Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency

[CLains]

I vote notary, or notary nodes.

[CLains]

The term trustee sounds like marketing suicide. Change the name.

Perhaps acceptor? 
Notary?
Witness?

Operator.
The connotation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operator_assistance

Facilitator or Processor

trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny

"Notary" seems fine to me.  I don't think it helps to over-euphamize things to the point that the word is inaccurate or unclear and meaningless... that does more damage than good

I prefer Notary to all the other terms because it conveys the role best:  they have the power to sign/witness/certify transactions (contracts) but not to determine their contents.    Operator sounds like it has too much control and witness and observer is passive.  Trustee implies too much trust.  There is no need 'trust' a notary.

In a way the notary is just a 'timestamp server' and this also avoids the notary being confused with the issuer or operator of a virtual currency.

Wouldn't it be better to use terms that don't immediately lead the reader down the path of visualizing a human being? Terms like "facilitator" or "processor" might be better. Or, how about something like "trusted node" or "custodian node" or "operator node"?

[toast]

No, let a vested stakeholder do it. Maybe the large exchanges would offer to do it and would compete for the publicity it offered.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[amatoB]

And Luckybit has a good point that the focus of our argument for requiring a trustee should be based on the fact that shareholders are not placing any more trust in our trustee than XRP holders place in a gateway, or BTC holders place in the ASIC pools; and far less destruction to our personal holdings can result in a 100% breach of trust by our trustee in our case as compared to those who recently got goxed.
 
And does this trustee method really speed up transactions? Because Ripple is FAST !

Bytemaster is leaning toward kicking up the UTILITY factor here, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Ripple is a great example of how we already have proof the market hates a trusted gateway approach.
Despite it's utility, speed and the investment that went into it, it's trending to zero and the fact that there are no ripple clones/forks out there is very telling.

The biggest currencies since Bitcoin are the ones that have developed methods that involve less trust in ASIC pools, Litecoin,  Peercoin, then NXT.  (Do you think the introduction of scrypt asics soon will increase or decrease Litecoins value?)

It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.

Last time I checked, Ripple was the 2nd largest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap, still worth over $1 billion. For example, this is over 20x bigger than peercoin and over 30x bigger compared to NXT. The price of Ripple XRP seems to have tracked bitcoin pretty well over the past few months.

I thought that most of the hostility towards Ripple was due to their initially being closed-source and also the seemingly self-serving, "premined" way in which they distributed the Ripple XRP currency (i.e., they initially held on to 99% of the supply and only promised to give something like 1/2 away)?

[onceuponatime]

So whats the worst case scenario if a trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny goes rogue? 

Could they get a double spend off and profit from it, even if they get caught and canned immediately afterwards?  Lets say I have a million dollars worth of BTS. Could I double spend that and actually get a million dollars profit for doing it?  This would be especially attractive if I had hosted the node through tor, as then all I'd have to do is wash the BTC I double spent for. 

The only way for them to 'go rouge' and perform a double spend is if they isolated their victim from the rest of the network.   As the Notary is not anonymous and their signature would be on two blocks at the same time, there would be incontrovertible proof of intent to defraud.  So I would say that the potential for a double-spend is near 0... especially if you have your client connected to several verified and public peers (like major exchanges). 

The most the Notary could do is delay the processing of transactions. 

With respect to paying the Notary, that may be a reasonable thing to do because it would give the notary the financial resources to improve their security and provide redundancy in multiple jurisdictions.   On the other hand paying the notary would result in even greater political battles because now you have financial incentive to stir up conflict and take over the role. 

I prefer Notary to all the other terms because it conveys the role best:  they have the power to sign/witness/certify transactions (contracts) but not to determine their contents.    Operator sounds like it has too much control and witness and observer is passive.  Trustee implies too much trust.  There is no need 'trust' a notary.

In a way the notary is just a 'timestamp server' and this also avoids the notary being confused with the issuer or operator of a virtual currency.

