Author Topic: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market  (Read 30065 times)

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Offline AsymmetricInformation

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I think it would help if you could summarize how it works. Probably not many people know about the details which matter. Any constructive discussion is appreciated.
I would suggest to summarize truthcoin so as many people as possible can understand it and then have a public discussion with BM on the mumble server.
I guess the crucial question is how truthcoin determines who wins and who loses the bet.

Ah, but that is the whole point of the project! There is a whitepaper and FAQ about just that. It was also the subject of my LTB interview.

Offline carpet ride

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I just thought I would update everyone:

(1)  Although toast has expressed a desire to bang out a working version of this, he has been severely distracted by BtsX. The tentative arrangement we discussed did involve (at least) 20% of the Vote-ownership (not coin ownership, please see my presentation draft to learn more about this) going to AGS/PTS holders.

(2)  I am still working on Truthcoin in my spare time, and I may hire one or two freelancers to help. If so, I will feel less inclined to give away the ownership at all (as no one has been helping), or I may airdrop to Bitcoin for the superior network effects. In other words, it remains possible that AGS/PTS owners may "miss out" on their chance to own Truthcoin.

(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it would be more successful. I would probably be happy if Bitsharestalk made a bunch of noise and diverted some developer talent here (or made some noise at Bitcointalk or something). As the project-owner, I unfortunately am in a bad position to make noise, as it appears selfish.

(4)  In general, I'm hoping that the devs at BTS will learn a lot from their BtsX experience and use that for my project.

AI, I hope I get to participate in some kind of sharedrop that you do; whether that's through PTS/AGS or BTC. I seriously doubt there's any chance you'll get the bitshares/invictus folks to divert energy from BTSX in the forseeable future. I mean, clearly, BTSX is bitshares/invictus. It's the first project idea they had, the reason they founded the company, and the only one (of their ideas) that people are terribly interested in.

I certainly hope you don't take it as a rebuff or an affront that they won't take time away from BTSX to work on your project, since BTSX is simply the thing that makes them what they are. It is my sincere hope that before too long you'll be able to get some bitshares devs working on your project. If you can't wait that long, then I wish you well and I'll keep an eye on truthcoin wherever it ends up.

A successful BTSX would fund this project.
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Offline biophil

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I just thought I would update everyone:

(1)  Although toast has expressed a desire to bang out a working version of this, he has been severely distracted by BtsX. The tentative arrangement we discussed did involve (at least) 20% of the Vote-ownership (not coin ownership, please see my presentation draft to learn more about this) going to AGS/PTS holders.

(2)  I am still working on Truthcoin in my spare time, and I may hire one or two freelancers to help. If so, I will feel less inclined to give away the ownership at all (as no one has been helping), or I may airdrop to Bitcoin for the superior network effects. In other words, it remains possible that AGS/PTS owners may "miss out" on their chance to own Truthcoin.

(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it would be more successful. I would probably be happy if Bitsharestalk made a bunch of noise and diverted some developer talent here (or made some noise at Bitcointalk or something). As the project-owner, I unfortunately am in a bad position to make noise, as it appears selfish.

(4)  In general, I'm hoping that the devs at BTS will learn a lot from their BtsX experience and use that for my project.

AI, I hope I get to participate in some kind of sharedrop that you do; whether that's through PTS/AGS or BTC. I seriously doubt there's any chance you'll get the bitshares/invictus folks to divert energy from BTSX in the forseeable future. I mean, clearly, BTSX is bitshares/invictus. It's the first project idea they had, the reason they founded the company, and the only one (of their ideas) that people are terribly interested in.

I certainly hope you don't take it as a rebuff or an affront that they won't take time away from BTSX to work on your project, since BTSX is simply the thing that makes them what they are. It is my sincere hope that before too long you'll be able to get some bitshares devs working on your project. If you can't wait that long, then I wish you well and I'll keep an eye on truthcoin wherever it ends up.
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Offline santaclause102

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I just thought I would update everyone:

(1)  Although toast has expressed a desire to bang out a working version of this, he has been severely distracted by BtsX. The tentative arrangement we discussed did involve (at least) 20% of the Vote-ownership (not coin ownership, please see my presentation draft to learn more about this) going to AGS/PTS holders.

(2)  I am still working on Truthcoin in my spare time, and I may hire one or two freelancers to help. If so, I will feel less inclined to give away the ownership at all (as no one has been helping), or I may airdrop to Bitcoin for the superior network effects. In other words, it remains possible that AGS/PTS owners may "miss out" on their chance to own Truthcoin.

(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it would be more successful. I would probably be happy if Bitsharestalk made a bunch of noise and diverted some developer talent here (or made some noise at Bitcointalk or something). As the project-owner, I unfortunately am in a bad position to make noise, as it appears selfish.

(4)  In general, I'm hoping that the devs at BTS will learn a lot from their BtsX experience and use that for my project.

I think it would help if you could summarize how it works. Probably not many people know about the details which matter. Any constructive discussion is appreciated.
I would suggest to summarize truthcoin so as many people as possible can understand it and then have a public discussion with BM on the mumble server.
I guess the crucial question is how truthcoin determines who wins and who loses the bet.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2014, 11:07:14 pm by delulo »

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I just thought I would update everyone:

(1)  Although toast has expressed a desire to bang out a working version of this, he has been severely distracted by BtsX. The tentative arrangement we discussed did involve (at least) 20% of the Vote-ownership (not coin ownership, please see my presentation draft to learn more about this) going to AGS/PTS holders.

(2)  I am still working on Truthcoin in my spare time, and I may hire one or two freelancers to help. If so, I will feel less inclined to give away the ownership at all (as no one has been helping), or I may airdrop to Bitcoin for the superior network effects. In other words, it remains possible that AGS/PTS owners may "miss out" on their chance to own Truthcoin.

(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it would be more successful. I would probably be happy if Bitsharestalk made a bunch of noise and diverted some developer talent here (or made some noise at Bitcointalk or something). As the project-owner, I unfortunately am in a bad position to make noise, as it appears selfish.

(4)  In general, I'm hoping that the devs at BTS will learn a lot from their BtsX experience and use that for my project.

I hope we stick with point 4.  See the post on BitShares Vegas.  How much more rudimentary is that concept compared to Truthcoin? BM and hackfisher expressed interest in it. I think in general there is a great deal of interest in Truthcoin or something like Truthcoin.  tl;dr In general, I want to be included in the share allocation, but I am also deeply interested in the idea


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Offline tonyk

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....
(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it [Truthcoin] would be more successful. [than BTS X] ...



I do not know whether to laugh or to cry at such statements...


[EDIT]
 I know it is hard for big brain like yours (according to your measuring stick) to comprehend it but let me try:

If BTS X  happens to be a  success, it will be worth more than anything in the crypto space for now and for the foreseeable future.

If it fails, it will be worth less than the  time you put to come up with the above non-sense … so not a great project to beat,  in that case.


« Last Edit: July 16, 2014, 08:59:42 pm by tonyk »
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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I just thought I would update everyone:

(1)  Although toast has expressed a desire to bang out a working version of this, he has been severely distracted by BtsX. The tentative arrangement we discussed did involve (at least) 20% of the Vote-ownership (not coin ownership, please see my presentation draft to learn more about this) going to AGS/PTS holders.

(2)  I am still working on Truthcoin in my spare time, and I may hire one or two freelancers to help. If so, I will feel less inclined to give away the ownership at all (as no one has been helping), or I may airdrop to Bitcoin for the superior network effects. In other words, it remains possible that AGS/PTS owners may "miss out" on their chance to own Truthcoin.

(3)  My feeling is that my project would be much simpler and faster to implement than BtsX (my understanding is that toast agrees). My personal opinion is also that it would be more successful. I would probably be happy if Bitsharestalk made a bunch of noise and diverted some developer talent here (or made some noise at Bitcointalk or something). As the project-owner, I unfortunately am in a bad position to make noise, as it appears selfish.

(4)  In general, I'm hoping that the devs at BTS will learn a lot from their BtsX experience and use that for my project.

Offline liondani

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In my opinion, this is the source of much of today's economic failure (huge firms with none of the owners knowing or caring about what's going on)."

 +5%

Offline CLains

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Said he had some funds on his own, and seems to want to do a special kind of BTC airdrop, because "its about plugging into the best network."

Aside from the "coins" there are "votecoins" which he wants to distribute to "developers/funders/contributors/etc. But its hardly a settled issue."
"the Votecoins are not "free", one must do the work of Voting (for which you are paid)."

The idea behind seems to be this: "In the ancient past, shareholders did a lot of work, monitoring their corporation and electing its Board and Executive Managers. Today, people just kick back and do nothing. In my opinion, this is the source of much of today's economic failure (huge firms with none of the owners knowing or caring about what's going on)."

http://forum.truthcoin.info/index.php/topic,6.0.html

Offline Gentso1

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How come? – the AGS account shows huge balances and very little expenses. If you have already dedicated most of the funds you better have a way to show them on the open books. If you have dedicated say 100 K PTS already and you gonna show them only after spending them (sending out the funds) those open books do little to no good.

I will not talk about how those AGS funds could have been much bigger - I have posted long enough posts on the topic before…

Good point, right now the AGS funds are being documented on a cash basis rather than accrual.   The funds have been mostly reserved to keep a development
team going for 1 year with some margin for Bitcoin price falling further.

680 $/BTC seams a reasonable price to lock/sale ,  like 1/3 of the BTC in the AGS fund, so you feel more secure/not have reasons to not provide funding for very well looking projects. ( I do understand the thought process that funds kept in PTS/BTC are more open to ‘community control’ and you cannot post the $ acc. # you have the funds from the sale, like you can do with BTC or PTS, but it is mostly technicality)

So with the btc price increase III can keep there reserves and we should be able to give this guy some funding unless there is another issue that has popped up?

Offline tonyk

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How come? – the AGS account shows huge balances and very little expenses. If you have already dedicated most of the funds you better have a way to show them on the open books. If you have dedicated say 100 K PTS already and you gonna show them only after spending them (sending out the funds) those open books do little to no good.

I will not talk about how those AGS funds could have been much bigger - I have posted long enough posts on the topic before…

Good point, right now the AGS funds are being documented on a cash basis rather than accrual.   The funds have been mostly reserved to keep a development team going for 1 year with some margin for Bitcoin price falling further.

680 $/BTC seams a reasonable price to lock/sale ,  like 1/3 of the BTC in the AGS fund, so you feel more secure/not have reasons to not provide funding for very well looking projects. ( I do understand the thought process that funds kept in PTS/BTC are more open to ‘community control’ and you cannot post the $ acc. # you have the funds from the sale, like you can do with BTC or PTS, but it is mostly technicality)
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline Bitcoinfan

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^ truthcoin has already submitted once to hacker news

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Do you know who that is? Because neither Paul or I submitted that to ycombinator.  :) 

Offline bytemaster

How come? – the AGS account shows huge balances and very little expenses. If you have already dedicated most of the funds you better have a way to show them on the open books. If you have dedicated say 100 K PTS already and you gonna show them only after spending them (sending out the funds) those open books do little to no good.

I will not talk about how those AGS funds could have been much bigger - I have posted long enough posts on the topic before…

Good point, right now the AGS funds are being documented on a cash basis rather than accrual.   The funds have been mostly reserved to keep a development team going for 1 year with some margin for Bitcoin price falling further.   
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Offline santaclause102

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We have some design disagreements... but I am OK with that.   With BTC price drop we cannot fund everyone until after our core products are out.
Has this been communicated actively?
I appreciate the perspective that it is ok to deviate a bit from one's approach in order to get the synergies of collaboration.
There is value in such a collaboration in itself. It gives credit to Invictus (assym.info. has an acedemic background) and proofs that the social consensus model works which would be a great signal.

Offline tonyk

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How come? – the AGS account shows huge balances and very little expenses. If you have already dedicated most of the funds you better have a way to show them on the open books. If you have dedicated say 100 K PTS already and you gonna show them only after spending them (sending out the funds) those open books do little to no good.

I will not talk about how those AGS funds could have been much bigger - I have posted long enough posts on the topic before…
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline bytemaster

We have some design disagreements... but I am OK with that.   With BTC price drop we cannot fund everyone until after our core products are out. 
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
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Offline mf-tzo

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As long as there are discussions I am ok! And if there are disagreements it is probably for the best. I just don't want that we ignore such projects...


Offline santaclause102

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Can't I3 use part of the AGS funding to help the development of the Truthcoin and in return Truthcoin gives stakes to AGS shareholders once launched? Why there is no proposal from anyone? It might not worth it to use AGS funding but unless a proposal is on the table we will not be able to judge it.

Isn't that an efficient way to use AGS funding?

Why there are no discussions about possible agreements? I am pretty sure that if we do not support Truthcoin soon someone else will do (like bithaus)
+5
I think the barrier atm is that there is some minor disagreement or misunderstanding about the design between BM and AsymmetricInformation. But also BM didnt look to closely into it yet. Once BTS X is launched there will be more time I think. I would greatly appreciate a collaboration!

Offline mf-tzo

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Can't I3 use part of the AGS funding to help the development of the Truthcoin and in return Truthcoin gives stakes to AGS shareholders once launched? Why there is no proposal from anyone? It might not worth it to use AGS funding but unless a proposal is on the table we will not be able to judge it.

Isn't that an efficient way to use AGS funding?

Why there are no discussions about possible agreements? I am pretty sure that if we do not support Truthcoin soon someone else will do (like bithaus)

Offline toast

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^ truthcoin has already submitted once to hacker news

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Offline MolonLabe

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GitHub Stats

Bitcoin: 5372 stars, 5726 commits, 198 contributors
Bitshares: 77 stars, 802 commits, 20 contributors
Truthcoin: 183 stars, 106 commits, 2 contributors



Offline santaclause102

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It's just a matter of still being at school .p2p taking up more time at the moment.

Finish strong!  School that is! 

We are interested.

The main limitation is that Bytemaster is heads-down with his whole team working to get XT out the door.

Truthcoin is one of the more intellectually deep DACs and it deserves much more mindshare than is available at this particular instant in time.  Hopefully we can thoroughly review their proposal in the next few weeks.

Nothing stops this community from contributing to the vetting of the ideas and recruiting of talent in the mean time.

