NeuCoin's 40-page white paper rebuts all nothing at stake objections

[crypto_coiner]

Thanks for doing that. Actually, Sigmike is one of our technical advisors and has already read the paper and given us feedback.

Then,
How does your solution (if verified) to the nothing at stake problem differ from Nu's one other than that it comes way later (so reasonably likely to be imitating it or identical to it)?

edit: typo

[sabreiib]

Investors have keenly sensed this potential, with NeuCoin having already secured US$2.25 million in seed and angel funding from investors including Patrik Stymne, Uber senior vice-president of business Emil Michael, Facebook’s head of growth Rob Goldman and Hotwire president Henrik Kjellberg.

Wow, the "wolf" is coming! You see Uber/Facebook/Hotwire behind neucoin. Why they prefer PoS rather than PoW?

In fact, we just talked about scarcity 2 months agao, see this link:

https://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=3799.msg37024#msg37024

arbitrageur said

ok let's make a few examples.

bitcoin right now has, according to my estimates, about 250k users. here comes linkedin, they silently buy 10m litecoin (the price will shoot up let's say to 0.02 btc while many people wonder what's happening to that crappy coin) and then distribute them to their users, let's say 100m people, or 400 times as much as btc distribution. on the announcement litecoin will shoot even further to 0.25 btc, its theoretical value, or even higher.

now what's likely to happen? well, I believe that since btc security provided by its mining it's way higher than ltc, people will start selling ltc to get btc. yes ltc mining will increase rapidly, but most likely not enough to match btc's hashrate and security. so slowly ltc will come back down to a reasonable price. also, due to the switching from ltc to btc by most of those 100m people, btc will be much better distributed, even to the point of overtaking ltc new distribution.

after a few weeks facebook creates a new coin, facecoin, a copycat of btc and distribute it even to a wider user base, 1B people. lots of mining will swiftly switch from btc to facecoin as the price of the new coin will make it hugely profitable, but this won't last long. people will most likely start selling facecoin for bitcoin (while the miners are selling for fiat) and we will end up exactly as before.

now, let's say 2 years from now btc is dead and ppc has taken its place with about the same price and distribution btc has now. repeat the two stages. first linkedin adopt an existing copycat of ppc called linkcoin and distribute it to 100m people. istantly it will be 400 times more secure than ppc and even more fairly distributed. so it will takes its place. when facebook creates its facecoin, the same happens. facecoin will replace linkcoin because it has even a wider user base and a fairer distribution. and then, I don't know but nobody today has more network than facebook (maybe some chinese social network?), in any case I believe the copycat process will end up with a winning POS that had the widest and fairest distribution.

Sentinelrv said:

The way I've always looked at it is that every blockchain is independent of one another. For example, Bitcoin's scarcity relies solely on the supply of Bitcoin and not any other crypto that also happens to use proof-of-work. The same would go for Peercoin. Peercoin's scarcity relies solely on the supply of existing PPC, how many are being created through inflation and destroyed through transaction fees. Peercoin is Peercoin. Why should some other copycat proof-of-stake coin affect Peercoin's scarcity? Am I wrong in thinking that copycat blockchains should have no effect on the scarcity of the originals as well as each other, since they're all independent from one another?

Sentinelrv, there are two ways to betray the PPC blockchain.
1) mine on multi blockchains within ppc , this way is blocked by Jordan/Sigmike.

2) Creat a brandnew PoS coin with same features as PPC and get more distributed than PPC. Jordan/sigmike can do nothing about this behavior, if they don't contribute to the new coin.....

Scarcity means substitutability. Bitcoin's scarcity depends on its extremly high hashrate otherwise it has no scarcity at all after being copied thousands times. Could you find other pow coins with 300p hashrate? No!

Now facebook/Uber comes, do you PPC fans still have the faith that PPC has more security than coming Neucoin? They can issue each Uber/Facebook user a small amount of Neucoin.Then what the next? For me, the neucoin's quality/security/popularity better than PPC, I will definately use neucoin and dump ppc! A fake PPC(no offend against neucoin) will overtake original ppc, all boils down to so called " energy efficiency, security" features, LOL. Nothing at stake!

This community has badly underestimated the value of Primecoin, what a pity!

[mhps]

I believe that these numbers are in the right ballpark. However, I don't quite get why you choose these goals. In a 20mn window, the entire network is supposed to find 2 blocks. Modelling the arrival of blocks as a Poisson process, an attacker with >50% the mining power (and therefore, certain to successfully conduct the attack we're talking about) has a probability to find 6 blocks in a 20mn window that is ~0.00059 so of course this is not what an attacker is looking for

I am going to travel so I can't go into a lot of details. I choose a 20min window because it happens often enough that no block is found in 20 minutes. If you squeeze 6 of your blocks in 20 min window you have a very good chance to out-gun the main chain and double spend with your chain. Yes one can do a double spend with less strict requirement.

