“Unable to differentiate” is a statement of fact (my perception of it) not argumentum ad personam. Would be if I implied that it’s due to your deficiencies of a kind. Which I never did.
As to the rest - ignored as promised due to being not relevant to the debate.
My stance in the debate is that the Nakamoto consensus is a social consensus mechanism for popular vote, analogous to popular vote in a nation-state, and that I agree with both yours and @Brooks viewpoints on the benefits of trusting a mob (as in Ethereum or Bitcoin) or trusting a person (as in Holochain. ) Besides social consensus, Bitcoin/Ethereum and Holochain use same technology, both have hash-linking and digital signatures (trustless parts. ) That it is not relevant to the debate… it is my stance in the debate.
Machine consensus in blockchains and Bitlattice is independent on social consensus. While one can use those mechanisms for achieving for instance voting consensus these two levels never mix. A use of a tool is external to that tool. One can use a hammer to drive nails or as a door stopper. The hammer stays just a hammer, doesn’t become “nailing hammer” or “door stopping hammer”.
You start from a prerequisite that the tools you desperately try to pin here have anything to do with the phenomenon we discuss. Then, you present your stance inferred from that prerequisite. It would only be valid given the prerequisite is true. But isn’t.
The Nakamoto consensus as a mechanism for popular vote, is social consensus. It is integrated with machine-consensus like hash-linking and digital signatures, and in Holochain the social consensus is at a smaller scale while the machine-consensus parts are the same. The innovation from Craig Wright was the social consensus part, the rest is much older. His invention is the exact equivalent of popular vote in a nation-state, the first version just happened to vote with CPU because it was technically easy to implement. If you did manage to actually use the popular vote mechanism in a nation-state as a door stopper I guess you could call it a door stopper, a flower pot and a mug are the same object more or less, still given different names.
You are the one who is rejecting my stance in yours and @Brooks debate, and dictating about why I hold it. Stick to the topic instead, ad hominem are not necessary. That the Nakamoto consensus is mob rule (popular vote), whereas Holochain is person-to-person consensus (relationship/community based), is a premise that is valid and true, and relevant to yours and @Brooks debate, and the reason I agree with both your viewpoints, I see benefits to both of the niches you debate about. I see no conflict, and I think you are both just debating based on… false premises, actually. One main selling point of Holochain was that it was “meta” in regards to social consensus, that it could scale to Bitcoin-type social consensus. I ignored Holochain to begin with, and paid a bit more attention to it after you gave it credit on Bitcointalk, and never got the impression that you were against small scale social consensus, your tweet just pointed out a benefit with BL and @Brooks response was that it was “dystopian”, and I do not agree it is, I am very interested in your technology as an “exocortex” for humanity, but I still like relationship-based ledgers, also as part of web 3.0, I see them as two separate niches. That opinion is quite unpopular, I was banned from a Holochain channel once for mentioning it. Overall, I agree with both yours and @Brooks viewpoint.
While both Bitcoin and Ethereum and similar technology are in the public domain, exactly how BL coordinates which history to follow, I cannot access that, only you can. What you have told me about BL seems to just be focused on improving the parts of blockchain technology that existed long before Bitcoin was invented, proof-of-structure seems to be for “sharding”, and I have seen similar ideas for sharding blockchains, just less refined. The lattice structure you use seems to be an improvement of the chain structure in a blockchain (so separate from the social consensus in a blockchain or bitlattice), and the lattice cryptography seems to be an evolution of the elliptic curve cryptography. I would assume, based on Bitcoin/Ethereum as prerequisites, that you have a separate popular vote mechanism, but, proof of that is not accessible to me while it is accessible to you. I respect your integrity, I have thought that I might miss something about BL in how you have designed popular vote into it, but this is my perspective at the moment based on what I can access, mainly based on Bitcoin and Ethereum as public utilities that have been around for 5-10 years.
According to what I said before, I shouldn’t answer your post. However, I found it entertaining to prepare a little analysis. I’m also in a mood for a short lecture of logic.
But the analysis first. I love numpy and mathplotlib - echo of my years long affection toward statistics. It’s so easy to dump huge amounts of data in minutes onto a graphical representation. The results of my recent, little experiment are below:
Consensus seems to be a matter that you are the most interested in. Maybe it deserves another thread? Your almost constant interest in Bitlattice is certainly something that I should appreciate. What bothers me however is your diminishing interest in trust - as it’s still the subject of this debate. The source is here - just feed it with a text file with posts separated by a delimiter. You can apply it on your own - you don’t have to trust me.
