You don't need to 'claim' anything. It's written into the rules of the blockchain. You cannot change the rules like that and expect to have your blocks appended to the canonical chain.
I don't know that we can predict today what people in the future will view the incentives to be, but its certainly not impossible that the collective view of the bitcoin community might shift towards some change on that front.
I'm not saying this is the only solution, but if having no block rewards really threatens the existence of bitcoin, and a regular inflation rate were deemed to be the beset way to solve that -- the cap on the number of coins isn't actually immutable. There would be a hard fork in that case, sure, but if that's where the people went, that's where the value would go.
Keep in mind that the miners would have some incentive to back a change to that cap. Every block reward would be extracting value from the non-mining users and distributing it to themselves -- similar to the inflation tax we face with normal currencies. It's not inconceivable that they could drag the user base along with if it was seen as existential. A 2% inflation rate is better than the collapse of something holding a significant fraction of one's wealth.
I suppose you might argue that the amiga paved the way for the architecture of the PS2 - the copper chip ran a rudimentary display list, the blitter hardware accelerated graphics operations. But I wouldn't say there is a direct relationship... wait you're not talking about the CDTV, are you?
Nope not CDTV, CD32 was a later project and really quite good but C= couldn’t sustain it. The story I think I heard was that the similarity in the controllers was some sort of homage. Maybe it was PS1 rather than PS2 ... thinking about the timeline that all lines up, and Sony would have been looking for a jumping in point rather than starting from scratch after being burnt by Nintendo.
CD32 was a repackaged Amiga 1200. It was the worst fifth generation game system. It featured such gems as Wing Commander running at 1 frame per second.
It was a fine machine, and though it was weaker than its competitors it was ahead of the curve. You say “repackaged Amiga 1200” like that’s a bad thing. The Amiga was the premium home personal computer of the early 90s and only ever died out because of mismanagement at Commodore.
The GS (graphics chip) in the PS2 had a great hardware bug whereby if you turned off the z-test, it would never come back on again. You had to change the z mode to always pass to get around it.
It's up for me. You may be in an area, or using an ISP, that is blocking access to that domain. Unfortunately I don't have any info to hand on alternate access methods, but I know they exist.
I think the direction is right -- the solution probably lies in deriving scarcity from intelligence unique to the brain (for now).
Both brains and computers can perform pattern recognition. Computers are better at this task because they can be scaled and brains cannot. Therefore, this form of intelligence lies in the domain of financial capital. It can be abstracted through the cost of performing arithmetic operations (Proof-of-Work).
Brains can perform abstract thinking (answering the question why), computers cannot. If we could create a metric tied to the ability, it would be nested in the human capital.
I'm skeptical in regards to the practical application proposed in the thread. Even if this is robust, it'd be incredibly wasteful. The whole point of PoW is that it's moving computation from the brain onto a chip. This would go the other way around.
That idea is oversimplified. One can write a traveling salesman solver, that will outperform most humans in several weeks of work: any decent RL algo like A2C will do. Even a simple genetic algorithm will probably perform better actually, and that can be written as an exercise during a CS school lesson.
Not to mention that the central consensus mechanism is completely broken.
You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive:
Quoted from my post linked below:
o) Network hashrate is the overall power of the network - in bitcoin, this is the computing power needed to generate a block.
o) Bitcoin employs a mining reward which creates a competition between miners to produce a block and claim their reward for doing so. Slower miners lose out to faster miners, but they still participate in the competition to produce a block because they stand a chance of winning occasionally.
o) This mining subsidy provides a positive incentive to miners to play by the rules, and encourages them not try to double spending, because they might as well claim the mining reward instead of trying to double spend which is often much more difficult than producing a single block.
o) The mining subsidy also encourages all miners to participate in the mining process, which gives an overall metric for total network hashing power, which you can then use to give an estimate of when it is safe to accept a transaction of a given size, as confirmed, because (on average), the block reward is equal to the electricity cost of mining that block. That means that when your transaction has been buried under enough blocks that the mining subsidy equals the transactions size, it is more or less safe to accept that transaction as confirmed.