I haven't checked the math but you are right that one could reduce the required number of coins to mount an attack if he could see the future and pick stakes. I have to think if there are show stoppers.

[mhps]

Bitcoin has huge hash rate barrier(300P?) so the PoW copy cats can hardly get same security as bitcoin.

But what the defend of Peercoin(PoS) against imitators?

You get it backward. BTC sits on a secure hash power barrier and stops improving. POS coins face severe compitition and excel by providing the best service.

[sabreiib]

Bitcoin has huge hash rate barrier(300P?) so the PoW copy cats can hardly get same security as bitcoin.

But what the defend of Peercoin(PoS) against imitators?

You get it backward. BTC sits on a secure hash power barrier and stops improving. POS coins face severe compitition and excel by providing the best service.

I agree with you that without hash rate barrier, the competition among PoS coins is much severer than in PoW world. If big companies such as Uber/Facebook create their own PoS coins, their scarce resource---big "Social Networking Services" can play critical role in beating PPC.

The chance for PPC is leaving.

[koubiac]

So in this regard a flexible stake modifier like in Blackcoin (and Neucoin) is more secure. I don't know though if a flexible stack modifier opens up other attack vectors.
It would be great to have Sunny's and SigMike's opinions on this matter.

Since all the stakes share the same stake modifier (the last one to have been computed) an attacker working on his own fork can grind through all the stakes at the same time by grinding through the previous stake modifier. With Peercoin's implementation it is more complicated (grinding through a given stake modifier only modifies the performance of the stakes using this particular stake modifier).
However, as explained in section 3.3.3 of the Neucoin whitepaper, we have modified the parameters of the stake modifier in a way that makes this attack very inefficient. An attacker would need >30% of all the coins to succeed.

Jordan Lee posted about this here...

NeuCoin Is A Bitcoin Alternative Designed For Microtransactions (2.25musd in...

Citing me and the Nu network (in addition to sigmike) as the source of their nothing at stake solution would be the right thing to do. Sigmike and I co-architected it in a long series of communications.

To be totally honest I haven't paid much attention to Nu. We discovered the idea of the punitive duplicate stake detection mechanism through Sigmike's proposal on github ]https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/pull/75/commits[yo]
If it has been developed with the help of jordan lee, we would of course be happy to acknowledge it in our paper.
The reason why I haven't followed Nu as much as other currencies, is that I don't believe the "parking" mechanism - which is supposed to stabilize the price of the coin when demand drops - is economically sound. I've had a chance to discuss it with a couple economists that are into crypto when Nu came out and I just don't believe it is economically sustainable.

Then,
How does your solution (if verified) to the nothing at stake problem differ from Nu's one other than that it comes way later (so reasonably likely to be imitating it or identical to it)?

As I said, I'm not very familiar with Nu's implementation. To answer your question:
1/ The reward mechanism is very different and is designed to both reward early adopters and insure a high percentage of coins staked
2/ As described in the previous posts (about preprogrammed attacks) we believe the current implementation of the stake modifier introduces severe security issues.

I can't seem to find anything in the whitepaper or wiki about the effect of distribution on the security of a proof of stake coin.

river333 this is an interesting topic and as you said it hasn't been extensively covered in the white paper. I think this topic deserves a separate post to be properly tackled, so let me come back to you as soon as I have a moment

[Sentinelrv]

To be totally honest I haven't paid much attention to Nu. We discovered the idea of the punitive duplicate stake detection mechanism through Sigmike's proposal on github ]https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/pull/75/commits[yo]
If it has been developed with the help of jordan lee, we would of course be happy to acknowledge it in our paper.
The reason why I haven't followed Nu as much as other currencies, is that I don't believe the "parking" mechanism - which is supposed to stabilize the price of the coin when demand drops - is economically sound. I've had a chance to discuss it with a couple economists that are into crypto when Nu came out and I just don't believe it is economically sustainable.

We didn't believe it was sustainable either. That's why we discussed it for several months and came up with better solutions. Before the supply of NuBits could only increase. Parking was only a temporary way to reduce supply, but in the end it would end up adding even more to the supply through parking interest, hence the unsustainability. Now we've connected NuBits even more with NuShares. When demand is lower, rather than parking, we can tap our market cap by voting to print more NuShares, selling them and using the proceeds to buy and burn NuBits. So now the supply can effectively be increased and decreased at the will of shareholders. Parking is still available as a tool, but I imagine it will end up being used less than originally planned. Here is a quote from Jordan that describes how our network is setup now...

