First we really don't know if POS will work, it is uncertain if POW will even work, but by now POW at least seems kind of reasonable that it will work.

Even if POS has a lot of advantages, the advantages compared to the advantage of Bitcoin vs Fiat is miniscule. If it is hard getting people to switch to Bitcoin it might be even harder to get them to switch to a slightly better altcoin.

We'll see what happens in the future, I am hedging by investing in altcoins, but right now I don't see any reason to invest in POS like Nxt, BlackCoin, Peercoin etc. And it seems that Ethereum will not do POS:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/03...s-proof-stake/

This is a comically bad post Tom, even for you.

I'm the opposite. Only investing in PoS altcoins. (Prefer to invest in coins where the wealth isn't continually being diluted by people running factories of power hungry ASICS.)The issues with PoS seem solvable as far as I can tell, in which case PoW will always be inferior. There's huge resistance to PoS from miners/bitcoiners because it makes miners redundant, so there seems lots of unwarranted hate for PoS coins.

Coming from you, thank you.

One of the biggest potential issues with Bitcoin is the economics of the blockchain and mining. Clearly transaction fees will have to cover mining, and need to be sufficient for security. One mistake people make is assuming there is some "correct" level of mining. I am not sure there is, it's just all tradeoffs. If anything, we have "too much" security now. I think that is by design (or intentionally helpful), as it helps build the network faster than it would make sense to attack it, so that it cannot be attacked early on when it is weakest. But we need to transition to a transaction fee model sooner, which is useful. Blockchain space is scarce and if successful, transaction fees will bid upon that space. A lot of people assume that fees must be low per transaction. I disagree with this, fees should rise if it's useful to be in the chain. Thus, only the most valuable uses of the blockchain will make it in, and trivial uses will be priced out.

If we look 10 years into the future, either Bitcoin will be a huge success or will be worthless. So the problem solves itself - there is enough value being transmitted in the blockchain that fees will be useful for what is being protected, or it will be a sandcastle that only bullies kick over since nothing is on the line.

All this talk of POS and DPOS is mostly dreamers who just don't understand the issues with those systems and have no ability to see through good arguments against them or buy into non-arguments in favor of them by those who have an interest to promote such coins. The funny thing is, the POS coins cannot win. If they somehow start gaining enough share, it's trivial to switch Bitcoin to such a model, and they have no advantage there and are losing the network advantage battle. If they don't gain any share and aren't any better, then it's a moot point. It's almost like a free playground where they can fail or not and they have nothing to gain.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but I was speaking more to his mental health than his finances.
I just couldn't imagine him trying to deal with the downswing of the past 6mos.

If only there was some kind of trustless mechanism for escrowing value for such a bet.

Let's put a 2 of 3 multisig in place with an arbitrater. If the price gets below $162.5, you win, if it goes above $650, I win. We can set a time limit of 1 year if you want, and we get refunded after a year.

Since your winning condition will mean Bitcoin is worth half as much, I'll put up 2-1 on it. Willing to lock up 3 BTC to your 1.5.

you can make your own bets on betmoose

https://www.betmoose.com/

Not going the trusted third party route with anything related to Bitcoin.

Can someone briefly explain the problem with proof-of-stake?

Vitalik explained it:
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15...ake-algorithm/

More can also be read here:
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/alts.pdf

Another problem with most POS coins is centralization. The ownership of such coins is almost always centrally controlled and they can go back and rewrite history at will, as they control the stake at the beginning. Far worse than any 51% attack by miners.

For longs is it more about the market cap or the price per coin?

There's plenty at stake, why would a PoS holder want to stake on a fork and try and destroy the value of their wealth. An attacker needs to persuade 51%+ of PoS forgers to forge on his fork. The advantage: might gain a few extra pennies in forging fees, the disadvantage: all your wealth is destroyed. Also, there are ways to penalize those who forge on forks.

Centralization is less of a concern than with PoW coins, IMO. In PoW, you only have to buy/control enough hashing power to control the coin. In PoS you have to control a majority of the coins themselves, so trying to buy the coins will raise the price, thus making it hundreds of times more expensive to attack. Also, by the time someone has 51% of the coin, destroying it will hardly be in their best interest. Due to PoW, there is already huge centralization in the hashing power of bitcoin. Imagine if bitcoin was PoS and control was spread amongst the hundreds of thousands of users, it would be much more secure and distributed.

If you are talking about a history attack, where an attacker gains control of the addresses that previously controlled a large portion of the stake, a lot of PoS coins have rolling checkpoints. Plus, a chain with a larger cumulative difficulty will have to forged to be accepted, which would require thousands of attempts and each block forged requires a hash, so it would end up costing more hashing power than an attack on a PoW network.

Nxt whitepaper has a good discussion on its PoS architecture and discusses some of the possible attacks: http://www.nxtcommunity.org/nxt-whitepaper There are further defenses against possible attacks planned.

I'm still waiting to see a viable attack on a PoS coin actually put into action, and meanwhile the number of PoS coins in the top twenty on coinmarketcap continues to grow.

Price per coin. Market cap can rise over time and still make price per coin decrease since bitcoin is inflationary.

If there was anything worth attacking, maybe. But right now it's like kicking over a sandcastle.

Who cares about the number of coins in the top twenty? PoS is the latest flavor of the month. Total market share has dropped like a rock for non-Bitcoin coins. 2.0 coins like Mastercoin have gotten destroyed.

PoS coins simply cannot win. Either their argument doesn't matter, or their argument matter and gets adopted elsewhere leaving them with bags. You don't even need any actual technical arguments on whether it can or cannot be attacked. If it has advantages and is superior and ever poses any kind of threat, it is dispatched.