The above is of course a situational joke, the sample is very small, so we all know that one couldn’t draw serious conclusions out of it, right?
Before we go toward a lecture I have one warning. You already accused me of wrongdoing - namely, you accused me of using straw-men tactics and argumentum ad hominem. In the first case you weren’t kind to present any substance for it. In the latter you brought my sentence: “I can’t help when you’re unable to differentiate between what is internal and what is external” as an evidence. The problem is that the sentence isn’t a personal attack (as ad hominem should be) - it was a statement of fact. In my eyes you’re unable to differentiate what is internal and what external (what your latest post confirms) and I really cannot help here. If you took it personally it’s your problem - deal with it. But if you continue accusing me (which in practice is a form of ad hominem itself) our dialogue will come to a definite end.
Let’s now head toward a lecture. A Scottish monk, living in XIII/XIV centuries, known as Duns Scotus formulated a logical principle known as the Principle of Explosion. It basically states that from two contradicting prerequisites any conclusion can be drawn and this conclusion will be true. By any I mean anything. Like “the Moon is made of cheese”. That has many consequences, even as far as in logic that our computers use.
Subscribing to both parts of our debate, on a general level, you can effectively and logically draw any conclusion you want. If you only supported specific parts of mine and @Brooks arguments (like @jakob.winter did) all would be correct, as our stances are complex. By supporting both general stances, that are defined in a binary, mutually exclusive form, you are free to discuss anything being always right and it’s almost correct - almost, because there is also the Law of Noncontradiction. But that’s for another lecture.
As to Bitlattice - our conversation about the details was like playing Chinese whispers. I tried to explain you the architecture, you asked repeatedly about social consensus and wanted me to include your proof-of-power. I even went as far as to propose that I’ll help you in implementation of your proof in the dapps layer (I wanted to be nice), because BL core is well equipped when it comes to proving and doesn’t need anything more. Ultimately I wrote “As to Bitlattice - you can consider it whatever. I operate on facts, not considerations” as I lost hope that I’ll ever successfully explain you internals. Therefore, I won’t try again expecting a different result. And I repeat for the last time - I won’t discuss BL matters here anymore.
You have said for two years that you disagree that popular vote in Bitcoin and Ethereum is important in BitLattice. I respect your integrity. I’m unable to access proof of your claims, is all. My best guess based on the technology that is available in the public domain is that BL would have a popular vote mechanism, and it has seemed to me that proof-of-structure as you have explained it is not that but that it is more of a sharding-mechanism. So my stance in yours and @Brooks debate is still that I agree with both your viewpoints, that it can be good to trust a mob like the Nakamoto consensus in Bitcoin, or, a personal relationship like in Ryan Fugger’s Ripple running on Holochain.
I claim that the popular vote issue is not important at all in context of distributed ledgers. The difference is that the structure of tools you mentioned enable malicious actors to manipulate networks (and they do it on a regular basis), while BL restricts such manipulations. I have a proof and you’ll be able to read it straight from a white-paper when it’s published. However, I doubt that it’s going to change your mind. You start from a hard set prerequisite that the popular vote has something to do with consensus mechanism in distributed ledgers. That assumption is a logical fallacy, as I already presented several times in a row. To my example with a hammer you replied with a statement that I can assign any names to a phenomenon. My point wasn’t about names, but about a nature of an object. If I could, citing you “use the popular vote mechanism in a nation-state as a door stopper” it would still be a popular vote mechanism. Names doesn’t matter, nature of a thing/phenomenon doesn’t change with context. The same applies to the consensus mechanism - it’s just a logical mechanism designed to deliver an output based on an aggregate of inputs. Repeatably, provably. Just that - it’s its nature. No society is needed here, no will, trust, mumbo-jumbo. It’s the machine consensus (or better an algorithmic one). What one uses it for is irrelevant. Machine consensus can be used to perform a popular vote, but it remains machine consensus. Being used as a tool, the tool doesn’t magically turn into social consensus.
