I see that my response above was “flagged by the community” and thus greyed out. What is going on? Is this the “you are posting too many links” heuristic?
Uh, must be an automatic action because your account is too new and posting links maybe?
I wouldn’t worry about it.
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I see it grayed out too… not sure why flagged/auto flagged. But I can still view upon pressing the text.
K=1, T=75 still gets to a very incorrect number, though?
I brought this up in a chat I am in with the other paper co-authors. Our best guess is that we were using a slightly different parameterisation in the code that generated the table and failed to update the paper.
Rechecking, we are getting the same results as your table. This should be ok though. It does not change the point being made.
Fair enough. Perhaps the propagation impedance was higher, or otherwise, that leads to greater differences. The math is quite clear, though, that regardless of variables used (within bounds), Tailstorm is more effective.
@pkel @Griffith Is the paper here “Parallel Proof-of-Work with DAG-Style Voting & Targeted Reward Discounting” (I am coining as “NextGen TS” for now) the latest generally agreed-upon system for BU? If this is the latest, I want to take a deep dive into that now that TailStorm is largely understood.
(cc @ShadowOfHarbringer)
Thanks for the reminder, I will review it next.
It seems that TailStorm is not what I want since it changes the block reward. The block reward using TailStorm could be too random due to reward slashing (called “discount” in the paper) and to miners playing the algorithm for profit and it cannot be forseen just how much it will be played.
I will also publish a comparison between TailStorm and internal intermediate/sub blocks soon™.
I’m not sure this is game-able. Miners cannot earn more than the current block reward no matter what, though maybe some clever scheme to ensure more blocks. Doesn’t seem very likely though, particularly with orphan rate improvement. Actually is supposed to improve withholding. But also seems NextGen TS will further improve this. Will read the paper to learn more.
It’s absolutely gameable (not sure how precisely yet, but it is) for a simple reason.
You get slashed (discounted) for every block that is not mined in series but in parallel.
Bitcoin(Cash) has the advantage of being a battle tested algorithm that has been gamed for 14 years since inception, so we have real-life data to back it and we pretty much already know what can happen/will happen.
Such data does not exist for TailStorm, it will take several years to create it.
So it is pretty much absolutely certain that TailStorm would change the block reward and issuance. The question is how much - at this point impossible to predict.
The issue with this is that Bitcoin, without original issuance can be claimed to no longer be “Bitcoin” which is a very significant psychological/social cornerstone.
not the maximum per block – just the minimum. It is an incentive to improve selfish mining.
We changed the difficulty algorithm, we have 10-block finality – seems by the same logic those would make us not Bitcoin as well.
A reward scheme with the same fundamental principles seems to me like it would still be Bitcoin. And just because something was done originally, does not mean it is the best way forward. (this does not mean I am saying we 100% should change our current reward scheme). Bitcoin was meant to be improved (when it makes sense, of course).
Anyways – let’s both take a read of NextGen TS and see what that brings.
Significantly chainging the issuance is not part of the original contract of “Bitcoin”.
So even for me, this is too much. It could turn out that issuance will change by for example 10% as the result of mining parallel blocks.
This is not really acceptable.
It may seem this way to you, but it may not seem this way to hundreds of millions of different people.
I am not saying it makes sense, I am saying this is how it is with humans.
To be fair – the majority of crypto doesn’t care about “bitcoin.” As is clear with BTC and every other coin taking up 50% of total market cap. So the “hundreds of millions” is most likely not going to care.
Don’t get me wrong, I see where you’re coming from. The people suggesting us to change the name I think are misguided. Having Bitcoin in the name is important, particularly for the brand recognition. But the brand recognition is what hundreds of millions of people will care about, not as much the reward scheme as long as it remains non-inflationary. That is the critical part. If the inflation of supply is lower as a result of a new thing, I do not see where the negativity would come from.
Though rather than just us two, I would like to hear more opinions from others in this forum. Though, still want to finish reading NextGen TS first, then can go into further detail.
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why is this even hidden lol
I can more or less agree with this.
However, this does not change the stupid reality.
If an alternative solution can be found (and I am pretty sure it can), then I would like to avoid creating new “Bitcoin Civil War” over what is “Bitcoin” and what is not.
Having a solution that can work (and possibly can work even better) than TailStorm while not sacrificing the “Bitcoin” brand would be preferable.
Since my last reply, I see people worrying about Tailstorm changing the reward scheme, short term and total issuance, in an unpredictable way. I want to present two arguments why it’s not as bad as you think.
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In Bitcoin miners build a tree of blocks. They ignore everything but the longest branch. Rewards are also restricted to the longest branch. In the short term (ignoring halving), the amount of minted reward is proportional to the height of the tree which is also the length of the longest branch/chain. It’s the same in Tailstorm, by design of the discount scheme: the amount of minted reward is proportional to the height of the tree. In case of parallel mining, we end up with more blocks in the chain (compared to Bitcoin, where parallel blocks would be orphans) but the discount scheme ensures that the amount of coins minted stays the same.
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Total issuance is fixed if implemented correctly. Bitcoin ensures a fixed total supply of 21M, by halving the mining reward every 210k blocks. Tailstorm adds more blocks to the chain (what otherwise would have been orphans) without minting more coins. The right approach for a fixed total supply is to schedule the halving based on coins minted, instead of number of blocks included. Merging point 1, the Tailstorm halving should be scheduled whenever the accumulated height of subblock trees crosses a multiple of 210k. The analogy to Bitcoin is obvious: also here the halving is scheduled whenever the height reaches a multiple of 210k.
I cannot speak for BU. This paper is my own thoughts. You should take a look as it presents a simplified version of Tailstorm (I call it tree style voting there) where all blocks have a PoW and a list of transactions (also the summaries). This solves the cloned summary problem discussed earlier in this thread, in an IMO lean manner. DAG-style voting and discounting is (IMO) an obvious improvement over Tree-style voting. But it breaks with property 1 of my last reply. That can maybe be fixed though by further tweaking the reward allocation. Discussions welcome!
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Correct, however what I worry about is not the scheme working incorrectly.
I worry about miners playing the algorithm.
This cannot be accurately predicted and it is absolutely certain that miners will play the algorithm for profit, like they did with Bitcoin (Cash).
So ultimately the precise issuance speed cannot be predicted at this time (EDIT: due to insufficient real-life evidence).
Total issuance is not the problem, it’s easy to ensure that the final number matches.
Issuance speed is the problem here.
PS. Will you also address my point about temporary mining in parallel when all previous weak blocks are already “taken” by a summary?