Re: decentralized vs distributed payments

On 24 September 2015 at 22:38, Tao Effect <contact@taoeffect.com> wrote:

> People always talk about 'decentralized' money when it's 'distributed'.
> What's the difference? A distributed system is shared over many hard
> drives. A decentralized system goes one step further. It does not have a
> central point of control.
>
> So far so good.
>

Thanks for the feeback! :)


>
> In the case of bitcoin the central point of control is the protocol which
> says "longest chain wins".
>
> No. That is not a central point of control, that is just the protocol rule.
>

So what about consensus decisions by the developers and miners to change
the spec?  Doesnt that affect everyone with a balance, whether they agree
or not?  What if bitcoin changed to proof of stake, for example?


>
> A pure decentralized system would be much simpler. It would take the
> essential essence of money (a ledger + transactions) and have no other
> constraints. Each entry in the ledger would point to an entity. Each value
> in the ledger would be an amount. That's it. There is no pre ordained
> protocol.
>
> More accurate would be to call that a purely malfunctioning system.
>

Do you mean incomplete, if so I agree.  Would like to understand
"malfunctioning" better.


>
> Any decentralized payment system needs to solve the double-spending
> problem, and this one does not.
>

What defines "solving".  We can all agree double spending is undesirable.
Does it have to be zero, or kept to a certain low level.  For example in
fiat currency coins and notes are copied and spent illegally, but the
volume is low enough not to disrupt the system.


>
> Cheers,
> Greg
>
> --
> Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with
> the NSA.
>
> On Sep 24, 2015, at 7:06 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> People always talk about 'decentralized' money when it's 'distributed'.
> What's the difference? A distributed system is shared over many hard
> drives. A decentralized system goes one step further. It does not have a
> central point of control. In the case of bitcoin the central point of
> control is the protocol which says "longest chain wins". That means the
> chain with the most electricity is valued and all other chains are
> valueless. If you agree on the central tenet (and a few rules) you can
> participate.
>
> A pure decentralized system would be much simpler. It would take the
> essential essence of money (a ledger + transactions) and have no other
> constraints. Each entry in the ledger would point to an entity. Each value
> in the ledger would be an amount. That's it. There is no pre ordained
> protocol.
>
> Any agent or group can use their ledger for operations of the system. But
> that's boring. When it becomes interesting is when ledgers start to
> interact and form protocols spontaneously. Fortunately the web facilities
> this quite well. A ledger is easy to program, a beginner programmer could
> write a ledger in less than 10 minutes. It would look something like:
>
> {
> coinbase : 1000
> identifer1 : 0
> identifer2 : 0
> }
>
> Then transactions are just diffs on that. It can run in a browser, on the
> web, on a server or even on pen and paper. Once distributed systems like
> this emerge and create spontaneous protocols through P2P consensus, we'll
> have a truly decentralized money system.
>
>
>