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There has recurring debate about the meaning of the word "decentralized". Apparently one opinion is that the connotations of the word in this industry have moved it away from its dictionary denotations and that further evolution of its meaning in response to ongoing technological innovations should be resisted.Our point has been that there are multiple valid ways to move control away from the center and that having all stakeholders select from a high-quality set of candidate block signers based on their established reputations has some design advantages over randomly selecting signers from a much larger group of candidates with unknown reputations. (At least for some systems with certain additional design objectives and target applications.) Signing authority is uniformly distributed among the 101 most respected members of the community without regard to the size of their stakes. This can change every 10 seconds and everybody has a chance to participate based on merit, not chance. Signers have strictly limited power. They can either faithfully do their job or be detected and immediately fired.The key is recognizing that there are multiple design degrees of freedom we can play with. We need enough scalable signing nodes to be fault tolerant and a decentralized way to select them. Both NXT and BitShares accomplish this objective in different, valid ways. Whether each stakeholder does the routine and transparent signing work on their own computer or on a computer from someone with a vetted reputation they are still selecting which computer they want to have do it. I know I'd certainly rather pick somebody I trust to do the signing than take responsibility for that technical specialty myself!All "trustless" systems allocate residual trust somewhere, usually by default. We have made it explicit. Making it explicit in turn gives us a unique by-product asset - trustworthy nodes selected by all stakeholders. Our designs then leverage these assets to assign them other functions that benefit from established trustworthy reputations, where any breach of trust can be detected and instantly removed by all stakeholders as well.
101 is indeed an arbitrary number. We could have chosen 51 or 151. 101 was chosen simply by an argument about diminishing returns. Going from 1 to 2 signers doubles the redundancy. Going from 100 to 101 increases the redundancy by less than 1%. The important thing to recognize is that the axis being analyzed here was how much redundancy, not how much decentralization. We felt that dispersing the processing uniformly among 101 nodes would mean the loss of any one node would impact the system performance by less than 1% until it could heal by dynamic reconfiguration to insert a "hot spare" standby node. Adding more nodes increases costs linearly, while improving performance robustness negligibly.Decentralization of control in BitShares is a completely different design axis. Every shareholder gets to choose which 101 of the available nodes they want to perform this fault tolerant processing function. They are free to vote for their own processor or any other processors they feel will suit their interests. If they do pick their own, and enough of their peers agree, their node will be used.So, in BitShares, all nodes participate in building a consensus about what is the most trustworthy cost-effective fault tolerant configuration of available processors to run the system. All stakeholders participate in this consensus according to the amount of stake they have at stake, so to speak.So, all people have a chance to sign blocks. Instead of having their chances determined by the size of their stake, it is determined by the size of their reputation.
101 is just a point of comparison with BitShares. As I have discussed on my blog:1) We assume that free market competition drives margins toward 02) We assume that to avoid subsidizing by stakeholders, transaction fees equal cost of block production 3) We assume that the market will drive transaction fees as low as possible via competition among chains4) We assume that for a given number of transactions, the fewer block producers that must share the fees, the lower the fees may be.5) We assume that no sustainable system should depend upon actors operating at a loss. 6) We assume marginal utility decreases for each additional block producer 7) We conclude there exists a number where fees / # producers == marginal utility of an additional producer. Cool We conclude that the lowest fees will be a system with one block producer 9) We conclude that no system will profitably operate significantly outside the same # producers10) When measured on a log2 scale we submit that all systems will converge on statistically the same amount of decentralization *OR* fail their users. 11) When all systems converge on the same number of nodes, we submit that delegated voting creates a more TRUSTED and FLEXIBLE set. 12) We project that 101 nodes is greater than the # the market will naturally converge upon as being a sufficient between robustness and cost. If you really want to increase the effective decentralization then you must double the fees for each additional level of decentralization when measured on log2 scale. Given two chains with equal features, it would require a hell of a network effect to sustain 2x fees.
Quote from: barwizi on January 13, 2015, 10:32:45 ami just want to give you a for how you are consistently earning your keep by standing up and responding on Bitcointalk.Thanks. That's something we had been ignoring, figuring those who were interested knew where to find us. That left the field open for sewing all kinds of misinformation. At least now we are trying to put the other side of the story along side the wild claims.One good thing, we've had about 6000 views across several threads since we started engaging more.BM's blog also helps. Gives us something concrete to link to.
i just want to give you a for how you are consistently earning your keep by standing up and responding on Bitcointalk.
for how you are consistently earning your keep by standing up and responding on Bitcointalk.