Best Selling Option

[liondani]

@r0ach

The tradeoff with your approach is electing block producers solely because they are putting up the largest stake vs electing block producers that are most trusted by stakeholders, especially if larger stake-holding candidates are elected by default unless the user manually changes the vote.  Some of the most trusted candidates may not have the largest stake.  I like users having no vote by default and having to manually change their vote.  This also works to reduce the effects of voter apathy because those who are most involved in the system and have the largest stake will make sure to vote.

Good points but all this could be solved quite easily in my opinion 
What about to follow r0ach approach (it rhymes!) BUT with a little tweak!

The voting process should have a double or even triple impact over the auto-collateral  process!....
Give the most power to the voters! They deserve it!

[liondani]

I don't think that "game theory candidates" is true. You have to demonstrate there is not a benefit to having the majority or a large portion of candidates under the control of 1. It is sort of a half-assed game-theoretical approach, but nothing says it is a optimal/un-exploitable solution.

A flat rate only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system improves on it much further.  The only thing needed is to lock the collateral and make it unable to be used for your sybil delegates to vote for each other.  There are numerous different ways to accomplish this lock.  This is not the most optimal way, but if you wanted to do a rush job for BTS 2.0, one of the more exotic methods would be to have some type of asset on the exchange people purchase at a 1:1 ratio, "delegate token" or whatever you want to call it, then the voting list sorts people by how many delegate tokens they have in their account and puts them at the top.

Like I said, not the best way to do it, but just thinking of a way it could be rushed for BTS 2.0 on time.

exactly that is what I think about yesterday! Brilliant and easy to implement!

PS make it sense not to let the purchase ratio of the witness-asset 1:1 but let the market decide how valuable it is to get a witness?Let the market decide how much security they want

[jsidhu]

I don't think that "game theory candidates" is true. You have to demonstrate there is not a benefit to having the majority or a large portion of candidates under the control of 1. It is sort of a half-assed game-theoretical approach, but nothing says it is a optimal/un-exploitable solution.

A flat rate only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system improves on it much further.  The only thing needed is to lock the collateral and make it unable to be used for your sybil delegates to vote for each other.  There are numerous different ways to accomplish this lock.  This is not the most optimal way, but if you wanted to do a rush job for BTS 2.0, one of the more exotic methods would be to have some type of asset on the exchange people purchase at a 1:1 ratio, "delegate token" or whatever you want to call it, then the voting list sorts people by how many delegate tokens they have in their account and puts them at the top.

Like I said, not the best way to do it, but just thinking of a way it could be rushed for BTS 2.0 on time.

I would think that the amount of capital to vote someone in is significantly more than the collateral people will be willing to put up to be a witness. So locking up the collateral to not vote is probably not  that important.

The real question is whether the price to purchase a delegate is more than the harm than can be done. To me, that would be more of a game theoretical way of looking at it and that is a very hard question.

i see where roach is coming from he thinks that later on people(countries) will be buying up delegates indirectly anyway so they have voting power, perhaps buying multiple.

However on the other hand the barrier of entry on being a witness just increased because of thr need to have more coins locked than anyone else competing. Does this matter?

If so then the right balance may still be to let it organically grow to a point where people end up purchasing their delegates at a higher cost because we need to achieve network affect first. This will let others become witnesses now and reduce barrier of entry until it organically grows out of that demographic of witnesses.

If barrier of entry to witness matters, then leave it as is.

[matador123]

The problem with a high number is voter apathy, so like  i said, becoming a delegate should require you to submit a collateral bid, then the client is set to automatically vote for the highest 101 collateral bids unless you choose to manually vote.

 

Is nobody paying attention here?
r0ach makes one of the best suggestions/proposals I have heard lately!
We should evaluate them seriously.


PS I agree with the PR nightmare known as 17 delegates
PS2 PR was never his "big thing" 

Not a bad idea... but it is effectively buying your way into power which is less accountable and has different risks.

is voter apathy really going to be a problem in these early days? I'm not so sure... I believe that, at this point, most people who own bitshares do so because they are actively following the project and know about 2.0. the problem with voting in 1.0 was that the software ran poorly, and voting was a pain in the ass. If voting is built into the GUI in an intuitive, easy way in 2.0, then everyone following this project is going to vote.

If that is the case, then this discussion doesn't actually matter so much, because no matter what the initial number of delegates, the community can change it as soon as the software is released.