If the notary is not paid, then what would be the motivation for competent agents to perform this service? (Agents who will spend the time and money on "to improve their security and provide redundancy in multiple jurisdictions")?

Hopefully,the role of notary would be undertaken by actors motivated by desire to further the emerging DAC vision. But, judging from my experience so far in the crypto world, there are also entities who will be wolves in sheep's clothing, awaiting and seeking an opportunity/vulnerability to game the system.

So my conclusion is that the notary should be paid just enough to compensate for legitimate security expenses. There will be two types of person wanting to undertake the service, one that wants to benefit the overall vision and one wanting to benefit only themselves. Either way, funding them above expenses is unnecessary.

[Empirical1]

It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.

Define trust?  Do we not trust the mining pools not to collude?   Do we not trust the government to to shutdown every mining pool or outlaw asic?   

Trust is all relative and ultimately begs the question... "trust what?" and "what happens if my trust is violated?".   In the case of Bitcoin if your trust in the mining pools and large ASIC manufactures is violated you have no recourse except to start a new chain based upon a new security model.   Bitcoin miners own all sha256 based chains.  What would happen if Bitcoin suddenly lost 75% of its value... would it be hung out to dry like PTS taking an hour per block?   What happens if the 'core developers' make decisions that harm the network (possibly coerced) and the pools support these hard forks?    You see,  these other systems only have marketing behind them to make it appear as if their is no need to trust anyone.  Ultimately you are trusting an unelected group of individuals who have erected barriers to entry that protects their power.

In the case of Ripple they have 90+% (last I heard) of the shares and ran the only servers which alone *define* the consensus.   So in this case you are trusting them to be benevolent and not change their definition of consensus or block transactions.    Ripple operates on a 'trustee' model defined by the "unique node list" on the principle that the UNL will not collude to defraud you.   

So how have we improved things with TaPOS + Notary?   First of all the largest shareholder in BTS systems has less than 10% and the remaining shares are divided among 1000s.   Everyone participates in securing the network and making it immutable.   No other system has this property of being immutable because it is always possible to mine longer alternative chains whether it is POS or POW.   No other system has as every shareholder participating in the securing of the network and ultimately ratifying the ledger.   You could say that TaPOS means that eventually every transaction is confirmed and ratified by 90% or more of the shareholders.   

There are two kinds of decentralization:  power & redundancy.   There are two types of power:  power to change and power to prevent change.   In the bitcoin space, the miners have the power to change history and the power to block transactions.   As soon as 51% of the hashing power is controlled any transaction can be blocked forever by the attacker refusing to build upon any block that includes it.   As a government that didn't want make Bitcoin illegal (for political reasons), they could certainly 'follow the rules' and gain the ability to do far more than the Notary could with TaPOS.   The notary has no ability to change history with only the power to prevent change and their power is easily taken from them. 

With respect to 'centralization' of a point of failure, it is easy for the Notary to provide some redundancy and for the network to have contingency plans in place should anything happen.   These contingency plans can be executed without manual involvement of everyone. 

Decentralization:  Removing barriers to entry and maximizing competition. 

No other system is as decentralized as I am proposing.

Thanks for the response, know you are super busy.

No I don't trust pools not to collude or .gov not to go after pool operators. I have moved a greater allocation of my portfolio into gold since understanding that threat. I have also hedged in POS alt-coin NXT.

I should note I originally complained vehemently about AGS as well as later the allocation model of AGS and was obviously proved wrong and actually hold all my Bitshares via AGS rather than PTS. So I hope most of my fears are unfounded in this case as well.

The notary has no ability to change history with only the power to prevent change and their power is easily taken from them.

Ok that is re-assuring and sounds like an improvement on Bitcoin for sure, provided your mechanism for removing power is actually 'easily/rapid/effective'. However, I'm not clear how it is an improvement on NXT...

Even in its' current form NXT processes transactions fairly fast & I understand they have at least 100 public nodes in at least 10 geographic locations, albeit operated by only a few operators. (& a POS system with a public node incentive built into the fee model would make the decentralisation even broader.)

