[Question] Contract enforcement, doomsday, risk, etc (this topic is not very focused)

[Nagalim]

I would prolly sell all my NSR immediately. Also, it would be more like “Why does that grant have 25% support when no one’s voting for it?” It wouldn’t just get granted without people taking notice.

[CoinGame]

We don’t have plans for that event. It is a known risk, but has always been considered very remotely possible.

[Nagalim]

It’s akin to a hostile hard fork of the Bitcoin miners (basically, a 51% attack). Prices would plummet.

Note that if you have 51%, why would you pass a grant? Why not just 6 conf (or 15 conf or whatever) as many double spends as you want? It would take people longer to notice.

[jgeewax]

OK, so basically if anyone were to abuse the power, you’re saying you at least would throw in the towel saying “this experiment failed”?

Which… sounds like it would set in motion a bunch of events leading to NBT and NSR basically becoming worthless.

So basically, we have to hope that this guy is neither a current shareholder, nor capable of getting 50+% NSRs…

Note that if you have 51%, why would you pass a grant?

Good point. The only reason I can think is because the money-printing machine is basically clicking a button in the UI, versus double-spending which is a bit more technically involved? (I think?)

[Nagalim]

Yes, if the network succumbed to a hostile hardfork I would throw in the towel (as I would for bitcoin if all of a sudden core developers and 51% of the miners started making new coinbase BTC at their addresses). Basically, the assumption with Proof of Stake is that the network is constantly being 51% attacked by all the right people.

[jgeewax]

It’s akin to a hostile hard fork of the Bitcoin miners (basically, a 51% attack).

This is a good point, however there’s a recurring cost to 50% of the mining power, whereas a 51% attack on Nu would be a one-time purchase and then you’re done.

I also don’t have numbers, but I’m under the impression that we’re talking about O($10k USD) per hour to sustain a 51% attack on the current BTC network… which means the joker would need much deeper pockets…

[CoinGame]

It takes 5001 blocks in any 10,000 block window to pass a grant or a motion. At one minute block times it would take (with 100% of the blocks voting on that grant) at the soonest 3.4 days for someone to pass such a grant. If there’s a system in place monitoring the votes then the network can be alerted to such an abuse and developers may be able to intervene. That might be controversial itself though.

[Nagalim]

Buying 51% of the NSR network is not just a ‘one time purchase’. Either you’d have to basically be JordanLee, or you’d have to buy up the network, which means prices would skyrocket and people would hold onto their NSR tight. It’s a losing battle.

[jgeewax]

Let me start by saying I love how many Batman references I get to make in this thread. I hope you guys are laughing a bit with me on this…

Either you’d have to basically be JordanLee, or you’d have to buy up the network, which means prices would skyrocket and people would hold onto their NSR tight.

Sure, let’s say the price-tag goes up by 10x or even 100x. $100m USD is (unfortunately ) not that much money anymore, so buying these up might be more expensive, but certainly possible.

To avoid the economics conversation there though, let’s just say you’re JordanLee:

Who somehow gets corrupted and becomes this guy:

Who then decides to trash Nu, for whatever reason…

Are we all in agreement that this is a very real possibility?

To give you some context, I’m hoping to do some very real stuff with NBT, because I think it’s amazing. However it seems to me that an attack on BTC would be absurdly expensive and is therefore much more unlikely, whereas an attack on NBT seems much more likely and much less expensive, so that has me a smidge worried.

I don’t think these things would happen, but if I’m doing something “real” with NBT, people will ask “how expensive and likely is an attack?”, I’d rather say “as unlikely as BTC”, but it seems a bit like the only firm and truthful answer is “welp, there’s this guy, who if he got pissed off, could take down the entire system… he won’t though…”

(I’m definitely hoping I’m wrong, so please someone tell me I am ?)

