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Messages - Empirical1

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796
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: April 01, 2014, 09:49:49 pm »
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.

797
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: April 01, 2014, 08:15:14 pm »
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)

798
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: April 01, 2014, 03:25:20 pm »
Quote from: unimercio on April 01, 2014, 10:33:51 am
Quote from: delulo on April 01, 2014, 09:26:04 am
Quote from: oco101 on April 01, 2014, 01:23:21 am
Quote from: Empirical1 on March 31, 2014, 09:44:03 pm
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!
+5%
+5%

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.

799
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: April 01, 2014, 01:45:10 am »
Quote from: AsymmetricInformation on April 01, 2014, 12:56:35 am

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: Empirical1 on March 31, 2014, 09:44:03 pm
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!



800
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: March 31, 2014, 09:44:03 pm »
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. 

801
General Discussion / Re: A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market
« on: March 31, 2014, 04:56:47 pm »
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.

802
General Discussion / Re: Website 4.0....
« on: March 30, 2014, 06:33:59 pm »
Quote from: bytemaster on March 30, 2014, 06:35:58 am
I am working on a draft site with more content here...  after seeing the new website I found it to be lacking in content and the stock photos have constantly come up as a problem.  The single thing that made the site was the video.   Recognizing that the problem was lack of content...

I really liked the website, but I agree with those observations. It might also be more personal if you had some candid photos of you guys in a meeting, sharing a joke, struggling with a problem etc. as opposed to some of the stock photos. 

803
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 09:53:23 pm »
Quote from: amatoB on March 29, 2014, 09:00:48 pm
Quote from: Empirical1 on March 29, 2014, 11:43:20 am
Quote from: .dac on March 29, 2014, 07:35:13 am

And Luckybit has a good point that the focus of our argument for requiring a trustee should be based on the fact that shareholders are not placing any more trust in our trustee than XRP holders place in a gateway, or BTC holders place in the ASIC pools; and far less destruction to our personal holdings can result in a 100% breach of trust by our trustee in our case as compared to those who recently got goxed.
 
And does this trustee method really speed up transactions? Because Ripple is FAST !

Bytemaster is leaning toward kicking up the UTILITY factor here, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Ripple is a great example of how we already have proof the market hates a trusted gateway approach.
Despite it's utility, speed and the investment that went into it, it's trending to zero and the fact that there are no ripple clones/forks out there is very telling.

The biggest currencies since Bitcoin are the ones that have developed methods that involve less trust in ASIC pools, Litecoin,  Peercoin, then NXT.  (Do you think the introduction of scrypt asics soon will increase or decrease Litecoins value?)

It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.


Last time I checked, Ripple was the 2nd largest cryptocurrency in terms of market cap, still worth over $1 billion. For example, this is over 20x bigger than peercoin and over 30x bigger compared to NXT. The price of Ripple XRP seems to have tracked bitcoin pretty well over the past few months.

I thought that most of the hostility towards Ripple was due to their initially being closed-source and also the seemingly self-serving, "premined" way in which they distributed the Ripple XRP currency (i.e., they initially held on to 99% of the supply and only promised to give something like 1/2 away)?

No Ripple has a 'false-cap' they're multiplying their share price by 10-20x more that what's actually circulating in the market which is easily discernible from their low volume.

Similar to the way Auroracoin looked liked it had a huge cap only because 95% of the shares were held back and only a few were circulating. At least with Aurora though you knew when and how the airdrop was supposed to take place, with Ripple your share value is completely at the mercy of the central controllers, hoping and praying they won't be incentivised to devalue your shares too much, not unlike the way people are naive enough to believe central banks are working in their currency holders best interest.

804
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 08:48:47 pm »
Quote from: bytemaster on March 29, 2014, 04:44:56 pm
Quote from: Empirical1 on March 29, 2014, 11:43:20 am
It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.

Define trust?  Do we not trust the mining pools not to collude?   Do we not trust the government to to shutdown every mining pool or outlaw asic?   