For what it's worth, we did issue their first bitshares.org email account yesterday...   :)

Whatever we do, it will not be insignificant, and it is very important that we do it.  To echo Stan’s point, we are all coming here to make something great.  If we are to believe we are to do great work, we must challenge each others thoughts, assumptions, beliefs, and conceptual groundwork.  Often our hunches are the beginning of creative ideas.  But, they just stay like that.  They don’t become breakthrough innovations unless they involve and are tested by the hunches of others.  I encourage each one of you to read Paul’s whitepaper, think about it, find ways to break it, and come back here with questions.  In the end, we will arrive at the best approach.  which I firmly believe is the Truthcoin method. 

-- happy to have a Bitshares email!  You all can find me at James@bitshares.org

+5

Offline Bitcoinfan

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any updates on this?
I am also curious about what is going on with this project.  Can anyone comment?

I am still working on the project in my free time, writing and reviewing my code for clarity and performance. Recently, I (finally) perfected Scaled Claims, which allow a PM to take on a final value between 0 and 1, which can be scaled and shifted to represent a price index such as the DJIA or a number of House of Representative seats (the two examples I used in the R code). I have yet to rewrite this in Python or document it. I also still have to write a FAQ and more clearly document the project's requirements.

For details of what I am working on, see the 'Pipeline' section of my GitHub ReadMe, which I update occasionally https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin#pipeline

One issue is the economic model. Should this create new currency units (in addition to creating shares)? I had originally planned to use Bitcoin, but this depends on the development of, for example, side chains / tree chains / whatever. I may use Bitcoin's UTXO set purely to gain network effects and testing (distributing the shares [not currency] to the developers [currently just me]).

Many individuals have expressed interest in the project via private message or email, including one developer here. However, no one has volunteered to do what is actually required, and commit a few weeks of undivided development attention. Currently, I am not comfortable hiring anyone, mainly because half-finished code is worthless.

Bitcoinfan indicated to me that Bitshares would be able to provide dedicated developers and/or funding-for-developers in exchange for proportional ownership of the project's shares, but I instead expressed the opinion that Dan would (understandably) be hesitant to fund something which might directly compete with his own project. While meeting with Dan, he indicated that he had not read the whitepaper/code/supporting-documentation, and that he would not be able to directly provide any funding. Nearly all of his questions were about how Truthcoin would compare to his BitsharesX + Feed(s) idea. I interpreted this as confirming my original expectations.

So I am not sure that there is any room for partnership, but Bitcoinfan remains very optimistic so I am leaving it to him to arrange.

I think the community has shown great interest in the project. When a few DACs are out and Invictus is a well recognized brand/company it will be much easier to hire developers. I'd like to see a collaboration!

There is good reason why truthcoin is the top alternative dac post.  I think once the community reads and thinks about Paul’s whitepaper, more will see the light and how essential it is to have a decentralized protocol such as Truthcoin. Principally, Truthcoin’s entire theme is that “talk is cheap,” and to actually believe people’s words they should have “skin in the game.”  We are enthusiastic about creating a system that will enable people to put up money where their mouth is before they are seen are credible by the public. 
We hope the interest is enough to get Truthcoin off the ground, but that alone wont be able to kickstart anything.  I know Paul.  He has his own hesitancies about taking people at their own words.  He even has a plaque in his kitchen that says. “Nullius in Verba” (i.e. Take nobody’s word about it.)  He doesn’t care what people say, only which actions will make this project happen. 

Offline Bitcoinfan

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It's just a matter of still being at school .p2p taking up more time at the moment.

Finish strong!  School that is! 

We are interested.

The main limitation is that Bytemaster is heads-down with his whole team working to get XT out the door.

Truthcoin is one of the more intellectually deep DACs and it deserves much more mindshare than is available at this particular instant in time.  Hopefully we can thoroughly review their proposal in the next few weeks.

Nothing stops this community from contributing to the vetting of the ideas and recruiting of talent in the mean time.

For what it's worth, we did issue their first bitshares.org email account yesterday...   :)

Whatever we do, it will not be insignificant, and it is very important that we do it.  To echo Stan’s point, we are all coming here to make something great.  If we are to believe we are to do great work, we must challenge each others thoughts, assumptions, beliefs, and conceptual groundwork.  Often our hunches are the beginning of creative ideas.  But, they just stay like that.  They don’t become breakthrough innovations unless they involve and are tested by the hunches of others.  I encourage each one of you to read Paul’s whitepaper, think about it, find ways to break it, and come back here with questions.  In the end, we will arrive at the best approach.  which I firmly believe is the Truthcoin method. 

-- happy to have a Bitshares email!  You all can find me at James@bitshares.org

« Last Edit: May 05, 2014, 02:43:37 am by Bitcoinfan »

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http://www.reddit.com/r/BeyondBitcoinShow/comments/240gyj/26_apr_14questions_for_dev_voice_hangout_w_dan/

This question was asked during the last Dev Voice Hangout.  The above link has a quick rundown of BM's response.
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Offline Agent86

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I imagine market depth and voting participation would be important to Truthcoin.  For example if I can go big on a bet and take over 50% of one side (using sybil attack/sockpuppets/collusion with friends) and then I use that power to force the voting in my favor even if it's not the real outcome I can take the money.  For example all my voting shares vote to say that Mitt Romney won the 2012 election and I get the majority vote so I take the money of the people who bet on Obama; you could pick smaller bets that have less participation to use this attack.  I imagine you have thought of ways to deal with it, just pointing out the most obvious attack.
« Last Edit: April 30, 2014, 05:07:16 pm by Agent86 »

Offline tonyk

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Nicolai,
I am not even 50 % sure BTS X works, I just hope it does.

[Edit] BTW my logic is more akin to: expected  return 50x to 500x+ if it does work; chance of it working >  2%!

 I understand why it might not work.BUT  this is not the issue I am talking about here!

But if you read what I have written the problem with TRC (truthcoin) is magnitudes bigger! Just read it again. – The TRuthcoin layer is utterly unnecessary for the PM! The same is not true about BTS X – The market needs BTSX (as currency/value holding entity) if the BTS X prediction market is to succeed!

Continued…
« Last Edit: April 30, 2014, 08:09:05 pm by tonyk »
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline toast

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^^ tonyk how do you imagine bts X works? The theory is that in a distributed environment you cannot establish a consensus point that isn't the "real" one because you cannot coordinate otherwise.

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Offline tonyk

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Read the white paper! (several times) 
Great Idea! Well almost…

Let me get some things straight.
So the owners/voters try to guess what the others vote will be, and not what the actual outcome would be! Their incentive is vote with the majority not to guess correctly! If they want to gain by correctly predicting the outcome they must become traders! I.e. bet correctly not vote for the correct outcome.

The consequence of this is that their voting (as a whole, as a group) is completely unrelated to how well the market they are  supposed to care about performs. If they (as a majority) always get the prediction correctly or they are always wrong the actual (trading) market will perform as it wants- i.e. successfully or unsuccessfully based on totally unrelated factors (advertising, competition, fees etc) -all factors pertaining to the trading market itself.
Which leads to the logical question – Why  are they needed at all?
I have more points but let’s see if you will answer  this one first.

I understood my mistake. Disregard the above!
« Last Edit: April 30, 2014, 07:42:45 pm by tonyk »
Lack of arbitrage is the problem, isn't it. And this 'should' solves it.

Offline santaclause102

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any updates on this?
I am also curious about what is going on with this project.  Can anyone comment?

I am still working on the project in my free time, writing and reviewing my code for clarity and performance. Recently, I (finally) perfected Scaled Claims, which allow a PM to take on a final value between 0 and 1, which can be scaled and shifted to represent a price index such as the DJIA or a number of House of Representative seats (the two examples I used in the R code). I have yet to rewrite this in Python or document it. I also still have to write a FAQ and more clearly document the project's requirements.

For details of what I am working on, see the 'Pipeline' section of my GitHub ReadMe, which I update occasionally https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin#pipeline

One issue is the economic model. Should this create new currency units (in addition to creating shares)? I had originally planned to use Bitcoin, but this depends on the development of, for example, side chains / tree chains / whatever. I may use Bitcoin's UTXO set purely to gain network effects and testing (distributing the shares [not currency] to the developers [currently just me]).

Many individuals have expressed interest in the project via private message or email, including one developer here. However, no one has volunteered to do what is actually required, and commit a few weeks of undivided development attention. Currently, I am not comfortable hiring anyone, mainly because half-finished code is worthless.

Bitcoinfan indicated to me that Bitshares would be able to provide dedicated developers and/or funding-for-developers in exchange for proportional ownership of the project's shares, but I instead expressed the opinion that Dan would (understandably) be hesitant to fund something which might directly compete with his own project. While meeting with Dan, he indicated that he had not read the whitepaper/code/supporting-documentation, and that he would not be able to directly provide any funding. Nearly all of his questions were about how Truthcoin would compare to his BitsharesX + Feed(s) idea. I interpreted this as confirming my original expectations.

So I am not sure that there is any room for partnership, but Bitcoinfan remains very optimistic so I am leaving it to him to arrange.

I think the community has shown great interest in the project. When a few DACs are out and Invictus is a well recognized brand/company it will be much easier to hire developers. I'd like to see a collaboration!

Offline Stan

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I really don't think Dan ever meant to show that Bitshares would not want to help you guys because you're the competition. To the contrary I think the whole point here is that *any* value-adding DAC idea can find a win-win arrangement with bitshares.

The usual deal is you honor at least 10% PTS and 10% AGS and in return you get to use bitshares_toolkit and get the support of everyone in the community. This is something you might want to do anyway if you use snapshots for allocation - better than dropping purely on bitcoin's utxo set!

Pretty soon there should be several DAC engineers who might be willing to contribute more focused effort in exchange for more equity in the DAC. I myself am intensely interested in Truthcoin and my grant from Bitshares allows me to work on any DAC that honors the social consensus. It's just a matter of still being at school .p2p taking up more time at the moment. The bitshares landscape will also look much different once XT and then .p2p/Lotto are launched.

In other words, don't turn your back to collaborating just yet! We want you guys!

We are interested.

The main limitation is that Bytemaster is heads-down with his whole team working to get XT out the door.

Truthcoin is one of the more intellectually deep DACs and it deserves much more mindshare than is available at this particular instant in time.  Hopefully we can thoroughly review their proposal in the next few weeks.

Nothing stops this community from contributing to the vetting of the ideas and recruiting of talent in the mean time.

For what it's worth, we did issue their first bitshares.org email account yesterday...   :)
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline toast

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I really don't think Dan ever meant to show that Bitshares would not want to help you guys because you're the competition. To the contrary I think the whole point here is that *any* value-adding DAC idea can find a win-win arrangement with bitshares.

The usual deal is you honor at least 10% PTS and 10% AGS and in return you get to use bitshares_toolkit and get the support of everyone in the community. This is something you might want to do anyway if you use snapshots for allocation - better than dropping purely on bitcoin's utxo set!

Pretty soon there should be several DAC engineers who might be willing to contribute more focused effort in exchange for more equity in the DAC. I myself am intensely interested in Truthcoin and my grant from Bitshares allows me to work on any DAC that honors the social consensus. It's just a matter of still being at school .p2p taking up more time at the moment. The bitshares landscape will also look much different once XT and then .p2p/Lotto are launched.

In other words, don't turn your back to collaborating just yet! We want you guys!
Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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any updates on this?
I am also curious about what is going on with this project.  Can anyone comment?

I am still working on the project in my free time, writing and reviewing my code for clarity and performance. Recently, I (finally) perfected Scaled Claims, which allow a PM to take on a final value between 0 and 1, which can be scaled and shifted to represent a price index such as the DJIA or a number of House of Representative seats (the two examples I used in the R code). I have yet to rewrite this in Python or document it. I also still have to write a FAQ and more clearly document the project's requirements.

For details of what I am working on, see the 'Pipeline' section of my GitHub ReadMe, which I update occasionally https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin#pipeline

One issue is the economic model. Should this create new currency units (in addition to creating shares)? I had originally planned to use Bitcoin, but this depends on the development of, for example, side chains / tree chains / whatever. I may use Bitcoin's UTXO set purely to gain network effects and testing (distributing the shares [not currency] to the developers [currently just me]).

Many individuals have expressed interest in the project via private message or email, including one developer here. However, no one has volunteered to do what is actually required, and commit a few weeks of undivided development attention. Currently, I am not comfortable hiring anyone, mainly because half-finished code is worthless.

Bitcoinfan indicated to me that Bitshares would be able to provide dedicated developers and/or funding-for-developers in exchange for proportional ownership of the project's shares, but I instead expressed the opinion that Dan would (understandably) be hesitant to fund something which might directly compete with his own project. While meeting with Dan, he indicated that he had not read the whitepaper/code/supporting-documentation, and that he would not be able to directly provide any funding. Nearly all of his questions were about how Truthcoin would compare to his BitsharesX + Feed(s) idea. I interpreted this as confirming my original expectations.

So I am not sure that there is any room for partnership, but Bitcoinfan remains very optimistic so I am leaving it to him to arrange.

Offline Bitcoinfan

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any updates on this?

I think this one of the most promising ideas in crypto - to get an anonymous prediction market bootstrapped is like bootstrapping trading reality, with all his up- and downsides.


Yes!  Thank you for your interest.  We have not received any commitments of developers or funding just yet.  Dan is waiting for us to send in some proposal documentation before we can proceed with the Bitshares Foundation.  Stay tuned! 
« Last Edit: April 26, 2014, 03:10:40 pm by Bitcoinfan »

Offline Gentso1

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I am also curious about what is going on with this project.  Can anyone comment?

Offline nakaone

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any updates on this?

I think this one of the most promising ideas in crypto - to get an anonymous prediction market bootstrapped is like bootstrapping trading reality, with all his up- and downsides.


Offline Empirical1

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I still have some concerns about whether an anonymous, self-selected, majority is better than a majority of public trusted feeds and a prediction market that uses 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5 feeds will provide better results. I am certain that 2 out of 3 trusted feeds is likely cheaper and more efficient.

May a million DACs blossom!

 +5% I think your solution will be cheaper & more efficient as you said, so in general I prefer that now.

There are some questions you can pose to a TCPM that you wouldn't be able to elsewhere, so it could develop its own niche and build from there.

I also think it could even be useful in Bitshares, occasionally a few loud voices, with multiple overly long posts, (which I've been guilty of too) can almost create a false community consensus on certain topics. Putting some community type questions to our own TCPM occasionally could be useful.

Offline CLains

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Will the market care about whatever the optimal solution is? Look at Bitcoin.

Offline bytemaster

I had a good chat with the guys behind Truthcoin and have concluded the idea is likely sound from a technical perspective. 

I still have some concerns about whether an anonymous, self-selected, majority is better than a majority of public trusted feeds and a prediction market that uses 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 5 feeds will provide better results.  I am certain that 2 out of 3 trusted feeds is likely cheaper and more efficient. 

