Peter Todd responded once on my comment on the LTB-podcast, but I've not gotten a single reaction from him since. He did have something to say about PoS and that he thought that could never work. I've tried asking him to elaborate on why his concept is less centralized than standard merge mining or side-chains in general. I even tried challenging other commenters to try and eek out some more insights, but most of them seem to just echo what they heard in the interview and take those remarks at face value, without being able to explain the details as to why those statements would be valid.

My brain is not firing on all cylinders yet due to a tenacious flue so I've not been able to work through the mailing-list article yet.

But the rest posts and debate in this mail list thread is , eh.., embarrassed?

Indeed. I was trying to get more insight from people reacting to his proposal, but instead the discussion seemed to focus around Peter Todds personality and how he was scaring away would be developers and new ideas.

Ubuntu 64bit, but not upgraded to the recent 14 version.

I'm logging in remotely via ssh, could that be an issue? It sees AMD it does not recognize the card and says there is no gpu with identifier "0" (nor any other identifier for that matter.

Seems I'm also not to good with time-zone conversions and just discovered that the tuesday-session starts well after midnight in my neck of the woods. While I might be awake around that time, I won't be able to speak because I'm not the sole resident and waking them at those hours tends to make them rather grumpy afterwards.

If security, ddos and uptime are concerns then we also need info on how the network detects and connects to delegates or if the model is reversed how delegates connect to the network.  That way we might also be able to setup failover systems, traffic shaping and firewalls. Unfortunately I can't deduce this from the source-code because I can't code and I probably won't understand the code if I read it. (Yes I'm mentally disabled, but there's not much I can do about that.)

PS
Seems the need for bitYuan is becoming dire these last few days, so lets hope we can get the show on the road quickly enough.

Noted.  The reason I bumped this was because it belies an ASIC-centric viewpoint that comes from being sucked too far into the POW sphere of influence.  The only people who really would like merged mining are those whose businesses center around the use and production of ASIC devices.  Very apt dovetail into the original link provided in this thread. 

You know guys...this would be a WONDERFUL topic for the next sitdown with BM.  And it is obvious you each would bring some interesting conversation topics to the table.  Remember it is this coming Tuesday, 29 APR 14 @ 7PM EST:  https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=4387.0

P.S.  Someone may be there who is planning to write an article on bitShares, so your opinions might prove valuable for him to better explain the complexities of the problems and the intricacies of potential solutions the entire industry needs to be looking at.  Soo dont miss it?

Ah, sorry I wasn't actually talking about bitsharestalk, but the discussion on the channels that should be more neutral. I meant it as an observation instead of a reprimand. I was also making a guess from the title of that podcast "Lets talk bitcoin" that it aimed to be somewhat neutral, but I'm not that familiar with the show (only listened to a few excerpts of a couple of shows this year), this was the first one with Antonopoulos (sorry if I've misspelled it) and I was expecting some more input from him, based on a couple of his presentations I've seen on youtube, but it sounded like he was unfamiliar with the whole side-chain proposal. Bitsharestalk is an area where I think you can expect a certain focus in point of view and I suspect quite a large percentage are not in favour of mining, asics and centralization if they can be circumvented. That does bring the risk of introducing an us versus them way of thinking and limiting our avenues of thought and discovery of new options more than necessary.

I'll try to connect on tuesday, but can't make any promises as of yet, but it does sound very interesting. Is it okay to just listen on the channel and maybe sending an occasional channel-message? I'm not sure my voice will have returned by then, so I'd rather type than disturb everyone with my growling.

EDIT
Correction to my earlier post about the interview, I think I'm having some problems with soundcloud on my system, which made the stream cut out right at the intermission, making me believe I'd reached the end of the interview. Only when I tried posting a comment there just now I discovered there was a second part that does tie into the sidechain and merge-mining concepts discussed in the first part.

The second part of the interview is a lot more interesting even though it is very pie in the sky and in my opinion not actually solving the risk of mining centralization he pointed to in the first part. In short he wants to make blocks more modular and essentially merge-mine more tree-like structured blocks, where miners can merge mine on sub-block-branches as well as the main block, but he needs the solutions proposed by side-chains before he can work out his plan in more detail. While I understand how this could make the bitcoin-blocks more versatile I don't see how this addresses mining centralization in the way he described it in the first part. From what I could gather his proposal does nothing to decrease the hashing advantage of the big boys, or is there something I've missed in that discussion.