Therefore, neither existing distributed ledgers, nor BL will ever have a popular vote mechanism as you suggest. Simply because to call something popular you imply existence of a populus that has an exclusive right to use it. Which isn’t a case, because input provided to a ledger can come from different sources, even from a source of ideal randomness with Kolmogorov complexity at infinity (if it exists).
Another sentence in your post gives an insight into your misunderstanding. You found it problematic that the proof-of-structure deals with sharding. You seemingly fail to understand what actually proofs are for (before you call it an ad hominem - there’s nothing wrong in not understanding that fact, most people fail to grasp it). Their only purpose is to properly route data (as distributed ledgers are nothing more than databases). In BL, spatial distribution of data exists to avoid certain expensive operations that plague “flat” systems. No surprise then that the proof aims at proper accountancy in said space.
In my previous post I mentioned the Principle of Explosion and I did it for purpose. It’s because you use a tactic that while being obvious to a trained eye is mostly overlooked by most readers. Again, I don’t impute that you use it for nefarious purposes. More, I think you are honest and don’t even realize its existence.
When people are presented with a natural language example of the principle it’s usually something along: “Water is wet and water isn’t wet therefore, the Moon is made of green cheese”. It’s clearly gibberish.
When in a debate a similar mechanism can be used, but often goes unnoticed. A participant expresses agreement with both stances presented. Is applauded, as it’s so gentle, consilient and universal. Attendees often overlook that both stances are contradictory. Then the participant changes the subject and attendees agree, out of a reasoning that if all was already agreed, there’s nothing to add, the change is justified. The behavior of attendees is based on trust that an all-encompassing individual is likely to provide a valuable input, while in fact the input is unrelated to the original subject. On the bright side, it means that our brains are logical on a deep, unconscious, level as (p ∧ ¬p) ⇒ q stands always true.
That tactic is more commonly used than some could expect, often by politicians. I bet many heard a passage like this: “Our government, by proposing new taxes, is working to provide resources for social purposes, while at the same time ensuring that citizens are not fiscally overburdened. Therefore, the overarching aim of our actions is to ensure an appropriate level of education for our young citizens”. The bs-meter hits the end of scale, but most won’t notice any inconsistency or manipulation.
Your tactic is similar. You have several pet subjects you like to discuss, namely social consensus, your proof, tubulin, Craig Wright and others that you present via Steemit and other mediums. Apparently, you don’t have anything to add to the debate on trust or likely you’re more interested in discussing said pet subjects instead. So, you start from agreeing with two opposites and then continue into your favorite direction. I don’t blame you, it’s natural to pursue matters that one considers important. Don’t be surprised however, that I consider a stance: “We need more trust and we need less trust, so let’s talk about consensus” dubious at best.
But every cloud has a silver lining - our exchange gave me a chance to present one interesting behavior related to trust on a live example. Hence, you deserve full credit for your contribution.
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and I respect that. I respect your integrity. I disagree with your opinion, since popular vote is what the Nakamoto consensus is, and the invention that Bitcoin contributed to the world, invented by Craig Wright a decade ago and developed by him together with Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney. I assume, based on the distributed ledger technology that exists in the public domain, that BL will have a popular vote mechanism like Bitcoin and Ethereum have, and I lack access to proof of that. I happen to also have invented an ideal popular vote mechanism, in collaboration with Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, but that is another topic.
While I initially wanted to delve into deficiencies of Bayesian inference and reasons why there is a qualitative difference between the popular vote and machine performed consensus I realized that continuing our exchange won’t probably be educative enough. I feel that this quote from The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov can serve as a summary:
You and I are speaking different languages, as always,
said Woland,
but that does not alter the things we are talking about.
The Nakamoto consensus with proof-of-work is just a way to distribute voting power in a social consensus, it was easy to implement because it only required a simple hash function (machine consensus). Proof-of-stake was another way to distribute voting power, and “proof-of-vote”, staking people-votes instead of coins, another popular vote mechanism. BitLattice is not in the public domain, so I lack access to how it solves popular vote over what state to follow (social from *sekw, to follow. )
Your claim that social consensus === machine consensus is logically fallacious. I explained it in detail many times. Meanwhile, while it’s irrelevant to the debate, you continue repeating that claim with minimal changes as it would make it less fallacious.
Tell me, why?
