Decentralization of Power

[jakub]

I think we need to strike the right balance between these two:
(1) our ability to prevent an attack
(2) our ability to recover once the attack happens

It's like going for a winter sailing trip. You can choose to wear very warm clothes and feel safe from the cold.
But once the boat capsizes and you are in the water those very clothes will immediately turn against you and hamper your rescue efforts.

[monsterer]

https://github.com/d11e9/poi

How is that anonymous? I'd say your face was a personally identifying feature.

[r0ach]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3kscue/antisybil_protocol_under_development/

That will never work.  It's voter apathy^3

[luckybit]

Imagine a Chatroulette style app, where everyone in Bitshares can sign up and get paid some initial incentive to take part in the visual signing parties?

Random chats would be created with randomly shuffled newcomers. Human beings would then visually confirm that each person is real and not a video or loop. They would then take their phone, take a picture of the person, it goes into facial recognition, becomes some encrypted hash, and that is it.

If anyone is wrong then they get immediately fired, just like with witnesses. So people would be encouraged to always want to be 100% accurate. If it scales up to enough people then it will be anonymous yet it would still allow people to verify each other not that much unlike the PGP key signing parties.

That would provide sufficient security and anonymity because no one would know the names of the faces they see. Bytemaster and team themselves could initiate it. The real problem would be the fact that even if you know a unique person controls a certain key of a certain witness you don't know if the person controlling that key is an independent or coerced person.

If they are a coerced person they might hold onto the key on behalf of a group of individuals which would put the group in control of the witness. I don't see that there is any way to prevent that though.

[luckybit]

You can have proof of unique person while also keeping the identities anonymous.

All we need is proof that someone unique is behind the digital signature. We don't need to know exactly who that someone is.

No, you can't. This is an unsolved problem.

https://github.com/d11e9/poi

Yes you can, and it's solved in theory. Once you're confirmed to be a unique person you're always confirmed and it doesn't matter who or what confirms you as long as whatever does confirm you has a 100% accuracy rate. A complete stranger can confirm you without knowing your name if they have a smart phone with some facial recognition software.

I don't have to know who anyone is if I know their digital signature is verified. Twitter verifies accounts of celebrities for example. In the case of Bitshares Identabit or something more decentralized can be used but as long as someone or something has confirmed you in the past then that is enough.

Over time I would expect some protocol such as POI to become mainstream. When that happens eventually people will simply be able to take a hash or digital signature into any app they choose, remain pseudo-anonymous, but have the digital signature confirm them as unique.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3kscue/antisybil_protocol_under_development/

[btswildpig]

Just a survey .

How much money would you guys expect to get at least as labor for running the witness node with responsive maintenance ?

[Ben Mason]

I agree with CLains.  Perception based on flawed logic is not what we should be basing technical decisions on.

BM's arguments are well reasoned so perhaps we should give them more weight than the idea that people will not understand that Bitshares is/will be as decentralized as it needs to be.  Let's work on how we get the message across, rather than waste resources because people might not understand.

Paying for development via dilution, testing that mechanism, was the right thing to do at the time, irrespective of BTS price movements (the causes of which cannot be stated with any certainty.)  Regardless, now we have Graphene and are in a stronger position than ever.....

[CLains]

Some practical observations: In practice we're in a specific circumstance, with specific people like xeroc, liondani, etc. actually planning to run a witnesses. If we can't dig up 60 decent witnesses then we're out of luck, no matter the arguments. In practice we have some total amount that we're spending that can vary by several hundred percent from one month to the next. If our market-cap goes down to 5 mill we can only afford one third of what we're paying for now. In practice the narrative is important. If we start low and go higher and higher, people will expect and be interested in this positive development. In practice perception is important. If people don't get that having less than 30 witnesses can be decentralized, we're out of luck, no matter the arguments.

[jakub]

For me the main message in OP boils down to this:
- it's not true that the more witnesses we have the more secure we are
- we can't really prevent an attack, what we can do instead is retain the utmost ability to be adaptive and responsive when it happens

Therefore we must find a sweet spot between:
- users' ability to keep witnesses accountable
- our adaptability, i.e. how quickly decisions can be made
- our ability to coordinate when communication is disrupted
- costs of witnesses' pay
- risk of witnesses' collusion
- risk of one person pretending to be multiple people
- and last but not least: the perception of outside world
All these need to be considered when the optimal number of witnesses is proposed.

[monsterer]

You can have proof of unique person while also keeping the identities anonymous.

