Oct 21, 2019

A consensus algorithm that uses a combination of tier 1 PoW mining like BTC when combined with staked tier 2 PoS full nodes (e.g. Dash Masternodes) with the application of chainlocks does add additional security. It also vastly improves the security of zero confirmations over that of bitcoin-core. Dash rotates its chainlock quorum of 400 masternodes trustlessly from a pot of ~5K every 24 hours using BLS signatures. Dash rotates its InstantSend quorum of 30 masternodes trustlessly from a pot of ~5K every 24 hours using BLS signatures.

https://github.com/tdickman/crypto51/issues/45 provides details for how to calculate the cost of a 51% attack for the Dash network’s Chainlock LLMQ, 60% of 400 masternodes.

Zero conf has no security, by definition.

Random rotation doesn’t achieve anything if it’s a fair distribution (which it must be).

Not with 2nd tier locking all network transactions associated with an InstantSend UTXO until the 1st tier completes the PoW confirmation for the given instantSend TX.

BLS aggregate signatures are causal but results can’t be predicted in advanced and thus can’t be gamed.

Hence, the quorum selection is trustless.

Can’t be gamed.

Just reading that one link there are obvious flaws. I’ve never looked at Dash, but the assumption of non-collusion is a fatal flaw, and the assumption that there isn’t sufficient available Dash to achieve a controlling stake cannot be true.

The quorum can all be the same person.

A 1000 Dash stake is required by each masternode. That staking makes the Dash masternodes immune to Sybil attacks.

What makes a masternode?

Is it just the ownership of 1000 Dash?

Don't forget that Darkcoin/Dash is flawed for staking because when it was release, something like ~50% of the supply was 'instamined' in the first day or so. It was claimed to be a bug, but staking can't be trusted after that, as all masternodes (that require some darkcoin/dash) are almost certainly mostly the same person(s)

Is a Blockchain fullnode with extra consus rules and provides extra value added services, e.g. InstantSend, PrivateSend.

Sooo, who controls them and how did they get this control?

@neillm I didn’t know that, but good to see that practice follows theory :).

Anybody that has 1000 Dash and is willing to field a masternode or outsource a masternode on a VPS.

Yeah, Darkcoin has a very bad past. Dash was the rebrand and the community has done their best to distance itself from that origin. I remember when it all went down, and re-starting the chain was on the table, but of course didn't happen.

So how is it assumed that these are distinct individuals. And how does one overpower this censoring group?

BLS signatures are applied to seperate duties between masternode stakers, masternode operators, and masternode voters.

Signatures can not assure independent identities.

No. The identities of stakers can remain anonymous.

So 1 person can in fact be 90% of the masternodes, which is the problem. Masternodes used to (perhaps still) do mixing as well, which is why it's can't be trusted. If you can have the ability to be most of them, mixing isn't actually mixing, it's just convoluted tracking.

1 masternode maps to 1 vote for approving budget on the Dash masternode network. Can’t stake more than 1000 Dash per masternode, and staking must be at least 1000 Dash.

Ugh, centralized

No different than having one person controlling 90% of a PoW minining network.

Not censorship resistant

It is different

Agreed

Controlling 90% of mining doesn’t matter unless you censor. Once you do you can be evicted from control. In a PoS system you own it, forever.

PoS strictly limits open participation. Majority mining can be temporary.

Is very censorship resistant in accordance with the Dash consensus rules. Can always run your own Dash full node and or masternode to connect your clients.

Not only temporary, but irrelevant.

That’s not censorship resistance.

Your own node and master node cannot control tx confirmation.

There is no censorship resistance if you don’t run your own nodes. Not your nodes, not necessarily your routing rules. Dash also inherits its tier 1 consensus rules directly from Bitcoin-core.

Dash is no longer a fork of the LTC scam coin. Dash gets its base code from Bitcoin.

The Dash fast mine was an artifact of the same Litecoin fast mine that Charlie does not like to talk about.

I haven't been following Dash that much, but as far as I know the issuance remained the same, which was based on the X11 mining algo, released as Darkcoin, which gave the instaminer's (presumably Evan the 'founder') a massive amount of funds to work with. Of course PoS and masternodes were his later invention.

The actual events are irrelevant, the point is that it is not censorship resistant. A group can obtain sufficient state to forever control the future.

I heard many excuses about the fast mine, but never that one. LTC didn't mine over half the supply in a day.

But agreed, with @evoskuil here. It's a good chat to be had, and not trying to bash anyone or anything here unnecessarily.

I’m just responding to the critique, which I don’t accept. PoS cannot be censorship resistant.

Agreed

Facts about the Dash fastmine are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=0&v=O39kWbOu11M.

It was certainly not launched as xcoin, as the wallet and naming back then was called darkcoin 😉

FYSA - Not aware of any coin control mechanisms that support Trezor, Ledger, and KeepKey other than that available at https://github.com/Bertrand256/dash-masternode-tool/releases that connect to the Dash-core wallet.

I don't want to go down these routes though, been there years ago. It's not important as @evoskuil hinted. The model is still problematic.

