Tuck Fheman : Decentralized Blockchain Technology & Doom Updates

All too often I see people making the claim that Delegated Proof of Stake is too centralized, but centralization is all relative. Today I would like to explore the meaning of decentralization as it relates to Proof of Stake systems and compare the top 3 approachs: BitShares, Nxt, and Peercoin. My aim is to be as objective as possible.

Steve Baker MP at the historic debate in UK Parliament on Money Creation

On Thursday 20th November 2014 over 30 MPs took part in a debate in the House of Commons on money creation and society. This was the first time in 170 years, since the Bank Charter Act in 1844, that the topic has been fully debated.

Decentralization: Get ready for the Revolution

Much like the DVR before it, decentralization technology is hard to explain to an audience who needs to be educated about how it works. And much like the DVR before it, decentralization has a terrific side-effect: cutting out the middlemen

Everything in the music world begins with the artist. Unfortunately, it all too often doesn’t end with artists receiving adequate compensation for bringing their artistic vision to life. And we’ve all seen what that means: fabulous musicians reduced to playing for “drinks and tips” or else no longer playing at all as they drop out to pursue boring desk jobs that help keep the lights on in their apartments.

At the same time of the second police operation against the centralized Darkmarkets under Tor, we had big important releases of the new generation darkmarkets, Openbazaar and NXT FreeMarket.

The peer-to-peer market could fill Silk Road's shoes, and it could be much more difficult to bring down.

Popcorn Time Shows the Way - Now "Impossible" to Shut Down

www.cryptocoinsnews.com

The recent news about the crackdown on Silk Road 2.0 are a reminder that, as long as Web services depend on central servers, they can be shut down by Big Government and Big Capital anytime. It’s evident that we need decentralized, distributed services without central single point failures. Popcorn Time, the BitTorrent video streaming service, has taken a small step along the distributed way.

We use the Internet for so many things every day, and yet few people realize how old the Internet's plumbing is. Surfing the web, sending and receiving email, and much more actually work by using a thirty-year-old centralized routing system called the Domain Name System (DNS), which many of us would dearly love to decentralize.

The Imminent Decentralized Computing Revolution

blogs.wsj.com

Gary Sharma, founder of GarysGuide: A mega-trend is brewing that could make bureaucratic hierarchies, middlemen and gatekeepers everywhere obsolete including social networks, banks, stock exchanges, electronic voting systems and even governments. It’s called decentralized computing, and it could fundamentally transform the way we connect to and exchange value on the Internet. There are three technologies that will form the foundation of the decentralized computing stack -- mesh networks (decentralized networking), block chain (decentralized transactions) and autonomous agents (decentralized decision making). ...

A Glimpse Into XCurrency’s Mission to ‘Decentralize Everything’

cointelegraph.com

Last week, CoinTelegraph received a press release from XCurrency that said its developers were working on architecture for a distributed, blockchain-based web that got my attention — primarily because the release announced XCurrency’s team will soon create the first such web 3.0 application.

Coinbase Case Demonstrate the Pitfalls of Regulatory Compliance

cointelegraph.com

A Reddit user ostensibly representing SatoshiBet, an online casino, posted a warning to Coinbase users Wednesday that the payment processor had begun closing accounts of customers who transferred bitcoins from gambling sites.

This week I am meeting with Vitalik to discuss a partnership between our two projects.  We spent several hours last night and 5 hours to day talking about blockchain technology and challenges we both face.   I am happy to report that we are finding some common ground and are planning more regular collaboration.

Some of the things we have discussed is:

• Moving Ethereum to DPOS 
• Honoring AGS/PTS with some of the stake saved by not mining Ether.
• Distributing the Mining Rewards via Delegates
• Improving the performance of Ethereum
• BitAssets, DNS, and other market algorithms.

Vitalik seems to be of the opinion that DPOS is the way to go and the best overall compromise.  He appears to recognize proof of work as dead and I have shown him that the "nothing at stake" argument does not apply to DPOS.    We will be working to improve upon DPOS.

With respect to Turing Completeness and claims that Ether can do everything and anything, we had a deep discussion regarding the lack of first class data structures (heaps & trees) in Ether and even had some discussion on alternative abstraction on their data store.    DPOS could significantly enhance the types of contracts ethereum could run by greatly increasing speed and effectively eliminating the potential for chain reorganizations.  

Effectively my goal is to make both projects better and to secure AGS/PTS holders a stake in Ether.  Our two communities can then work together to fill the various niches in the DAC ecosystem as we both agree that in its current incarnation Ethereum is not well suited to implementing many of the algorithms we have proposed for BitShares DACs.

Other areas of potential collaboration is our wallet technology.  Our architectures are very similar and there is potential we may be able to combine resources here.

Vatalik is a smart guy and the two of us working together really helps sharpen both of us.  

Nothing final at this stage, but I am optimistic a lot of good will come out of this.