All we need is proof that someone unique is behind the digital signature. We don't need to know exactly who that someone is.

No, you can't. This is an unsolved problem.

[r0ach]

I'm going to make this conversation very simple.  I can't think of one off-hand, but there's many websites you can visit where it shows a world map of where all connections are coming from.  Given the fact that you're already going to have a large number of dots on the map occur from the US and Europe, you need a high enough count of dots to where the odds of the smaller places being hit increases.  Something like this will never happen with 17 total units for example.  I don't know what the magic number is where you start to see any noticeable distribution outside of the US and Europe, but it's probably 100 units or more.  It would probably take you 50 total before you even saw Australia being hit.

Even though you're voting in people, this still has to be used somewhat as a guide.  17 is too low for both perception and redundancy.  33 is too low because collusion is still too easy.  51 with the option to vote to expand once bigger is the lowest I can really see.  As BTS expands, you would end up with exchanges and other businesses operating as delegates and voting people in/out isn't something that needs to be constantly done.  Delegate pay isn't so much important as it is for how much they have to lose if the thing goes south.

[luckybit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net

[btswildpig]

Perception is everything.  Bitshares will be seen as centralized with only 17 witnesses, no matter how you cook up the narrative.  Same how Bitshares had less dilution than Bitcoin, but the fear of it drove down the price more than the dilution rate itself.

I have some new thoughts on this .
Bitcoin's dilution is fixed schedule .  It has no value in the beginning . If the market does not value Bitcoin , it wouldn't form a highly liquid market to accept the dilution in terms of fiat .  So it translated into "Bitcoin's dilution cost is a result of market acceptance" .  Simply put , the market choose to accept Bitcoin's dilution knowing all the terms after five years .

While BitShares stood on Bitcoin's bubble without going through 5 years of hardship , struggle , acceptance , it come out with a high marketcap only because Bitcoin has pumped up PTS and all the crypto price in 2013 and 2014 . It's not a result of natural market selection but heat of the moment thing . So as a result , the market gave BitShares too much value than it can bear at its very early stage .

While BTS couldn't even justify this high market cap even with fixed supply schedule , it started to dilute to the market only accelerates the bubble to pop. It's not a matter of what percentage is , but the market already disagree with the actual value the system can offer in terms of fiat , so the fiat marketcap can no longer grow easily .

People all think BitShares has too much value , so it should not be under Dogecoin , NXT , etc . But Dogecoin and NXT's market cap are the result of speculative drive , if we were to argue that we can produce actual value , we shouldn't even compare ourselves to a bubble to beginning with . And here we are , trying to consume the speculative bubble to grow the actual value of the system  in hope of market cap rising exactly beyond the existing speculative bubble as a baseline but not below simply because our IPO price and purchase price is determined during the speculative bubble . So the way of thinking becomes "now the price is x , if I dilute a tiny percentage to grow the system , the price should be x+1 , it makes perfect sense , right ?  " . Except it does not work that way . Just like during the PE , you can easily get say 0.1 million USD loans from a bank with even half-ass credit .  After the PE ended , you've found a new job with higher income and only ask for 0.01 million more loans , you think that " make sense , my value has increased , so the bank should loan me more , it's not that much , it already gave me 0.1 million to beginning with , I'm simply asking for 10% more . "  Except that the bank is considering even take back the 0.1 million that already gave you , let along giving you more .

The market cap is only a vague number . Liquidity is what the market actually allows you to take .
Diluting on the marketcap and daily volume was not the same thing as diluting on the buy orders . And buy orders don't come in easily even with you value increased because it takes risks to buy a speculative object ,  buy order won't coming because you wallet added a nice feature  . Buy order would only come in if they think they will benefit from it .

Dilution percentage on the market cap and daily volume (large portion generated by trading bots instead of real need ) is like the bank telling you "I'm giving you a line of credit" , but when you come to cash in , the bank would tell you "oops , I can only give 20% of it because I didn't know you're actually gonna withdraw it from our precious cash flow "

And if we're aiming to go beyond speculative needs , we have to prepare ourselves for a low market cap to beginning with , that's how a thing without a bubble works , it grows slow and steady and will not worth million of dollars only after a year .

I hope this can shed some light on "why the hell did the market cap shrink with only that little dilution" . I haven't been able to put it into understandable words until now because I just rejected from adding another line of credit with my value increased significantly .

[wuyanren]

Too few witnesses, the public will doubt the authenticity of the witness. If there is only one witness, then the man said, they are skeptical.

[wuyanren]

Why is 17, not 51?