Interesting, so I have the original darkcoin git source and in fact, it was xcoin at one point. It was darkcoin by the time it was launched though, as that's the repo I initially retrieved at launch.

And by interesting, I mean 🙄

We will agree to disagree for now. I don’t understand how the model is flawed. Don’t confuse Bitcoin’s network effect lead with Dash being a flawed model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=675&v=qrwgYDAoZV0 is a video from Andreas that speaks about Dash Chainlocks.

Flawed in that PoS is not censorship resistant.

Once again: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-Fallacy

PoW is also not censorship resistant if someone spins up say 10K full nodes on say AWS.

This has no bearing whatsoever on censorship resistance or any other aspect of Bitcoin security.

I'd love for someday all of us to get together and chat 🙂

👍

CryptoEcon 2020

Can it be US based?!

No

Censorship resistance has to do with not filtering transactions sent, transmitted by wallets. It is routing issue.

Heh, well then ... maybe 😉

Not at all

Oooh, incorrect.

Censorship pertains to confirmation, not P2P networking.

(think mining locally)

There are other full nodes routing at the application level. Who is to say there are no full node intermediaries that are not censoring?

They don’t matter

I understand there are nominally 8 connections to other full nodes.

P2P direct routing also needs mining HP to mine a block.

No idea what HP is, but think about if you locally mined a tx you wanted in the chain.

Seem to remember that Slush gave priority to a Tone Vays Bitcoin transaction that by all rights did not pay adequate mining fees. Does a propaganda mine also qualify as censorship?

The p2p network doesn’t matter. It’s not required for either validation or confirmation, and cannot be secured.

HP - horse power

Put simply, If I need a tx confirmed, I'll mine it myself -- no matter the cost.

A single miner can simply collect txs directly from merchants, via email... or pigeons.

Why can’t a Dash miner do the same?

He can, as I said, irrelevant.

Censorship is about absolute control over confirmation.

A majority stakeholder controls all confirmation, forever.

Put simply, if someone with more stake than me wanted my tx to not be confirmed, the chain may move without my tx.

Someone with controlling stake.

Yes, thanks, that's an important distinction.

But this can be done with majority hash power too. The distinction is in the ability to resist the censor.

Miner and Full Nodes strike the balance. If mined blocks don’t conform to consensus rules, the full nodes won’t propagate the mined blocks. If signed transactions don’t conform to consensus rules they won’t be forwarded to miners.

PoS cannot resist, PoW can and does naturally.

Propagation is totally irrelevant.

"The distinction is in the ability to resist the censor." PoW allows options.

Censorship resistance :)

Once there is a censor in PoS he has control forever.

Resistance it literally futile.

Censorship is intermediary interference with TX routing or Mined Block routing.

☝️ No more options.

No, that’s “interference”.

Censorship is a man-in-the-middle attack that prevents information from flowing to intended recipients.

No, you have chose a definition that is not in common use. More importantly it is causing you to ignore an actual behavior regardless of what it’s called.

@skaht What about the case of me setting up the biggest mining shop and mining empty blocks with NO peer connections? This is censorship.

Ledgers/Blockchains can be viewed as the public recipient.

I’m out.

Same, soon, but thanks for good convo!!

Mining blocks with zero transactions is denial of service which is a temporary form of censorship.

Delay, Deter…

Except that it's profitable, so why not ... ?

The Dash Network consensus rules can be tweaked to reject mined blocks not containing any TXs.

Hence, it can be made to be not profitable.

That doesn't solve anything, a government/state actor could do that as well. It doesn't mean that YOUR tx will ever be confirmed though.

@skaht I don't like to travel. Any chance you can make it to CryptoEcon 2020 (no idea where that is), but if you can make it, I think I'd like to make it as well.

If a transaction completion must be timely, a delay in the confirmation has the effect of being censored.

That's not the case.

That is very much the case in the real business world. Products get sent to customers that effectively settle 1st.

Looking into CryptoEcon 2020

Yes, we're not talking about traditional everyday bidness txs (like coffee). We're talking about txs that need to happen at any cost.

Not finding the URL. Can you share?

Like I said, I don't know anything about it, so @evoskuil is the one to hit up. BTW, it's exciting because I think this is the FIRST conference hosted/planned by @evoskuil(presumably with a team, but not sure).

This space BADLY needs cryptoecon lessons. At least analyzing what it is we're dealing with honestly (and better yet, provably).

Got it! Will be game if costs can be constrained, on my dime. Traveling to Anarchapulco during Feb. 2020.

Cool yeah, no comment on the costs, but can't imagine it would be crazy weird. No idea though 🙂

Any idea about what month CryptoEcon 2020 is to occur?

I have no info, but haven't looked, sorry

@evoskuil Now is the time to chime in 😛

FYSA - There are around a half a dozen virtual Dash masternode services like https://masternode.me. Hosting full nodes and/or masternodes is a form of centralization that State actors can effectively pull the plug. This issue is in common with all cryptos.

