.
That said, I like the idea of a SMALL collateral being posted. Similar to what we had where paid delegates in the old system paid a fee to register, which could recover a couple weeks of their cost if they did nothing.
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Why wouldnt you lock as long as you are witness? You remove witness status to get collateral back.
Because you don't have any idea how long you are going to be a witness. When we say lock, we mean locking it in an unacceptable smart wallet that is programmed to only give it back after a certain amount of time that you decide prior to locking.
If you lock 1000 away for 6 months, then I can lock 1000 away for 7 months, and I get the votes. This promotes political activity, and healthy competition. Now you must lock more away to compete with me for the apathetic vote.
Maybe the apathetic vote should only apply to 50% of the total number of allowable witnesses!?
but after time expires you open up the same attack we are trying to avoid? better to lock away until you stop signing blocks
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Bytemasters response on the mumble was basically:
* Witnesses are posting their reputation as collateral. If you don't htikn a person has enough reputation for you to trust them, dont vote for them
* Requiring large collaterals, as with the proposal where the highest collateral posted gets autovotes, turns DPoS into normal PoS, where large holders stake to secure the network.
That said, I like the idea of a SMALL collateral being posted. Similar to what we had where paid delegates in the old system paid a fee to register, which could recover a couple weeks of their cost if they did nothing.
If collateral is required, might that imply liability?
Isn't that something they were hoping to remove from the equation with the separation of delegate tasks?
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Why wouldnt you lock as long as you are witness? You remove witness status to get collateral back.
Because you don't have any idea how long you are going to be a witness. When we say lock, we mean locking it in an unacceptable smart wallet that is programmed to only give it back after a certain amount of time that you decide prior to locking.
If you lock 1000 away for 6 months, then I can lock 1000 away for 7 months, and I get the votes. This promotes political activity, and healthy competition. Now you must lock more away to compete with me for the apathetic vote.
Maybe the apathetic vote should only apply to 50% of the total number of allowable witnesses!?
but after time expires you open up the same attack we are trying to avoid? better to lock away until you stop signing blocks
Yes, of course, the lock out period is also dependent on their tenure as witness, so you cannot remove funds until your are no longer a witness and your lock away period is over.
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Guys .. do you know that with BitShares2.0 EVERYONE can lock away his BTS if he desires to?
As a delegate you simply point to that vesting balance to attract those voters ..
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* Requiring large collaterals, as with the proposal where the highest collateral posted gets autovotes, turns DPoS into normal PoS, where large holders stake to secure the network.
Sometimes its good to recognise advantages of your competitors. POS has a maximal game theoretic advantage over DPOS, because in order to be the best block producer you need to own the most stake, and therefore have the most to lose by misbehaving. In DPOS you have nothing to lose at all.
Adding collateral bids would fix this problem, and you'd still get to keep the deterministic block production order and delegate elections, which are other notable DPOS features.
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* Requiring large collaterals, as with the proposal where the highest collateral posted gets autovotes, turns DPoS into normal PoS, where large holders stake to secure the network.
Sometimes its good to recognise advantages of your competitors. POS has a maximal game theoretic advantage over DPOS, because in order to be the best block producer you need to own the most stake, and therefore have the most to lose by misbehaving. In DPOS you have nothing to lose at all.
Adding collateral bids would fix this problem, and you'd still get to keep the deterministic block production order and delegate elections, which are other notable DPOS features.
It's far superior to the current system. I feel the only reason people are going against it is because they think their voting power will somehow be "diluted" and they want to maintain this current paradigm of a small number of big stake holders controlling everything.
The current system is bogus because if a govt agency goes after Bitshares or this website like it did Liberty Reserve, then it's toast. The system is not automated enough to replace delegates in a seamless, timely manner. In my proposal, I stated the collateral bids wouldn't automatically roll over to prevent zombie delegates. You could also make them expire after a certain time offline to get new delegates in faster.