When our network began, we had a way to increase the NuBit supply at the will of shareholders. We then decided to add a way to decrease the NuBit supply at the expense of increasing the NuShare supply (due in the 0.6.0 release). It should not be surprising then, that a mechanism for reducing the NuShare supply would also be introduced, to complete our flexible supply of both shares and currency.

Specifically, I am proposing that in most cases, instead of distributing dividends, proceeds from the sale of NuBits be used to purchase NuShares in the open market, which are then burned. This is commonly done with equities and is known as a share buyback. Due to low liquidity in the NuShare market, we can expect such activity will have a marked positive effect on the NuShare price. This high NuShare price will enhance our ability to sell NuShares later when we are in the opposite part of our economic cycle and need to support the NuBit price. Therefore, we will have two complimentary mechanisms which are the exact inverse of one another:

1. When NuBit demand is low, NuShares will be created and sold while NuBits will be purchased with the proceeds and burned. NuShare supply increases as NuBit supply decreases. This depresses the NuShare price as it supports the NuBit price to the pegged level.

2. When NuBit demand is high, NuBits will be created and sold while NuShares will be purchased with the proceeds and burned. NuBit supply increases as NuShare supply decreases. This inflates the NuShare price as it suppresses the NuBit price to the pegged level.

With the ability to control supply up or down, our system is much more sustainable than when it was originally introduced. The main thing we're working on right now is decentralizing liquidity operations while eliminating counterparty risk. You and your partners should come join us on the Nu forum if you think these inherent changes make our system more economically sound. We're always looking for people that are serious about creating a more useful cryptocurrency. We can use all the help we can get. I believe a non-volatile crypto is the future. There's still a lot to learn though and we're always evolving as you can see. Of course there are uses for cryptos like Peercoin as well. Also, you might find that Jordan Lee is more willing to make security changes to the protocol than Sunny King. He's much more active than Sunny as well, at least when it comes to community discussion.

[sabreiib]

Hi koubiac, your answer to my questions below will be appreciated.

1) Scarcity. You claims Uber/facebook/Hotwire managers involved in Neucoin project, how can you prove this? Any interview to them? And is it possible for neucoin to be accepted by those companies in future? PoS coins have no hash rate to protect themselves so they need some scarce resource(such as facebook's SNS) to become valuable. That's why PPC is so vulnerable when Neucoin comes.

2) Volatility. PoS is suitable for share concept and not perfect for currency because "rich people get richer". Are you interested in issuing a stable currency just like Nubits? Nubits is not perfect but it has a lot of innovation. I agree with you that the parking mechanism is not economically sustainable and a better solution does exist. Although in your white paper the long run inflation rate(defined as monetary supply) is steady at 3-6%, another inflation/deflation definition(coin price vs FIAT ) predicts that the Neucoin's FIAT price will be volatile. As long as being volatile, Neucoin is not suitable for unit of account at all.

[Dan_Kaufman]

Hi Sabreiib
This is Dan. I am also part of NeuCoin team.
Regarding the uber/facebook/hotwire guys -- they are all angel investors in NeuCoin. We have dozens more investors of the same type. Check out the list on our wiki at neucoin.org
Will Uber, facebook, hotwire, candy crush saga, spotify, etc etc work with NeuCoin the currency just because their top managers are investors and advisors? No way.
But all of these guys see the potential in what we're doing - developing a digital currency that will be easy and useful for regular consumers - with a distribution model that rewards all participants who help make the currency more valuable and useful.
And after the currency launches in the next few months, you can be sure that the NeuCoin team will be talking to our angel investors about doing pilot projects with their companies. We have two of these pilot projects lined up already in the online video and music spaces. Again check out our wiki for tons of details. One key thing that NeuCoin's distribution model allows is that.. if a partner like candy crush or spotify wants to promote a service to their user base that can be paid for in NeuCoin, the NeuCoin foundation gives the user a small amount of free NeuCoin to try the service for the first time. If he likes the service, he can buy more NeuCoin. But allowing the user to try the experience the first time for free with the least amount of friction makes all the difference.
The volatility issue you bring up is a good one and I don't disagree. In another post we'll explain why we hope that NeuCoin will be less volatile than most other cryptos due to its initially super high but then shrinking inflation rate, and the role that the foundations play by choosing the rate at which they sell coins. But for sure the currencies that are focused on removing volatility like Nubits really solve this and we just try to ameliorate it.