Masternodes require stake, so that isn't common with all cryptos.

The hosting of Bitcoin full nodes can accomplished on centralized VPS cloud service providers. That is what is in common.

Agreed, but doesn't matter for the mined locally case ... in that I have a tx I want in, and I mine it. Doesn't matter if VPS nodes accept it (because it was valid from the start, just not approved by the censors).

Can accomplish the very same thing with Dash.

The more I think about, Dash masternodes are really staking based upon Proof of Service that also requires staking. Incentivizing masternodes (sharing 45% of the mined block rewards) ensures there are a substantial number of Dash network full nodes.

If 90% of dash masternodes don't want a particular tx included, is there any way it could be not included in the chain?

Lets see if the question you asked either teaches you or me something new. If 60% of a transaction quorum don’t want a transaction to be mined only because the transaction is not consistent with the hard coded transaction consensus rules within the masternode code base maintained by the dash-core development team. If miners don’t like new masternode consensus rules, they don’t have to mine newly formed transactions associated with a new Dash code base. Miners must approve all new Dash-core code releases. Dash transaction quorums are rotated every 24 hours from a pool of ~5K masternodes deployed around the World. The mathematics behind BLS threshold signature technology is applied to randomly select the next transaction processing quorum of 30 masternodes every 24 hours. It is important to realize the Dash-core wallet is a Dash full node without extended Dash masternode behaviors that provide value added services such as voting on Dash Treasury proposals (funded by 10% of Dash mining proceeds), InstantSend, PrivateSend, and eventually services such as IPFS…

I'm talking about a 100% perfectly consensus valid tx. But it's a tx that that a state actors says can't happen because of XYZ.

(think war on drugs, or whatever)

POSe scores penalize masternodes not performing their roles. If a State actor takes down a masternode performing a Long Lived Masternode Quorum (LLMQ) function properly. It is removed and the quorum’s masternodes are updated.

I'm not out to fight this atm ... the masternode system is flawed, as stated earlier. Punish whoever you need, which I'm guessing isn't many.

No masternode bonding is required because the master node selection process is trusteless and PoSe score non-compliance prevents non-compliant masternodes from collecting their round robin staking rewards.

Cool, so if I own 90% of masternodes, this isn't a problem. (?)

I’m not trying to fight. Trying to learn if there is something I don’t understand. Sorry if I’m coming across as being adamant.

Owning 90% is a costly thing to accomplish. The mining of Dash is decentralized. Miners can also run masternodes. About 1/2 of Dash has yet to be mined.

Acquiring 90% of the BTC will drive the market price of BTC up. The same is true for Dash.

90% isn't hard if you're early, which has been my point. It was closer to ~50%.

Satoshi was early and has control of ~1M BTC.

👻

Agreed

But that's not the same as mining power that can secure it ...

BTC havenings are approximately every 4 years. Dash block rewards are adjusted approximately every year and are reduced to 13/14 the rewards of the previous year (-7.2%), which currently puts Dash on approximately a 10 year halvening cycle.

The ownership distribution of Dash is about as egalitarian as BTC and XMR.

There's nothing more I want to argue here at the moment. None of this matters if you're 90% of the current masternodes.

I agree that the Gini Coefficient is extramely important for cryptos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

With BTC being perceived as a store of value, that could ruin BTCs Gini coefficient. Being an easy to use medium of exchange could improve the Gini coefficient to counter the negative effects of staking.

How many governments have survived the test of time with 90% thresholds in legislatures? Nothing gets done. A constitutional amendment requires 3/4 of the States to approve. Albeit, cryptos are about opt-in versus being forced-in. A 90% consensus threshold by BTC could make it a technological dinosaur to cryptos that are slightly more agile with their governance.

That's the point, no? Governance is basically making up new rules whenever/wherever, which is the problematic point.

I mean, if you don't like Bitcoin, just don't use it ...

The network effect of BTC is not to be underestimated. If BTC starts to fail with its fungibility, XMR will become a relief valve. If BTC fails with scalability and processing speed, Dash is likely to become a relief valve with its innate point-of-sale capabilities.

Fiat/Visa/PayPal is the real relief valve though.

Most of my holdings are BTC.

I'm not asking what you're holding, just pointing out that there are options for many people to make transactions.

The market should determine what is best, per Friedrich Hayek’s thoughts.

Fiats are a Keynesian thing, they are dead dinosaurs walking.

Hell is when the IMF SDR is viewed as the solution to Triffin’s Dilemma. Crypto is a also a Stateless solution to Triffin’s Dilemma.

Xcoin/darkcoin/dash is a total marketing scam, I ran a masternode briefly when it was darkcoin

Not mentioned was during the early days when the "bug" that mined most of the coins happened, the coin supply was capped at litecoin's level of 81 mil I think, then sometime after the bug they moved it down to 21 mill or even lower I think

They use "anonymity" half baked crap schemes to market false value

Most if not all the work is just spun from someone else's research or ideas and marketed as innovation. Even the 1000 coin requirement was a ploy to up the price of the coin