May a million DACs blossom!
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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AsymmetricInformation, are you aware of the OP_RETURN issues Counterparty has (Mastercoin seems to have the same issue)? The discussion is all over the the Counterparty thread: Here are parts of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg5815887#msg5815887

It is completely irrelevant. I wish I knew of a way to make this sound more respectful (I really do), over text/internet which can often make things sound harsh, but the fact that you are even bringing it up indicates to me that you probably don't understand Bitcoin, my proposal, or OP_RETURN really at all. It's like saying "Are you aware of the new laws against writing on dollar bills?" to someone who is trying to start the Chicago Board Options Exchange. I did mention OP_RETURN in the Implementation section of my paper in passing, but only for the sake of completeness in discussion.

Thanks very much for the replies!

My pleasure.

TRU seems a bit different to PTS in that regard as I understand in the moment. In TRU I don't see a lot of new trees but I see a lot of new branches that don't honour the original trunk.

Like say I owned 1% of the first TRU blockchain, then someone created a basketball sub-chain which honoured the base chain,
I would then own 1% of the Basketball sub-chain. But as I'm not particularly interested in voting on Basketball, I would sell my Basketball stake or it would slowly erode away (Through demurrage.)

After a year, the Basketball chain is working well and has gained a great reputation,  however the voting demand is too much so they decide to make some new sub-chains/forks and divide basketball up by the various divisions.

It seems if you wanted to make a sub-chain/fork that works the best and that basketball bettors would trust the most, the basketball division sub-chain would be better off honouring holders of the current Basketball Chain not holders of the original TRU blockchain from which it was originally forked?

I think you've hit on another weak area of writing. I realize now that I was thinking of the 'tree analogy' in time, with ownership equivalent at each fork-point, not a tree of permanent-ownership. So you'd want to own the earliest chain, and you could maintain ownership of it through time (by continuing to vote), and this is the way (not any other way) that you are connected to the trunk (the 'option' to own future branches). I think I need to clarify this a little more in the paper.

The bold part is exactly what I had in mind, in other words, but the tree analogy starts to get confusing after you've abandoned a branch (unlike in a real tree in which you can't do that, and if that branch catches fire or something the whole tree probably dies).

Offline Empirical1

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Thanks very much for the replies!


In some of your notes you suggested timelines of a couple of weeks for voting. Would it be fair to say this wouldn't be suitable to horse racing etc. where the events happen very fast, there are many of them and payouts need to be made fairly quickly.

The price will not fix at 1 or 0 until voting occurs, but it will converge toward one of those values as the event info is revealed (ie just as the horse wins). If voting is in two weeks, there may be some time-value-of-money/time-preference/liquidity effect, but shares of the winning horse could still sell for 99.0 or 99.9. Those buying at 99 would be Wall Street / banker types who pick up the shares purely to earn 2 week's worth of above-market interest on their capital.

So fast cashouts shouldn't be a problem.

Yes that makes a lot of sense. I can even see third parties advertising they use TCPM on the back-end but bettors might interact with an interface that is market specific and very user friendly with fast cashouts, all for a small fee but which still makes the process a lot cheaper than traditional betting plus with some new interesting options.

Another question, (I'm not 100% sure I understand the coin system exactly so apologies if this is wrong) but you say in your whitepaper, that

Quote
a) Any Bitcoin-user can trade on any prediction market without directly interfacing with Truthcoin at all.

Ie. The trading part is done in Bitcoin.

Trading uses the Truthcoin blockchain, but not the 'Truthcoins' themselves. This is probably my fault for relying on the word "directly", I'll put it on my edit list for v1.2.

It seems that if TCPM became a trillion dollar market, the real benificiary would be Bitcoin holders.

Hard to say. Truthcoin owners would be getting 1% of the trading volume. You are probably right, thus is the power of money's network effect.


Yeah 1% of a $Trillion trading volume would be $10 Billion, which is very lucrative.
However, yeah,  the coin that sucks up that $1 trillion volume, (The one the trading is denominated in) will benefit a lot I think.
I still can't clearly see the reason for not making a new TRU trading coin, (especially because the return on that new coin which would start from a very low market cap would be incredible & I don't think Bitcoin separates the ownership/control problem that much better.) but might just be me. I can be a bit slow on some things.

(Because even though the return on a specific TCPM blockchain would be higher by being a voter and owning truthcoin, a voter only has the capacity to vote on X amount of blockchains, so as the TCPM expands they will be selling or losing their stake (via demurrage) in various sub-chains whereas the Bitcoin holder would have a stake in all of them, because all of the trading volume would be denominated in Bitcoin. So IMO the current system does to a certain extent 'separate ownership from control' anyway? )

Actually, the vision for Branching is that all current owners will own all future branches (they will just sell or fail to use the TRU on branches they are disinterested in). It is actually quite a bit like ProtoShares, where PTS is the first branch. Of course, someone can "plant a new tree" by forking the project completely, which might be ideal for private firms, but for public PMs skeptics would wonder why they should trust you vs. something with an existing reputation. So there is an incentive to buy the earliest tree.

TRU seems a bit different to PTS in that regard as I understand in the moment. In TRU I don't see a lot of new trees but I see a lot of new branches that don't honour the original trunk.

Like say I owned 1% of the first TRU blockchain, then someone created a basketball sub-chain which honoured the base chain,
I would then own 1% of the Basketball sub-chain. But as I'm not particularly interested in voting on Basketball, I would sell my Basketball stake or it would slowly erode away (Through demurrage.)

After a year, the Basketball chain is working well and has gained a great reputation,  however the voting demand is too much so they decide to make some new sub-chains/forks and divide basketball up by the various divisions.

It seems if you wanted to make a sub-chain/fork that works the best and that basketball bettors would trust the most, the basketball division sub-chain would be better off honouring holders of the current Basketball Chain not holders of the original TRU blockchain from which it was originally forked?

Offline santaclause102

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AsymmetricInformation, are you aware of the OP_RETURN issues Counterparty has (Mastercoin seems to have the same issue)? The discussion is all over the the Counterparty thread: Here are parts of it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=395761.msg5815887#msg5815887

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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I think the thing I'm potentially most excited about is this -

Quote
Prediction Markets (PMs) can do more than predict the future. First, the mere presence of a PM-based forecast can conclusively end debates, prevent lies, encourage and protect whistleblowers, and provide decision makers with honest advice.


At the moment the MSM and politicians have a monopoly on truth or can at least obfuscate it enough to get away with things they shouldn't really be able to.

Not just them. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Wegener/


In some of your notes you suggested timelines of a couple of weeks for voting. Would it be fair to say this wouldn't be suitable to horse racing etc. where the events happen very fast, there are many of them and payouts need to be made fairly quickly.

The price will not fix at 1 or 0 until voting occurs, but it will converge toward one of those values as the event info is revealed (ie just as the horse wins). If voting is in two weeks, there may be some time-value-of-money/time-preference/liquidity effect, but shares of the winning horse could still sell for 99.0 or 99.9. Those buying at 99 would be Wall Street / banker types who pick up the shares purely to earn 2 week's worth of above-market interest on their capital.

So fast cashouts shouldn't be a problem.

Another question, (I'm not 100% sure I understand the coin system exactly so apologies if this is wrong) but you say in your whitepaper, that

Quote
a) Any Bitcoin-user can trade on any prediction market without directly interfacing with Truthcoin at all.

Ie. The trading part is done in Bitcoin.

Trading uses the Truthcoin blockchain, but not the 'Truthcoins' themselves. This is probably my fault for relying on the word "directly", I'll put it on my edit list for v1.2.

It seems that if TCPM became a trillion dollar market, the real benificiary would be Bitcoin holders.

Hard to say. Truthcoin owners would be getting 1% of the trading volume. You are probably right, thus is the power of money's network effect.

(Because even though the return on a specific TCPM blockchain would be higher by being a voter and owning truthcoin, a voter only has the capacity to vote on X amount of blockchains, so as the TCPM expands they will be selling or losing their stake (via demurrage) in various sub-chains whereas the Bitcoin holder would have a stake in all of them, because all of the trading volume would be denominated in Bitcoin. So IMO the current system does to a certain extent 'separate ownership from control' anyway? )

Actually, the vision for Branching is that all current owners will own all future branches (they will just sell or fail to use the TRU on branches they are disinterested in). It is actually quite a bit like ProtoShares, where PTS is the first branch. Of course, someone can "plant a new tree" by forking the project completely, which might be ideal for private firms, but for public PMs skeptics would wonder why they should trust you vs. something with an existing reputation. So there is an incentive to buy the earliest tree.

Offline Empirical1

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Another question, (I'm not 100% sure I understand the coin system exactly so apologies if this is wrong) but you say in your whitepaper, that

Quote
a) Any Bitcoin-user can trade on any prediction market without directly interfacing with Truthcoin at all.

Ie. The trading part is done in Bitcoin. So even though I understand your comment

One could design a class of 'owner-only' shares, but this separates ownership from control, introduces agency cost, and otherwise threatens the model. My research into the financial history of this planet indicates to me that separation of ownership from control produces something permanently unworkable. Bitcoin miners control Bitcoin, and are paid in Bitcoin. Bitcoin owners can only destroy their own Bitcoin. Perfectly logical.

It seems that if TCPM became a trillion dollar market, the real benificiary would be Bitcoin holders.
Because Bitcoin would absorb all of that Trillion Dollar TCPM trading volume and the value of Bitcoin would increase as a result  of its' 'fairly' fixed supply.

Therefore if you wanted to bet on the success of TCPM you would buy Bitcoin.

(Because even though the return on a specific TCPM blockchain would be higher by being a voter and owning truthcoin, a voter only has the capacity to vote on X amount of blockchains, so as the TCPM expands they will be selling or losing their stake (via demurrage) in various sub-chains whereas the Bitcoin holder would have a stake in all of them, because all of the trading volume would be denominated in Bitcoin. So IMO the current system does to a certain extent 'separate ownership from control' anyway? )

If that's the case wouldn't it be better to start a separate fixed supply trading coin in which all trading is denominated?

A) That way initial Truthcoin owners/voters could also be given a stake in the 'trading coin' so they're incentivised to expand the network beyond their personal voting capacity because they can still maintain a stake in the future success of the TCPM by holding the fixed supply trading coin in which all TCPM trading is done.   

B) If all TCPM trading is done in a new universal trading coin 'Y' then a small demurrage can also be applied to the trading coin 'Y' that gets paid to Truthcoin holders based on the volume their Truthcoin blockchain contributes to the overall market.  (This way you're actually giving more of the ownership back to the voters, because you couldn't apply this demurrage to Bitcoin, so if you made the trading in Bitcoin it would allow people who are long Bitcoin to get a lot of the value of TCPM without giving anything back to Truthcoin holders.)




 


« Last Edit: April 08, 2014, 04:32:46 pm by Empirical1 »

Offline Empirical1

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Thanks for the earlier reply.

I think the thing I'm potentially most excited about is this -

Quote
Prediction Markets (PMs) can do more than predict the future. First, the mere presence of a PM-based forecast can conclusively end debates, prevent lies, encourage and protect whistleblowers, and provide decision makers with honest advice.


At the moment the MSM and politicians have a monopoly on truth or can at least obfuscate it enough to get away with things they shouldn't really be able to.

A robust, widely dispersed, proven TCPM can potentially do a lot of good in the world.


As for the other applications I like that it's decentralised, in that it doesn't need any external feeds, but even though you say..

Quote
In the United States, it is popular to gamble on the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship. The creation of a fully liquid 1x68 market concerning only the champion team (in other words, not a full bracket) only costs about 6 times as much seed capital as authoring a simple 1x2 binary market7 (although decision fees are 67 times greater).
This allows everyone to gamble at once, interactively in an environment where money can be made and lost before, after, and during a game. Likely, no entertainment experience can compare! Moreover, a prediction market has (by definition) actuarially fair odds. There is no ‘house edge’, and with only a 1% trading fee this is possibly the fairest proposition in the history of gambling.

In some of your notes you suggested timelines of a couple of weeks for voting. Would it be fair to say this wouldn't be suitable to horse racing etc. where the events happen very fast, there are many of them and payouts need to be made fairly quickly.

Ie. The TCPM does sacrifice some speed overall and is also not suited (By comparison to tradition onlilne betting) to multiple fast paced, complicated events & betting. For example horse racing.

The benefits are that it is decentralised, no external feeds required and your odds are MUCH better. (The book-maker in sports betting is  usually taking 4-5% at least so 1% does change the game completely.)

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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Welcome AsymmetricInformation and Bitcoinfan!
Thank you!

AsymmetricInformation, you said somewhere that you didn't believe BitUSD would peg to the dollar back then. What do you think now?
I'm not sure. I happen to be a very skeptical guy, of everything (as James (Bitcoinfan) will tell you). I am impressed with the way the core idea keeps improving, and I think it could easily continue to improve as potential attacks are discovered, as Bitcoin does. BitSharesX is pretty complicated, and I frequently wonder if I even understand it enough to comment. (I'm even skeptical of myself)!

I do know a lot about prediction markets, and I still believe that BitUSD would not represent a prediction market for USD under the established definition, it would instead be something new. A lot of the resistance PMs have to market manipulation is due (in my opinion) to the certainty that traders have that their shares will be worth a certain amount at a certain time ($1 upon the contract maturity). So lately I have been following the market manipulation thread in BitsharesX very closely.

There is some interesting BitSharesX game theory in people's refusal to accept anything other than the market price for their shares. I think this could work really well, but the margin call disrupts this ability-to-refuse. The margin call gets its information endogenously (internally, from the BitPrice) and is a weak point. James and I discussed that BitSharesX could occasionally call out to Truthcoin to find some information about the 'real' market price (say a range of valid prices), and base the margin call (or something else) off of that. The design, though, is already changing to try and block a malicious margin call in other ways (as I was saying).

I think the present forum members have already done a good job voicing their concerns in the relevant threads. If I think of anything new to say I might post there.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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These are good questions, much better than I expected.  (I expected people to not even read the paper, and make all kinds of wrong claims about the accuracy or desirability of PMs).

1. It seems you have to expose your private keys when you want to vote, I think there may need to be some alternative to this.  (I know NXT has very low 'forging' participation rate, a) because the incentives are low but b) because users don't want to frequently expose their private keys to potential keyloggers etc.)

