That sounds interesting enough that I'll read the whitepaper, but the unfortunate truth is that people aren't going to switch off bitcoin any time soon. There are already massive improvements on the bitcoin protocol which have been largely ignored, partially because people don't understand them. This looks even more complicated, which adds both skepticism and implementation security risk.
I don't think anyone seriously imagines all the users of bitcoin switching to a new protocol. It's still an interesting exercise to try to build on it, since vanilla Bitcoin is filled with suboptimal qualities.
I don't see Bitcoin dying unless (until?) it's discovered to have an incurable security flaw.
> it's discovered to have an incurable security flaw.
AFAIK, that's not possible. Secure hashing algorithms tend to fracture instead of completely break, so there will be some warning; to change to a new algorithm, simply more than 50% of the Bitcoin miners would have to mine on the chain that relies on that new algorithm, and it thus becomes "voted" in.
Bitcoin-NG is precisely as decentralized as Bitcoin. Whereas in Bitcoin, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that took place in the preceding 10 minutes, in NG, a miner is elected via a distributed lottery to determine the transactions that take place in the following 10 minutes.
How are leaders discouraged from attempting network isolation attacks?
How do nodes handle the sudden peaks in traffic when selected on the "round-robin" PoW scheme when load is high? How do the network handle the ever shifting connections (with TCP session setups and all), what's the topology?
Are you considering the effect of the current leader being attacked by 0-days,what do that do to the network when it gets hijacked?
What if the leader drops off or otherwise have connectivity issues?
The effect of an unreliable or malicious leader is fewer transactions than possible or unfair prioritization of transactions, but limited to a single (10 minute) block. Seems like if it were an uncommon event it should be not-very-consequential.
Then again, if the lottery likelihood is a function of hashing power then maybe it's not so well distributed.
>If people would rather use something else to trade with
This is the key problem with moving away from bitcoin. Both parties have to accept whatever the new currency is. The real issue any of the alt coins face (and even bitcoin itself) is user adoption. People won't adopt a new currency just because it's good, it has to be popular/accepted.
If you think that's true, you must assume that bitcoin is just a hokey experiement, because nobody would switch to it in the first place.
Sure, if bitcoin were widely used, it would be very hard for something else to overtake it. But it's not widely used yet. We have not really reached that point. Something else can still be http and bitcoin can still be gopher.
That said, I am still speculating long-term on bitcoin becuase I don't think anybody can/will come out with something that is non-marginally better.
You're missing the point, BitcoinNG is not going to be an altcoin. You missed this paragraph from the article:
"It is worth noting that there is no conflict or contradiction between NG and Blockstream’s sidechains; in fact, Blockstream’s pegs allow for moving bitcoins among chains, and such chains can benefit from improved performance using Bitcoin-NG. In future work, we plan to expand on how to incrementally deploy Bitcoin-NG on top of the current Bitcoin network."
Not to be confused with Bitcoin XT, the vehicle for that open rebellion against Bitcoin Core by Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn announced back in August.
NG is more efficient than the Bitcoin-type blockchain, while maintaining its security properties. Any currency running on a blockchain can therefore benefit from it.
Lightning network allows for off-chain transactions, so it's separate and complementary.
I would like to know what the researchers think of the consolidation of miners within Bitcoin.
From the whitepaper "Miners with capacity smaller than 1/4 of the total network are incentivized to follow the protocol."
Yet, if any two of the five biggest mining pools collude, https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs they'd already be over 1/4th of the network. And if three or more collude, they could take over the entire thing.
Miner consolidation is a long-standing problem with Bitcoin itself.
When Ittay and I discovered selfish mining [1], we were quite worried about the size of mining pools at the time. Even though we also came up for a fix against selfish mining, the fix only prohibits selfish mining for pools <25%, and we also found that there can never be a fix to prohibit selfish mining for pools >=33%.
Things looked grim for a while, and we played a role in pushing back against GHash when they exceeded 51% around April of '14. The only tool that the community had at the time to break up large miners was just social pressure.
In part as a reaction to GHash crossing of the 51% line, we [2] and Andrew Miller et al [3] came up with techniques based on non-outsourceable puzzles. This is a cool technique that would make it difficult for miners to run large open pools. It does require a potentially disruptive change to Bitcoin, so it's good to have in one's back pocket if the mining situation gets out of hand, but it's not something you want to deploy.
Luckily, Ittay's subsequent work on the Miner's Dilemma [4] discovered an incredibly interesting result: it pays for miners to attack other miners who are running large open pools. This puts natural pressure on miners to not open themselves up to the public and accept people into their pools willy nilly. This in turn is, I think, fantastic news, as it means that the problem may take care of itself, at least when it comes to open pools.
Overall, the distribution of mining power is a point of concern for everyone in the Bitcoin space. The situation looked bleak at first, as it looked like there were few mechanisms to keep open pools from growing ever larger. But now we have a strong technical solution and a natural process that is well-characterized. Large solo miners still remain an ongoing concern.
This is interesting stuff, but it's still a stop gap. As you say, large solo miners are an ongoing concern.
If bitcoin ever makes it big, IMO, it'll be large corporations running mining operations. Just as the general population does most of its services through huge corporations, mining bitcoin will probably be done by them as well.
What do you think of Proof of Stake systems? Are they feasible? I'm working on one, btw, with a shared spending pool and an ability to vote to spend the pool, and to change the code of the official client, thereby changing the rules of the system.
Additional chains will be great when someone comes up with a race-free, third-party trust-free protocol to do cross-chain trades. Last I read up on the subject this was not considered possible.
From the article: "Bitcoin-NG addresses the scalability bottleneck by enabling the Bitcoin network to achieve the highest throughput allowed by the network conditions. Paradoxically, not only does it improve transaction throughput, it also reduces transaction latencies -- it is possible to get an initial transaction confirmation in seconds rather than in minutes. And it does so without changing Bitcoin’s open architecture and trust model."
@stanga as you are one of the authors, could you give us a tl;dr as to how this is possible?
It says so right in the article: "In Bitcoin-NG, the protocol is, instead, forward-looking: every 10 minutes, NG elects a leader, who then vets future transactions as soon as they happen."
All good questions, all of which are answered in the white paper. An "elected leader" is essentially the same thing as a miner that mines a block in Bitcoin. Miners can mine empty blocks in Bitcoin. This is OK, as others will step in for such defunct miners. Likewise, in Bitcoin-NG, another miner will step up if the elected leader does not mint microblocks.
Keep in mind also that NG would be layered on top of Bitcoin, so everything that works in Bitcoin will work in NG as well.
people have thought proof-of-work to death and what we have now is the best that they've come up with.
every other scheme that people suggest replacing it with runs into difficulties because you can't predict the amount of time (roughly) it takes to do the work. in Bitcoin's case, you CAN predict (roughly) the amount of time it will take to roll 3 1's in a row when repeatedly rolling a 6-sided die.
and here: http://gnusha.org/bitcoin-wizards/2015-10-14.log
cross-post of https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3or365/bitcoinng_p...