Repeating a statement to make it more acceptable by the crowd is a practice of propaganda and media. But here we discuss (hint: we discuss something different) which is bound to presenting arguments and counterarguments. Repetition isn’t an argument.
PoW, PoS, BL’s system of inference and other distributed ledgers’ proofs are mechanisms that route data depending on specific inference from prerequisites. An intent of their authors, their use cases, their perceived usefulness in specific areas doesn’t affect their nature of being data accountancy algorithms.
Funnily enough, it just hit me. Your very first line, @Hibryda, that started this debate:
What I like in crypto is the absence of need to trust.
And this paradoxically makes this world more honest and fair.
gives a good indication of how Holochains “proofing-algorythim” works. Well, there’s a kind of “Proof-of-Closeness” algorythm, finding the agents with addresses closest to the hash of a transaction.
But the important bit is, that whenever I interact with another agent, I don’t have to trust anyone. I can validate their hash chain right to its gegesis entry. No trust needed!
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Exactly. Hashes can be content-aware, location-aware, whatever-aware. It’s just a matter of passing another data together with the hash in a quasi random form. They can be nothing-aware, but linked with other data in the database via some descriptor structures (like in many blockchains).
What makes blockchains attractive is possibility to test the links - the more the better (because it’s possible to link data in numerous ways). Test, not trust.
The problem is that people are so attached to trust as a tool that they try to emulate it in environments that doesn’t need trust at all, effectively nullifying benefits of such systems.
That is not a claim I make, that is just you dictating a strawman on me. Stick to the topic instead.
Proof-of-work (as machine consensus) is just allocating voting power in a social consensus, as Craig Wright defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008, under the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto, “miners vote with their CPU”. Proof-of-stake does the same thing, and proof-of-vote as well. The nation-state consensus is also the same thing, popular vote over what state to follow, socially, social from *sekw, to follow, it is a mechanism to agree on a leader. That is done with what psychiatric science calls executive function, social intelligence, what can also be called trust.
The main difference in Holochain is that people form social consensus at the scale of individuals, instead of social consensus by a mob like the Nakamoto consensus or nation-state consensus. As there is no conflict between your viewpoint or @Brooks viewpoint, I agree with both of them. BL is not in the public domain, so I cannot know how it does popular vote. The proof-of-structure as you have described it seems to be more of a “sharding” mechanism, people have similar but less refined ideas for how to do “interoperability” in blockchains.
re: data accountability, PoW, PoS, and PoV are about that people are accountable to the data (the social consensus, in Holochain between individuals rather than a mob), not that the data itself is accountable (the machine consensus, hash-linking, digital signatures, the “trustless” components that are identical in Holochain and Bitcoin/Ethereum, and therefore not much of a debate between you and @Brooks I would guess. ) When social accountability fails, the ledger “forks” into Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, for example, difficult overall to get people “on the same page”, as the Nakamoto consensus and nation-state consensus were invented to do.
The claim you made is exactly this that what you consider being a social consensus is what I consider being a machine one. And, consequently, you can agree with mutually exclusive stances of me and @Brooks, as according to you they refer to the same phenomenon and are convergent.
Your call to stick to the subject is hilarious, but let it be, as at least you attempted to present some arguments. Let’s break them down.
When the pottery was invented, probably by accident, the person who did it first most likely advertised it as being a way to manufacture containers to store food and cook it. Now, when one stands in a bathroom, on ceramic tiles, holding a ceramic knife (a little modified version of the famous scene from Psycho) nobody will consider these items being made to hold and cook food, regardless the intent of the inventor.
There was no writing around at the time, so we don’t know how the whitepaper of pottery would look like. But I assume it could include a passage like this: “The new technology presented herein, if applied tribe-wide and in accordance with the best practices set forth in Appendix B, chapter 11, should enable us to store enough food to reduce the amount of children dying due to hunger by at least 32 percent (for mean 10 years distribution normalized). Therefore, the invention (hereinafter referred to as Pottery) shall equip every member of our tribe with power to save lives and lead us toward prosperity” 
.
The creator of Bitcoin was similarly concerned about our social structure. And economy. Also, as any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic the inventor had to present some concepts using metaphors. Hence, the passage you cited. Miners don’t vote. They only provide computing power that actually performs something that can be called voting (election). They potentially can vote, but this possibility may be damaging to a network, depends on Byzantine fault tolerance of a system and is unrelated here.