[Sentinelrv]

But for sure the currencies that are focused on removing volatility like Nubits really solve this and we just try to ameliorate it.

Did you read my previous reply on the advancements that have recently been made in Nu to address koubiac's concerns about unsustainability? As I said, I think the Nu team would love to work together with the people in your team to advance and market this technology. I would suggest joining our forum or emailing info@nubits.com if you're interested in working with us.

[crypto_coiner]

We discovered the idea of the punitive duplicate stake detection mechanism through Sigmike's proposal on github ]https://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin/pull/75/commits[yo]

Sigmike is not even mentioned in the list of advisors (http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#advisors) and in the technical background (http://www.neucoin.org/en/wiki/#bitcoin) although his work has been crucial to your recent advertisement.

Consequently, symetrically, I dont see any reason from the Peercoin perpective to pay attention to Neucoin and refer ppl to it if you are not doing it already and correctly , notwithstanding DAOs like Nu have the benefit to be the first to have solved this issue and Neucoin solution (if any) is just a reuse of it.

[sabreiib]

Hi Sabreiib
This is Dan. I am also part of NeuCoin team.
Regarding the uber/facebook/hotwire guys -- they are all angel investors in NeuCoin. We have dozens more investors of the same type. Check out the list on our wiki at neucoin.org
Will Uber, facebook, hotwire, candy crush saga, spotify, etc etc work with NeuCoin the currency just because their top managers are investors and advisors? No way.
But all of these guys see the potential in what we're doing - developing a digital currency that will be easy and useful for regular consumers - with a distribution model that rewards all participants who help make the currency more valuable and useful.
And after the currency launches in the next few months, you can be sure that the NeuCoin team will be talking to our angel investors about doing pilot projects with their companies. We have two of these pilot projects lined up already in the online video and music spaces. Again check out our wiki for tons of details. One key thing that NeuCoin's distribution model allows is that.. if a partner like candy crush or spotify wants to promote a service to their user base that can be paid for in NeuCoin, the NeuCoin foundation gives the user a small amount of free NeuCoin to try the service for the first time. If he likes the service, he can buy more NeuCoin. But allowing the user to try the experience the first time for free with the least amount of friction makes all the difference.
The volatility issue you bring up is a good one and I don't disagree. In another post we'll explain why we hope that NeuCoin will be less volatile than most other cryptos due to its initially super high but then shrinking inflation rate, and the role that the foundations play by choosing the rate at which they sell coins. But for sure the currencies that are focused on removing volatility like Nubits really solve this and we just try to ameliorate it.

Hi Dan, thanks for your answer. In Neucoin wiki
Strategic Advisors
Jackson Palmer
Creator of Dogecoin

It reminds me that Neucoin is probably a "PoS version Dogecoin", usually with very good Marketing. There was a severe hash rate competition between Doge and Liticoin, finally LTC succeeded with the help of higher and stable hash rate so that nowadays Doge's capitalization and trade volume is obviously less. Doge fails to overtake LTC, although the latter has little innovation and bad marketing.

Now, will PPC maintain its Number One PoS status 1-2 years later after competition with Neucoin?

Wait and see, : My opinion is that the PoS coin's lack of scarcity and can easily replaced by a better distributed and marketing competitor.

Furthermore, if you find a good scheme of stable currency, the open source of Nubits project is useful, especially the Nubot section. Sooner or later, Nu will face your competition too.

Where to download your wallet? Any screen shot?

[redlee]

Hey,
Sabreiib mentioned Neucoin so take a look at the neucoin wiki.
1. Why 3 foundations? 1 Bitcoin foundation is bad enough.
2. I try to find more info about Daniel Kaufman.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-kaufman/41/348/205
It would be convenient for people to verify the authenticity of these "core team" and "advisors" by giving more info like linkedin or email to contact them.
3. Last but not least, paycoin scam still smells fresh.
http://coinfire.io/2015/03/06/coin-fire-gaw-miners-catches-sec-ftc-irs-dhs-attention/

[Ben]

1. I try to find more info about Daniel Kaufman.
   http://www.linkedin.com/pub/daniel-kaufman/41/348/205
   It would be convenient for people to verify the authenticity of these "core team" and "advisors" by giving more info like linkedin or email to contact them.