[CoinGame]

I would love to say with confidence that you’re wrong. Realistically this is an experimental project that is totally unique in the cryptocurrency world. Outside of the concerns you mentioned there are probably many other attack vectors that are unique to this project as well that we haven’t even thought of yet. It has a lot of moving parts. I think you’ve been around long enough to see people just show up and help push things forward a little bit at a time. You’re another piece of that puzzle with the ideas you’ve brought and nobody is exactly sure what the big picture is. Everything could fall apart tomorrow. I think it would be as irresponsible for anyone to tell you it’s a bullet proof system right now, as it would have been for anyone to say the same about Bitcoin four years ago.

Though if I had to give you a completely biased non-objective opinion on the matter I would say you’re wrong. I’ve been on the development team since it was a secret project in early 2014 and I don’t think the possibilities that have been mentioned here are realistic. I wouldn’t continue to spend my time on the project if I thought they were.

Only time will tell if i’m playing my cards right.

I will add though that we’ve already had a lot of bumps and bruises to the project. You can read about them all on our project history page. https://docs.nubits.com/history/ We’ve been able to bounce back, pivot, evolve, and I think it has a lot to do with how the voting system is designed. Maybe seeing it be able to survive through so much already and maintain its goals is why I feel so positive about it. It has not been an easy path.

[jgeewax]

That is a rockin’ answer. Love it.

So right now: experiment, risky, bumps in the road, totally vulnerable to attack, however already pretty far along that path, so while still likely to be bumpy in the future, unlikely that the road leads off a cliff.

SGTM

[Nagalim]

Just to point out, you say that a “Jordan Lee Attack” is scary, but you make reference to a ‘cost’. The Jordan Lee Attack has no cost, it is a purely opportunistic attack. The 51% attack on a PoS system outside of initial distribution is still an extremely expensive attack, in my opinion akin to a prolonged 51% attack on a PoW system.

[Cybnate]

Just like to jump into this interesting, slightly derailed thread.

(I’m genuinely hoping that this thread ends with “OK cool, sounds like we’ve already got this all covered”.)

No, we haven’t (yet). We are on a road to determine what we need to run a DAO managing stable coins. In the last year we managed to maintain a reasonably solid peg. That was bumpy road indeed and we had a lot of lessons learnt which made us stronger.

guarantee that no single individual “owns” more than 50% of the shares

No guarantees, would be interested to hear whether you have one keeping the Shareholders kind of anonymous. The principle of a DAO is that there is no Shareholders register.

if someone was covertly buying up shares, and had a few million bucks to spare

Yes, with a few million you can play a lot around, not only with Nu. There are many companies and other organisations in this world you can ground with that amount of money. The question is why would Nu stand out for them.

OK, so basically if anyone were to abuse the power, you’re saying you at least would throw in the towel saying “this experiment failed”?

We don’t have a war machine or a legal team at hand to fight abusers as they are probably anonymous anyway or smart enough to hide in places where it is not worth pursuing them.

let’s say the price-tag goes up by 10x or even 100x. $100m USD is (unfortunately ) not that much money anymore, so buying these up might be more expensive, but certainly possible.

Goods and services in this world can always be bought at some price and people will get corrupted :-0

So right now: experiment, risky, bumps in the road, totally vulnerable to attack, however already pretty far along that path, so while still likely to be bumpy in the future, unlikely that the road leads off a cliff.

Ever driven a car? Risky, bumps in the road, vulnerable to attack, pretty long around, still be bumpy for a while, many cliffs and idots to circumvent every day. Does that mean you are not driving a car for that reason? Probably not.

Point what I’m making is that every activity comes with a risk. Unless the same activity can be done with less risk or in other better ways it can still be profitable to persue.

[quote=“jgeewax, post:32, topic:3484”]
SGTM [/quote]
Hope that you continue to contribute to our unique and fascinating DAO and this great forum and help us find solutions within the mission and constraints we are working. As Coingame already said there a lot of moving parts and we are not confident we have them all covered. The question is would that ever be possible. Unlikely I would say.