So NXT with improved fee model would allow for fast transactions, hard for a central authority to shut down & easy to rapidly exclude nodes that don't process certain transactions.

1. Transactions can be sent directly to the miner who will mine the next block (if he decides to reveal his location on the Internet), thus saving traffic and coming much closer to VISA/MasterCard processing volumes.
2. Blocks can be generated in advance and sent to most of the miners before they become valid (timestamp validation), thus greatly reducing rate of orphaned blocks.
3. Due to ability to predict timestamps of future blocks (rate of blocks) it becomes possible to set appropriate fees to assure quick confirmations for important transactions (without paying too much for inclusion into a block).

And the most important feature:
The network can detect which miners don't take part in block generation and act accordingly.

http://www.nxtcrypto.org/nxt-coin/transparent-forging

You say 'no other system has this property of being immutable because it always possible to mine longer alternative chains whether it is POS or POW'

I think NXT explains their defense to attack here, some of which is still not revealed but it seems solutions are possible?

Imagine someone is going to do a "51%" attack against Nxt and he owns 90% of all coins. The adversary must stop generating blocks for legit branch coz he won't be able to compete against 100% mining power with his 90%. So he decides to "skip" his turn to generate a block. The rest 10% of the network detects this and penalizes the adversary by setting his mining power to 0 and distributing it among other miners. Now the network is back to 100% power coz everyone got 10-fold increase. The adversary can mine other branch in a secret place but it won't be able to replace the legit branch. Of course, the 2nd branch will have 100% "hashing" power tied to it as well, coz the attacker will get his 90% bumped to 100% but this can be counteracted by some mechanisms of advanced consensus (still not revealed).

http://www.nxtcrypto.org/nxt-coin/transparent-forging

Your system appears to be easier for a central authority to shut down and would likely be slower to respond to a notary (similar to a public node) who acted nefariously as it would require some form of voting.

So whats the worst case scenario if a trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny goes rogue? 

Could they get a double spend off and profit from it, even if they get caught and canned immediately afterwards?  Lets say I have a million dollars worth of BTS. Could I double spend that and actually get a million dollars profit for doing it?  This would be especially attractive if I had hosted the node through tor, as then all I'd have to do is wash the BTC I double spent for. 

The only way for them to 'go rouge' and perform a double spend is if they isolated their victim from the rest of the network.   As the Notary is not anonymous and their signature would be on two blocks at the same time, there would be incontrovertible proof of intent to defraud.  So I would say that the potential for a double-spend is near 0... especially if you have your client connected to several verified and public peers (like major exchanges). 

The most the Notary could do is delay the processing of transactions.   

Hmm, maybe that answers most of it, if the above means not that there is no incentive for them to double spend but that they can't perform a double spend and get the money out the system then that's cool. However I don't think you can double spend in NXT nd still think they can replace a bad notary faster.  Don't worry about answering my question though, if you feel it's been covered, know you're busy and I should research/understand how more of this works myself. 

Good luck, whatever decision you guys take I'm sure I'll probably be buying more BTS X than I have already been allocated as soon as they become trade-able.

[amatoB]

for "witness" instead of "trustee"

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Witness has a negative connotation too because it's associated with courts and crime.

To me witness is almost as bad as trustee because of the frame and subliminal images it evokes.

Operator evokes the images of telephone operators from the time where calls had to be connected to each other manually. Older generations will remember this and have a positive frame of reference while younger generations may not know what it means except that it's associated with 911 or 0. Finally to make my case for use of the word more solid, operators reference communication or information networks while "witness" and "trustee" seem to reference the legal, justice, or government type of networks which people tend to want to avoid.

Observer also have a better frame and connotation than witness and means the same thing. So if you want to use something like witness but not have it evoke negative frames then observer would work.