For a slightly different collateral idea, you could make the collateral bid system work by instead of voting for whoever locks up the largest amount of shares, have the client auto vote for whoever has the largest total of Bit Assets like BitGold, BitUSD, etc, that decides to run as delegate. That way you can still invest while locking the currency up as collateral. If you wanted to be invested only in Bitshares and not any of the bit assets, then a delegate token exchanged at a 1:1 ratio with bitshares could be used and counted as a bit asset.
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For a slightly different collateral idea, you could make the collateral bid system work by instead of voting for whoever locks up the largest amount of shares, have the client auto vote for whoever has the largest total of Bit Assets like BitGold, BitUSD, etc, that decides to run as delegate. That way you can still invest while locking the currency up as collateral. If you wanted to be invested only in Bitshares and not any of the bit assets, then a delegate token exchanged at a 1:1 ratio with bitshares could be used and counted as a bit asset.
I am happy we have you on our community! Brilliant ideas!
At the end I am sure we will have the best of them somehow integrated in the current system. I hope BM find''s the "sweet spot".... 8)
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I think a prerequisite should be that the person must join the test network for a period of time and demonstrate they a proficient in managing a witness. After that a they can be released into the the pool of users that quality to be voted on for the witness role. Just like there are metrics to judge a poor performing witness, there should be metrics to prove worthy of being a witness.
Do you know how ridiculous this idea sounds? Do you think Bitcoin would exist at all if it was that easy for government agencies to shut it down? Their attack vector is to simply stand in front of the test net? I feel like I'm surrounded by crazy people.
Click this link and then re-write your post with a new solution that would prevent a government agency from taking it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve
The only viable method I know of is that collateral bid system for delegate selection. Nobody is going to invest in Bitshares if all a govt agency has to do is shut down this website to win.
The delegate replacement process has to be easy, seamless, and as autonomous as possible. Any solution people suggest that involves asking Bytemaster to let them be a delegate is completely asinine.
I think the average person who wants to be & would make a good witness for $300 per month is not going to have a large amount of collateral.
What do you think the average collateral bid would be? (I think it could easily be less than 500k BTS per witness on average, meaning 8 million BTS required to use voter apathy to gain a 16/31 majority vs. being required to purchase 322 million BTS in the current system + the cost of having to rapidly sell them post voting in your bad witnesses but prior to an attack.)
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,18584.msg239122.html#msg239122
Also the collateral the average prospective good witness has would stay fairly stable in $ terms over time, so as the BTS CAP increased, the cost of attacking BTS in % terms via collateral bid sytem would get cheaper and cheaper. (So the collateral bid system makes BTS security weaker the more valuable BTS becomes.)
The current system to me works similarly to how shareholders elect a board of directors. It's not easy to convince shareholders to vote in a majority of bad directors. (The directors usually have a reasonable amount of service/experience & well established reputations etc.)
Try to envision the quality of people BTS could attract when much larger & it becomes more of a statement to be a witness, pays much more, or both. As an unlikely extreme would you rather trust Max Keiser/Julian Assange as a witness or some random guy with 1 million BTS who got voted in through voter apathy? Reputation matters imo.
There is certainly an argument for having multiple communication channels that are difficult to shut down.
Edit: With regards to your concerns about voter apathy. I have them too. However we can see by looking at public companies
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/corporate-governance/publications/assets/pwc-proxypulse-april-2014.pdf
That they end up being owned by a fairly even mix of institutional and retail investors. Institutional investors vote with a majority of their shares, up to 90%, and retail investors only about 30%. This seems to still result in high voting numbers while giving smaller investors the ability to be less involved and yet have the blockchain still run smoothly.
I think with voting improvements, simplification & possibly a few incentives, hopefully we can achieve similar voting numbers long term as centralised companies which should be sufficient.
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There is certainly an argument for having multiple communication channels that are difficult to shut down.
I think having an internal blog or forum similar to qora would be a great idea.
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There is certainly an argument for having multiple communication channels that are difficult to shut down.
