This looks too much like the fiat monetary system to be more attractive than bitcoin ideologically. If you aren't the few chartered banks, you cannot create dollars. In this VIVA system, if you aren't an owner of a crown, you cannot create coins. Bitcoin is different because ASIC hardware can be created new and you don't need to buy from someone ese who has a new one.
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I think you misunderstand why things are structured the way that they are within VIVA.
ANYONE can run a worker node and find a VIVA Crown, or they can buy a VIVA Crown on the open market, or they can borrow one from an existing crownholder.
All of these are paths to starting a mint.
Sure you can buy or build an ASIC miner to mine bitcoin. But you'll be solo mining and competing against literally exahashes of capacity. This capacity is controlled by a small cartel of miners in China. Those miners resist any changes that might be good for bitcoin but bad for their bottom line and there is no guarantee you'll ever see a penny of it. As bitcoin struggles under the weight of it's existing growth this mining cartel is showing very clearly that they are the ones really in charge.
To earn VIVA, you can use any computer and you attach to an existing mining pool called a mint, just like with any other crypto.
However the mint pays by the hour for using your computer and the mint is guaranteed to able to pay its bills, always. This is because those contracts to pay worker nodes are backed by the entire network. It is the act of paying worker nodes, that brings new currency into circulation.
Being a mint, allows the network to guarantee, or back the contracts issued by the mint, even if the owner hits a hiccup. There isn't another crypto that allows for this kind of flexibility.
What the mint system gives us here is accountability in the strictest sense, without resorting to weak consensus models such as proof of work or proof of stake. Instead a mint can mint whatever coins it needs to in order to pay it's workers. This eliminates the waste from coins that require some competitive "race to the finish" in order to gain coins.
What mining algorithm do you use if not PoW or PoS?
Traveling Salesman
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TravelingSalesmanProblem.html
Consider each mint as a bank that owes money to other banks and is also owed money by other banks. Your worker node is proposing to drive the only available armored car in an effort to zero out the books between up to 42,000 mints.
You need to propose a path to settle the balances between all mints wherein all debts are be settled in full and each mint is visited only one time. However a mint cannot send money it does not yet have on hand. Thus it may need to purchase coins on the open market in order to pay it's debts, or it may need to exercise a TR. You ideally want to make sure the mint is only paying out of funds on hand or else the mint may not sign off on the settlement proposal.
Any worker node can propose a settlement; The most optimum proposal during the 24hr settlement period is the winner.
This is an NP hard problem with factorial(42,000) or 2.38 x 10^175938 potential solutions which makes this a whole lot more secure than an SHA256 hash :D
Nice thing about NP hard problems is that they are hard to calculate, but easy to verify.
Do you need 100% authorisation by all nodes before a transaction is verified?
How long does a verfication take?
What happens if half of the network drops out?
Do you have any code or pseudo code you can share for how you verify the transactions?
Don't confuse transactions with settlement, this isn't bitcoin we don't reference previous TXs, when building new TXs. We just have accounts with summary balances and this means that individual transaction histories are default private.
Settlement happens once a week and it's always mint to mint and yes settlement requires a majority of mints to sign off. Refusing mints are penalized by not being able to exercise TRs until they sign off, since all TRs must reference the current settlement proposal as supported by the majority. This means if they want to pay bills, they'll need to buy coin on the open market.
For individuals and businesses though, transactions are instant and all accounts are multisig.
You sign a transaction that amounts to "move x units of VIVA from account A to account B" and submit it to whichever mint happens to be handy for you.
The mint verifies you had the authority to authorize that movement (you are the account owner, or you had their permission), and then countersigns.
This transaction is added to the local chain of that mint, which will generally be instant. From here your summary balance is updated and begins to percolate through the balance chain (summary account balances are maintained on a separate chain that has a 1 year rolling window).
If account B is not with your particular mint, then your mint transmits the B side receipt to B's mint (source is left blank unless you specify otherwise).
Both mints sign a "movement receipt" / slip which shows the mint to mint action and the movement slip is broadcast to the network. The sum of movement slips is what is factored into the initial conditions of the settlement procedure.
A movement slip is always a debt between two or more mints.
Transactions between individuals are considered private and never broadcast to the world.
You don't need all nodes to be active and you are free to move your account from one mint to another for any reason at any time and no one can stop you or freeze your account.
Authority, i.e. individual account ownership certificates, are kept in the CAN, and change deltas such as issuing and revocation of certificates, form their own individual chains similar in many ways to Git or IPFS.
You can add or revoke authority for any cosigner at will. But mints are liable for every penny they sign off on. Thus you have the irreversibility of bitcoin, i.e. recipient is never liable for chargebacks, with the advantages of more civilized methods of payment like bank accounts, where you can dispute transactions and you have a window for doing so.
Mints must also produce on demand by you, your personal transaction history if there is a dispute and they must be able to justify any balance changes by providing the A side on demand. But you have to demand it. Otherwise your history is invisible to the rest of the world.
I think that this explanation about relationship between Crown Holder, Mint and worker require an independent post with more diagrams and numerical examples, for nongeeks.
Thanks for the detailed response, I will keep an eye out on the project