However the more investments and contributions from smart and/or wealthy people the more risks and issues can be addressed or mitigated. So I would like to hear your ideas you have with NuBits so we can strengthen our DAO even further.

Just make sure you fasten your seatbelts and you might feel a little queasy at times but we will get you somewhere

My adagium: No risk, no joy, no progress, no value!

[zoro]

Actually, attackers, hackers and all the other “bad guys” out there are doing “good”!
Why? because they are the tools of evolution! They will destroy something that can be destroyed, at the same time a new more robust system will take its place!
Remember how the borgs (in star trek) were able eventually to adapt at any attack!

[jgeewax]

The 51% attack on a PoS system outside of initial distribution is still an extremely expensive attack, in my opinion akin to a prolonged 51% attack on a PoW system.

I agree that they’re similar, and both costly. My hunch is that the PoW 51% attack is more costly due to the ever-moving target.

PoS attack here is kind of like climbing a really long staircase (each step is buying N shares). And the steps can get taller (more expensive) due to your influencing market rates for shares. But once you’ve climbed a step, you’ve climbed a step.

PoW attack seems more like a climbing a down-going escalator. You can’t ever “stand still”, and the attack is all about you climbing much faster than the escalator is going down – and the speed tends to vary based on how many people are also climbing.

Not sure if that’s a great analogy, but luckily that particular piece isn’t all that important anymore.

I think the key piece here is the “outside of initial distribution”. The Jordan Lee attack seems to be the only realistic one, so that’s going to come up a bunch. I suppose it’s somewhat similar to Satoshi coming back and dumping all his BTC on the market – in the sense that there’s a person out there able to shake things up. The difference is that there’s no way for Satoshi to give himself more BTC after selling – whereas a Jordan Lee attack makes it possible to create more NBT…

[jgeewax]

@Cybnate: Yea, this did get way off topic… I was having too much fun getting answers from everyone… Sorry !

No guarantees, would be interested to hear whether you have one keeping the Shareholders kind of anonymous. The principle of a DAO is that there is no Shareholders register.

I am certainly all for anonymity, so a shareholders registry doesn’t sound like the best idea to me. Further, I don’t think there’s a good way to prove that addresses aren’t controlled by the same party (which is a weird thing to want to prove… never thought I’d be looking to solve that one …).

The problem that comes with that though is you really are taking a large risk if you invest in NBT or NSR, and while shares are inherently risky, bits are supposed to be a solution to the problem “I’m sick of paying for a diet coke with a Facebook share… that’s an investment, not money… wtf!”. (At least that’s why I love the NuBit idea…)

Because of that, it’d be very reassuring to know that the share distribution is such that we’re sufficiently confident that no single person had the ability to effectively become a dictator (which I don’t think we can say for sure is the case today). After all, part of the reason I suspect we’re all here is that we don’t want a single person dictating monetary policy – we want to vote on it.

One of the amazing things about Bitcoin is the fact that monetary policy is effectively defined and enforced in code. And while that can get them into trouble (ie, this debate about increasing the block size limit), at the very least people know that a dictatorship here would be extraordinarily unlikely. That said, it seems like maybe that wasn’t the case in the early days of BTC, so maybe we’re just in that same position right now…

Regardless, I don’t think we know how to put the peg into code (yet…?), but would be … pretty awesome if we could do that…

Ever driven a car? Risky, bumps in the road, vulnerable to attack, pretty long around, still be bumpy for a while, many cliffs and idots to circumvent every day. Does that mean you are not driving a car for that reason? Probably not.

I get your point that everything’s risky – I guess what I’m trying to point out is that there are boatloads of alternatives to Nu, and I’d like Nu to be the one that’s less risky for everyone. The risk of driving may not be enough for you to not drive all together, but you don’t ignore the car safety features when you go car-shopping.

