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Ask HN: Is Bitcoin alt. witho POW and open to every gov's unilateral action posible?
I have difficult or impossible technical requirements and I would like a genius and practical mathematician and programmer to suggest an approach. You must understand my requirements and then come up with the closest workable alternative.
I have the following problems with bitcoin:
1) The proof of work paradigm wastes resources. The proof of work is literally proof, that you have burned resources in some direct way.
2) It is lawless, not subject to seizure by any authority through any direct, programmed interface.
I would like to address these issues. Requirements:
1. I would like proposed version not to rely on proof of work, to stop wastage.
2, I would like every country to be allowed to change any account to which its users give their citizenship. I would like users to be able to specify their citizenships when starting.
e.g. U.S. citizen specifies he or she is subject to U.S. seizure and oversight; dual citizen of the U.S> and Canada would be able to specify these two countries, so that either the United States or Canada would be able to directly modify their account.
3. (optional) I believe it would be better for account balances not to be public; it should be visible to the countries of citizenship.
4. The owner of one account should be allowed at their option to add identity information to the account which is visible only to their countries.
5. I believe that some countries are incompetent: after they fuck up and accidentally leak their private key, it must be possible to roll back all actions taken from the time of their fuckup.
Please propose an outline for a scheme that meets some of these mathematical requirements. How can it be run?
I'd like to hear ingenuous mathematical proposals that meet the above requirements. If you have no solution or are not ingenious enough, please do not respond with low-quality comments. Thank you.
- al2o3cr 10y agoI believe there's already a system like this, that uses Turing-complete rules described in natural language to regulate the behavior of a network of independent agents (both human and computer). They're called "banks", regulated with "laws" and "lawyers". But seriously, some of these requirements appear to make an implementation exceptionally challenging - in particular, if value is allowed to leave the system by transforming into other currencies or tangible items then #5 essentially requires lawyers. #2 and #3 together also seem to imply that a state-level actor could create arbitrary balances in secret. I would like a genius and practical mathematician and programmer to suggest an approach. Wouldn't we all. And for free on HN, too!
- notimpossible 10y agoI found your introduction exciting, until I realized you were only just joking about the real-world. Well, regarding a state-level actor being able to create arbitrary balances in secret: I specify only forfeiture, not creation. In essence each state to which someone checks their allegience should be allowed to remove (as punishment or following whatever rule of law process is in place there) whatever they want from any of their citizens' accounts. This would at least allow some recourse against illegal activities. Yes, the involvement of the respective governments' legal systems is obviously a given. The difference between this and banking is that banks don't operate a distributed monetary network anyone can join and transfer coins among without any fee: on the contrary, banking infrastructure is cumbersome. The required scheme has the goal of allowing governments to intervene directly. Otherwise it would be like bitcion. Also the onerous proof of work blockchain work requirement is lifted. However the mathematics and trade-offs to make this work are not obvious. Hence my Ask HN. Thanks for your response.