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> But there are new altcoins that have solved both of these, that exist right now! What cryptos do you believe have solved these problems?

zeroxfe 9y ago
Stellar, NEO, Ark, Ripple, Lisk, IOTA, RaiBlocks -- all using novel variations dPoS/PoW/PoS and making different tradeoffs w.r.t. centralization.
- rspeer 9y ago
  You're just listing names of coins that have been pumped recently. IOTA isn't even real cryptography.
  - zeroxfe 9y ago
    I have no opinion w.r.t. they have been pumped or not. I'm just saying that they all use novel consensus mechanisms that don't rely on huge amounts of work or long finalization windows. NEO, for example uses dBFT consensus (which is a type of dPoS), and trades off availability for consistency (the opposite of Bitcoin). It has a block time of about 20 seconds and can do thousands of transactions per second. IOTA, uses a block DAG (which it calls Tangle) instead of a chain, and uses a novel PoW mechanism to validate transactions that allows for parallelism, and it's throughput grows with the size of the network. (I don't know what you mean by "isn't even real cryptography.") There is a huge amount of research in this area, and some of the ideas coming out are really interesting (from a distributed consensus perspective.) (/me worked on paxos-based consensus systems for a decade.)
    - rspeer 9y ago
      My view of all these cryptocurrencies is that the math and CS they're originally based on is pretty cool, and they do provide a proof of concept of a rather difficult distributed consensus task. But all the speculation right now cares about none of that. They only care about optimizing how quickly people can be convinced to throw money at the coin. They don't need to do the math right, they just need it to sound right. IOTA is a prime example. IOTA does cryptography like a literal cargo cult does aviation. They just went through the motions without understanding what they're doing. They rolled their own hash function, in ternary for some dumb reason. It turned out to be vulnerable to attacks known for decades the moment a cryptographer looked at it. The spin they've come up with after that indicates that they don't fundamentally understand why not to roll your own crypto, especially not a hash function. They are amateurs, screwing around. Any research you've read in distributed consensus, I guarantee you that the IOTA team doesn't understand it. The fact that you included IOTA in your list undermines the credibility of your entire list, and makes me at least think that you haven't applied your expertise in consensus systems to looking at what these coins actually do. More information: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/ https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/
mattbeckman 9y ago
I'm sure you'll get multiple answers, but Bitshares solved these problems in 2014 with Proof-of-Authority (aka Delegated Proof-of-Stake). Seconds between blocks produced, and the transaction fees are like $0.005 or something ridiculous. The code was forked to create the Steem blogging platform, and now EOS is in development to essentially back Ethereum-like smart contracts with the DPoS model. Ethereum is trusted, and Vitalik is a great project leader. If they can solve distributed smart contracts with his new plans, that would be huge. For now, it seems like the middle ground is where it's at.

zeroxfe 9y ago

Stellar, NEO, Ark, Ripple, Lisk, IOTA, RaiBlocks -- all using novel variations dPoS/PoW/PoS and making different tradeoffs w.r.t. centralization.

rspeer 9y ago
You're just listing names of coins that have been pumped recently. IOTA isn't even real cryptography.
- zeroxfe 9y ago
  I have no opinion w.r.t. they have been pumped or not. I'm just saying that they all use novel consensus mechanisms that don't rely on huge amounts of work or long finalization windows. NEO, for example uses dBFT consensus (which is a type of dPoS), and trades off availability for consistency (the opposite of Bitcoin). It has a block time of about 20 seconds and can do thousands of transactions per second. IOTA, uses a block DAG (which it calls Tangle) instead of a chain, and uses a novel PoW mechanism to validate transactions that allows for parallelism, and it's throughput grows with the size of the network. (I don't know what you mean by "isn't even real cryptography.") There is a huge amount of research in this area, and some of the ideas coming out are really interesting (from a distributed consensus perspective.) (/me worked on paxos-based consensus systems for a decade.)
  - rspeer 9y ago
    My view of all these cryptocurrencies is that the math and CS they're originally based on is pretty cool, and they do provide a proof of concept of a rather difficult distributed consensus task. But all the speculation right now cares about none of that. They only care about optimizing how quickly people can be convinced to throw money at the coin. They don't need to do the math right, they just need it to sound right. IOTA is a prime example. IOTA does cryptography like a literal cargo cult does aviation. They just went through the motions without understanding what they're doing. They rolled their own hash function, in ternary for some dumb reason. It turned out to be vulnerable to attacks known for decades the moment a cryptographer looked at it. The spin they've come up with after that indicates that they don't fundamentally understand why not to roll your own crypto, especially not a hash function. They are amateurs, screwing around. Any research you've read in distributed consensus, I guarantee you that the IOTA team doesn't understand it. The fact that you included IOTA in your list undermines the credibility of your entire list, and makes me at least think that you haven't applied your expertise in consensus systems to looking at what these coins actually do. More information: https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/ https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/iota-response/

mattbeckman 9y ago

I'm sure you'll get multiple answers, but Bitshares solved these problems in 2014 with Proof-of-Authority (aka Delegated Proof-of-Stake). Seconds between blocks produced, and the transaction fees are like $0.005 or something ridiculous. The code was forked to create the Steem blogging platform, and now EOS is in development to essentially back Ethereum-like smart contracts with the DPoS model. Ethereum is trusted, and Vitalik is a great project leader. If they can solve distributed smart contracts with his new plans, that would be huge. For now, it seems like the middle ground is where it's at.