It feels a bit like we’ve added airbags to the Nu-mobile, and we’re continually improving the safety features – which is great. I just want to make sure we’re not overlooking the biggest one, which is: “there very well may be a bomb in the trunk…” If that’s the situation, it doesn’t matter how good your airbags are if the car blows up…

(Also – New Yorker here no car for me)

Just make sure you fasten your seatbelts

Totally.

The one thing that I can say so far is that the community here seems super nice, and receptive to idiots like me asking far-fetched doomsday type questions, and poking at a project that they’ve all invested a good deal of time in – without getting defensive and angry.

I think that says a lot about the project. You guys rock.

[jgeewax]

@Cybnate: I renamed the thread so it’s more reflective of what we’re actually discussing… because … yea it’s gotten messy… My bad.

[CoinGame]

Because of that, it’d be very reassuring to know that the share distribution is such that we’re sufficiently confident that no single person had the ability to effectively become a dictator (which I don’t think we can say for sure is the case today). After all, part of the reason I suspect we’re all here is that we don’t want a single person dictating monetary policy – we want to vote on it.

I will say that there is a possible (although it would be extremely controversial) way to make sure that no one entity controls most of the network. We can literally print more NuShares. If the network passed a motion (or directly a grant) we could print enough new NuShares and distribute them in a more transparent process than the original distribution. Maybe people wouldn’t like this because it would impact their share of the total supply, and could negatively impact the market price. Though if it was the only way to dispel the “Jordan Lee doomsday” scenario it’s a possibility.

The nice part is we can actually vote on whether or not we’d like to do that. Jordan Lee doomsday scenario is a possibility. There is no single person that can verify his distribution actions. Jordan has a lot of influence on the board because he’s the architect. Though he has submitted some ideas and changes that he felt very strongly about and they completely fell flat when it came to a vote. Since those moments I never had a sense he had enough of ownership to push his own policy through.

But if we wanted to dilute the existing share supply to get some more people involved into the ownership pool in a way that transparently proves no single existing entity could have complete control it’s entirely possible.

[Nagalim]

Worth mentioning here that B&C followed NSR distribution + BTC distribution + IPO. I agree that there is some ‘blind faith’ associated with the NSR distribution, but we have seen that at least the ones minting are responsive to the needs of the network because the important votes get through. So we don’t know the initial distribution, but we have history of voting records as proof of fair play. But no, I don’t have an answer to the question of does a single entity control the majority.

@coingame presents a good possibility. We could use another, more fool-proof distribution criteria and dilute. It would have to be publicly announced and probably involve some method that shareholders collectively think they have a good shot at (like liquidity provision or burning NBT). Anyway, I’d propose that we are headed in that direction (we currently pay stuff with nbt but there was a time when we talked about using nsr) but it is still a good ways off yet. I think the core group is really trying to get everything working right, and I personally trust in the current distribution model. We haven’t had a huge amount of opposition, though people wish things happened faster, we haven’t had any hardforks or rebellious alternate forums popping up, so I think we’re doing alright. If there’s a bomb in the trunk, well I’ll be damned, but I can’t imagine it would make a whole lotta sense to build a car with a bomb in it. I mean, what if Jordan Lee is the person dumping NSR on the market and every time there is a buyback he sells? I could go on with the hundreds of better ways to milk Nu, but every single method you end up realizing that the best action is to help Nu grow so that you can take your something something on the side. That’s a business, I just don’t see why someone would create a business from scratch and invest all that energy into it just to turn around and destroy it just as it’s starting to take off.

But yah, colluding actors suck. What if like 3 of the initial investors decide to say screw everybody else. Or what if a board of like 10 super-owners take control over the network and we all have to do what they say? The datafeeds are nice because you know that if the operators start behaving vagrantly people will pull their feed.

[masterOfDisaster]

So much about cars here…
Have a look at this:

[Draft] FLOT and T4+6 - masterOfDisaster edition

Oh, I've found another very interesting article, which explains why we should start to work on the topic I created this post for: Only after we've started to create a rule set, we can start automating parts of it!

It’s related to Google cars and driverless money based on rule sets.

I think it fits here