@Redlee: There are lots of "Dan Kaufman"s on LinkedIn. The one you want is here: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=13890633

[koubiac]

Hey,

We're trying to spark a debate on proof-of-stake versus proof of work on bitcoin's subreddit. (NOT focused on neucoin)

Feel free to join and help get proof-of-stake back on the map!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/30t3k4/proofofstake_is_more_decentralized_efficient_and/

[sabreiib]

Hey,

We're trying to spark a debate on proof-of-stake versus proof of work on bitcoin's subreddit. (NOT focused on neucoin)

Feel free to join and help get proof-of-stake back on the map!!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/30t3k4/proofofstake_is_more_decentralized_efficient_and/

The NeuCoin Project’s 39-page white paper mathematically demonstrates how PoS can maintain consensus and defeat all attack vectors - including grinding, history revision and pre-programmed attacks. Bounties for anyone who points out flaws in the paper.

Although I am not interested in your bounties, as a XPM fan, I will argue for PoW.

[Sentinelrv]

I see there are some concerns about banks holding a lot of coins. I'm not sure about this issue, but I made a post about how Nu potentially solves the problem in my comment, since NuBits themselves can't be used by the banks for evil purposes, since they have no minting power. I was responded to by Jeff Garzik about Peercoin's security problems and tried to address them in my replies. Check it out...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/30t3k4/proofofstake_is_more_decentralized_efficient_and/cpvlsw6

[koubiac]

Although in your white paper the long run inflation rate(defined as monetary supply) is steady at 3-6%, another inflation/deflation definition(coin price vs FIAT ) predicts that the Neucoin's FIAT price will be volatile. As long as being volatile, Neucoin is not suitable for unit of account at all.

As Dan said, this is not our highest priority in the near future.
These are definitely valid concerns and at some point, some measures will have to be taken but we believe that in the short term it is not what is holding back consumer adoption.

[Sandrine]

Proof of stake is only as decentralized as its distribution. As far as I can tell, after the presale 96.66% of coins (and therefore total control of the network) will be under the control of the original private investors and foundations. While it does say that coins will be distributed to new users, developers, companies etc. to encourage growth, I wouldn't have much faith in this improving things to an acceptable level.

Hi river333! I'm also part of the NeuCoin team, chiming in to continue the discussion about the subject you mentioned above.
True that NeuCoin’s three transparent non-profit foundations - the Code, Growth and Utility foundations - initially own the majority of coins. Please note that the foundations are controlled by NeuCoin holders (1 coin = 1 vote).
Over time - as you already mentioned - the foundations will be distributing the currency to all participants who increase its value - consumers, merchants, developers, service providers, etc - a section of our wiki covers this subject in details.

These three foundations have no economic incentive to do anything else than distribute their coins. What is often disregarded is that the economic incentive of the founders is precisely to distribute the coin as much as possible - so that the minority of the coins (owned by founders and investors) grow in value. Centralization-wise, these people's holding are orders of magnitude smaller than that of Bitcoin whales.

[sabreiib]

Although in your white paper the long run inflation rate(defined as monetary supply) is steady at 3-6%, another inflation/deflation definition(coin price vs FIAT ) predicts that the Neucoin's FIAT price will be volatile. As long as being volatile, Neucoin is not suitable for unit of account at all.

As Dan said, this is not our highest priority in the near future.
These are definitely valid concerns and at some point, some measures will have to be taken but we believe that in the short term it is not what is holding back consumer adoption.

At that point,you may copy Nubits source code. LOL

IMHO, I feel Neucoin will be very good at Marketing,wish you become PoS version Dogecoin, hope Neucoin complete node quantity exceeds PPC's hundreds scale within several months, thus Neucoin rapidly reaches better security/quanlity than PPC.
Don't go scam please, just be a better counterfeit of PPC. Can counterfeit be better than a genuine PoS (PPC)? Yes! I believe. This is cruel for PPC fans for their three years support, however, they will thank you Neucoin team because your activity tell them truth that PoS coin will always cheap as fresh air.
When more GPUs in cryptoworld move to Dogecoin, Doge hashrate/security rise and Litecoin hashrate/security decreases. Vice versa. But a PPC node can also run Neucoin application with little price, isn't it?
If BTC community really wanna kill PoS, there is a simple solution. Every BTC holder/wallet can recieve a certain amount(be proportional to one's BTC quantity, on a side chain?) of new PoS coin named "Cheap PoS", there are almost 8000 complete BTC nodes in the world, right? Thus the "Cheap PoS" security far better and will probably always better than PPC/Neucoin. "Cheap PoS" is difinately the No1 capitalization PoS and protects BTC's statue.
Wake up PoS fans!
In order to have a bright future, the only way out for PoS system is to introduce scarce FIAT/BTC into your system, appearently you haven't realized the fatal principle.