Trust is all relative and ultimately begs the question... "trust what?" and "what happens if my trust is violated?".   In the case of Bitcoin if your trust in the mining pools and large ASIC manufactures is violated you have no recourse except to start a new chain based upon a new security model.   Bitcoin miners own all sha256 based chains.  What would happen if Bitcoin suddenly lost 75% of its value... would it be hung out to dry like PTS taking an hour per block?   What happens if the 'core developers' make decisions that harm the network (possibly coerced) and the pools support these hard forks?    You see,  these other systems only have marketing behind them to make it appear as if their is no need to trust anyone.  Ultimately you are trusting an unelected group of individuals who have erected barriers to entry that protects their power.

In the case of Ripple they have 90+% (last I heard) of the shares and ran the only servers which alone *define* the consensus.   So in this case you are trusting them to be benevolent and not change their definition of consensus or block transactions.    Ripple operates on a 'trustee' model defined by the "unique node list" on the principle that the UNL will not collude to defraud you.   

So how have we improved things with TaPOS + Notary?   First of all the largest shareholder in BTS systems has less than 10% and the remaining shares are divided among 1000s.   Everyone participates in securing the network and making it immutable.   No other system has this property of being immutable because it is always possible to mine longer alternative chains whether it is POS or POW.   No other system has as every shareholder participating in the securing of the network and ultimately ratifying the ledger.   You could say that TaPOS means that eventually every transaction is confirmed and ratified by 90% or more of the shareholders.   

There are two kinds of decentralization:  power & redundancy.   There are two types of power:  power to change and power to prevent change.   In the bitcoin space, the miners have the power to change history and the power to block transactions.   As soon as 51% of the hashing power is controlled any transaction can be blocked forever by the attacker refusing to build upon any block that includes it.   As a government that didn't want make Bitcoin illegal (for political reasons), they could certainly 'follow the rules' and gain the ability to do far more than the Notary could with TaPOS.   The notary has no ability to change history with only the power to prevent change and their power is easily taken from them. 

With respect to 'centralization' of a point of failure, it is easy for the Notary to provide some redundancy and for the network to have contingency plans in place should anything happen.   These contingency plans can be executed without manual involvement of everyone. 

Decentralization:  Removing barriers to entry and maximizing competition. 

No other system is as decentralized as I am proposing.

Thanks for the response, know you are super busy.

No I don't trust pools not to collude or .gov not to go after pool operators. I have moved a greater allocation of my portfolio into gold since understanding that threat. I have also hedged in POS alt-coin NXT.

I should note I originally complained vehemently about AGS as well as later the allocation model of AGS and was obviously proved wrong and actually hold all my Bitshares via AGS rather than PTS. So I hope most of my fears are unfounded in this case as well.

Quote from: bytemaster on March 29, 2014, 04:44:56 pm
The notary has no ability to change history with only the power to prevent change and their power is easily taken from them.

Ok that is re-assuring and sounds like an improvement on Bitcoin for sure, provided your mechanism for removing power is actually 'easily/rapid/effective'. However, I'm not clear how it is an improvement on NXT...

Even in its' current form NXT processes transactions fairly fast & I understand they have at least 100 public nodes in at least 10 geographic locations, albeit operated by only a few operators. (& a POS system with a public node incentive built into the fee model would make the decentralisation even broader.)

So NXT with improved fee model would allow for fast transactions, hard for a central authority to shut down & easy to rapidly exclude nodes that don't process certain transactions.

Quote
1. Transactions can be sent directly to the miner who will mine the next block (if he decides to reveal his location on the Internet), thus saving traffic and coming much closer to VISA/MasterCard processing volumes.
2. Blocks can be generated in advance and sent to most of the miners before they become valid (timestamp validation), thus greatly reducing rate of orphaned blocks.
3. Due to ability to predict timestamps of future blocks (rate of blocks) it becomes possible to set appropriate fees to assure quick confirmations for important transactions (without paying too much for inclusion into a block).

And the most important feature:
The network can detect which miners don't take part in block generation and act accordingly.

http://www.nxtcrypto.org/nxt-coin/transparent-forging

You say 'no other system has this property of being immutable because it always possible to mine longer alternative chains whether it is POS or POW'

I think NXT explains their defense to attack here, some of which is still not revealed but it seems solutions are possible?