Just a thought. The problem with terms like "trustee" or "witness" or "operator" may not really be one of positive vs. negative connotation. Maybe the problem is that such terms tend to evoke the wrong image in a reader's mind. A casual reader (maybe someone only slightly familiar with cryptocurrencies and bitShares) who first sees a term like "trustee" or "operator" would probably tend to think of an actual, flesh-and-blood person. I certainly did. Then, the reader's natural reaction would be to wonder whether a human being who oversees such centralization of power can be fallible, corruptible, etc. This type of gut reaction to the notion of having one human being wielding a lot of power could be why some people seem to be uneasy with the new scheme.

Wouldn't it be better to use terms that don't immediately lead the reader down the path of visualizing a human being? Terms like "facilitator" or "processor" might be better. Or, how about something like "trusted node" or "custodian node" or "operator node"? I confess to knowing almost nothing about the technical details of the newly proposed scheme, but I hope the point I'm making is clear. We want developers, people, and the community to evaluate the proposed scheme on the basis of its true merits and limitations, not on the basis of a misconceived view that evokes negative emotions...

[bytemaster]

So whats the worst case scenario if a trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny goes rogue? 

Could they get a double spend off and profit from it, even if they get caught and canned immediately afterwards?  Lets say I have a million dollars worth of BTS. Could I double spend that and actually get a million dollars profit for doing it?  This would be especially attractive if I had hosted the node through tor, as then all I'd have to do is wash the BTC I double spent for. 

The only way for them to 'go rouge' and perform a double spend is if they isolated their victim from the rest of the network.   As the Notary is not anonymous and their signature would be on two blocks at the same time, there would be incontrovertible proof of intent to defraud.  So I would say that the potential for a double-spend is near 0... especially if you have your client connected to several verified and public peers (like major exchanges). 

The most the Notary could do is delay the processing of transactions. 

With respect to paying the Notary, that may be a reasonable thing to do because it would give the notary the financial resources to improve their security and provide redundancy in multiple jurisdictions.   On the other hand paying the notary would result in even greater political battles because now you have financial incentive to stir up conflict and take over the role. 

I prefer Notary to all the other terms because it conveys the role best:  they have the power to sign/witness/certify transactions (contracts) but not to determine their contents.    Operator sounds like it has too much control and witness and observer is passive.  Trustee implies too much trust.  There is no need 'trust' a notary.

In a way the notary is just a 'timestamp server' and this also avoids the notary being confused with the issuer or operator of a virtual currency.

[Agent86]

"Notary" seems fine to me.  I don't think it helps to over-euphamize things to the point that the word is inaccurate or unclear and meaningless... that does more damage than good

It seems like people keep imagining the notary has more power than it would.  If it's easy to verify that it is following the rules why would it matter if it uses Tor?  Could just make it harder to shut down.

[bitcoinba]

I like your idea but think there should 100% be a small but meaningful reward for successfully doing the job whose payment should be delayed by a decent period of time, say a week or a month that would allow any betrayal of trust to involve much of the vested time going unpaid. 

It would encourage those who want to scam the network to just do it immediately because they're not going to be paid for most of the good work performed once the betrayal is discovered.

In other words, fail fast.

True decentralization isn't necessary for everything, the important part is to prevent to monopoly of what is "correct".  So whether you do a random lottery or whatever, it should be attractive to the average user because lacking the average user you'll have only specialists and bad guys populating your trusted oracle system, and those aren't good odds.

So is the new ETA TBD?

 

I agree, a balance needs to be struck between decentralization, security, usability, utility and adoption, with a lowest common denominator approach.

Regarding this "trustee" role/function how does this really increase the risk of scrutiny from regulators? This game or experiment and its exchange j of virtual tokens will not change fundamentally, or am missing something?
 

[AdamBLevine]

I like your idea but think there should 100% be a small but meaningful reward for successfully doing the job whose payment should be delayed by a decent period of time, say a week or a month that would allow any betrayal of trust to involve much of the vested time going unpaid. 

It would encourage those who want to scam the network to just do it immediately because they're not going to be paid for most of the good work performed once the betrayal is discovered.