PoS is simply the latest flavor of the month for those who think they can get rich quick and replace something that simply is not going anywhere. They missed the boat, and want to hold onto some kind of hope that they can beat those who beat them. Not going to happen.

NXT is almost 100% a scamcoin, even worse than the rest of them. Complete garabge. Anyone buying NXT deserves to go broke.

As for the fork, no they don't need 51%. Even a small holding allows you to try every fork possible without any cost. The argument that since it hasn't even been worth attacking, it's attack proof doesn't hold up any more than a sandcastle that hasn't been kicked over is somehow immune from destruction.

What about the possibility of a combined POS/POW scheme which could take the advantages of each. Would it simply be centralization squared, since big miners are probably big stakeholders as well?

Yeah, obviously no point discussing this with you. There's a hundred million worth of marketcap just in the PoS coins in the top 7 on coinmarketcap. Sure, what's a hundred million, hardly worth powering up a few computers to run an attack.

NXT has outstanding tech, it has 7 core developers, a dedicated community of hundreds, dozens of guys working on projects around Nxt, and has had very few price ups and downs (compared with most coins) over the last 8 months or so where it's always been in the top 6/7. It has an asset exchange with most of the top crypto assets (https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/) What's your definition of a scamcoin exactly?

Not true. Every block requires you to run a single hash. A single hash isn't much processing power, but to try and run the billions upon billions that it would take to try and create a viable fork isn't feasible. Plus there are rolling decentralized checkpoints every 1440 blocks, so you don't have much time to create your fork.

Destroying value doesn't mean it's valuable to attack.

• It is marketed like a scammy penny stock.
• Anon early super large stakeholders + Proof-Of-Stake == the big guys run the table, if they choose. https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf The central bankers are in place from Day One unless they are super-virtuous and give tons away “fairly.”
• Anonymous developers
• Closed developing process. Source is periodically handed down from the ivory tower to the masses.
• Certain notable personages (& key stakeholders) that dodge, dodge, dodge, when an obvious attack vector — mitigated in other crypto-finance projects by known techniques — is highlighted.
• Active resistance to making it easier to independently reproduce the software
• Technical criticism is routinely met with bizarre behavior (notably from come-from-beyond)
• Attacking critics, rather than responding to criticism.
• Several security incidents that smell like inside jobs.

1 hash per second is the cost of following every fork? And that's sufficient computing power? LOL.

You don't need billions of forks.

Decentralized checkpoints that are centralized, man you are buying their crap hook line and sinker or you are one on the inside trying to cash in on fools.

Here's a good read about Proof of Work that many who are instinctually drawn away from it seem to miss about its benefits. An interesting section on PoS as well (what an appropriate acronym).

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool...-work-concept/

to be fair, this is true of every cryptocurrency. the success of every coin (bitcoin included) is going to be binary, and if you're not treating bitcoin or any other coin the same you would a penny stock, you are doing it wrong.

NXT is certainly worse than the others by a longshot. Attend any Bitcoin conference. They are like vultures. Ripple was 2nd worst, and there was some lolcoin there Phoenixcoin or whatever trying promote something, that might not even be the name, it was so podunk they just had fliers.

Took my CoinTerra 1.6 T/H offline recently. The machine no longer covers electricity costs... not really understanding who is mining and how the difficulty is STILL rising.

I'm sure you can figure out how to short it if you can figure out how to destroy it.

Yeah, Jeff Garzik got into his head to attack Nxt and that was his list. Little of it is remotely true. But you don't seem like you want to have a discussion, just make unsubstantiated claims so I won't bother going through it point by point. (Anonymous developers, are you kidding me, ever hear of Satoshi?) Here's a video response from someone who has actually decided to investigate Nxt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r8areoxqag

How are they centralized? They automatically happen every 1440 blocks, there's no master at the wheel. Some PoS coins do have centralized checkpoints, not Nxt.

I investigated bitcoin to convince myself it was a worthless ponzi scheme. And when I investigated I found it was a fascinating technological advancement. But altcoins were surely worthless, though? I started investigating them and some of them had lot of innovation and interesting ideas, and the best of those was Nxt. I wasn't there a year ago when they came up with the masterplan of spending a year developing an amazing cryptocurrency just to piss off the bitcoin devs and scam those who decide to invest in the project. So I guess I fell hook and line for the bitcoin scam and then hook, line and sinker for the Nxt scam.

People in the Nxt community believe that it is an undiscovered gem in this field and they want to tell everyone about it. I guess some people don't want to listen.


I can't understand why you are so angry about Nxt. Litecoin is just a copy of bitcoin, brings nothing interesting to the table. Many coins are just sold on one feature, the price is pumped up and then the developers disappear, and the coin dies.

Nxt has been worked on for over a year, there's lots of hard work and development going on in the background trying to create interesting ideas in the crypto field (There's a decentralized poker project, there's a blockchain based MMO game, there's various other interesting projects.) There are about 6/7 clones of Nxt in existence, so not everyone thinks their software is trash. Nxt has some issues, but has more going for it than against.

From your point of view, as a diehard bitcoiner, I would have thought you'd be happy to see innovation happening and software development man hours invested in this space, so that bitcoin can adopt whichever innovations are useful and avoid the pitfalls of innovations that fail.

basically if you're chinese, bitfury, knc, or a handful of smaller companies with their own EEs and chip designs. Their costs are far lower than the end consumer.

Does anyone here own Ripple? What site does trading for it? What are the advantages of Ripple? It overtook Litecoin in market cap so I'm pretty curious about it. I really didn't think that was going to happen anytime soon.