Now, imagine the situation with no mining reward.
o) Instead of participating in a competition to win the block reward, miners have no positive incentive to participate anymore. They now are left with the negative incentive to try and double spend.
o) Since these miners are not contributing their hashing power to the network anymore, the overall hashrate of the network in unmeasurable, since these miners are quite likely to leave their ASICs in sleep mode until they want to double spend
o) With the network hash rate unmeasurable, there is no way to put an estimate on when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed.
When there is no way to estimate when it is safe to accept a transaction as confirmed, that currency is now useless because any transaction can potentially be reversed.
This is why both byteball and iota use trusted third parties to secure the network, but at that point, you might as well be using VISA.
> You cannot have a trustless consensus without a mining incentive
This is not true, Proof-of-stake creates a suitable incentive to verify transactions and maintain the network. It's a legitimate alternative to proof-of-work.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that proof-of-stake can be made trustless. The only designs that I've seen that seem realistic rely on some notion of checkpointing to prevent large scale chain rewrites.
While it may be possible to make that checkpointing distributed, the only way that I'm aware of is to use proof of work. The easier path is to just checkpoint in the client, so that the trust comes from the github repository that pushes the client, or gets trusted updates from some trusted authority.
That's not to say that trustless consensus is necessary for a currency. I used to be a very strong believer that that was a necessary component, but I've begun to question that belief. The notion of censorship-resistance is an important part of why I liked Bitcoin in the first place, but may turn out not to be sufficiently valuable to people to impact coins that don't have that property.
> I have yet to see a convincing argument that proof-of-stake can be made trustless.
It turns out that "trustless" is more subtle and not quite as discrete as we might've thought. While PoW coins like Bitcoin are probably ranked higher on this scale than others, it might not matter.
> That's not to say that trustless consensus is necessary for a currency.
Agreed. IMO these newer coins that are lower on the trustless scale would not have been possible without the high bar that Bitcoin set. But now, they are.
> It turns out that "trustless" is more subtle and not quite as discrete as we might've thought.
That's exactly it -- even in the centralized variants, the "trusted" authority doesn't have a lot of power. The main power they have is censoring transactions, both in the present (not accepting a new transaction) and in the past (rewriting the chain to omit a transaction and all of its dependents).
The ability to rewrite history is a dangerous one, but is mitigated by the fact that they can't do so undetected by the network. This is a social/economic effect rather than a cryptographic one, which has its own dangers, but means that the trusted authority risks losing (or forking) its status to a competing trusted authority for the same coin if the consensus of the network is that they cannot be trusted.
The forward security guarantees are just that the transactions are signed, and those signatures cannot be forged, even by the trusted authority, so there is no way for another actor (including the trusted authority) without access to your private keys to spend your coins.
I'll have to give it a closer look, but from a cursory look it seems that there's no avoidance of the bootstrap problem (given two chains, which one does a new node choose?), and no guaranteed Sybil-resistance in the "honest majority" required to avoid the grinding attack.
It would take the endorsement of someone that I consider extremely trustworthy to even go to the trouble of trying to deconstruct whether this approach is valid.
It stands, I think, in stark contrast to the simplicity of the proof-of-work based Sybil resistance, and the "central authority will sign the block" based Sybil resistance.
That said, given this discussion about the nature of trust, this scheme may work in effect, even if in the end it devolves into a centralized or social proof to find the correct chain. I'm not sure it adds a lot on top of that except instilling some potentially false sense of security in naively written nodes.
Sorry, no it is not. There is no nash equilibrium in PoS at all. The only thing preventing it from collapsing completely is hidden centralisation in all the PoS protocols.
I think you must have misread what I wrote because I specifically mentioned incentive.
> There is such a mining incentive in proof-of-stake, block signers get rewarded.
Not in all PoS coins, actually. And arguably you don't need it. Your stake's value is contingent on fulfilling the implicit promise of the network: honest, accurate, fast transactions.
> both byteball and iota use trusted third parties to secure the network
and Byteball looks more secure than IOTA you can have several witnesses that can bee different entities and you have to conclude more than half to change consensus state.
