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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.


> > I don't see Bitcoin dying unless (until?) it's discovered to have an incurable security flaw.

> AFAIK, that's not possible.

That's an incredibly stupid thing to say. Please don't comment on topics you're ignorant on; you're spreading misinformation.

Obviously the hashing algorithm is one of the stronger points in bitcoin's implementation; that's completely irrelevant.


People absolutely would switch away from bitcoin if something better came along.

If people would rather use something else to trade with, bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade.

If bitcoin stops being potentially widely used in trade, it stops being a potentially good store of value.

If it stops being a potentially good store of value, it stops being something people want to speculate on.

If people don't want to speculate on it, the price crashes.

In other words, the whole value proposition of bitcoin rests on the idea that it is useful for trade.

In other words, that you'd rather use it than at least one of the set:

{credit cards, cash, paypal, regular wire transfers, wire transfers involving foreign currency exchange}.

That said---I have not read the Bitcoin-NG paper yet but others are saying it is highly centralized, which would make it a non-starter.


Hi. Ittay here, one of the authors.

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.


But if the leader signs conflicting transactions, which wins?


>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."




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