Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency

[santaclause102]

Assumptions:
With the shares system we have an easy way to vote on anything.
With the TaPOS system the transaction ledger becomes immutable automatically over time as the ledger is confirmed by everyone on the network.
Generating the next block should be as efficient as possible to maximize dividends.
Transaction validation should be as quick as possible.

Solution:
Shareholders vote (off chain) on a trustee.
Trustee generates blocks every 30 seconds (or at will..... no need to require any particular rate)
If trustee is compromised or shutdown, shareholders can elect a new trustee by broadcasting their vote.
Once a new trustee has 51% of the shareholders support the network continues.

As a trustee you cannot double spend (you will be caught and fired).
As a trustee you cannot perform Denial of Service without being caught and fired.
As a trustee you cannot be coerced without being let go.

As a shareholder this maximizes your value (dividends, transaction speed, no potential of forks).

A trustee is not a paid position and requires almost no resources to run.  A trustee could even operate behind a tor node.

The result is like a 'constitutional company' where the laws are entirely defined in the constitution and the 'president' can be recalled at any time and has almost no power even when in office.

This same process can be used to resolve when a hard fork goes into effect.   

Thoughts?

Does this have the potential to delay the release of ME/XTS/Lotto/DNS .? I assumed the end of March for the first DAC (ME) to be released... 

[Stan]

If it isn't sufficiently efficient from the get go, the door to competition who will find a way to make it efficiently efficient will be wide open. I don't like the idea of centralizing this at all, but I also figure bytemaster is bringing this to us now because there isn't another viable way at the moment that won't cause other headaches or delays in getting BTS launched.

As this subject is very 'touchy' I do want to let everyone know that I am a firm believer in decentralizing POWER.   I am also committed to finding solutions that eliminate single points of failure.   I also recognize that decentralization brings its own security concerns.

1) All of the random selection techniques discussed here (and with Nxt) depend upon people putting their private keys at risk.  So rather than trusting a trustee, everyone has to trust their computer not to get hacked.   
2) All of the random selection (mining + POS / etc ) techniques have potential for forks (even if just for a few blocks) and this potential is highly problematic.
3) Everything in life is about tradeoffs.... so lets focus on decentralizing power in the most efficient manner.

Identify the failure modes in the various systems and you will conclude:
1) Trustee model is more decentralized than Ripple because the Trustee has less power than Ripple's inner nodes have.
2) Mining results in a kind of centralization and de-facto trustee that cannot be fired
3) POS requires peoples keys to be kept on line and ultimately a minority of nodes will participate in block generation

I don't think there is any gray area when it comes to decentralization. Either you are, or you are not. There is no partial compromise.  Since most people will be operating within the borders of existing government laws, true decentralization wil never be achieved. You must do what you think is best.

The way I would put it is:  "Decentralization is a philosophy and a powerful tool, not the automatic answer to every design question."   

[jae208]

I'd prefer to trust in my ability to protect my private key than to trust a trustee. A digital company shouldn't require any voting or representatives to vote on behalf of shareholders. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of calling it a DAC because it is no longer autonomous in the slightest sense because instead of the code taking care of that now we have to rely on people.

[bytemaster]

With proof of stake your private key is your proof.   


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[clout]

Identify the failure modes in the various systems and you will conclude:
1) Trustee model is more decentralized than Ripple because the Trustee has less power than Ripple's inner nodes have.
2) Mining results in a kind of centralization and de-facto trustee that cannot be fired
3) POS requires peoples keys to be kept on line and ultimately a minority of nodes will participate in block generation

I simply don't understand the technical aspects of block production, but why must private keys be used in this process?

[NewMine]

If it isn't sufficiently efficient from the get go, the door to competition who will find a way to make it efficiently efficient will be wide open. I don't like the idea of centralizing this at all, but I also figure bytemaster is bringing this to us now because there isn't another viable way at the moment that won't cause other headaches or delays in getting BTS launched.

As this subject is very 'touchy' I do want to let everyone know that I am a firm believer in decentralizing POWER.   I am also committed to finding solutions that eliminate single points of failure.   I also recognize that decentralization brings its own security concerns.

1) All of the random selection techniques discussed here (and with Nxt) depend upon people putting their private keys at risk.  So rather than trusting a trustee, everyone has to trust their computer not to get hacked.   
2) All of the random selection (mining + POS / etc ) techniques have potential for forks (even if just for a few blocks) and this potential is highly problematic.
3) Everything in life is about tradeoffs.... so lets focus on decentralizing power in the most efficient manner.

Identify the failure modes in the various systems and you will conclude:
1) Trustee model is more decentralized than Ripple because the Trustee has less power than Ripple's inner nodes have.
2) Mining results in a kind of centralization and de-facto trustee that cannot be fired
3) POS requires peoples keys to be kept on line and ultimately a minority of nodes will participate in block generation

I don't think there is any gray area when it comes to decentralization. Either you are, or you are not. There is no partial compromise.  Since most people will be operating within the borders of existing government laws, true decentralization wil never be achieved. You must do what you think is best.   

[toast]

It is different because there is no ceo thay can get hit with a truck. I'm thinking about how smoothly the nextwork transitions to another signing authority

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[bytemaster]

What happened to that idea where you could sign for which pool gets to sign for you? Then do deterministic mining picked from any "pool" which has at least 1% of funds. This fixes DDOS and other issues because pools have incentive to become hardened, trusted pools.

Not hierarchal, the pool you sign your votes to cannot then sign them onto another pool or anything.

Is this what NXT does? Except they have an incentive for pooling more and more funds. We could give worse returns with larger pools after a certain threshold. This doesn't prevent large pools from splitting up their funds, but it gives small pools a way to butt in.