Also tree-chains do not sound all that space and bandwidth efficient, so I'm having some trouble working out how his proposal is better or more preferable than purpose-built sidechains.

Sorry for dropping off half-way in the discussion, I caught the flu complete with fever and all, so I thought it wise to not post in a delirium.

Forgive me if I sound addled or if I'm rambling, but my mind is still plenty foggy.

Again about the evil bit, that still is just a matter of point of view. People might complain about asics and centralization, but fact of the matter is most alt-coins don't do a better job of it. Just look at Litecoin and it's asic-proof mentality, people are already complaining about the litecoin-devs not wanting to take action to prevent asics from messing up the market.

About the counterparty dispute, I've read the forum thread on bitcointalk and this discussion, (which btw was blown out of all proportions by the crypto tabloid as usual) was not about all bitcoin-devs being "anti-2.0" or even uncooperative, at least not at the start of the discussion. The way I saw it, counterparty was being a diva and pissed off that not everyone in bitcoin-land was devoted to their every whim. Counterparty was exploiting a feature that was not meant for that purpose and were causing blockchain-bloat that cannot be filtered, which means they were burdening everyone using bitcoin with their stuff and their argument that the miner got his fee does not make that right. Also they were expecting people to guess what they were doing and what they needed, without participating in any discussion on the proper and open channels for this, nothing on the bitcoin mailinglists, no BIP nothing. The bitcoin-devs posted some ideas about more elegant (and filterable for people not interested in counterparty) solutions and temporary workarounds in the meantime, but counterparty seemed to want nothing of it and the discussion quickly deteriorated, with Luke-Jr and Counterparty both throwing oil on the fire.

Back on topic of centralization of POW and ASIC-miners and evil centralization. I don't exactly see how sidechains would stop innovation. As I mentioned before, I'm not actually seeing the benefits of the vast majority of alt-coins even the big ones like Litecoin, especially with the advent of scrypt-asics. I'm also not seeing devs being religiously pro POW per se, but they just don't believe there is a better way to issue coins and even peercoin (and PTS for that matter) seems to share that believe. There is a thread on bitcointalk where someone with a long name with "slippery" in it, is trying to come up with a way to upgrade bitcoin to POS, while at the same time keep a fair and reliable coin-issuance mechanic. Bitcoin-devs were telling him to go right ahead, but warned him that he would fail like all others who tried before him.

The AGS-auction, while ingenious is not actually an integrated decentralized solution, so up till now nobody seems to have worked out a better method for coin-generation than POW (resulting in centralization, miningpools and asics) before getting to the stage of POS. The other method is premine like NXT and they are not actually doing that great of a job redistributing the wealth and "forging" power (I keep seeing the same few block forgers appearing on their blockexplorers).

Also keep in mind, should a few bitshares DACs take off, how would people late to the party view our stake in the market? I'm pretty sure we'll get plenty of complaints about premine, unfair advantage, centralization and people clamoring the righteous need for these projects to get forked. I also noticed some hefty opposition when discussing ways to come up with more "fair" distributions like airdrops and such. I like the lottery idea in bitcoin rewarding people for lending services to improve or run the network and use that as an incentive to bootstrap the system. Biggest problem seems to be to get initial stakeholders to agree on it, Bytemaster seems to not be in favor of any share-diluting features like new token/share-generation.

Hmm, that gave me an idea about something which probably should be front and center on the bitshares webpages and faqs. A list of facts and myths plus rebuttals for people unfamiliar with (D)POS and what it implies. Like how lottery style token-generation won't work in (D)POS, not even if done in separate stages. For example a 20% founder premine and timed issuance of the remaining 80% through lottery amongst blocksolvers/ full node runners, would still unfairly advantage the initial stakeholders in the lottery.

I'll have to break off again here, I passed out a few times while writing this post so I'm starting to suspect that I probably should hit the sack and try to sleep off this flu.

That was a good presentation, shame the slides were out of frame.

In case this video is referenced by bitshares I think it would be nice to post an accompanying link to the slides, or post an edited version with the slides added.

Quote from: JoeyD on April 22, 2014, 05:20:32 pm

...

How can you free yourself from the technical limitations of Bitcoin if you're a sidechain? Please explain this.

