User:Ids

(real name: Iain Stewart)

I worked as a computing lab assistant at Imperial College, London, U.K. from 1991-2011.

I am especially interested in helping to improve bitcoin's usability from a non-tech-savvy user's perspective. By this I don't just mean GUI improvements and the like - plenty of people far more talented than me are working on that - but changes to the network protocol itself that will help with responsiveness from a merchant's or customer's point of view, while not compromising cryptographic security, decentralization, or the strength of the blockchain.

I have a provisional proposal, which I call adaptive difficulty, which I believe will help with this. I'm hoping to eventually put it up as a BIP. For now I'll work on it at that non-BIP page. Comments and feedback welcome. (Remember that for now, the Bayesian analysis of what proof-of-work is deserved by what difficulty-sequence is unfinished, and the formulae are of indicative status only.) (in fact the whole page is just a stub for now - I must first master mathematical wiki-speak!)

(You might also be interested in a proof-of-stake-based system which I at least provisionally believe can be made extraordinarily robust! I call it "proof of blockchain fair sharing". - That page is currently just a teaser description, sketching the idea and why it doesn't contradict an "obvious" theorem on >50% attacks; followed by a forum post where I speculate on possible broader approaches to the >50% attack problem.)

I can be contacted at iain dot david dot stewart at gmail dot com.