This is effectively no different than nominating a board of directors who then nominate the active CEO.

[bytemaster]

If it isn't sufficiently efficient from the get go, the door to competition who will find a way to make it efficiently efficient will be wide open. I don't like the idea of centralizing this at all, but I also figure bytemaster is bringing this to us now because there isn't another viable way at the moment that won't cause other headaches or delays in getting BTS launched.

As this subject is very 'touchy' I do want to let everyone know that I am a firm believer in decentralizing POWER.   I am also committed to finding solutions that eliminate single points of failure.   I also recognize that decentralization brings its own security concerns.

1) All of the random selection techniques discussed here (and with Nxt) depend upon people putting their private keys at risk.  So rather than trusting a trustee, everyone has to trust their computer not to get hacked.   
2) All of the random selection (mining + POS / etc ) techniques have potential for forks (even if just for a few blocks) and this potential is highly problematic.
3) Everything in life is about tradeoffs.... so lets focus on decentralizing power in the most efficient manner.

Identify the failure modes in the various systems and you will conclude:
1) Trustee model is more decentralized than Ripple because the Trustee has less power than Ripple's inner nodes have.
2) Mining results in a kind of centralization and de-facto trustee that cannot be fired
3) POS requires peoples keys to be kept on line and ultimately a minority of nodes will participate in block generation

 

[mint chocolate chip]

If it isn't sufficiently efficient from the get go, the door to competition who will find a way to make it increasingly efficient will be wide open. I don't like the idea of centralizing this at all, but I also figure bytemaster is bringing this to us now because there isn't another viable way at the moment that won't cause other headaches or delays in getting BTS launched.

[bytemaster]

What if the trustee offers shareholders something in return for modifying the block chain

All nodes must still validate the chain.  Trustee is not the source of the security and has very little power beyond about 24 hours.  If 51% of the shareholders want something different then you would get a hard fork even with bitcoin. 

[bytemaster]

If Bitshares x could reach that kind of speed for validating transaction will be amazing and it is worth taking in consideration.
 
The problems I see :

- No more decentralized
- One trustee one point of failure, the DDOS attack will be hard to prevent 

If trustee is compromised or shutdown, shareholders can elect a new trustee by broadcasting their vote.
Once a new trustee has 51% of the shareholders support the network continues.

Not clear. How long it takes the voting process , meanwhile all transactions are stooped ?  Can you elaborate more on the voting process ?

The voting could take place well in advance and there could be contingency keys lined up.   There could even be a panel that is elected where the panel in turn selects the active trustee but could act quickly to fire him.   

DDOS is not really possible because the network would still be broadcast based and the trustee would likely have multiple redundant nodes all over the world ready to sign blocks if there were an issue. 

The critical point here is that voting for the trustee can be a continuous process and there can be a chain of command.  51% may not be necessary if you assume people can set up delegates to vote on their behalf.   Everyone elects their own representative and they in turn get a vote proportional to their constituency. 

The main take away from this is that there are many ways to address this to support rapid, efficient failover.

[CryptoVape]

What if the trustee offers shareholders something in return for modifying the block chain

[toast]

What happened to that idea where you could sign for which pool gets to sign for you? Then do deterministic mining picked from any "pool" which has at least 1% of funds. This fixes DDOS and other issues because pools have incentive to become hardened, trusted pools.

Not hierarchal, the pool you sign your votes to cannot then sign them onto another pool or anything.

Is this what NXT does? Except they have an incentive for pooling more and more funds. We could give worse returns with larger pools after a certain threshold. This doesn't prevent large pools from splitting up their funds, but it gives small pools a way to butt in.

[luckybit]

I think decentralization, scalability and long term sustainability are more important than trust, profits, and performance. Efficiency is important but not if you have to give up on the core principles.

Having a pyramid style deterministic hierarchy of trustees to me seems to be the ugliest design from an adherence to core principles perspective. If it's not more decentralized than Bitcoin then why get rid of mining only to lose an advantage somewhere else?

You can make it decentralized with the trustee method, so I'm not completely against that.
But the way Bytemaster described it doesn't sound very decentralized, and lacks the element of chance, of randomness which in my opinion is necessary for security.

Maybe it could be done like this but selling it to the decentralization community is going to be hard unless it can be shown that it's less centralized than Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others.

If there must be a sort of "CEO" or "President" of Bitshares as the trustee, it adheres to a set of principles which promote the thinking which backs government/corporate hierarchy. This is why I recommend treating it more like a pool of nodes where an individual node is randomly selected and attempt to grow the pool of nodes as large as possible. Utilize the organic emergent properties.

This way many nodes will get a chance to be a trustee and it's not just one chief node at the top. The last thing we need is a pyramid at the heart of the chain in my opinion.

Generating the next block should be as efficient as possible to maximize dividends.
Transaction validation should be as quick as possible.

What are we talking about here in terms of increased efficiency and faster transactions? If the advantage is it will be a significant amount more efficient and significant amount faster, which in terms makes it much more usable for actual users of the system and profitable for shareholders, I say go ahead and find someone.

Would it be possible for i3 to be the (initial) trustee, they probably have the most BTS so their stake in the success of the operation makes them a good candidate and they have the technology means to set up the backup systems to make sure there is no disconnect with the network.

This is the exact scenario I am concerned about. How exactly is Bytemaster going to explain that to the decentralization community? Don't go the route of Ripple unless you're able to form the industry ties with Google.

Peercoin has similar problems and SunnyKing had a difficult time explaining some of his design decisions. Maybe they were necessary for the security of Peercoin but those decisions still have to be explained.

The more centralized it is, the harder it is to explain. Sure the current shareholders are going to want maximum profit but people who are future shareholders are not going to like it if looks like this.