libbitcoin-system

inguishable from warnings against CSPRNGs in favor of dice rolls or whatever, perhaps this is an example of the harm that chicken-little crying about CSPRNGS causes. Nor can I figure out for whose convenience this function would serve except attackers. In any case, this is the only place I found any kind of warning and the warning postdates the mastering bitcoin usage (as well as the change that made the command unconditionally unsafe). https://archive.is/HDe8h Current libbitcoin-explorer instructions telling users to use the seed command to generate private keys. https://archive.is/fhm5J#selection-12915.2-12915.10 Current libbitcoin-explorer instructions telling users to use the seed command to generate BIP39 seeds (also private keys). https://archive.is/PWLKJ Current libbitcoin-explorer documentation on randomness noting that bx seed is the ONLY source of randomness available to users in the package, and that all other commands that need randomness require the user to provide it. It also notes that 'bx seed' will not function if less than 128-bits are requested. The private key and bip39 seed usage (above) sure appears to be the "intended usage" in their documentation, but the "bx seed" function as currently implemented (since 2016) is unambiguously not fit for those purpose.

maybe this is a happy compromise between energy usage, throughput and centralization. In some sense, we have many "layer-2" like structures on the internet, with DNS caching, replication and load balancing etc. > Most importantly, non regulation doesn't always mean good. Otherwise why we need law and government? Why not live in the wild west and let strong people kill weak people? Why not let big company play the monopoly? As a counterpoint, regulation isn't always a good thing when it's been captured by hedge funds, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies or other special interests. I'm having a hard time understanding if the line "Why not let big company play the monopoly?" was meant to be rhetorical in the affirmative or the negative. Are you suggesting that company monopolies are a good thing? Or are you suggesting that a decentralized currency unseating what is essentially the current banking monopoly is a bad thing? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDGliHwstM8&t=490s [1] https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

% of the stake — even if owned by separate entities — were to deliberately engage in censorship, the general public would have absolutely no recourse. Conversely, in Proof of Work systems, new miners could join the network at any time to challenge the majority miner censor. That is simply impossible under a Proof of Stake model with network censors. In addition to being vulnerable to total censorship, Proof of Stake consensus suffers from the misfeature of not even having a quantitative fork ranking protocol — i.e. it lacks a way to objectively compare the truthfulness of divergent blockchains. Under adversarial conditions, the PoS chains pos1, pos2, and pos3 cannot be quantitatively ranked by hashing power the way the PoW chains pow1, pow2 and po3 could be, as there is no hashing power in PoS. Instead, there is only “phone-a-friend” consensus, which Vitalik Buterin has euphemistically referred to as “weak subjectivity”. Jude C. Nelson, who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeston, critiques PoS better than anyone [2]: PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?). > Proof of Work blockchains, while wasting a lot of energy, can be regulated easily because the government can simply regulate the large miners in their countries. Because Proof of Stake blockchains can’t even come to consensus under adversarial conditions without human intervention (per JCN), these “blockchains” can actually be understood as distributed append-only ledgers managed by trusted central organizations the membership to which is gated by wealth. It’s highly misleading — even outright deceptive — to promote such systems as being more permissionless than PoW-powered systems like Bitcoin. “Green-friendliness” was never a design goal of cryptocurrency: creating a lasting store of value sans institutions, exchangeable pseudonymously over the internet, was. [1]: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

it more in depth, cryptoeconomics Proof of Work fallacy is a great resource by Eric Voskuil. Link: https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-system/wiki/Proof-o....