Q&A: Atalanta- Monero's Reservist Army

(This won’t make much sense unless you’ve read two prior posts. First, a summary and analysis of the attack on Monero (XMR) that uncovered its weaknesses; and second, my proposal for a reservist army playing a video game, Atalanta, to respond to future attacks.)

Why use wownero (WOW) or minotari (XTM) or pirate (ARRR)? Shouldn’t we create a token and get rich?

Second party tokens immediately raise my mistrust in a project.

Why must the in-game reward have real-world value?

I think this makes the game more sticky. We need longterm players.

You mention ‘dear electricity in their region’ as a plausible reason why people aren’t mining monero already, and yet your solution would use a lot of electricity too. Aren’t you building a disincentive into your solution?

Yes, we would need to be heedful of electricity-costs.

There are mitigating factors. Mining-devices run all the of the time, and compete against every other device on the network all the time. Atalanta-running-computers would only run on-demand, have regular pauses, and effectively cut down the power needed to one-sixth, as most of the time, the player competes for one of six golden apples. The graphics of the game would need to be spartan to give most power to the pseudo-mining part. This need not look cheap and nasty. Tron (1983) still looks fantastic today.

What happens if malevolent miners reorganize more than 8 blocks?

They win. I have a low opinion of cryptocurrencies which can’t withstand a >8 block reorg.

What are the pauses in the game and why?

Pause within the round. This is for allowing the latest block from the Monero blockchain to be mined by the actual miners and then downloaded as the platinum apple. It is also allows slower nodes to suffer no bad consequences for being slow to download.

Pause between rounds. This is to minimize the use of electricity over a long stretch of time.

How long would a round take?

On average, 80 seconds.

• 45 seconds solving the golden apples.
• 15 second pause
• 20 seconds solving the platinum apple, since every node competes on this one, boosting the effective hashpower by as much as 6x. (Hard to calculate the effect).

Obviously, it’s a guessing game, so could vary a lot. A round needs to be similar to a Monero block-generation-time.¹ Much faster, and the platinum apple will get out of sync. Much slower, and it won’t have a chance of catching a reorg.

How long would the pause be between rounds?

60 seconds. This means your computer running Atalanta will get more rest than work. See the question above about ‘dear electricity’ and disincentives. It does put pressure on Atalanta if there’s a deep reorg in Red Alert mode. There could be a rule that Red Alert Mode cuts down the time between rounds to 15 seconds. I haven’t thought that through.

Is there a Difficulty Adjustment?

Yes, but I’m not sure when the Difficulty Adjustment should be recalculated. It should definitely be more than a few hours. A time of more than a few hours allows a big surge in competitors to generate much faster round times. This would be very handy, given a Red Alert.

The Difficulty Adjustment would be taken from the average time taken to solve the golden apples (i.e. not platinum), with the top 1% and bottom 1% of times trimmed off.

What happens if there is no new block to be used as the platinum apple?

Another one of the set of eighteen is chosen at random to be the platinum apple.

Doesn’t this rest on a centralized solution, because a single server sends out the golden and platinum apples?

Sort of. It’s true that an authenticated server sends out some necessary information. (See also a broader answer just below). However, the server is limited in its role. The nodes do the work. Most crucially, the decision to go into Red Alert mode is made independently of the server.

How much value do you put on decentralization in cryptocurrency?

It’s crucial, but only on Layer One. Layer One is the settlement layer. It’s the archive. The archive must stand the test of time. For this reason, the Layer One blockchain must be decentralized, both in terms of place and of governance. It’s different for Layer Two. This is the scaling layer. There needs to be some degree of centralization to be worth doing at all. Vitalik’s Blockchain Trilemma² is relevant here.

What is DNSSEC and why do you use it?

DNSSEC is a lot like the TLS certificate you get on a website. It assures you that the website is not an imposter. A chain of unbreakable calculations prove that some URL, e.g. gamemaster.getmonero.org is really what it claims to be. That chain goes to the Root of the Internet. You can’t get more important than that.We need this because the nodes need to be sure that they are getting their golden and platinum apples from the right server. Otherwise, malevolent ISPs could just give the nodes fake apples.

From a design standpoint, DNSSEC is relatively simple and non-corporatey.

Who owns the Gamemaster server?

Ideally, partly by the creators of the game, and partly by a group of developers and thought-leaders in the Monero community.

Can a node compete for a different golden apple than its first choice?

A node may compete for a still-up-for-grabs golden apple only if and only if it has won its chosen golden apple and has waited 20 seconds. This prevents some super computer from scooping up all the golden apples. On the other hand, it helps the cause during a Red Alert. Imagine waiting for one last golden apple to be solved and feeling helpless…

Explain more about how the Atalanta nodes ‘can’t be mustered in the employ of a malevolent force.'

Normally, they just work on already-published blocks. They are as harmless as a student is to a book which he has in photocopied form. Nodes can only try to reorganize back to a hitherto accepted version of the blockchain. That hitherto accepted version will either be good or bad. If bad, it’s not the fault of the Atalanta nodes at all. If good, well… good. Since the only two modes of activity are ‘harmless’ or ‘conservative-good’, they cannot be used for malevolence.

Who makes the template for the platinum apple in Red Alert mode?

The gamemaster server. It cannot censor. It picks up the transactions waiting to be confirmed in the mempool.

What if the Gamemaster server is compromized and sends out a template with no transactions?

In this worst-case scenario, all the blocks of the golden apples are fine, and it’s just the platinum apple which is useless; as soon as Atalanta pulled off the reorg successfully, the miners would take over again, and could publish all the transactions that the Gamemaster server ignored. Empty blocks are a hassle, but are no risk to merchants.

What if hardly anyone is gaming when the Red Alert happens?

This is a flaw, yes. The game needs a setting whereby people can be away but the node still competes for the apples; perhaps at a lower power setting or perhaps only every 3rd or 4th round. Then, a ‘Red Alert ping’ wakes the node up and it’s ‘all hands on deck’.

Also, the Difficulty Adjustment comes into play. People could sign up for a Red Alert warning to their smartphones. There could be a version of Atalanta on smartphones. They could start playing immediately. Since the Difficulty Adjustment would be low, bringing onboard a few hundred more players in a couple of minutes would make a difference.

Atalanta seems really complicated.

It’s the kind of solution which would need to be built before people really saw its potential. This is often the case. Indeed, Satoshi himself got a skeptical response to his whitepaper and needed to release the actual software a few months later to win people over.