Also how do developers make money from the process? How does crowd funding take place?

A sidechain is a completely different blockchain. For example say enough people want to have faster confirmation times than the 10 minutes from bitcoin, then a 2.5 minute litecoin like sidechain can be created and there can even be a different token amount based on a preprogrammed exchange rate. For example every bitcoin locked into the lite-side-chain-contract would issue 4 lite-btc on the 2,5 minute block confirmation sidechain.

There are many, many ways to fund development even outside of internal revenue of the sidechain. Pumping and dumping or premine are not the only "solutions". Developers will have to work out for themselves how they intend to fund themselves or if they even want monetary compensation for working on interesting ideas (just making bitcoin more useable and valuable could be enough compensation for some). They could code it in directly via a percentage cut of transfer-fees or at the moment of issuance of the new chain btc-pegged-tokens. There are other ways they could raise funds outside of the chain itself, by collecting bounties from interested parties or by working for companies that need something that can be done more easily on a sidechain than on the bitcoin main-chain, say for example companies wanting to do smart contracts and hiring devs to develop and maintain a turing-complete contract sidechain. (That last possibilty seems to have affected Ethereums project lead V. Buterin most of all, judging by the amount of posts on the bitcoin subbreddit about this 2-way-pegging and apparently him feeling the need to defend the worth of his project.)

Quote from: bytemaster on April 22, 2014, 06:20:45 pm

...

Is this side chain idea good or evil? I still cannot figure out whether or not it will work or why developers would want anything to do with it.

Good or evil? According to whom? From the point of view of some bitcoin devs and Dr. Adam Back alt-coins are seen as diluting, distracting and shameless copy-cats with evil intentions by not wanting to contribute to bitcoin and even a threat to the very survival of the idea of cryptocurrencies. One major fear seems to be that if bitcoin were to be replaced by an alt-coin that would be a terminal blow to the credibility of the whole concept and make any crypto-coin replaceable and therefore unreliable in the eyes of the general public. Admittedly I myself was bothered by everyone using the bitcoin2.0 term and think that it was not very clever to try and make bitcoin sound inferior without realizing that this just sets you up to be bitten in the ass when the next alt-coins come along happily naming themselves bitcoin3.0 or bitcoin.ad-nauseam. I did not expect however that this project announcement would make all bitcoin2.0 alt-coins sound petty and inferior to bitcoin overnight. Personally I think that bitshares should try to distance themselves from the 2.0-gimmick as much as possible, especially since I don't think we can confidently say we've even reached anything close to the 1.0 version of bitcoin yet.

At the moment I'm not convinced that Dr. A. Back is an evil person. His motivation seems to be to enable free experimentation and development, but in conjunction with bitcoin instead of in competition with it, and he also sees it as a way to get rid of scam-like pump and dump schemes, because these sidechains are pegged to bitcoin and completely voluntary. But even if the developers are not evil, that does not mean that they have spent enough time working out all possible bad effects this could have, because that tends to be a blind spot for people focusing on new technology and possibilities.

As to why developers would want to contribute, that's almost as impossible to answer as the good vs evil one. You could just as well ask why wouldn't developers want to play with this. The ability to try out new things which are difficult in the current design of bitcoin, but without the need to set up a completely new alt-coin community plus things like exchanges and such, is plenty motivational by itself.

I've suggested this before, but I think you'll get better answers if you listen to the interviews with Dr. Adam Back that are published online and read the discussions on reddit, bitcointalk and maybe even the discussion about two-way-pegging on the bitcoin-mailinglist. I don't think it's wise to base your point of view on the judgement of others and especially not on someone as deficient as I am.

Personally I think this is a very ingenious concept and could make bitcoin better/more useable than it is now. I'm also not that convinced about the good intentions of people behind a lot of alt-coins, so I'm not that disturbed by their possible extinction. This unfortunately also includes projects like Ethereum where imho some very, very disturbing things have been uttered by smooth talking individuals, but that could just mean I'm evil for not separating my pov of the project because of those statements, that very possibly might be in direct opposition to the intentions of a larger less vocal and hopefully far more influential part of the team. So again I urge you to seek out the information yourself until your confident about your ability to make a judgement. That way you'll be better equiped than I can be, my abilities in this regard are limited to put it mildly.