[tahoe-dev] weekly dev chat report for 2013-05-02

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

(This may be confusing, because it is  cryptic and telegraphic and
also doesn't have anything to do with Tahoe-LAFS.)

In attendance: Brian, Zooko (scribe), Andrew, Amber, Daira

Brian says:

Bitcoin 1.0 is a specific implementation of a more general concept.

Actors

Secure Distributed ECMA Script

Purses

Verification doesn't necessarily have to be proof-of-work based.

Ben Laurie's cabal idea.

Maybe split up the jobs of sequencing and verification.

Ask everyone to commit to a statement of fact, and then after everyone
has committed, reveal.

This is an algorithm for reifying Schelling Points.

Zooko thinks this is vulnerable to manipulation for profit.

You might want to use this only for a few specific things.

Make a monster movie in which an alien gorilla attacks one of the
participants of the video chat.

The rules of the game get to change according to the votes of the
people playing the game.

You can submit patches to the code that runs the game board.

* full-scale actors in the block chain

* separating out the sequencing from the verification

* vote in patches

* could have lower super-majority requirements for unit-test-matching patches

* meetings, actors, secretaries, actors can be put into storage, ...

* you have to pay for CPU and RAM

* meetings can have predictable bounds, enforced

* use cases:
   + simple 1-in-1-out payment
   + multi-in-multi-out payment
   + ripped certificate
   + options contract of some kind

* transaction fees can be generalized into the notion of a "tax"

* if primary sequencer is detected cheating, he gets ejected and
replaced by one (random?) sequences from the pool of backup sequencers

Daira says:

next week's Weekly Dev Chat agenda: Noether

Amiller says:

* "Scarcity is dead ; long live scarcity." ; Amiller doesn't like
gold-like scarcity, and likes credit networks like Ripple. ; Cites
alternative crypto-currencies as evidence against scarcity.

* When is it not in your best interest to mine on the longest chain?
When there is an exceptionally large transaction. What you should if
you win is take only a small slice and redistribute the rest to the
next miner... The "coinbase maturity rule" prevents that, so that rule
is an important design flaw.


Brian says:

* can vote in new rules changing money supply

Zooko says:

inputs to crypto-currency value: monetary base scarcity, gold-rush
effect, demand for crypto-currency as opposed to other currency ; The
latter is potentially far bigger than the first two, by at least
several orders of magnitude.


Amiller: i submit to the record my notes about the rational mining
behavior and coinbase maturity
https://gist.github.com/amiller/cf9af3fbc23a629d3084


--
Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep

https://LeastAuthority.com