On another note, I don't really like the idea of people being able to buy their way into delegate spots though collateral bids. how would that even work?

[tonyk]

This thread is becoming massive.
And I want to post in it .
Not that I have anything important to ad or something.


The" Best Selling Option(s)" are the underpriced one, imho.

[Ander]

R0ach;s idea of collateral + client auto voting for highest collateral witnesses unless you manually change it is very interesting.

[gamey]

I don't think that "game theory candidates" is true. You have to demonstrate there is not a benefit to having the majority or a large portion of candidates under the control of 1. It is sort of a half-assed game-theoretical approach, but nothing says it is a optimal/un-exploitable solution.

A flat rate only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system improves on it much further.  The only thing needed is to lock the collateral and make it unable to be used for your sybil delegates to vote for each other.  There are numerous different ways to accomplish this lock.  This is not the most optimal way, but if you wanted to do a rush job for BTS 2.0, one of the more exotic methods would be to have some type of asset on the exchange people purchase at a 1:1 ratio, "delegate token" or whatever you want to call it, then the voting list sorts people by how many delegate tokens they have in their account and puts them at the top.

Like I said, not the best way to do it, but just thinking of a way it could be rushed for BTS 2.0 on time.

I would think that the amount of capital to vote someone in is significantly more than the collateral people will be willing to put up to be a witness. So locking up the collateral to not vote is probably not  that important.

The real question is whether the price to purchase a delegate is more than the harm than can be done. To me, that would be more of a game theoretical way of looking at it and that is a very hard question.

[jsidhu]

What will you do about not having any witnesses from China or thailand or any country that purposely crnsors internet aswell as slows connections down to a crawl? A 1 second or heck even 10 second confirmation time wont work there will it?

I'm pretty sure we currently have nodes operating from China on the test net with 3 second blocks.

@r0ach

The tradeoff with your approach is electing block producers solely because they are putting up the largest stake vs electing block producers that are most trusted by stakeholders, especially if larger stake-holding candidates are elected by default unless the user manually changes the vote.  Some of the most trusted candidates may not have the largest stake.  I like users having no vote by default and having to manually change their vote.  This also works to reduce the effects of voter apathy because those who are most involved in the system and have the largest stake will make sure to vote.

Anyway, I don't think the cost/benefit of implementing your suggestion would be worth it at this point.  What are the chances of a failure directly resulting from not implementing your solution vs the chances of failure if your solution were to actually be implemented.  I don't think its going to make a difference at this stage.  Perhaps it is something that can be explored at higher levels of adoption once the chain becomes profitable and there is plenty of money in the coffers to explore such a solution.  At this point, the current solution is probably sufficiently decentralized for this stage in the game. 

I am also of the opinion that we should explore r0achs proposal after launch of bts 2.0.  In addition to the down sides you pointed out it also requires us to set a default number of witnesses.  I'm of the opinion that the number should be set by the network.  If we set a default of voting for the top 101, we are almost stuck with 101. 

If we can get the currently designed system to work well.  With proxy voting and witness number set by the network I think we will be in better shape than if we need to go with r0aches proposal.

Isnt firewall of china adding latency? Well going fwd they will introduce latencies anyway so will other countries, would it be port 80 traffic only then hmm? Seems odd, unless those people are unaffected I thought that it was w country wide thing.

[puppies]

What will you do about not having any witnesses from China or thailand or any country that purposely crnsors internet aswell as slows connections down to a crawl? A 1 second or heck even 10 second confirmation time wont work there will it?

I'm pretty sure we currently have nodes operating from China on the test net with 3 second blocks.

@r0ach

The tradeoff with your approach is electing block producers solely because they are putting up the largest stake vs electing block producers that are most trusted by stakeholders, especially if larger stake-holding candidates are elected by default unless the user manually changes the vote.  Some of the most trusted candidates may not have the largest stake.  I like users having no vote by default and having to manually change their vote.  This also works to reduce the effects of voter apathy because those who are most involved in the system and have the largest stake will make sure to vote.

Anyway, I don't think the cost/benefit of implementing your suggestion would be worth it at this point.  What are the chances of a failure directly resulting from not implementing your solution vs the chances of failure if your solution were to actually be implemented.  I don't think its going to make a difference at this stage.  Perhaps it is something that can be explored at higher levels of adoption once the chain becomes profitable and there is plenty of money in the coffers to explore such a solution.  At this point, the current solution is probably sufficiently decentralized for this stage in the game. 