The way they act is similar to tossing a dice, ideally they have neither influence nor insight into the process of tossing, so the entropy of input is at maximum. Of course, dice gives random results, while calculations done by nodes have a more sophisticated nature. But the rule remains the same, the more entropy, the better. The details with respect to probability of interference (and consequently on entropy) are in chapter 11 of the Bitcoin whitepaper (yes, 50%+).
Going back to the dice - if miners really used it to decide on something (PoW is actually a very elaborated dice), then the output would be at least flat in a long run, provided no serious number of malicious actors is involved. Flat means undisturbed by any external factor. Here enters the trust. Trust adds small scraps of lead to the dice. While the output now weights toward a certain solution it’s no longer reliable, as the crowd can be convinced to glue those scraps to a certain number by media, superstitions, authorities, customs, whatever. Therefore, the goal of any distributed ledger that is supposed to deliver reliable data is to limit any possible external influence. That directly translates to trashing trust entirely.
Here I should delve into Bayesian inference and its deficiencies, problems with entropy distribution and many more, but I have no time at the moment. Maybe, I will deliver that lecture on another occasion.
So, your conclusion, that nation-state consensus and machine performed proofs are the same is flawed. In the former, trust plays a paramount role - follow the leader rule depends largely on belief, not on test. Meanwhile, proofs are tests. Their effectiveness directly depends on low probability of any altered input prevailing, they shield insides of systems from humans as efficiently as possible. Those two approaches never mix, as they are mutually exclusive.
So, my argument still stands - you can agree with mutually exclusive stances, you can mix unmixable concepts, but it makes no sense whatsoever.
So what we can test, we know. And for things we don’t know we use the things we do know to gauge the probability of a desirable outcome, which could be called trust?
For a machine, trust is equivalent to a high probability to cooperate. It can be calculated.
For humans this calculation is done in part by our subconscious, which can work with way more variables than our conscious mind, but has a less precise outcome (and can be manipulated rather easily).
I am inclined to revise my earlier statement regarding @Brooks’ viewpoint, where I stated that:
Now I am starting to understand, that the word trust is a human concept and isn’t necessary in the machine world (where the word probability is more fitting).
Therefore:
Topic 1
@Hibryda: Yeah, its great that we can deal with complete strangers with confidence, because the system allows for completely trustless interactions.
Topic 2
@Brooks: Yeah, we need systems, where we can create recurring, real, human connections, where we can trust others, throw our lot in with them, tackle great problems, create beautiful solutions.
Ideally the former builds the sound foundation for the latter.
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That is still you projecting a strawman on me, and not a claim I make. You can reject my perspective, as I said, I respect your integrity. To project is a logical fallacy, at the root of social intelligence in humans that both you, me and @Brooks are bound by (claiming we are not does not change the human condition, but can be a popular story. ) That I tell you to stick to the topic, yes, appeal to ridicule is not necessary. Stick to the topic.
What validators decide on with popular vote is which state to follow. Bitcoin has a number of forks (BTC, BCH and BSV), as does Ethereum (ETH and ETC), the social consensus mechanism is a signal to decide which fork to agree on, analogous to selecting a leader. You and I have disagreed on that for two years now, and as you mentioned, neither of our beliefs change the things we are talking about (I read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov when I was 15, and I like that idea overall. Natural law. )
I agree metaphors are often used when presenting concepts outside the literal grid of an audience, another observation that can be made is that double-speak is often used when communicating outside what you trust (using what psychiatric science calls executive function). Orwellian double-speak is a way to not meet the other person, and, a logical fallacy. Just like metaphors are often used to communicate new ideas, literal descriptions are also often used. The fact that popular vote was seen as the primary attack vector in Bitcoin, a 51% attack, is one way to see that the idea that validators in Bitcoin only vote in the metaphorical sense, is false. Popular vote in Bitcoin is not a metaphor, it is the social consensus that people use to agree on what state to follow, social from *sekw, to follow, like the creator of Bitcoin Craig Wright wrote in the Bitcoin whitepaper, miners vote with their CPU, chapter 4 and 12 of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
The social consensus in Bitcoin happens to allocate voting power using proof-of-work, and that is why people tend to assume it is “trustless”. It was a simple way to implement a way to do popular vote, the technology stack already existed, a simple hash function, and the probability of finding a valid hash was similar to throwing dice, and mining pools was a way to maximize how many dice you could throw, one-CPU-one-vote.