I don't know a lot of crypto, there probably is a better way of doing this. Of course, by the time you expose that key, it is useless, but I agree that automated (or even manual) exposure of private keys is inconvenient and a risk. There needs to be a way to encrypt the votes in a way that they can't be decrypted by anyone else, if there were nothing at stake individuals could publish the decryption key and allow other people to read their votes, which would weaken (and complicate) voting strategy in a number of ways.

2. Have you considered a fail-safe dispute resolving mechanism?

Yes I have. In the ancient past, one can observe these lingering notes in line 237 the original R code:

Quote from: https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/40b859cc3d396af3e2ab068be3f23c8312db6e4b/lib/consensus/ConsensusMechanism.r
#Voting Across Time
#Later Votes should count more
#! ...simple change = ConoutFinal becomes exponentially smoothed result of previous chains.
#! require X number of chains (blocks) before the outcome is officially determined (two weeks?)

# Will need:
# 1] Percent Voted
# 2] Time Dimension of blocks.

But I later decided it wasn't worth it. I don't remember all of the reasons for that decsion. Clearly, it would take more time. I was thinking an average across outcome-results, with later results counting more (as manipulators are short term). However, I reasoned that, if the first outcome were 'wrong' the total smoothed outcome would now be more likely to be wrong than right. In a way, it unseals some of the votes in advance, disrupting the coordination game.

If the dispute completely replaced the old outcome, then I think I was also worried that attackers would abuse it by endlessly lodging disputes, but you might be on to something there by making it expensive. I'm not sure the benefit of this outweighs the cost, however.

Although the entire incentive scheme is designed on off-path reasoning (if people lie, if people refuse to vote), the Nash Equilibrium has everyone voting on all the outcomes [market depth & market price are irrelevant] on their branch (this is a major reason for branches...too much work for voters). I really do expect participation to be nearly 100% all the time, particularly in the medium to long run.

In Truthcoin's current form, do people bet using Bitcoin and pay a trading fee that gets paid to Truthcoin holders or do they buy Truthcoin and use that to bet?

Yes you've missed this part:
For c, in this blockchain the 'Coins' *are* reputation.  There are basically two coins at once (although the network-currency "Bitcoin" are just inputs in a signed message to the market maker). Then they are 'withdrawn'. This withdraw thing is a little complicated, but some people on Bitcointalk helped me with several possible solutions, which are in the Implementation Details section.

Check the Appendices for how I punish people who refused to vote. This will have to be **clearly** explained to shareholders (as if a large proportion of them do nothing, their shares will actually start to disappear). One could design a class of 'owner-only' shares, but this separates ownership from control, introduces agency cost, and otherwise threatens the model. My research into the financial history of this planet indicates to me that separation of ownership from control produces something permanently unworkable. Bitcoin miners control Bitcoin, and are paid in Bitcoin. Bitcoin owners can only destroy their own Bitcoin. Perfectly logical.

Offline Bitcoinfan

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Welcome AsymmetricInformation and Bitcoinfan!

This is super interesting, and I really hope you guys work something out with the Bitshares community. In think it's an awesome fit.

AsymmetricInformation, you said somewhere that you didn't believe BitUSD would peg to the dollar back then. What do you think now?

I'm a huge advocate for Bitassets and Bitshares.  If we find things weren't going according to Invictus's plan, at worst, Paul and I have found a elegant fix using the Truthcoin protocol as periodic feedback loop.  Its another one of the merits possible from Truthcoin.  By sponsoring this project, we would all effectively be hedged against the downside risk.  Certainly in the best interest of the forum members. 
« Last Edit: April 02, 2014, 12:51:32 am by Bitcoinfan »

Offline Empirical1

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In Truthcoin's current form, do people bet using Bitcoin and pay a trading fee that gets paid to Truthcoin holders or do they buy Truthcoin and use that to bet?

I was thinking, (Sometimes I write without thinking as you've noticed), wouldn't it makes sense to have POS Truthcoin Betting Stock and POS Truthcoin voting stock?

If you wanted to make a bet you would buy betting stock, when you made a bet you would pay a trading fee and there would be a small monthly demurrage.

If you wanted to be a voter you would buy voting stock. You would receive trading fees and the betting stock demurrage fees, however in voting stock there is a big penalty (demurrage) for not actively participating in a lot of voting.

That way you can have lots of busy investors investing in Truthcoin via betting stock (The more popular the network becomes and the more investors and bettors/traders it attracts the more the betting stock would be worth.)  while lots of people especially in poorer countries, E.g India  could make a living voting almost full time and holding the voting stock.

If you made them just one stock, then it discourages people from investing who aren't willing to be active voters & eliminates a big part of the market unless you make the demurrage low but then the incentive wouldn't be high enough to be an active voter.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2014, 09:52:40 pm by Empirical1 »

Offline CLains

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Welcome AsymmetricInformation and Bitcoinfan!

This is super interesting, and I really hope you guys work something out with the Bitshares community. In think it's an awesome fit.

AsymmetricInformation, you said somewhere that you didn't believe BitUSD would peg to the dollar back then. What do you think now?




Offline Empirical1

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I just finally got round to finishing the whitepaper, great stuff.

I loved how you explained how the forks would work as the market expanded, makes perfect sense.

Quote
What is possible, however, is to fork the project to half the future judging activity
required on each of the two new blockchains. This could be done for simple reasons:
because Voters are fatigued at the number of Decisions they are asked to vote on, for the
sake of increased competition, or to charge different fees. More interestingly, forking
could change the quality of the Decisions accepted within that blockchain, for example to
create “Truthcoin Sports” or “Truthcoin Finance”. By forking off a new blockchain, all
previous Owners would maintain their old Truthcoins (and with them the voting
influence of their established reputation), which means that the established trust of the
system would be upheld in both the new and old chain. Eventually, some Owners would
sell, or simply not use, their coins of a disliked chain, and “Truthcoin Sports” would
eventually be owned by individuals especially interested in sports. When “Truthcoin
Sports” later splits itself into “Truthcoin Sports:Basketball” and “Truthcoin
Sports:NonBasketball” (because, for example, there are just so many basketball Markets),
the reputable sports fanatics owning Truthcoin Sports (and no other Truthcoin Owners)
will have their voting power transferred to the two new chains. Therefore the network
grows organically, branching in the same way that a healthy tree splits new branches
when the environment can support them.

My only other inputs or concerns are the following, apologies if they've been addressed elsewhere.

1. It seems you have to expose your private keys when you want to vote, I think there may need to be some alternative to this.  (I know NXT has very low 'forging' participation rate, a) because the incentives are low but b) because users don't want to frequently expose their private keys to potential keyloggers etc.)

2. Have you considered a fail-safe dispute resolving mechanism?

I know you are confident that it is unlikely the TCPM will ever judge an outcome inaccurately even in thin markets but there is always the possibility that an error would occur. (Admittedly I don't understand all the maths, but personally I can see the potential that only a small % of total voters may end up voting for certain events, enough so that in small markets, a cartel may be successful. (I can see that the cartel would only be destroying the value/integrity of Truthcoin, (ie. their own holdings) but it's possible this may be their aim, eg. 'TPTB')

So what if for a few minutes after the outcome of an event is announced it is possible to lodge a dispute?   

However to lodge a dispute is INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE and if you're wrong you lose the funds you committed to it. 

Eg. Truthcoin declares X won the race, when really Y won the race. (As in definite manipulation has taken place.)

The people who lost money on the outcome will obviously be willing to commit lots of funds to having the decision overturned if they are certain it has been manipulated and perhaps there is also an incentive for others to dispute a manipulated outcome too. 

So lets say with a few minutes, a threshold of say $25 000 of Truthcoins in total has been committed to the dispute box.  (Perhaps if X amount is reached, say $10 000, a dispute isn't lodged but the dispute time is extended to allow the dispute funding threshold to be reached.)

As a dispute will be such an unlikely event, if Truthcoin works as described. When there is one, we can have a 'special alarm/alert' go out over the entire network. Then nearly all (or a lot) of Truthcoin voters will then be drawn to vote in the dispute a) to protect the integrity of Truthcoin and b) The financial incentive for voting correctly in a dispute can be made much higher than a normal vote.

Having a dispute option and such a high % of the network participating in a dispute, would ensure there was no point trying to manipulate a thinly voted event.

If the people who lodged the dispute are right they get their funds returned plus a premium (that incentivises people to lodge disputes for false results) if they lose the dispute they lose the funds they committed to the dispute. (Enough to incentivise people never to dispute an accurate outcome.)

Just the presence of the fail-safe should ensure a cartel don't try to manipulate a small/thin market and also provide re-assurance to people who are sceptical of Truthcoin being 100% efficient.  (Perhaps it can be removed after a while if it is proved that it is never needed)

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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Quote

Here are the challenges I see:
  a) With SVD you need to keep peoples individual votes secret and this is a challenge for a DAC
  b) Someone with a large stake can swing the consensus and pull everyone to his position.
  c) On a DAC there is no way to recognize individuals and track reputation (required to punish them in the future)


I will take a shot at addressing B and C, as A is really out of my realm of technical expertise. 

You only need to seal them while voting, as an anti-cartel measure (this prevents credible communication and ensures that voting is always a symmetric coordination game). You unseal them over the next week (or whatever), and track a parameter called 'cumulative participation' to see if blocks are censoring or innocently missing unsealed votes...chains with censored block become invalid.

Even with 49% of the stake, you are powerless to swing the consensus. Other people can claim to join your coalition, putting you over 50%, but because the votes are encrypted, and they stand to gain by betraying you, you can't believe them. One perfectly-coordinated group of >50% is required. If the group is completely uncoordinated (votes randomly), even if such a group comprises 70% or 80% of the total votes, the more-coordinated minority will win through and ensure that the network becomes accurately aware of the market outcomes. Traders wouldn't even notice.

With 51%, however, you can wreck pretty much everything. However you would stand most to lose, and unlike Bitcoin, the project could be easily restarted (possibly with slightly more centralization of the reputation).

For c, in this blockchain the 'Coins' *are* reputation.  There are basically two coins at once (although the network-currency "Bitcoin" are just inputs in a signed message to the market maker). Then they are 'withdrawn'. This withdraw thing is a little complicated, but some people on Bitcointalk helped me with several possible solutions, which are in the Implementation Details section.

Offline toast

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Those needs seem like exactly the point of the toolkit... It's essentially an altcoin template where you plug in your own validation rules and tx types. Not as battle-hardened as bitcoin obviously. PTS/AGS is a (possibly partial) solution to the distribution problem you are trying to solve. That could be done even if you don't use the toolkit and stick with bitcoin.
Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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So Paul (or Bitcoinfan),

What would you need to roll your project into Bitshares assuming Bytemaster agrees to said needs?

I have a genuine interest in the develop of this type of business on this platform. Feel free to use PMs if the forum venue is too public.

I just think it would be valuable to know exactly it would take to get to the next step, and see what you and other potential DAC developers really want in order to combine forces.

There's a simple sketch in Roadmap.xlsx in the docs/DevelopmentPlans of 'requirements', but I'm not sure that it will really be able to answer this question (although I hope to improve that Roadmap).

I refined the core idea for simplicity, to make it equal to a fork of Bitcoin with different block validation rules and a few different data and message types. It seems simple when I go over it in my head, but I've been programming long enough to know that it would probably still require guidance and consume a lot of skilled labor.

In addition to raw programmer time, we might require someone extremely familiar with Bitcoin itself. Not only is the design similar, but I'm not yet convinced that it is safe to stray too far from the established Bitcoin path.

That said, the reputation-coins have to be distributed at start, and earn money as the network performs, so it seems logical to distribute them to the individuals who worked to create the network. Its complicated, though, if two or more groups want to help, or someone wants to help and then drops out (and their code is unusable), etc. I'd hate to make any promise I couldn't keep, or ask anyone else to do the same.

I think its a hard question to answer. Maybe you can suggest some answers (if we aren't getting anywhere).

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A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market

To Bytemaster:

Let me start off by saying, I am a huge fan of what you are doing.  It’s clear to all of us on the forums, with each update you make, and each new development posting, each effort to answer a new member’s question, you are proving to us your commitment to the success of Decentralized Autonomous Corporations.  You are staying true to your creed of, “Creating something great that will be here long after we are gone.”

Executive summary

The Truthcoin project is seeking to work with Invictus Innovation as a collaborative project that will be synergic (non-competitive) with other companies in the DAC pipeline.  Truthcoins is a Decentralized Prediction Market Protocol that uses Singular Value Decomposition, a consensus correlation amongst Truthcoin holders at the maturity of a Decision Contract.  The correlated votes of Truthcoin holders determine True and False payouts for any matured Decision Contract.  Truthcoin Prediction Markets (TCPM) can act as insurance contracts, inventing new means for individuals to profit from their creative work, without restrictive legalities of patents and copyright.  A Decentralized Prediction Market can also function as an Executive Operational Management System for Distributed Autonomous Corporations.  Participants in DACs can create markets to predict the return on accepting an investment venture, or manage the hiring/firing of staff in a DAC in the same manner Human Resources or a Board of Directors would do in a Chartered Entity.  A last practical use of Prediction Markets is the ability to support crowdsourcing, micro lending by establishing a market for creditworthiness.  Publicly Funded projects like bridges and roads can be performed without the need for funds from municipalities.  Incorporation of Truthcoins into the Keyhotee Application (similar to Bitshares X) would support the DAC ecosystem. 

These new opportunities in predicting and hedging risk in any sector, would match the global success of the derivatives market, which is upwards of a $791 Trillion Market Capitalization.  Truthcoin holders would have a stake in this immense market by receiving the trading fees on the marketplace, providing the greatest wealth return for their shares. 

Introduction

As a long-time shareholder of Bitshares and an early member of the forums, I want to encourage Invictus to take a closer look into Paul’s work in the Truthcoin Whitepaper.  I personally know Paul, Asymmetric Information of Bitcointalk.org, and hold regular contact with him about his project.  I can say he is very passionate about the future that both crypto-currencies and prediction markets will bring.  Paul deeply understands statistics and forecasting.  The work with his colleagues at Yale (not a no sweat school either) and their input have allowed for his paper to be mathematically rigorous. I myself work within one of the country’s largest financial institutions in areas of predictive financial modeling and risk management.  Paul’s work is nothing short of remarkable.  This is an idea ahead of its time.

He has discussed with me the possibility of Decentralized Prediction Markets for over a year now, and we both knew this would allow for the formation of a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation—we personally had just called it “Decentralized Companies”.
We both see prediction markets as the next natural progression after Bitcoin, since it allows to people to bet anonymously (discouraging herding like on publicity traded stocks), and now because we have Bitcoin we can make financial instruments out of IDEAs.  Any idea we can conceive can become a financial asset; harkening back to the Internet’s promise of “Permission-less Innovation.”

