On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:36:34PM +0100, Matthew Toseland wrote: > > Basically the security model is now an attacker has to outspend the > > defenders in terms of Bitcoins sacrificed. Not perfect, but it may be of > > value, especially in conjunction with other protections. They do have > > potential anonymity issues, but we're talking about opennet where the > > attacker knows your IP address anyway. There's also a varient of > > proof-of-sacrifice where you prove you attempted to create Bitcoins, a > > proof that has no linkage to any other Bitcoin transaction. > > AFAICS this is a slightly more complex form of "pay to join", with the > dubious advantage that nobody gets the money. In theory this might help > people to not think we're scammers (although transient mode is more important > to that end) ... but by the time you've explained it, you've lost them > anyway, so I doubt it's worth the additional complexity.
Well any decentralized attempt to limit sybil attacks and other attacks via some kind of limited resource ultimately boils down to "pay to join", the question is what are you paying and how likely are honest users to already have what they need to pay? > It's likely that for the foreseeable future, any attempt to charge an entry > fee will result in losing a lot of nodes... (Not existing nodes, but > potential nodes). Social issues are a real concern - we have this same problem in Bitcoin with SPV nodes, like a light-weight smartphone wallet, that aren't contributing back to the network but are consuming resources. How do you distinguish between a botnet pretending to be tens of thousands of smart phones and tens of thousands of real ones? People are allergic to any kind of fee... Another option you might want to consider is proof-of-work. In some ways it's not as effective, because like I said before often the actual cost to attackers is less, but the social dimensions may be more effective. What are your thoughts there? The proof-of-work could easily be something that is gradually phased out and replaced by proof-of-useful-work as the opennet peer responds to more and more requests, doing useful work. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 00000000000000717df9323a96a2c158b1be0249d0762d3b966e861d728a7b67
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