When voting power is allocated with proof-of-stake or proof-of-vote then people have an easier time seeing that it was never trustless (while the machine consensus parts, the hash linking and digital signatures, are trustless. ) Who gets to authorize transactions or a block in PoS is often also by random, and the more stake a validator has the more probable it is that they are selected. PoV works the exact same way, only difference is that validators stake people-votes.
Holochain is often described as “meta” to Bitcoin in social consensus, since it is built around trusting individuals rather than a mob like the Nakamoto consensus, but could scale up to mob rule if people agreed on it.
I do not see any dispute between you and @Brooks, so I agree with both viewpoints.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are “follow the leader rule”, they are leaders. They just happen to be computers and not a human being. An “exocortex” is still a leader, it mediates and leads human attention, by trust (or coercion but primarily by trust. ) The nation-state consensus is a proof, it uses proof-of-person (personbevis) suffrage and voting rights. The same reformation that is happening now as a result of the internet took place with the printing press, leading to representative democracy and the nation-state consensus, rule of law and proof over superstition (it has not succeeded but has been a stepping stone. )
That “proof and belief” never mix is a strawman you repeat that misses what the topic is about. Both Holochain and Bitcoin/Ethereum use the exact same machine consensus, the difference is in the social consensus, belief, a human being believing in the mediator it interacts with, using what psychiatric science calls executive function.
The argument that it makes no sense to agree with mutually exclusive stances and mix unmixable concepts is valid for mutually exclusive stances and unmixable concepts, yours and @Brooks stances and the technology either of you focus on are not mutually exclusive though in any way.
If it’s not a claim you make, maybe it’s time for you to formulate your claim in a logically consistent way. So far you managed to touch most your favorite subjects, mixing them in a narrative looking superficially sophisticated, being nonsense in essence. You make a lot of intermediate claims that are taken from the thin air. While it’s perfectly correct to express opinions (as these are nothing more than opinions) there is no way to discuss it if its prerequisites are made out of wishful thinking alone.
So far, again, you proved to follow a scheme I described above - by subscribing to both mutually exclusive opinions, you feel entitled to switch to the area of your liking. They are exclusive (which I explained many times).
You went as far as to state that my argument that proof and belief never mix is a strawman. Such strategy can often be seen while debating believers - being unable to follow rules of logic to support their beliefs they claim that there is no opposition between their belief and facts. Such move has an important consequence - if accepted, it enables a believer to bring arguments from own domain and attempt to present them as being equally valid as logically inferred ones. They can come from scripture, Bitcoin manifesto, customs, whatever. It’s a dishonest practice, but often other participants of a debate accept it not seeing that danger or wanting to be nice and correct. I don’t accept. Bring only verifiable facts.
The verifiable facts I brought are:
- machine computation isn’t hard linked with human brains, therefore these environments are functionally separated;
- trust is a belief based on fuzzy prerequisites, easy to alter, unable to reasonably quantify, unpredictable;
- distributed ledgers infer data distribution based on simple algorithms;
- these algorithms are agnostic in terms of a data source, be it human society or machine actors;
- these algorithms abstract external input from internal processing to tame malicious inputs based on simple mathematical rules of decreasing probability;
- trust has no descriptor inside those systems, so there is no sense to dispute trust in those systems if viewed from internal perspective;
I brought many more facts here. Facts that are verifiable. Please, do the same.
Meanwhile, while waiting for them, let’s think about what you brought so far.
I don’t use strawman describing your claims - I try hard to figure out what it is, but so far nothing consistent was presented, so I presented my attempts to summarize what you wrote and figure out the meaning.
As to sticking to the subject - given that it was you who drifted from it on a regular basis, turning into a moral oracle now is hilarious at best.