Today, the combined global wealth of equities and stocks is upwards of $100Trillion.  $100 Trillion for a market that is highly regulated and saddled with enormous barriers to entry.  You and I simply can’t go to Wall Street and tell underwriters to IPO for us our company.  These gatekeepers will laugh, and then scold us for wasting their time, explaining that only companies in their league can afford the prestige of an IPO.  Even with gatekeepers at the door, a collective net wealth of $100 Trillion has crossed the threshold.  For a moment, think of how large a market for ideas could become.  Without the barriers to entry, the red-tape, the underwriting middle-men and empty-suit analysts, the wealth generated would be astronomical. 

You will hear me make this statement now, and continuously:  Invictus should look to implementing Truthcoins, because each AGS PTS owner will profit from it.  The Truthcoin holders will be able to earn on each and every single trade on this market through its consensus mechanism.  PTS and AGS holders, will earn profit from ballot submissions on each contract.  Some people on this forum will be able to make careers out of this.  Who could object to that?

Why Truthcoin protocol?
a) Singular Value Decomposition
Paul has prudently chosen the most favored statistical technique for evaluating the basis of consensus called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).  SVD was discovered around 100 years ago and it can be said to be the pinnacle of linear algebra.  SVD is a useful statistical technique that has found application in: engineering bridges, measuring IQ tests, data mining large populations of research, aircraft design, gene data analysis, seismology, animation and digital imaging processing.  It provides the highest possible correlation, on lowest possible factors and is ubiquitously well regarded.  In a more recent cases, SVD was used to verify that Dorian Satoshi Natamoto’s writing style was not that of Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Here is a quote from Paul as to why SVD is not the equivalent of democratic voting:

“Firstly, the system does not use 'voting' to establish consensus, the consensus algorithm uses a SVD-modified weighed-vote for coin-owners only. Coin owners have the highest ROI when future trading is maximized, a proof-of-stake system. The most significant multivariate-outlier-voter loses the most coins in the following period, and has the lowest relative influence within the current period. When voters lose in this way, honest voters gain, so every single actor has an incentive a] to vote honestly, and b] to lie about their voting intentions, discouraging cartels. The (required) accumulation of several votes into a Ballot is also a powerful decentralizing factor.”

Each submission is akin to mining, strengthening the overall prediction market and prevents someone from cheating or frauding others.  This forced feedback system cannot be manipulated by a cartel of voters. 

b) Multi-Dimensional Markets
Byemaster has proposed for event based prediction markets, a system of competing data feeds, whose credit trust is based on market verification.  Those who fall below a market threshold price will not be included as a prediction market feed.  This concept has merits of its own, and I’m not against this type of validation—however the real question we should be asking is why is this centralized data feed market competitive at all?

Exporting data feed is a horrible business to be in. There are no reasons why you would want to be doing this. What would prevent someone from providing a good feed today, to accrue good standing with the market, and then sabotage it later on?  What’s the incentive of providing an honest feed?  The work is tedious and dull. There is no scope for consequences of your wrongdoings.  If the incentives are small, how will the market be competitive?  In any case, why pursue the message of decentralization, if we’re compromising on centralized feeds?
Additionally, Truthcoin strives to improve upon the primary idea of Prediction Markets with an idea called a Multi-dimensional market.  That is to say, you can create winner take all decision scenarios.  For example, as in Paul’s example, he has a large 4 by 4 matrix of the chances of the 2 2015 Jobs Act” Passed and Signed, and the chances of Unemployment <6% for April 2015.  (Look to Examples in  #3 in https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf

In a way, a multi-dimensional system, allows us to mesh together hundreds upon hundreds of variables, each time, revealing the risk with each additional one.  The system provides granularity.  This will be more accurate and offer greater precision to the narrative of what is actually occurring.  Today, as in the case Bitshares Prediction Markets, we can only doing statements that are single faceted, without room for enhancing with additional variables. 

Because Truthcoins, permits the ability to attach infinite possible scenarios, the features of multi-combinatorial decisions would be too cumbersome to implement with validation from centralized data feeds.  It appears counter-intuitive for a competitive market feeds to verify the exponentially growing and limitless combinations of just one decision.  With Truthcoins, we would like to defer to the Truthcoin holders, since they should act rationally as to maximize the future value of their coins, if they choose to sell it, or profit from the income streams.   

More examples on Multi-Dimensional Decision Contracts look at  https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf

The Benefits of Prediction Markets
a) Example Problem: Media Proclamations

Talking heads rule our perceptions.  Radio hosts, media outlets, blogs, and newspapers, what have it; inaccurately define public reality.
Their talk is convincing, because they are a tuned to the left hemispheres of our brains—the processing language centers. They have us believe that something is true, especially when they place importance on technicalities.  What the media doesn’t see has fitting their models, is convincingly cut off.  It simply does not fit.  What becomes, is an improper selection of information.  Thus we get into a trap. Paranoia and dramatized sound bites become prevalent; myths and pop-science flourishes.  The sensational and scandal list grows tall.  The dumbing down of scientific research for the media consumption—such as, research on serotonin has been shown to imbalance has been shown to cause depression—would allow media and their marketers to say new studies show eating ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches helps fight depression. 

In our community this misinformation was evident when the famed Silk Road Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested by the police with some news outlets reporting things as egregious as “The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto funded Dread Pirate Roberts”.  In our current left-hemisphere world, headlines proclaim all.  When these “facts” are debunked later—the damage has been done.  Prediction markets are needed to rein in this sensationalism. 

b) Solution: Empirical Consensus

Truthcoins Prediction Markets solves this at the core.   What Prediction Markets offer is a determination at what % these stated facts are True or False.  Prediction Markets can put a stop to these endless arguments.  If you disagree about something, make a Prediction Market for it.  Put your skin in the game.  In a post-Truthcoin era, those who make severe proclamations (such as the likes of Paul Krugman, Mark Williams, and Warren Buffet who see no value in Bitcoin) will be called to put up or shut up.  In this world, to be taken seriously, they should put their money and be held accountable to when their right or wrong.  We can say, “If they don’t, then why should their advice be heard?  If you, yourself aren’t going to put it on the line for what you believe, why should I?”

The same idea can be brought here on these forums.  On any forums, the loudest minority opinion can influence actions, thereby clouding the perceptions and understandings of new DACs.  Why deal with them and their arguments, when one can simply look on the prediction market to see empirically what consensus says.  By what percentage is it better to accept this idea?   Bitsharestalk.org, in more recent weeks, has had disagreements about what is the next single-best DAC.  Invictus can solve this problem by posing the question—Do you think DAC XYZ, DACABC, or DACPSP will produce the highest ROI by 2014?  Its easy to ask those vocal members on the forums (our future leaders), to publically reveal their bets made on the Truthcoin blockchain.  Their opinion, and the stake the hold in that opinion are symmetric.  From here we can see how this will allow Invictus and other DAC entrepreneurs to make a decision: the highest performing DAC on the prediction market should be adopted because the results show it will succeed.  The prices will contain the information of which DAC the community/ market believes will have the highest future value.

Low-cost Hedging for Research and Development

This same concept can be adopted to understand the future benefits of any investment project.  This has a profound impact in the R&D space.  A company or organization can create a Decision Contract with the statement:  The Invictus Mobile Phone will be the highest marketed phone in the United States by the end of year?  Or, Will the Invictus Mobile Phone exceed sales of $2MM for the year 2020. 

Non-Profit Organizations can create statements such as: Company’s X will develop a new product that will eliminate the cold virus by the end of 2035?

A company such as Tesla can hedge their bets on certain projects by creating statements like:  The new driverless Telsa will exceed X units globally in the year 2021?  Then Elon Musk can buy up shares that Tesla’s new driverless car will not exceed this many units for purposes of reducing downside risk.  Hedging will allow companies to take advantage of the high growth of their investment projects, and dramatically reduce the fallback if the project were to be a failure or below expectations.  Its an effective, low-cost insurance within any playing field. 

Patents and Copyright Material

Bytemaster has already touched on this several times.  Prediction Markets will bring in a new system of principals that will eliminate the need for patents and copyright laws.  Within the movie, music, and book publishing industries, Prediction Markets will allow the original authors to benefit from consumption of their work.  It will also reduce the costs of distribution by eliminating those “gatekeepers”.  For example, a new 15-year high school author, who has finished writing her book, has been having a hard time finding a publisher in the traditional markets.  They all don't like her book for whatever reason.  With a Truthcoin Prediction Market, the young author can upload his book onto whatever distribution channel she wants (decentralized Mediashares or centralized Amazon/ Apple bookstore) and write a Decision Contract that will say: “This book will exceed 500K purchased downloads on site XYZ by the end of June 2014.”  The young author can then purchase shares of Yes on the Truthcoin Prediction Market.  Afterwards, it becomes a win-win situation for the author and reader.  Any casual reader can download her book at low cost (.001 BTC micropayment as a spam filter) and the author can directly profit from those enjoying her hard work.  Bytemaster introduced this concept a few months ago as AP Shares, where there will be tradable shares for an article’s value.  This can also take place with Truthcoin, and is a much more simplified implementation, allowing the young author to underwrite and IPO tradable shares herself for people to buy, as opposed to a Yes or No Statement share.  These are just a few of the limitless possibility of the Truthcoins design in the Copyright and Patent field. 

Executive Management System for DACs

The Father of Prediction Markets, Robert Hanson spoke about the power of prediction markets to estimate the performance of CEO’s.  A PM can track the CEO’s performance with the statement: Will CEO XYZ still be in the job at the end of Q2 2014.  Yes and No will display his reputation.  Truthcoins are the beginning of a DAC Operations Platform.  For a DAC, the platform will have markets to self-regulate itself.  There will be an endless host of statements for the performance of the company

(See example 4 of Paul’s 2_PM_Types Github https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf). 

Statements will included: Will the CEO, VP, Marketing Director, Product Designer and Developer, COO, Supply Chain manager, or middle managers be fired at the end of 2015?  Whatever percentage results, will clue into the performance of that employee.  A high marginal percentage means that employee is doing their job properly.  And a low would be high chances unemployment.

This improves the current shareholder voting system we have in the traditional financial markets.  Smaller shareholders have little input overall, and if they did, it would be in only the trivial issues such as changing the guards (CEO’s) whenever the Earnings per Share are low.  Prediction Markets will allow those invested in DACs to macro- and micro manage their decentralized company.  It will numerate all types of risks across the board: Operational, Business, Political and Legal, Valuation, Project Risk, etc.  Transparency becomes ubiquitous at all levels, thus pushing the envelope for how DACs should be structured.  The markets, through prediction markets, will manage the talents and resources within Distributed Corporations, and make them effectively autonomous true to their value.

From here anybody can see what consensus believes is the best choice.  And unmanned companies can maneuverer accordingly.  Remember this is not voting consensus, but market empiricism.  Those who don’t believe the idea will work or the company will follow through.  This is the footprint for what DACs are to become.   


Prediction Market Based Reputational System

This should already bring thoughts of a Reputational Based system incorporating PM’s sometime in the future.  For example Credit scores and Probabilities of Default can all be extracted from a Prediction Market.  Today we rely on Credit Rating agencies such as S&P and Moody’s for their expert Credit Ratings for countries and corporations.  But humans are fallible.  We all saw in the 2008 crash that Moody’s had turned a blind eye to dangerous leveraging that was happening at the time.  The United States today still has an AA+.  Do we think the chances of the United States defaulting on its promises to be that low?

For the ordinary consumer, adopting Prediction Markets hold great promise for P2P lending, by sorting out that friction and high human overhead required for securing a loans from Financial Institutions.  It can be done with the statement: Will this person or small business get a loan at this time frame?  The percentage of Yes’s derived will say what the consensus thinks the users Credit Worthiness is.  This will gain traction within new businesses and DACs who want to create global lending clubs.  Community Based Development, publicly funded projects -- profit and nonprofit, i.e. Repairing or building a town bridge, would benefit immensely with this free market lending environment.  PM will be the roadmap to decentralized Governance, such as a Futarchy system

(What is futarchy -- http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html).

(More interesting PM applications https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/3_PM_Applications.pdf)


Keyhotee and Prediction Markets

In our eyes, Keyhotee and TCPM are complementary.  TCPM benefits from Keyhotee’s user interface and multi-application wallet.  TCPM would be able to have Bid/Ask capabilities just like Bitshares, and can enable end of Decision Contract ballots on the already existing username system of Keyhotee.  Users can login into their Keyhotee account and periodically vote if a matured statement was correct or not. 

Over time, five years after the start of TCPM, we will be able to look through the blockchain and see which usernames were the strongest voters—the “experts” in their respective Truthcoin fields. The Truthcoin blockchain would be also a free, open-source, consensus verified dataset for everyone, from academics, to analysts, to researchers, students, to decision-markers to explore.

For Keyhotee, TCPM would open doors for a DAC platform—a means for operationally managing an unmanned DAC.  Keyhotee would establish itself as the iTunes of digital financial instruments, the application library for crypto-equities, i.e. small business IPO’ed coins, Movie IPO’ed coins, Bookcoins, Articlecoins, Pop Artist coin, etc. 

I heard enough!!!  What’s in it for us?

Since TCPM become equity derivatives of every idea in the world, the return on far surpasses a Billion-Dollar Industry.  We already know derivatives within current legacy banks dwarfs the size of the world stock market by an estimated $791Trillion to the 36.6 Trillion of global stocks.  Every PTS and AGS holder who votes in the system will get a piece of this pie. 

When implemented, prediction markets have the chance to impact every sector, industry, organization, political and education system in the world.  Built in a decentralized protocol, its adoption will be dramatic.  I strongly encourage Invictus to sponsor this project, as the payoff truly maximizes shareholder wealth. Paul has designed the TCPM in such a way to play a deep domain role within unmanned DACs.  The TCPM protocol is built on incentivizing security, proof-of-consensus, and builds on the very same notion Bitshares, by decentralizing the approaches to the problems that confront us in a top-down heavy paradigm.  Like the insurance contract idea, many early PTS, AGS holders will be able to make a career out of proof-of-consensus voting.  Truthcoin holders will have a steady stream of income from performing the required bi-weekly vote, their earnings coming from the pool of fees collected from trades in the decision market.  The more Truthcoins you have, the greater you’re earning power.

Remember, this is a market of ideas.  The only constrain is our imagination.  A resource that is infinite.  That is to say, as John Muer put it. “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
For us, the powers of prediction markets are unbounded.  For a full read on Truthcoin Prediction Market look at: 

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/tree/master/docs

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.0

-B



Let's fund this guy


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Offline AsymmetricInformation

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You've quoted me as saying 'This isn't to say..." - But I never said that, I think you meant to quote yourself.

You're right, I used the forum's quote feature and forgot to erase the auto-fill.

Edit: Looking at other response to my post looks like I'm the one that over-reacted. So apologies for the name calling, compared to you guys I'm certainly the freaking dumb one in the room. & GL with the project!

Apology accepted.  I'm sort of glad I screwed up the quote now...evens things out a little.

Offline Empirical1

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Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk! :o

Bitshares is all about helping to bring exciting, profitable DAC's to market. Bithshares, via AGS has already raised circa $5 million and PTS is valued circa $9 million, more importantly those funds come from a community of investors already in the thousands that are specifically interested in investing in and supporting DAC's. Besides BitsharesX and Keyhotee, they also already have 4/5 exciting projects in the pipeline. So IMO, if there's anyone whose attention you'd want to get that could both understand and then help in every aspect of bringing Truthcoin to market, it would be Bitshares and ideally, specifically, Bytemaster. 

So what do you do when you actually manage to attract Dan's attention and he goes out his way to interact with you, even unnecessarily prefacing his comment with...

"This is a good discussion and I do not want to derail the work presented in the OP as it is good work.   Here are some general concepts to consider:"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.40

Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

"Mr Larimer, I respectfully request that you keep any comments you make here related in some way to Truthcoin. I do not feel that your comment sets a good example of relevance. I realize that you'd like to talk about your project, but you have whole websites for that and I just have this one thread."

"..it has nothing to do with Truthcoin and is therefore completely off topic." "Finally, as I already explained..."

"This reads like a BitShares advertisement, when my intent was merely to answer a question regarding a comparison. Truthcoin does not have margin calls and cannot force any trades, whereas BitShares can, as you restate here for some reason."

Personally I love the concept and think it has HUGE value if it works. But the fact that you've so poorly misjudged such a basic social interaction and showed such terrible business acumen in the process (by potentially slightly alienating one of your most influential leads) makes it hard to believe as an investor, that you've considered all the business/social variables that would go into making the concept work in practice. I do hope to be proved wrong though.
I did read too the bitcointalk post. Although I agree that Bytemaster was not promoting Bitshares it could be interpreted that way. I thinks tough  harsh  comments are unnecessary. This post it is about a project that seeks to work with 3I it is not a war of ideology. The bitcointalk post was meant to expose a different take on PM and it was a pretty interesting debate. Bytemaster will be the better judge if this project will work as a DAC or something else. I really hope it will.
 I did't not finish the whitepaper but this seems  very interesting, I'll will like to welcome  AsymmetricInformation in our community  those kind of ideas and brilliant people could only straighten our community and bring huge value like you said.

Didn't see the purpose of this post either. Collaboration is always welcome if it makes sense.  Might be a good fit there!
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Yeah it was very unnecessary, I regret it and in case I wasn't clear - Sorry AsymmetricInformation,  actually love the concept of the truthcoin project, I will be the first to invest in it, and really hope you geniuses here can collaborate on something and make it happen.

Offline unimercio

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Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk! :o

Bitshares is all about helping to bring exciting, profitable DAC's to market. Bithshares, via AGS has already raised circa $5 million and PTS is valued circa $9 million, more importantly those funds come from a community of investors already in the thousands that are specifically interested in investing in and supporting DAC's. Besides BitsharesX and Keyhotee, they also already have 4/5 exciting projects in the pipeline. So IMO, if there's anyone whose attention you'd want to get that could both understand and then help in every aspect of bringing Truthcoin to market, it would be Bitshares and ideally, specifically, Bytemaster. 

So what do you do when you actually manage to attract Dan's attention and he goes out his way to interact with you, even unnecessarily prefacing his comment with...

"This is a good discussion and I do not want to derail the work presented in the OP as it is good work.   Here are some general concepts to consider:"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.40

Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

"Mr Larimer, I respectfully request that you keep any comments you make here related in some way to Truthcoin. I do not feel that your comment sets a good example of relevance. I realize that you'd like to talk about your project, but you have whole websites for that and I just have this one thread."

"..it has nothing to do with Truthcoin and is therefore completely off topic." "Finally, as I already explained..."

"This reads like a BitShares advertisement, when my intent was merely to answer a question regarding a comparison. Truthcoin does not have margin calls and cannot force any trades, whereas BitShares can, as you restate here for some reason."

Personally I love the concept and think it has HUGE value if it works. But the fact that you've so poorly misjudged such a basic social interaction and showed such terrible business acumen in the process (by potentially slightly alienating one of your most influential leads) makes it hard to believe as an investor, that you've considered all the business/social variables that would go into making the concept work in practice. I do hope to be proved wrong though.
I did read too the bitcointalk post. Although I agree that Bytemaster was not promoting Bitshares it could be interpreted that way. I thinks tough  harsh  comments are unnecessary. This post it is about a project that seeks to work with 3I it is not a war of ideology. The bitcointalk post was meant to expose a different take on PM and it was a pretty interesting debate. Bytemaster will be the better judge if this project will work as a DAC or something else. I really hope it will.
 I did't not finish the whitepaper but this seems  very interesting, I'll will like to welcome  AsymmetricInformation in our community  those kind of ideas and brilliant people could only straighten our community and bring huge value like you said.

Didn't see the purpose of this post either. Collaboration is always welcome if it makes sense.  Might be a good fit there!
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Offline santaclause102

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Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk! :o

Bitshares is all about helping to bring exciting, profitable DAC's to market. Bithshares, via AGS has already raised circa $5 million and PTS is valued circa $9 million, more importantly those funds come from a community of investors already in the thousands that are specifically interested in investing in and supporting DAC's. Besides BitsharesX and Keyhotee, they also already have 4/5 exciting projects in the pipeline. So IMO, if there's anyone whose attention you'd want to get that could both understand and then help in every aspect of bringing Truthcoin to market, it would be Bitshares and ideally, specifically, Bytemaster. 

So what do you do when you actually manage to attract Dan's attention and he goes out his way to interact with you, even unnecessarily prefacing his comment with...

"This is a good discussion and I do not want to derail the work presented in the OP as it is good work.   Here are some general concepts to consider:"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.40

Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

"Mr Larimer, I respectfully request that you keep any comments you make here related in some way to Truthcoin. I do not feel that your comment sets a good example of relevance. I realize that you'd like to talk about your project, but you have whole websites for that and I just have this one thread."

"..it has nothing to do with Truthcoin and is therefore completely off topic." "Finally, as I already explained..."

"This reads like a BitShares advertisement, when my intent was merely to answer a question regarding a comparison. Truthcoin does not have margin calls and cannot force any trades, whereas BitShares can, as you restate here for some reason."

Personally I love the concept and think it has HUGE value if it works. But the fact that you've so poorly misjudged such a basic social interaction and showed such terrible business acumen in the process (by potentially slightly alienating one of your most influential leads) makes it hard to believe as an investor, that you've considered all the business/social variables that would go into making the concept work in practice. I do hope to be proved wrong though.
I did read too the bitcointalk post. Although I agree that Bytemaster was not promoting Bitshares it could be interpreted that way. I thinks tough  harsh  comments are unnecessary. This post it is about a project that seeks to work with 3I it is not a war of ideology. The bitcointalk post was meant to expose a different take on PM and it was a pretty interesting debate. Bytemaster will be the better judge if this project will work as a DAC or something else. I really hope it will.
 I did't not finish the whitepaper but this seems  very interesting, I'll will like to welcome  AsymmetricInformation in our community  those kind of ideas and brilliant people could only straighten our community and bring huge value like you said.

Didn't see the purpose of this post either. Collaboration is always welcome if it makes sense.  Might be a good fit there! 

Offline bitcoinba

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So Paul (or Bitcoinfan),

What would you need to roll your project into Bitshares assuming Bytemaster agrees to said needs?

I have a genuine interest in the develop of this type of business on this platform. Feel free to use PMs if the forum venue is too public.

I just think it would be valuable to know exactly it would take to get to the next step, and see what you and other potential DAC developers really want in order to combine forces.

Offline Empirical1

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As I made clear, my complaint was (exactly as you say) that he did NOT need to promote BitShares in my post, as it was sufficiently promoted elsewhere. Yet, he did write several paragraphs which were completely off topic, about the advantages of BitShares, based on a response I gave to someone's question about a comparison between Truthcoin and BitShares. I would have made the same complaint if Jesus Christ started talking about Christianity in my post.

Perhaps you feel threatened by the responses...I noticed no response to this sentence:
This isn't to say an alternative institution wouldn't have value, wouldn't aggregate information via trades, or wouldn't operate in a similar way (however, you cannot claim that BitShares will do these things "because it is a PM").

Either way, I'm proud of the fact that I never called anyone names, and I'm not here to talk to anyone who does.

You've quoted me as saying 'This isn't to say..." - But I never said that, I think you meant to quote yourself.

As for being threatened by your responses. No, I'm personally excited about most of them, I think there's a market for the BitsharesX model in the liquid constant markets and for yours in the event based markets. (Maybe more so than the trusted feed model if it works) It's easy enough to invest in both, so nothing to be threatened by as an investor.

I was dissapointed though by the responses I highlighted, for the reasons I've already given above & because I wanted you to be brought into Bitshares if your concept was promising.

Edit: Looking at other response to my post looks like I'm the one that over-reacted. So apologies for the name calling, compared to you guys I'm certainly the freaking dumb one in the room. & GL with the project!


« Last Edit: April 01, 2014, 02:15:19 am by Empirical1 »

Offline oco101

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Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk! :o

Bitshares is all about helping to bring exciting, profitable DAC's to market. Bithshares, via AGS has already raised circa $5 million and PTS is valued circa $9 million, more importantly those funds come from a community of investors already in the thousands that are specifically interested in investing in and supporting DAC's. Besides BitsharesX and Keyhotee, they also already have 4/5 exciting projects in the pipeline. So IMO, if there's anyone whose attention you'd want to get that could both understand and then help in every aspect of bringing Truthcoin to market, it would be Bitshares and ideally, specifically, Bytemaster. 

So what do you do when you actually manage to attract Dan's attention and he goes out his way to interact with you, even unnecessarily prefacing his comment with...

"This is a good discussion and I do not want to derail the work presented in the OP as it is good work.   Here are some general concepts to consider:"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.40

Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

"Mr Larimer, I respectfully request that you keep any comments you make here related in some way to Truthcoin. I do not feel that your comment sets a good example of relevance. I realize that you'd like to talk about your project, but you have whole websites for that and I just have this one thread."

"..it has nothing to do with Truthcoin and is therefore completely off topic." "Finally, as I already explained..."

"This reads like a BitShares advertisement, when my intent was merely to answer a question regarding a comparison. Truthcoin does not have margin calls and cannot force any trades, whereas BitShares can, as you restate here for some reason."

Personally I love the concept and think it has HUGE value if it works. But the fact that you've so poorly misjudged such a basic social interaction and showed such terrible business acumen in the process (by potentially slightly alienating one of your most influential leads) makes it hard to believe as an investor, that you've considered all the business/social variables that would go into making the concept work in practice. I do hope to be proved wrong though.
I did read too the bitcointalk post. Although I agree that Bytemaster was not promoting Bitshares it could be interpreted that way. I thinks tough  harsh  comments are unnecessary. This post it is about a project that seeks to work with 3I it is not a war of ideology. The bitcointalk post was meant to expose a different take on PM and it was a pretty interesting debate. Bytemaster will be the better judge if this project will work as a DAC or something else. I really hope it will.
 I did't not finish the whitepaper but this seems  very interesting, I'll will like to welcome  AsymmetricInformation in our community  those kind of ideas and brilliant people could only straighten our community and bring huge value like you said.

Offline Bitcoinfan

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Quote

Here are the challenges I see:
  a) With SVD you need to keep peoples individual votes secret and this is a challenge for a DAC
  b) Someone with a large stake can swing the consensus and pull everyone to his position.
  c) On a DAC there is no way to recognize individuals and track reputation (required to punish them in the future)


I will take a shot at addressing B and C, as A is really out of my realm of technical expertise. 

B)  Only somebody with greater than 51% ownership in the coins can manipulate the results in their favor.  Given that PTS/AGS is distributed, I don't this will be a factor.  Paul has a graphic that shows even with a 50%/50% tie, SVD becomes the tiebreaker because the Truthcoin voters who voted Yes matched more closely together (Figure 3- Plot of Judgement Space-- in the whitepaper).  Paul has used this analogy to describe SVD: Think of equal set of marbles on each side of balance scale.  At the beginning they all weigh the same.  However, when the ballots are counted, one side suddenly tilts-- because that bucket of marbles react more closly to each other (eg. greater correlated votes) thus having a tendency to become heavier.  The other side are recognized as false submission and is ignored by the program.  Now the SVD function doesn't just take place on one matured contract, instead it uses the entire dataset of queued votes that are awaiting extrapolation.  If you wanted to manipulate one contract of your choice towards your favor, your bound to fail, since the rest of the voters have a correlation tendency across the ballot population.  Your cast is seen as noise and therefore tossed out.  This comes with a price, as you also face as loss in Truthcoins because of the failure to vote in sync with the other Truthcoins.

SVD is commonly used in image restoration to remove the blurry and grainy noise from a picture.  Using SVD, these study demonstrate how discernable images are brought to life, revealing things we didn't know were there beforehand.  In Truthcoin, SVD parses out the unnecessary, similar to the delicate features on a face portrait, only then can we see the underlying picture-- the remaining honest votes. 
 
http://jase.esrgroups.org/papers/4_3_4_10.pdf
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~nagy/courses/fall06/ID_lecture1.pdf


C)  You are only deducted at the end of that ballot roll call.  How much you are deducted depends on your results from that single period of voting.  This discourages votes against the grain.  The reputation is not a credit score, and does not carry into the future.  Any Truthcoin holder, I think would be more concerned about the value for which your coins could sell for.  Honest voting encourages trust in the system, and greater market traffic within the network.  You have more to gain with a periodic, and ever growing cash stream. 

Also if you tried to form a cartel of voters to fraud the results, you are faced with the dilemma that your friends will not vote with you and take your coins.  For the forum readers, look at section Voting Strategy in Paul's whitepaper.  He has a very interesting piece about this. 

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/Truthcoin_1.1.pdf

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

As I made clear, my complaint was (exactly as you say) that he did NOT need to promote BitShares in my post, as it was sufficiently promoted elsewhere. Yet, he did write several paragraphs which were completely off topic, about the advantages of BitShares, based on a response I gave to someone's question about a comparison between Truthcoin and BitShares. I would have made the same complaint if Jesus Christ started talking about Christianity in my post.

Perhaps you feel threatened by the responses...I noticed no response to this sentence:
Quote from: BitcoinTalk.AsymmetricInformation
This isn't to say an alternative institution wouldn't have value, wouldn't aggregate information via trades, or wouldn't operate in a similar way (however, you cannot claim that BitShares will do these things "because it is a PM").
Which seems to hit on some insecurities I've seen voiced on this forum. At the time, I personally did not believe that BitShares would succeed in tracking the value of underlying assets.

Either way, I'm proud of the fact that I never called anyone names, and I'm not here to talk to anyone who does.

Edit: fixed quote attribution
« Last Edit: April 02, 2014, 01:20:26 pm by AsymmetricInformation »

Offline Empirical1

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Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk! :o

Bitshares is all about helping to bring exciting, profitable DAC's to market. Bithshares, via AGS has already raised circa $5 million and PTS is valued circa $9 million, more importantly those funds come from a community of investors already in the thousands that are specifically interested in investing in and supporting DAC's. Besides BitsharesX and Keyhotee, they also already have 4/5 exciting projects in the pipeline. So IMO, if there's anyone whose attention you'd want to get that could both understand and then help in every aspect of bringing Truthcoin to market, it would be Bitshares and ideally, specifically, Bytemaster. 

So what do you do when you actually manage to attract Dan's attention and he goes out his way to interact with you, even unnecessarily prefacing his comment with...

"This is a good discussion and I do not want to derail the work presented in the OP as it is good work.   Here are some general concepts to consider:"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.40

Well somehow, you still managed to be so unbelievably freaking dumb (sorry but it's true) as to think that Dan would in a million years,  need to take time out of his very busy day to promote Bitshares on your 3 page bitcointalk post!?  ???  :o

"Mr Larimer, I respectfully request that you keep any comments you make here related in some way to Truthcoin. I do not feel that your comment sets a good example of relevance. I realize that you'd like to talk about your project, but you have whole websites for that and I just have this one thread."

"..it has nothing to do with Truthcoin and is therefore completely off topic." "Finally, as I already explained..."

"This reads like a BitShares advertisement, when my intent was merely to answer a question regarding a comparison. Truthcoin does not have margin calls and cannot force any trades, whereas BitShares can, as you restate here for some reason."

Personally I love the concept and think it has HUGE value if it works. But the fact that you've so poorly misjudged such a basic social interaction and showed such terrible business acumen in the process (by potentially slightly alienating one of your most influential leads) makes it hard to believe as an investor, that you've considered all the business/social variables that would go into making the concept work in practice. I do hope to be proved wrong though. 

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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Have you considered using bitshares_toolkit and partially honoring ags/pts? Sounds like it could be an ideal fit, depending on what you've already finished. We can chat on skype if you want

I'm a professional statistician/economist, and that involves a lot of programming, but I really don't consider myself a professional programmer. I care a lot about this project, enough to contribute my own money and time and/or fundraise for it, and hire someone to help finish it and/or manage a team who will help finish it. I'm open to any avenue of getting the help that the project needs to be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

- if it does work, the consensus algorithm could have other applications that could be useful in insurance and legal decision making.
It does.

But as I said it all depends whether the 'consensus algorithm using a SVD-modified weighed-vote for coin-owners only' actually has high probability of working etc.

You should skip to 'Voting Strategy' in the whitepaper, and there's also a little flowchart with a fictional conversation which might make the idea a little more accessible.

Offline Empirical1

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My two cents,

Well I'm not smart enough to be able to discern the probability of this working, but if it did I think it would be a big deal.
I would probably invest in it, if the consensus was it would work, whether it was part of Invictus or separate.

I would say the winner between Truthcoin and Bitshares Vegas (Assuming they were released at the same time) would be the one that requires the least trust in people and is hardest for governments to shut down, not the one that is most efficient. So given what I can ascertain at the moment I would speculate that 'if' truthcoin works as predicted it would trump a trusted feed model. 

Some people might look at Bitcoin and see the centralisation of mining problem and it's dominant position and conclude that a degree of centralisation is acceptable, however that is the result of first mover advantage.

If the difference in time to market is great then delivering a more efficient solution with 'market acceptable' points of failure (To manipulation or shut-down) is probably the way to go because first mover advantage + network effect + complacency will probably make that solution dominant until exploited. (I.e Euro depositors will only race to Bitcoin once more confiscations happen & Bitcoiners will only race to alternatives once pool operators collude or are targeted in a significant way.)  But if the release times are close together, I believe the market will choose the solution with the fewest points of failure (Gov intervention/manipulation) and be willing to compromise on efficiency.

Example had a, 1) ASIC mining, controlled by 3/4 main pools Bitcoin been released at the the same time as a 2) CPU forever (not possible, I know) Bitcoin with P2Pool. Which would the market choose? What if the Asic version had 1/2 the inflation and confirmation times twice as fast? Personally I and I think the market also would still choose 2.

So unless it was proveable/showable that the trusted feeds model would be harder than Truthcoin for .gov to interfere with and harder for people to manipulate then I would be inclined to favour Truthcoin.

However the beauty of the Invictus model is that you can do both. If the cost of sponsoring is reasonable I would favour bringing him on board because

- if it does work, the consensus algorithm could have other applications that could be useful in insurance and legal decision making.
- AGS is still being funded, so if the interest in truthcoin was high enough sponsoring & marketing it soon could bring in enough additional AGS donations to cover it, making it a 'free-roll.'

But as I said it all depends whether the 'consensus algorithm using a SVD-modified weighed-vote for coin-owners only' actually has high probability of working etc.

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Have you considered using bitshares_toolkit and partially honoring ags/pts? Sounds like it could be an ideal fit, depending on what you've already finished. We can chat on skype if you want

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

Do not use this post as information for making any important decisions. The only agreements I ever make are informal and non-binding. Take the same precautions as when dealing with a compromised account, scammer, sockpuppet, etc.

Offline AsymmetricInformation

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Hello.

I am the author of the Truthcoin whitepaper, and (as always) I am happy to answer people's questions about the project.

Currently the design (and some proof-of-concept code for the novel ideas) is essentially finished, but it would take a professional-level effort to actually bring the project into existence. Of course, many design choices (Merged mining, Bitcoin) are extremely flexible as they have nothing to do with the underlying goal.

The 'coins' of the project represent reputation, and earn dividends as the network performs. They could therefore be distributed at launch to the investors who made the development possible.

These are all great questions that are addressed in the whitepaper.  I will ask Paul if he would like to respond to your questions here.
Yikes.. I just realized I didn't read the white paper (just your post).... I will go through it at some point soon.

My apologies.

It took me a long time to write! I tried to get all the typos / confusing areas in v1.1, but writing really is a process of continual improvement.

how would I use TruthCoin for my project?

https://github.com/jaybny/fantasybit

I'm not sure. What does your project require in order to work? You might fork the project, give yourself permanent dictatorial voting power, and thereby create and arbitrate the (extremely high) number of contracts you'd seem to require to get all of that data about fantasy points in there. Your ideas sounds like a business (centralized agent in a decentralized economy), the management overhead of that data seems high.

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These are all great questions that are addressed in the whitepaper.  I will ask Paul if he would like to respond to your questions here.
Yikes.. I just realized I didn't read the white paper (just your post).... I will go through it at some point soon.

My apologies.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline BldSwtTrs

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I think I need to clarify something very important.   Decentralization is a means, not an end.   I want to create an entire video addressing this concept because decentralization is kind of a religion that has taken on a life of its own and become an end to itself.
There is a good blog post on that subject, that's worth reading it : http://bitcoinism.blogspot.fr/2014/03/decentralized-applications-its-time-for.html

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Offline Bitcoinfan

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These are all great questions that are addressed in the whitepaper.  I will ask Paul if he would like to respond to your questions here. 

Offline bytemaster

Ok, this write up was very dense to process given I have a headache.   Statistical analysis was not my strong suite and SVD is not something I have done in a long time.  I cannot comment on the viability of the idea from a mathematical perspective.   I can say that the write up is heavy on marketing / sales and I can say that I want to understand the exact algorithm and application of SVD. 


Quote
“Firstly, the system does not use 'voting' to establish consensus, the consensus algorithm uses a SVD-modified weighed-vote for coin-owners only. Coin owners have the highest ROI when future trading is maximized, a proof-of-stake system. The most significant multivariate-outlier-voter loses the most coins in the following period, and has the lowest relative influence within the current period. When voters lose in this way, honest voters gain, so every single actor has an incentive a] to vote honestly, and b] to lie about their voting intentions, discouraging cartels. The (required) accumulation of several votes into a Ballot is also a powerful decentralizing factor.”

Each submission is akin to mining, strengthening the overall prediction market and prevents someone from cheating or frauding others.

Please elaborate on 'akin to mining'... from what I see being weighted by shareholder balance means that a big fish can manipulate the system and cause the honest fish to be punished.   I also see a challenge of getting the data in a timely manner, especially when it isn't possible for the network to keep votes secret or to broadcast them all at the same time.   You would require a 2 phase process with collateral commitment... phase 1.. submit hash of your vote + collateral, phase 2 claim your collateral by revealing your vote in a timely manner.   This multi-phase process will generate a lot of overhead on the network and ultimately people still have to produce the feed!

In a sense, you have replaced my suggestion of a 'trusted data feed' that 'no one would want to produce' with many feeds that you expect people to produce.

I think your assumptions that 'participants want the value to go up' and thus will tend to be truthful may ignore certain incentives to gain personally even as it goes down.

Here are the challenges I see:
  a) With SVD you need to keep peoples individual votes secret and this is a challenge for a DAC
  b) Someone with a large stake can swing the consensus and pull everyone to his position.
  c) On a DAC there is no way to recognize individuals and track reputation (required to punish them in the future)

Quote
In any case, why pursue the message of decentralization, if we’re compromising on centralized feeds?

I think I need to clarify something very important.   Decentralization is a means, not an end.   I want to create an entire video addressing this concept because decentralization is kind of a religion that has taken on a life of its own and become an end to itself.

Lets look at the problems we are trying to solve with decentralization:

1) Single point of failure. 
2) Single point of control.

These two problems have varying degrees of severity and depend upon the threats you face:

1) Is it failure from accident, malice, or attack? 
2) What is the nature of the control?  Absolute, Finite, Limited?

If a centralized solution can perform the job, eliminate corruption, has low probability of government shutdown, and have redundant backups in case of acts of God or government then it will likely serve the needs of the market more efficiently than a decentralized attempt at the same problem.

From an economic perspective you must analyze what kind of market depth (participation) is required before your SVD approach can be effective.  If there are only 3 participants (long/short/feed) then I believe the sample size would be too small.   However, add a bit of trust into the equation and it would be fine.

Addressing your Concerns with my approach...

1) If there is demand for a feed people will be willing to pay enough money for the feed to exist so they can bet on it.
2) Many companies can make good money producing feeds
3) A simple 2 out of 3 judgement would be enough to prevent any one feed source from intentionally tanking the market.

I think I would like you to walk through the role of each actor in the system, how they get their role, how / when do they produce information, etc.

I am very happy to work with you on this idea... but you need to get it down to a simplified explanation that can allow us to crowdfund this idea.

For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline Bitcoinfan

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A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market

To Bytemaster:

Let me start off by saying, I am a huge fan of what you are doing.  It’s clear to all of us on the forums, with each update you make, and each new development posting, each effort to answer a new member’s question, you are proving to us your commitment to the success of Decentralized Autonomous Corporations.  You are staying true to your creed of, “Creating something great that will be here long after we are gone.”

Executive summary

The Truthcoin project is seeking to work with Invictus Innovation as a collaborative project that will be synergic (non-competitive) with other companies in the DAC pipeline.  Truthcoins is a Decentralized Prediction Market Protocol that uses Singular Value Decomposition, a consensus correlation amongst Truthcoin holders at the maturity of a Decision Contract.  The correlated votes of Truthcoin holders determine True and False payouts for any matured Decision Contract.  Truthcoin Prediction Markets (TCPM) can act as insurance contracts, inventing new means for individuals to profit from their creative work, without restrictive legalities of patents and copyright.  A Decentralized Prediction Market can also function as an Executive Operational Management System for Distributed Autonomous Corporations.  Participants in DACs can create markets to predict the return on accepting an investment venture, or manage the hiring/firing of staff in a DAC in the same manner Human Resources or a Board of Directors would do in a Chartered Entity.  A last practical use of Prediction Markets is the ability to support crowdsourcing, micro lending by establishing a market for creditworthiness.  Publicly Funded projects like bridges and roads can be performed without the need for funds from municipalities.  Incorporation of Truthcoins into the Keyhotee Application (similar to Bitshares X) would support the DAC ecosystem. 

These new opportunities in predicting and hedging risk in any sector, would match the global success of the derivatives market, which is upwards of a $791 Trillion Market Capitalization.  Truthcoin holders would have a stake in this immense market by receiving the trading fees on the marketplace, providing the greatest wealth return for their shares. 

Introduction

As a long-time shareholder of Bitshares and an early member of the forums, I want to encourage Invictus to take a closer look into Paul’s work in the Truthcoin Whitepaper.  I personally know Paul, Asymmetric Information of Bitcointalk.org, and hold regular contact with him about his project.  I can say he is very passionate about the future that both crypto-currencies and prediction markets will bring.  Paul deeply understands statistics and forecasting.  The work with his colleagues at Yale (not a no sweat school either) and their input have allowed for his paper to be mathematically rigorous. I myself work within one of the country’s largest financial institutions in areas of predictive financial modeling and risk management.  Paul’s work is nothing short of remarkable.  This is an idea ahead of its time.

He has discussed with me the possibility of Decentralized Prediction Markets for over a year now, and we both knew this would allow for the formation of a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation—we personally had just called it “Decentralized Companies”.
We both see prediction markets as the next natural progression after Bitcoin, since it allows to people to bet anonymously (discouraging herding like on publicity traded stocks), and now because we have Bitcoin we can make financial instruments out of IDEAs.  Any idea we can conceive can become a financial asset; harkening back to the Internet’s promise of “Permission-less Innovation.”

Today, the combined global wealth of equities and stocks is upwards of $100Trillion.  $100 Trillion for a market that is highly regulated and saddled with enormous barriers to entry.  You and I simply can’t go to Wall Street and tell underwriters to IPO for us our company.  These gatekeepers will laugh, and then scold us for wasting their time, explaining that only companies in their league can afford the prestige of an IPO.  Even with gatekeepers at the door, a collective net wealth of $100 Trillion has crossed the threshold.  For a moment, think of how large a market for ideas could become.  Without the barriers to entry, the red-tape, the underwriting middle-men and empty-suit analysts, the wealth generated would be astronomical. 

You will hear me make this statement now, and continuously:  Invictus should look to implementing Truthcoins, because each AGS PTS owner will profit from it.  The Truthcoin holders will be able to earn on each and every single trade on this market through its consensus mechanism.  PTS and AGS holders, will earn profit from ballot submissions on each contract.  Some people on this forum will be able to make careers out of this.  Who could object to that?

Why Truthcoin protocol?
a) Singular Value Decomposition
Paul has prudently chosen the most favored statistical technique for evaluating the basis of consensus called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).  SVD was discovered around 100 years ago and it can be said to be the pinnacle of linear algebra.  SVD is a useful statistical technique that has found application in: engineering bridges, measuring IQ tests, data mining large populations of research, aircraft design, gene data analysis, seismology, animation and digital imaging processing.  It provides the highest possible correlation, on lowest possible factors and is ubiquitously well regarded.  In a more recent cases, SVD was used to verify that Dorian Satoshi Natamoto’s writing style was not that of Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Here is a quote from Paul as to why SVD is not the equivalent of democratic voting:

“Firstly, the system does not use 'voting' to establish consensus, the consensus algorithm uses a SVD-modified weighed-vote for coin-owners only. Coin owners have the highest ROI when future trading is maximized, a proof-of-stake system. The most significant multivariate-outlier-voter loses the most coins in the following period, and has the lowest relative influence within the current period. When voters lose in this way, honest voters gain, so every single actor has an incentive a] to vote honestly, and b] to lie about their voting intentions, discouraging cartels. The (required) accumulation of several votes into a Ballot is also a powerful decentralizing factor.”

Each submission is akin to mining, strengthening the overall prediction market and prevents someone from cheating or frauding others.  This forced feedback system cannot be manipulated by a cartel of voters. 

b) Multi-Dimensional Markets
Byemaster has proposed for event based prediction markets, a system of competing data feeds, whose credit trust is based on market verification.  Those who fall below a market threshold price will not be included as a prediction market feed.  This concept has merits of its own, and I’m not against this type of validation—however the real question we should be asking is why is this centralized data feed market competitive at all?

Exporting data feed is a horrible business to be in. There are no reasons why you would want to be doing this. What would prevent someone from providing a good feed today, to accrue good standing with the market, and then sabotage it later on?  What’s the incentive of providing an honest feed?  The work is tedious and dull. There is no scope for consequences of your wrongdoings.  If the incentives are small, how will the market be competitive?  In any case, why pursue the message of decentralization, if we’re compromising on centralized feeds?
Additionally, Truthcoin strives to improve upon the primary idea of Prediction Markets with an idea called a Multi-dimensional market.  That is to say, you can create winner take all decision scenarios.  For example, as in Paul’s example, he has a large 4 by 4 matrix of the chances of the 2 2015 Jobs Act” Passed and Signed, and the chances of Unemployment <6% for April 2015.  (Look to Examples in  #3 in https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf

In a way, a multi-dimensional system, allows us to mesh together hundreds upon hundreds of variables, each time, revealing the risk with each additional one.  The system provides granularity.  This will be more accurate and offer greater precision to the narrative of what is actually occurring.  Today, as in the case Bitshares Prediction Markets, we can only doing statements that are single faceted, without room for enhancing with additional variables. 

Because Truthcoins, permits the ability to attach infinite possible scenarios, the features of multi-combinatorial decisions would be too cumbersome to implement with validation from centralized data feeds.  It appears counter-intuitive for a competitive market feeds to verify the exponentially growing and limitless combinations of just one decision.  With Truthcoins, we would like to defer to the Truthcoin holders, since they should act rationally as to maximize the future value of their coins, if they choose to sell it, or profit from the income streams.   

More examples on Multi-Dimensional Decision Contracts look at  https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf

The Benefits of Prediction Markets
a) Example Problem: Media Proclamations

Talking heads rule our perceptions.  Radio hosts, media outlets, blogs, and newspapers, what have it; inaccurately define public reality.
Their talk is convincing, because they are a tuned to the left hemispheres of our brains—the processing language centers. They have us believe that something is true, especially when they place importance on technicalities.  What the media doesn’t see has fitting their models, is convincingly cut off.  It simply does not fit.  What becomes, is an improper selection of information.  Thus we get into a trap. Paranoia and dramatized sound bites become prevalent; myths and pop-science flourishes.  The sensational and scandal list grows tall.  The dumbing down of scientific research for the media consumption—such as, research on serotonin has been shown to imbalance has been shown to cause depression—would allow media and their marketers to say new studies show eating ice cream and grilled cheese sandwiches helps fight depression. 

In our community this misinformation was evident when the famed Silk Road Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested by the police with some news outlets reporting things as egregious as “The creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto funded Dread Pirate Roberts”.  In our current left-hemisphere world, headlines proclaim all.  When these “facts” are debunked later—the damage has been done.  Prediction markets are needed to rein in this sensationalism. 

b) Solution: Empirical Consensus

Truthcoins Prediction Markets solves this at the core.   What Prediction Markets offer is a determination at what % these stated facts are True or False.  Prediction Markets can put a stop to these endless arguments.  If you disagree about something, make a Prediction Market for it.  Put your skin in the game.  In a post-Truthcoin era, those who make severe proclamations (such as the likes of Paul Krugman, Mark Williams, and Warren Buffet who see no value in Bitcoin) will be called to put up or shut up.  In this world, to be taken seriously, they should put their money and be held accountable to when their right or wrong.  We can say, “If they don’t, then why should their advice be heard?  If you, yourself aren’t going to put it on the line for what you believe, why should I?”

The same idea can be brought here on these forums.  On any forums, the loudest minority opinion can influence actions, thereby clouding the perceptions and understandings of new DACs.  Why deal with them and their arguments, when one can simply look on the prediction market to see empirically what consensus says.  By what percentage is it better to accept this idea?   Bitsharestalk.org, in more recent weeks, has had disagreements about what is the next single-best DAC.  Invictus can solve this problem by posing the question—Do you think DAC XYZ, DACABC, or DACPSP will produce the highest ROI by 2014?  Its easy to ask those vocal members on the forums (our future leaders), to publically reveal their bets made on the Truthcoin blockchain.  Their opinion, and the stake the hold in that opinion are symmetric.  From here we can see how this will allow Invictus and other DAC entrepreneurs to make a decision: the highest performing DAC on the prediction market should be adopted because the results show it will succeed.  The prices will contain the information of which DAC the community/ market believes will have the highest future value.

Low-cost Hedging for Research and Development

This same concept can be adopted to understand the future benefits of any investment project.  This has a profound impact in the R&D space.  A company or organization can create a Decision Contract with the statement:  The Invictus Mobile Phone will be the highest marketed phone in the United States by the end of year?  Or, Will the Invictus Mobile Phone exceed sales of $2MM for the year 2020. 

Non-Profit Organizations can create statements such as: Company’s X will develop a new product that will eliminate the cold virus by the end of 2035?

A company such as Tesla can hedge their bets on certain projects by creating statements like:  The new driverless Telsa will exceed X units globally in the year 2021?  Then Elon Musk can buy up shares that Tesla’s new driverless car will not exceed this many units for purposes of reducing downside risk.  Hedging will allow companies to take advantage of the high growth of their investment projects, and dramatically reduce the fallback if the project were to be a failure or below expectations.  Its an effective, low-cost insurance within any playing field. 

Patents and Copyright Material

Bytemaster has already touched on this several times.  Prediction Markets will bring in a new system of principals that will eliminate the need for patents and copyright laws.  Within the movie, music, and book publishing industries, Prediction Markets will allow the original authors to benefit from consumption of their work.  It will also reduce the costs of distribution by eliminating those “gatekeepers”.  For example, a new 15-year high school author, who has finished writing her book, has been having a hard time finding a publisher in the traditional markets.  They all don't like her book for whatever reason.  With a Truthcoin Prediction Market, the young author can upload his book onto whatever distribution channel she wants (decentralized Mediashares or centralized Amazon/ Apple bookstore) and write a Decision Contract that will say: “This book will exceed 500K purchased downloads on site XYZ by the end of June 2014.”  The young author can then purchase shares of Yes on the Truthcoin Prediction Market.  Afterwards, it becomes a win-win situation for the author and reader.  Any casual reader can download her book at low cost (.001 BTC micropayment as a spam filter) and the author can directly profit from those enjoying her hard work.  Bytemaster introduced this concept a few months ago as AP Shares, where there will be tradable shares for an article’s value.  This can also take place with Truthcoin, and is a much more simplified implementation, allowing the young author to underwrite and IPO tradable shares herself for people to buy, as opposed to a Yes or No Statement share.  These are just a few of the limitless possibility of the Truthcoins design in the Copyright and Patent field. 

Executive Management System for DACs

The Father of Prediction Markets, Robin Hanson spoke about the power of prediction markets to estimate the performance of CEO’s.  A PM can track the CEO’s performance with the statement: Will CEO XYZ still be in the job at the end of Q2 2014.  Yes and No will display his reputation.  Truthcoins are the beginning of a DAC Operations Platform.  For a DAC, the platform will have markets to self-regulate itself.  There will be an endless host of statements for the performance of the company

(See example 4 of Paul’s 2_PM_Types Github https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/2_PM_Types.pdf). 

Statements will included: Will the CEO, VP, Marketing Director, Product Designer and Developer, COO, Supply Chain manager, or middle managers be fired at the end of 2015?  Whatever percentage results, will clue into the performance of that employee.  A high marginal percentage means that employee is doing their job properly.  And a low would be high chances unemployment.

This improves the current shareholder voting system we have in the traditional financial markets.  Smaller shareholders have little input overall, and if they did, it would be in only the trivial issues such as changing the guards (CEO’s) whenever the Earnings per Share are low.  Prediction Markets will allow those invested in DACs to macro- and micro manage their decentralized company.  It will numerate all types of risks across the board: Operational, Business, Political and Legal, Valuation, Project Risk, etc.  Transparency becomes ubiquitous at all levels, thus pushing the envelope for how DACs should be structured.  The markets, through prediction markets, will manage the talents and resources within Distributed Corporations, and make them effectively autonomous true to their value.

From here anybody can see what consensus believes is the best choice.  And unmanned companies can maneuverer accordingly.  Remember this is not voting consensus, but market empiricism.  Those who don’t believe the idea will work or the company will follow through.  This is the footprint for what DACs are to become.   


Prediction Market Based Reputational System

This should already bring thoughts of a Reputational Based system incorporating PM’s sometime in the future.  For example Credit scores and Probabilities of Default can all be extracted from a Prediction Market.  Today we rely on Credit Rating agencies such as S&P and Moody’s for their expert Credit Ratings for countries and corporations.  But humans are fallible.  We all saw in the 2008 crash that Moody’s had turned a blind eye to dangerous leveraging that was happening at the time.  The United States today still has an AA+.  Do we think the chances of the United States defaulting on its promises to be that low?

For the ordinary consumer, adopting Prediction Markets hold great promise for P2P lending, by sorting out that friction and high human overhead required for securing a loans from Financial Institutions.  It can be done with the statement: Will this person or small business get a loan at this time frame?  The percentage of Yes’s derived will say what the consensus thinks the users Credit Worthiness is.  This will gain traction within new businesses and DACs who want to create global lending clubs.  Community Based Development, publicly funded projects -- profit and nonprofit, i.e. Repairing or building a town bridge, would benefit immensely with this free market lending environment.  PM will be the roadmap to decentralized Governance, such as a Futarchy system

(What is futarchy -- http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html).

(More interesting PM applications https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/3_PM_Applications.pdf)


Keyhotee and Prediction Markets

In our eyes, Keyhotee and TCPM are complementary.  TCPM benefits from Keyhotee’s user interface and multi-application wallet.  TCPM would be able to have Bid/Ask capabilities just like Bitshares, and can enable end of Decision Contract ballots on the already existing username system of Keyhotee.  Users can login into their Keyhotee account and periodically vote if a matured statement was correct or not. 

Over time, five years after the start of TCPM, we will be able to look through the blockchain and see which usernames were the strongest voters—the “experts” in their respective Truthcoin fields. The Truthcoin blockchain would be also a free, open-source, consensus verified dataset for everyone, from academics, to analysts, to researchers, students, to decision-markers to explore.

For Keyhotee, TCPM would open doors for a DAC platform—a means for operationally managing an unmanned DAC.  Keyhotee would establish itself as the iTunes of digital financial instruments, the application library for crypto-equities, i.e. small business IPO’ed coins, Movie IPO’ed coins, Bookcoins, Articlecoins, Pop Artist coin, etc. 

I heard enough!!!  What’s in it for us?

Since TCPM become equity derivatives of every idea in the world, the return on far surpasses a Billion-Dollar Industry.  We already know derivatives within current legacy banks dwarfs the size of the world stock market by an estimated $791Trillion to the 36.6 Trillion of global stocks.  Every PTS and AGS holder who votes in the system will get a piece of this pie. 

When implemented, prediction markets have the chance to impact every sector, industry, organization, political and education system in the world.  Built in a decentralized protocol, its adoption will be dramatic.  I strongly encourage Invictus to sponsor this project, as the payoff truly maximizes shareholder wealth. Paul has designed the TCPM in such a way to play a deep domain role within unmanned DACs.  The TCPM protocol is built on incentivizing security, proof-of-consensus, and builds on the very same notion Bitshares, by decentralizing the approaches to the problems that confront us in a top-down heavy paradigm.  Like the insurance contract idea, many early PTS, AGS holders will be able to make a career out of proof-of-consensus voting.  Truthcoin holders will have a steady stream of income from performing the required bi-weekly vote, their earnings coming from the pool of fees collected from trades in the decision market.  The more Truthcoins you have, the greater you’re earning power.

Remember, this is a market of ideas.  The only constrain is our imagination.  A resource that is infinite.  That is to say, as John Muer put it. “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
For us, the powers of prediction markets are unbounded.  For a full read on Truthcoin Prediction Market look at: 

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/tree/master/docs

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.0

-B
« Last Edit: April 05, 2014, 09:49:45 pm by Bitcoinfan »