I think having an internal blog or forum similar to qora would be a great idea.
+5%
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There is certainly an argument for having multiple communication channels that are difficult to shut down.
I think having an internal blog or forum similar to qora would be a great idea.
+5%
+5%
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The algorithm should place more weight on the length of time that the funds are locked up for.
For example:
Poloniex signs up to be a witness and locks up 10,000,000 BTS in a smart wallet that is inaccessible for 1 month (before transferring automatically to a wallet accessible to them).
I sign up to be a witness and l lock up 10,000 BTS for 30 years (similar smart wallet).
The default, apathetic, non-vote goes to me and not them.
Dig?
The risk is not only money but time. Someone who locks up 10,000,000 BTS does not deserve to get the default apathetic votes unless it's for a long time.
There should be a floor, or minimum (time and money), Like you must lock up at least 100,000BTS for 2 years in order to even be eligible to get the apathetic non votes. Because if you do go through with this, then these "money witnesses" will get substantial votes. I hope you realize this. In fact, we might want to put a limit on the total number of witnesses that these money votes are automatically applied to (certainly not 100%), such as 25% or 50%. That way the money votes have influence, and power, but can't take over the system entirely.
This logic is very similar to the "burn your BTS for more voting power" discussion.
This takes care of worrying about the hostile takeover from the exchanges that we were freaking out about plus it generates profits/liquidity
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The algorithm should place more weight on the length of time that the funds are locked up for.
For example:
Poloniex signs up to be a witness and locks up 10,000,000 BTS in a smart wallet that is inaccessible for 1 month (before transferring automatically to a wallet accessible to them).
I sign up to be a witness and l lock up 10,000 BTS for 30 years (similar smart wallet).
The default, apathetic, non-vote goes to me and not them.
Dig?
The risk is not only money but time. Someone who locks up 10,000,000 BTS does not deserve to get the default apathetic votes unless it's for a long time.
There should be a floor, or minimum (time and money), Like you must lock up at least 100,000BTS for 2 years in order to even be eligible to get the apathetic non votes. Because if you do go through with this, then these "money witnesses" will get substantial votes. I hope you realize this. In fact, we might want to put a limit on the total number of witnesses that these money votes are automatically applied to (certainly not 100%), such as 25% or 50%. That way the money votes have influence, and power, but can't take over the system entirely.
This logic is very similar to the "burn your BTS for more voting power" discussion.
This takes care of worrying about the hostile takeover from the exchanges that we were freaking out about plus it generates profits/liquidity
The argument from Stan has mainly been that 'Silence means consent' and if BTS shareholders were unhappy with a power group like CNX/other, that they could easily oppose it with 5-10% of BTS. So from that POV, I wouldn't worry, surely BTS would vote out the exchange if they weren't happy, right?
My personal view is that you see shareholder sentiment to big controversial decisions reflected more in the share price. While there are a lot of things that can influence the price short term, the current signs are positive. Since Yunbi announced they would be voting on January 8th, the BTS share price has risen modestly vs. BTC and USD.
In terms of your suggestion, I think that's a good move for CNX if they wanted to centralize control of BTS around themselves again.
BTS is already perceived as being centralized around BM+CNX. They are the strongest group of committed & active shareholders & would probably be the ones willing to lockup their stake longest for increased voting rights.
This would further centralize the DAC in the eyes of the market & significantly reduce BTS value.
As BTS is still so centralized around CNX you may argue that currently only they can have maximum 1 yr+ confidence in BTS based on whether they plan to focus on supporting BTS at a reasonable price. For example they could say to themselves 'if BTS is below $10 million this time next year we'll move on to something else completely' and then proceed to collect their rewards for lock up and sell onto the market while many other shareholders would be stuck. So regular shareholders are taking a much greater risk locking up shares for an extended period than BM & CNX at this stage imo.
A more expensive system would be some kind of masternode system/other rewards that would make shareholders want to keep their stake in their DEX wallet earning interest vs. letting a centralized exchange earn it.