I am also of the opinion that we should explore r0achs proposal after launch of bts 2.0.  In addition to the down sides you pointed out it also requires us to set a default number of witnesses.  I'm of the opinion that the number should be set by the network.  If we set a default of voting for the top 101, we are almost stuck with 101. 

If we can get the currently designed system to work well.  With proxy voting and witness number set by the network I think we will be in better shape than if we need to go with r0aches proposal.

[Helikopterben]

People LOVE the idea of having 10000 potential block producers with no barrier to entry.  But what this really means is that people love having the ILLUSION of direct control.

BitShares is supposed to be an exchange, so what people love is having all their trading needs fulfilled. If you go to the polo troll box no one cares how many block producers there are. What they care about is this:
-Liquidity
-Variety of markets accessible in one place
-Lending for shorting
-Talking to the community of traders (troll box)
-Beautiful trading GUI

We dont yet have any of those things.

Exactly.  Regular users won't get caught up in the nuts and bolts of how and why bitshares is more secure than a centralized exchange.  They will know that the platform they are using runs on the bitshares protocol, therefore it is secure.  Much like users look for the s on the end of http to know that the connection they have established is secure.  They don't know why it is secure, they just know that all the experts say it is secure so they use it.  The same will be true of bitshares, so the ones that need to be convinced first are the experts. 

Also, decentralization is only part of the security model.  Quoting Satoshi, "Digital signatures provide part of the solution."  Also, the ability to clone and fork at any point in time provides a certain level of security.  So I am in the camp of fewer witnesses, at least at this stage, as I see more witnesses as costing more than they are worth.

[jsidhu]

What will you do about not having any witnesses from China or thailand or any country that purposely crnsors internet aswell as slows connections down to a crawl? A 1 second or heck even 10 second confirmation time wont work there will it?

[BTSdac]

I think altcoin user is a crowd easy to understand and accept  BTS. 
BTS must need normal user , but altcoin crowd is also needed

[Helikopterben]

@r0ach

The tradeoff with your approach is electing block producers solely because they are putting up the largest stake vs electing block producers that are most trusted by stakeholders, especially if larger stake-holding candidates are elected by default unless the user manually changes the vote.  Some of the most trusted candidates may not have the largest stake.  I like users having no vote by default and having to manually change their vote.  This also works to reduce the effects of voter apathy because those who are most involved in the system and have the largest stake will make sure to vote.

Anyway, I don't think the cost/benefit of implementing your suggestion would be worth it at this point.  What are the chances of a failure directly resulting from not implementing your solution vs the chances of failure if your solution were to actually be implemented.  I don't think its going to make a difference at this stage.  Perhaps it is something that can be explored at higher levels of adoption once the chain becomes profitable and there is plenty of money in the coffers to explore such a solution.  At this point, the current solution is probably sufficiently decentralized for this stage in the game. 

[mike623317]

The problem with a high number is voter apathy, so like  i said, becoming a delegate should require you to submit a collateral bid, then the client is set to automatically vote for the highest 101 collateral bids unless you choose to manually vote.

 

Is nobody paying attention here?
r0ach makes one of the best suggestions/proposals I have heard lately!
We should evaluate them seriously.


PS I agree with the PR nightmare known as 17 delegates
PS2 PR was never his "big thing" 

Its clear my opinion of fewer witnesses is in the minority. If we cant have that, then i think the next best option is this hybrid approach suggested ^^.

[r0ach]

I don't think that "game theory candidates" is true. You have to demonstrate there is not a benefit to having the majority or a large portion of candidates under the control of 1. It is sort of a half-assed game-theoretical approach, but nothing says it is a optimal/un-exploitable solution.

A flat rate only puts an upper limit on number of sybil nodes, while a bid system improves on it much further.  The only thing needed is to lock the collateral and make it unable to be used for your sybil delegates to vote for each other.  There are numerous different ways to accomplish this lock.  This is not the most optimal way, but if you wanted to do a rush job for BTS 2.0, one of the more exotic methods would be to have some type of asset on the exchange people purchase at a 1:1 ratio, "delegate token" or whatever you want to call it, then the voting list sorts people by how many delegate tokens they have in their account and puts them at the top.

Like I said, not the best way to do it, but just thinking of a way it could be rushed for BTS 2.0 on time.