[VoterApathy] How To Make 51% Attacks A Lot Harder (without more people voting)

[Empirical1.2]

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in a centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

BitShares is as decentralized as its shareholders want it to be.
If they wanted more decentralization they could easily achieve it with a couple of mouse clicks.

That's the difference between DPOS and any other system: the shareholders of other systems have to live with whatever level of decentralization happens to exist in their system.
Whereas in our case it's the shareholders' choice.

Personally I don't agree with the current choice (I wish there was more voting and thus more decentralization) but I respect this choice as shareholders' will.

I'm not sure, as BM acknowledges...

People LOVE the idea of having 10000 potential block producers with no barrier to entry. 

So, I don't think it's a case that people are happy with the current level of centralization but that they don't feel they can't individually help change it or they would rather sell and invest in other options they perceive as not being as centralized.

[Stan]

Buy and hold more BTS.

Vote with it.

Tell your friends to do the same.

Problem solved.

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

Far less centralized and far less dilution that Bitcoin.

2 years and you still fail to grasp the elementary difference between 'immutable' and 'shareholder directed' in terms of trust required

Edit, Also perception is important. I think the general perception is that BTC is more decentralized than it is, among other things because there is a belief that hashers will quickly switch pools if they need too.

As we learned back in the ProtoShares days, hashers will continue to support a slightly more profitable pool even if it blatantly refuses to include any transactions.

The max dilution rate of both BTC and BTS is immutable, but BTS max is much smaller and shareholders can dial it to zero.  The max rate of Bitcoin is also the min rate and it all gets wasted, while whatever the much smaller BTS rate becomes gets spent on what the shareholders think is most useful.

There is no comparison.

I agree that this is not widely understood, but that is not a knock on DPOS, just on our ability to overcome false narratives that occur when even our long term members get careless about what they say.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in a centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

BitShares is as decentralized as its shareholders want it to be.
If they wanted more decentralization they could easily achieve it with a couple of mouse clicks.

That's the difference between DPOS and any other system: the shareholders of other systems have to live with whatever level of decentralization happens to exist in their system.
Whereas in our case it's the shareholders' choice.

Personally I don't agree with the current choice (I wish there was more voting and thus more decentralization) but I respect this choice as shareholders' will.

Well stated! 

[jakub]

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in a centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

BitShares is as decentralized as its shareholders want it to be.
If they wanted more decentralization they could easily achieve it with a couple of mouse clicks.

That's the difference between DPOS and any other system: the shareholders of other systems have to live with whatever level of decentralization happens to exist in their system.
Whereas in our case it's the shareholders' choice.

Personally I don't agree with the current choice (I wish there was more voting and thus more decentralization) but I respect this choice as shareholders' will.

[Empirical1.2]

Buy and hold more BTS.

Vote with it.

Tell your friends to do the same.

Problem solved.

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

Far less centralized and far less dilution that Bitcoin.

2 years and you still fail to grasp the elementary difference between 'immutable' and 'shareholder directed' in terms of trust required

Edit, Also perception is important. I think the general perception is that BTC is more decentralized than it is, among other things because there is a belief that hashers will quickly switch pools if they need too.

[Stan]

Buy and hold more BTS.

Vote with it.

Tell your friends to do the same.

Problem solved.

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

Far less centralized and far less dilution that Bitcoin.

[Empirical1.2]

Buy and hold more BTS.

Vote with it.

Tell your friends to do the same.

Problem solved.

Good luck convincing many friends to buy shares in a centralized blockchain with shareholder directed dilution 

Whether BTS is overly centralized is debatable, but if that was the perception, your solution wouldn't work as few would invest.
Besides consensus mechanisms and share distribution, this is also why initial distribution is also a contentious topic and has to a degree hamstrung NXT and while less severe, also continues to cause DASH PR issues too.

[BunkerChainLabs-DataSecurityNode]

Buy and hold more BTS.

Vote with it.

Tell your friends to do the same.

Problem solved.

