War games

I’ve seen a few of those “I’ve written a white paper that solves all the issues with Proof-of-Stake” posts on different sites. I always think “hey… what issues? Peercoin is a true PoS and it’s already working!”

What do you think about cloning Peercoin and let’s call the clone PeercoinWars. The protocol stays more or less the same, with only small changes such as a built in self-destruct after n-blocks (rendering the coins themselves worthless) and removing the checkpointing system. Then after distributing some coins to some people, we create a bounty with real non-clone peercoins. The entitity that are able to successfully attack (a more precise definition will have to be made) PeercoinWars will receive the bounty.

This way we could simulate what would happen if there is an attack. Everyone involved will benefit. The winner wins the bounty, if there is a weakness in the protocol we learn about it and can patch the code. If there is no weakness, well then that would be totally awesome and the bounty would instead be paid out to the unity project or another Peercoin project.

If there is an exploit found, the real Peercoin uses checkpointing so probably we would still be ok. Also better do to this now, when peercoins are relatively cheap and we have the checkpointing in place.

What say you?

Is that not the same as Testnet with some marketing sauce? :wink:

Slight differences on testnet make an attack easier: it takes 80 confirmations for a new block to mature instead of 520, and 1 day (instead of 30days) before a stake can mint.

hmmm, sauce :slight_smile:

I’ve wondered, too, if this is a good idea (and I keep coming back to the fact that it is).

My recommendation would be to do the same thing that we did with Peershares, and to create a new “coin” forked from the Peercoin source – my naming suggestion, “BreakTheStake” – with an intentionally broken “RealNet”. To do this, you insert non-valid hashGenesisBlockOfficial. To see how this all works, check out the Peershares wiki page about standing up an offering.

I’d try to disconnect this experiment form Peercoin, in the name, not because I’m worried about the perception, but because it gives us a better chance to market it as a stand-alone initiative.

I’ve never learned what the testnet was all about, so yes this might be totally the same thing. Perhaps the secret in the sauce is the bounty?

Is the testnet also using a checkpointing system? It sometimes get some bad criticism, so it would be nice (I think) to simulate what would happen if there was no checkpointing in place.

I think what Ben said was a great idea. Probably the P-word should be avoided.

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=19851.0 things like rhat is what I’m talking about. If we invite warren to a war game he will have a chance of both proving his point and winning a bounty.