In other words, fail fast.

True decentralization isn't necessary for everything, the important part is to prevent to monopoly of what is "correct".  So whether you do a random lottery or whatever, it should be attractive to the average user because lacking the average user you'll have only specialists and bad guys populating your trusted oracle system, and those aren't good odds.

So is the new ETA TBD?

[puppies]

It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.

Define trust?  Do we not trust the mining pools not to collude?   Do we not trust the government to to shutdown every mining pool or outlaw asic?   

Trust is all relative and ultimately begs the question... "trust what?" and "what happens if my trust is violated?".   In the case of Bitcoin if your trust in the mining pools and large ASIC manufactures is violated you have no recourse except to start a new chain based upon a new security model.   Bitcoin miners own all sha256 based chains.  What would happen if Bitcoin suddenly lost 75% of its value... would it be hung out to dry like PTS taking an hour per block?   What happens if the 'core developers' make decisions that harm the network (possibly coerced) and the pools support these hard forks?    You see,  these other systems only have marketing behind them to make it appear as if their is no need to trust anyone.  Ultimately you are trusting an unelected group of individuals who have erected barriers to entry that protects their power.

In the case of Ripple they have 90+% (last I heard) of the shares and ran the only servers which alone *define* the consensus.   So in this case you are trusting them to be benevolent and not change their definition of consensus or block transactions.    Ripple operates on a 'trustee' model defined by the "unique node list" on the principle that the UNL will not collude to defraud you.   

So how have we improved things with TaPOS + Notary?   First of all the largest shareholder in BTS systems has less than 10% and the remaining shares are divided among 1000s.   Everyone participates in securing the network and making it immutable.   No other system has this property of being immutable because it is always possible to mine longer alternative chains whether it is POS or POW.   No other system has as every shareholder participating in the securing of the network and ultimately ratifying the ledger.   You could say that TaPOS means that eventually every transaction is confirmed and ratified by 90% or more of the shareholders.   

There are two kinds of decentralization:  power & redundancy.   There are two types of power:  power to change and power to prevent change.   In the bitcoin space, the miners have the power to change history and the power to block transactions.   As soon as 51% of the hashing power is controlled any transaction can be blocked forever by the attacker refusing to build upon any block that includes it.   As a government that didn't want make Bitcoin illegal (for political reasons), they could certainly 'follow the rules' and gain the ability to do far more than the Notary could with TaPOS.   The notary has no ability to change history with only the power to prevent change and their power is easily taken from them. 

With respect to 'centralization' of a point of failure, it is easy for the Notary to provide some redundancy and for the network to have contingency plans in place should anything happen.   These contingency plans can be executed without manual involvement of everyone. 

Decentralization:  Removing barriers to entry and maximizing competition. 

No other system is as decentralized as I am proposing.

So whats the worst case scenario if a trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny goes rogue? 

Could they get a double spend off and profit from it, even if they get caught and canned immediately afterwards?  Lets say I have a million dollars worth of BTS. Could I double spend that and actually get a million dollars profit for doing it?  This would be especially attractive if I had hosted the node through tor, as then all I'd have to do is wash the BTC I double spent for. 

[bitcoinba]

Facilitator or Processor

[luckybit]

for "witness" instead of "trustee"

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

Witness has a negative connotation too because it's associated with courts and crime.

To me witness is almost as bad as trustee because of the frame and subliminal images it evokes.

Operator evokes the images of telephone operators from the time where calls had to be connected to each other manually. Older generations will remember this and have a positive frame of reference while younger generations may not know what it means except that it's associated with 911 or 0. Finally to make my case for use of the word more solid, operators reference communication or information networks while "witness" and "trustee" seem to reference the legal, justice, or government type of networks which people tend to want to avoid.

Observer also have a better frame and connotation than witness and means the same thing. So if you want to use something like witness but not have it evoke negative frames then observer would work.

[toast]

for "witness" instead of "trustee"

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk