No I meant the collateral payments can be stolen, not the tx fees. Are you meaning to write that collateral payments always go to the miners, thus master nodes have no incentive to lie?
No that's what you said earlier "Edit: but the master node can steal the tx fees. And then not include the input in the output signing. So scratch this idea."
We need to use specific terminology here. Tx fees are from the transaction and they go to the miners. Collateral payments are made out to the master nodes.
In either case, master nodes can lie and steal, they just make sure they also control miner(s) (or pools).
No one can prove the master node isn't being malicious to hurt the reputation of an innocent pool or miner.
Thus you can't stop theft.
You completely missed what I was saying. Collateral is multi-sig, requiring more than 1 party to lie. 99.999999999% they won't be the same party.
I'm getting tired, lets continue this another day.
As far as I can fathom, multisig doesn't protect you because master node can just lie and say none signed. How will the other signatories know if the master node is telling truth or not?
However, I have a partial solution for this. Send the collateral payment to the ether. Then master node loses some incentive. But still the master node might lie just to harm the coin and the owners of those collateral.
I guess the inputs can forward their communications to other signatories too?
In that case, your anonymity is more broken because more nodes would see the triplet of IP, input, and output on each Darksend. Thus the percent of master nodes needed to lower anonymity would be proportionally less (e.g. if 5 signatories, then need only 1/5 as many master nodes to be adversaries).
There's an even simpler solution.
User A: You
MasterNode A: The previous master node
MasterNode B: This rounds master node
User A makes the collater payment out to the Master A but sends it to Master B along with the input/out1/out2.
Master B can cash it, but it doesn't benefit him at all.
That solution doesn't decrease the anonymity, but complete destroys the incentives to cheat.
Adversary will wait until he is MasterNode A and MasterNode B. The more Sybil nodes he has, the more often that will be.
Actually adversary doesn't have to wait for that, if he has MasterNode B, he can spend it and cause trouble for DarkCoin. And who can prove he was lying?
With 5000 master nodes the chances that you're both Master A & B are (1/5000)^2 or .000000004. I think we're fine.
Adversary can't even node-Sybil attack the anonymity (can still Sybil attack the Darksend inputs regardless) if he doesn't control a significant percentage of the MasterNodes. So if he controls 20% of them, then (1/5)^2 = 1 in 25. So every 25th Darksend could be stolen.
But the government probably isn't interested in destroying the Darksends. Rather they would want to silently collect the identity data.
So if someone wants to buy 1000DRK off of the open market to be a master node and charge random people fees, I think they'll help darkcoin more than they'll hurt it. They'll raise the price and 1 in 5000 transactions will get charged .1DRK, it's still cheap.
Buying DRK is not a zero sum game. They can sell their DRK later. I think there people with a lot of money in the world, especially the government because they can print money.
And they gain all the identity data and they can use that to confiscate and tax funds, then it is very lucrative for the government. But they can do that and really don't have an incentive to steal the payments. In fact, don't want to draw attention to themselves, so they wouldn't steal.
Perhaps you've solved the stealing issue. Congrats.
But the anonymity issue remains weaker. Government does have the incentive to buy up the MasterNodes.
Plus, charging fees could reset the age of that 1000DRK and we could require an age of 24 hours or something. So that really limits their ability to mess with Darkcoin.
Why? If they plan to be a MasterNode for years why is 24 hours delay a problem?
My point is there's a million solutions.
Hehehe, but you haven't explained a million of them yet.