What validators decide on with popular vote is which state to follow. Bitcoin has a number of forks (BTC, BCH and BSV), as does Ethereum (ETH and ETC), the social consensus mechanism is a signal to decide which fork to agree on, analogous to selecting a leader. You and I have disagreed on that for two years now, and as you mentioned, neither of our beliefs change the things we are talking about
There is a subtle difference between belief that you hold and facts that I present. You believe that there is a connection between internals of networks and the social agreement as to which fork to follow. At least as I understand from what you write. There isn’t. The existence of forks is a consequence of what is written in chapter 11 I mentioned. Networks still work as intended, ignoring anything around them, they just multiply in number without being even conscious about the event. There are also unforkable schemes that aren’t subject to that phenomenon. There is the zero-knowledge paradigm that was invented specifically to avoid meddling with internals. So, while what you wrote stands somehow for the networks you mentioned it’s not universal. However, you made it a dogma of your belief and as it’s with most dogmas it’s false. You cannot draw any general conclusions from a specific non-general case with counter-cases in existence.
I agree metaphors are often used when presenting concepts outside the literal grid of an audience, another observation that can be made is that double-speak is often used when communicating outside what you trust (using what psychiatric science calls executive function). Orwellian double-speak is a way to not meet the other person, and, a logical fallacy. Just like metaphors are often used to communicate new ideas, literal descriptions are also often used. The fact that popular vote was seen as the primary attack vector in Bitcoin, a 51% attack, is one way to see that the idea that validators in Bitcoin only vote in the metaphorical sense, is false. Popular vote in Bitcoin is not a metaphor, it is the social consensus that people use to agree on what state to follow, social from *sekw, to follow, like the creator of Bitcoin Craig Wright wrote in the Bitcoin whitepaper, miners vote with their CPU, chapter 4 and 12 of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
I don’t know what your passage about the double-speak referres to. Metaphors are used very often to generally describe ideas without any malicious intent. Double speak is a metaphor’s evil half-brother - its purpose is to hide actual intent under a guise. A modern double-speak was best characterized by George Carlin in this clip.
Neither you, nor Craig Wright could tell whether the sentence you brought was a pure metaphor or was to signal a flaw that allows exploitation of the network in a way that allows forking (the only case when miners can actually vote - a degenerate case). Even asking the real author doesn’t have to provide a clear answer, as intent is mostly an emotional matter and thus should not be trusted and considered fact.
So, again, you bring a degenerate, specific case and draw a general conclusion out of it. Seemingly it doesn’t matter to you that the original author of the paper for most of his work describes how independent the network is when it comes to actions taken by malicious actors. But your argument focuses exactly on such actions, as forking makes possible alteration of the state of a network and is against a purpose of it (a purpose being an unmutable, reliable ledger).
What you did in that paragraph fits well with defending a belief. There is a scripture (Bitcoin WP) and a single sentence there that proves your point - “miners vote with their CPU”. Forget about the rest. I saw it somewhere - focus on parts where השם is nice and merciful, forget the rest full of atrocities and inhumane behavior.
One more thing, as I said before it doesn’t matter for veracity of a statement how many times you repeat it. The same applies to etymology of the word “social” that you repeated already 3 or 4 times. The fact that it derives from PIE *sekw doesn’t imply that its current meaning is limited by it. Since PIE (4500-2500BC) some changes happened to both our understanding of the society and the scale it operates. Now “social” is more about a communal structure than about following. However, if you insist on using *sekw root, far more reasonable choice would be “sectarian”. The etymology is the same, but emphasizes following a leader and a blind faith. So, maybe “sectarian consensus”?
The social consensus in Bitcoin happens to allocate voting power using proof-of-work, and that is why people tend to assume it is “trustless”. It was a simple way to implement a way to do popular vote, the technology stack already existed, a simple hash function, and the probability of finding a valid hash was similar to throwing dice, and mining pools was a way to maximize how many dice you could throw, one-CPU-one-vote.
It was a primitive way to implement a mechanism that would be resistant to manipulation to some extent (excluding 51% case). No sane person claims it’s absolutely trustless. Though, it’s practically trustless, as the amount of money needed to cross the 50% mark is very large. Also, secret agreement between miners is possible, but if discovered would cause more harm to them than profit (but happened in the past at least three times). The scale of the market makes the scheme effectively trustless even with flaws being its integral part.
Yet, I still don’t get the connection you picture between a popular vote, being an attack vector on the network according to your definition (as far as I understood it well) and a regular way the network was intended to work. Both schemes counteract each other and are the opposites.