[monsterer]

DPOS was a nice experiment, but the requirement for active voting was a big oversight. Much simpler to just plain remove it all and go with a much simpler system, which simply ranks by stake.

and suddenly you loose all the nice advantages of dpos, namely, the fact that only those that WANT to produce blocks may produce blocks.
With your approach we are back at square NXT and can't achieve 3secs blocks .. period

I don't think you've understood what I wrote at all. Namely:

1. Only those who chose to stake would be ranked
2. Keep the deterministic block production order

Basically, all you lose is the bad part, which is the elected delegates. Keep stake voting for proposals, of course.

[jakub]

DPOS was designed without the realisation of  what voter apathy would actually mean for the security of the chain. Instead of being the most decentralised currency, it is currently the least decentralised with one account controlling 100% of the chain.

Could you name this account "controlling 100% of the chain"?

[xeroc]

DPOS was a nice experiment, but the requirement for active voting was a big oversight. Much simpler to just plain remove it all and go with a much simpler system, which simply ranks by stake.

and suddenly you loose all the nice advantages of dpos, namely, the fact that only those that WANT to produce blocks may produce blocks.
With your approach we are back at square NXT and can't achieve 3secs blocks .. period

[monsterer]

51% is a gross overestimate. Try a 13% attack; that's what bitshares is currently vulnerable to.

DPOS was designed without the realisation of  what voter apathy would actually mean for the security of the chain. Instead of being the most decentralised currency, it is currently the least decentralised with one account controlling 100% of the chain.

As unpopular as the penalty fee was, perhaps only the removal of dilution & re-introduction of the 5% inactivity penalty fee for not voting at with BTS balances will improve it. (Ideally with FBA's the majority of that fee can be used for voter rewards.)

DPOS was a nice experiment, but the requirement for active voting was a big oversight. Much simpler to just plain remove it all and go with a much simpler system, which simply ranks by stake.

[Empirical1.2]

51% is a gross overestimate. Try a 13% attack; that's what bitshares is currently vulnerable to.

DPOS was designed without the realisation of  what voter apathy would actually mean for the security of the chain. Instead of being the most decentralised currency, it is currently the least decentralised with one account controlling 100% of the chain.

As unpopular as the penalty fee was, perhaps only the removal of dilution & re-introduction of the 5% inactivity penalty fee for not voting with BTS balances will improve it. (Ideally with FBA's the majority of that fee can be used for voter rewards. So you have both a penalty if you don't vote and a reward if you do.) 

Depending how it's applied, it could also get stake of the centralised exchanges.

[monsterer]

I would just have the system pick the top N forging accounts (by stake) and use those automatically as the delegates.

Any guarantee that top stake holders or collateral holders run witness nodes?
The problem is some of those accounts aren't currently voting.

Notice I used the qualifier 'forging' in the description

[Empirical1.2]

My ideas for improving the voting were the following, apparently the second has been debated by BM and Agent86 and it was concluded it would make BTS less secure but here they are...

1. Let a large group of standby witnesses produces a small % of blocks. (To make collusion harder )

In a system with 31 active witnesses and 70 standby witnesses. Let Standby witnesses randomly produce 25% of the blocks.

As a result I think this would mean that instead of needing 16/31 active witnesses to collude that you would need 21/31 active witnesses to collude. 

This has the added benefit of giving standby witnesses a monthly pay of $40 & motivation to stay active and compete.

This has the added benefit of letting us still market a 101 witness system but where the most trusted are producing the vast majority of blocks.

2. Let stake only be allowed to vote for 45% of active witnesses (To make it more expensive to attack BTS)

The  system always votes for the wintess(es) (among all the wittnesses that you trust) with the lowest total vote count & let stake only be allowed to vote for 45% of active witnesses.

The net result should be the very top witnesses having less votes but the bottom witnesses have about the same as in the current system.

However it should now become up to 2X as expensive to attack BTS.

As an attacker with 12-15% stake could only vote in 45% of block producers and then they would need another 12-15% of BTS stake to get them over the 51% mark.