As to mining pools - your claim here is either bogus or stems from your lack of understanding of matter. They aren’t about “a way to maximize how many dice you could throw”. The probability doesn’t change with mining in a pool vs. mining solo. The amount of computing resources doesn’t change as well. The only thing that changes is a way a reward is granted (high probability to get it and split between miners in a pool vs. low probability to gather it full while being solo).
When voting power is allocated with proof-of-stake or proof-of-vote then people have an easier time seeing that it was never trustless (while the machine consensus parts, the hash linking and digital signatures, are trustless. ) Who gets to authorize transactions or a block in PoS is often also by random, and the more stake a validator has the more probable it is that they are selected. PoV works the exact same way, only difference is that validators stake people-votes.
So, the internals are trustless, but externals aren’t? More or less you got the point. Less, because even internals in forkable blockchains aren’t 100% foolproof (provably). As to PoV - I don’t find walking back a way toward really trustless ledger attractive. That’s why I never considered anything similar for Bitlattice` - it would be unreasonable.
I do not see any dispute between you and @Brooks, so I agree with both viewpoints.
With every iteration I’m less and less surprised.
Bitcoin and Ethereum are “follow the leader rule”, they are leaders. They just happen to be computers and not a human being. An “exocortex” is still a leader, it mediates and leads human attention, by trust (or coercion but primarily by trust. ) The nation-state consensus is a proof, it uses proof-of-person (personbevis) suffrage and voting rights. The same reformation that is happening now as a result of the internet took place with the printing press, leading to representative democracy and the nation-state consensus, rule of law and proof over superstition (it has not succeeded but has been a stepping stone. )
I won’t even attempt to break the above down into parts. I don’t get what you actually want to say, and what are the prerequisites of your reasoning. Also, I can’t see any valid conclusion. The only answer I could give: POMO - whatever it generates would be similarly consistent.
Last but not the least - you stated: “To project is a logical fallacy, at the root of social intelligence in humans that both you, me and @Brooks are bound by”. I can’t say neither for you, nor for @Brooks, but can for myself and on a basis of some life experience also about humans in general. Social abilities are common among fauna on our planet, however a scale it’s found in particular species differs greatly.
We aren’t bound by social interactions to the extreme, we are only inclined to take them into consideration. Ants are bound, not humans. However, by writing “social intelligence” you probably meant “capacity to know oneself and to know others” as per the definition (psychological mumbo-jumbo btw). Which even further obscures what you meant by being bound by it. I don’t feel being bound by social abilities, awareness, knoledge about the society I live in, it’s only one of many tools at my disposal. There’s also cognition for instance that in many cases effectively helps me consciously shape social interactions. Certainly, social intelligence isn’t a dominant factor in every case, neither in what I do, nor in other humans.
I have a suggestion. Before you write another post, draw a scheme on paper. Use logical quantifiers and rules of inference. And write only those things that you can defend without resorting to thin air arguments.
Close, but not quite. As to the trust word I agree - it doesn’t fit into machines’ world. However, probability in that context isn’t fortunate either. I’d say that deterministic inference fits better, as even when some probability is taken into account, processing of such indicator is strictly defined by the algorithm (quantum processing is a special case and not so obvious, ML and similar algos as well).
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How I see it, the Nakamoto consensus from Craig Wright was a mechanism for social accountability, more or less a tool to allow a large mob to sign the state with popular vote (by competing to authenticate blocks, over time involving most “voters” in the process, in proof-of-work by “voting with CPU”, “one-CPU-one-vote”. ) Proof-of-stake was another mechanism for selecting the mob that adds social accountability to the data (while data accountability is trustless, with digital signatures and hash linking), and proof-of-vote (equivalent to proof-of-stake but staking people instead of coins) another social consensus mechanism for social accountability. In Holochain, the social accountability is at a much smaller scale, a multi-hop mutual credit like Ryan Fugger’s Ripple is only between two people, so people would trust other people rather than a mob of people like in Bitcoin and Ethereum (both cases involve social trust, belief, as well as trusting the machine consensus, proof, and the latter is identical in Holochain and Bitcoin/Ethereum. ) Because I see it that way, I agree with both yours and @Brooks viewpoint, and I disagree with how you represent my point of view, I think you project a strawman on me that is misrepresentative, and to avoid going off-topic, I focus on the topic of the debate more than on that strawman.