Quote
Imagine someone is going to do a "51%" attack against Nxt and he owns 90% of all coins. The adversary must stop generating blocks for legit branch coz he won't be able to compete against 100% mining power with his 90%. So he decides to "skip" his turn to generate a block. The rest 10% of the network detects this and penalizes the adversary by setting his mining power to 0 and distributing it among other miners. Now the network is back to 100% power coz everyone got 10-fold increase. The adversary can mine other branch in a secret place but it won't be able to replace the legit branch. Of course, the 2nd branch will have 100% "hashing" power tied to it as well, coz the attacker will get his 90% bumped to 100% but this can be counteracted by some mechanisms of advanced consensus (still not revealed).

http://www.nxtcrypto.org/nxt-coin/transparent-forging

Your system appears to be easier for a central authority to shut down and would likely be slower to respond to a notary (similar to a public node) who acted nefariously as it would require some form of voting.

Quote from: bytemaster on March 29, 2014, 08:34:51 pm
Quote
So whats the worst case scenario if a trustee/notary/witness/acceptor/inscriber/signer/authenticator/watcher/super node/cute cuddly bunny goes rogue? 

Could they get a double spend off and profit from it, even if they get caught and canned immediately afterwards?  Lets say I have a million dollars worth of BTS. Could I double spend that and actually get a million dollars profit for doing it?  This would be especially attractive if I had hosted the node through tor, as then all I'd have to do is wash the BTC I double spent for. 

The only way for them to 'go rouge' and perform a double spend is if they isolated their victim from the rest of the network.   As the Notary is not anonymous and their signature would be on two blocks at the same time, there would be incontrovertible proof of intent to defraud.  So I would say that the potential for a double-spend is near 0... especially if you have your client connected to several verified and public peers (like major exchanges). 

The most the Notary could do is delay the processing of transactions.   


Hmm, maybe that answers most of it, if the above means not that there is no incentive for them to double spend but that they can't perform a double spend and get the money out the system then that's cool. However I don't think you can double spend in NXT nd still think they can replace a bad notary faster.  Don't worry about answering my question though, if you feel it's been covered, know you're busy and I should research/understand how more of this works myself. 

Good luck, whatever decision you guys take I'm sure I'll probably be buying more BTS X than I have already been allocated as soon as they become trade-able.

805
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 11:43:20 am »
Quote from: .dac on March 29, 2014, 07:35:13 am

And Luckybit has a good point that the focus of our argument for requiring a trustee should be based on the fact that shareholders are not placing any more trust in our trustee than XRP holders place in a gateway, or BTC holders place in the ASIC pools; and far less destruction to our personal holdings can result in a 100% breach of trust by our trustee in our case as compared to those who recently got goxed.
 
And does this trustee method really speed up transactions? Because Ripple is FAST !

Bytemaster is leaning toward kicking up the UTILITY factor here, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Ripple is a great example of how we already have proof the market hates a trusted gateway approach.
Despite it's utility, speed and the investment that went into it, it's trending to zero and the fact that there are no ripple clones/forks out there is very telling.

The biggest currencies since Bitcoin are the ones that have developed methods that involve less trust in ASIC pools, Litecoin,  Peercoin, then NXT.  (Do you think the introduction of scrypt asics soon will increase or decrease Litecoins value?)

It's why no-one's afraid of JPM-coin it might have a lot more utility, but if it involves more trust than existing decentralised alternatives I think it's already dead in the water.
 




806
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 03:31:35 am »
Quote from: .dac on March 29, 2014, 02:39:38 am

I have to agree with Dan on this simply for the fact that the bitcoin centralization argument has thus far been nullified in practice, by the realization that the central mining power has little financial incentive to double spend because it will drive down the price of its stake. 

Time is money, and Dan’s time is cutting edge crypto.  He possess the vision of Tesla (Ethereum) who was designing a free energy wire around the planet, with the practicality of Edison (BTC).
 

1. I don't think we can know how much of the centralisation risk is priced into Bitcoin. I personally decreased my stake by about 40% once I'd analysed it.

Ghash.io for example is owned by who? At 40% plus some unknown hashing power they had a kill switch for Bitcoin they could flip at the most opportune moment. That is worth a lot more than $6 billion to TPTB. Even now, I have to factor a probability that in the event of a major financial event TPTB can decimate Bitcoin by getting to a handful of pool owners.

2. No doubt, the guy's a genius, but with practicality too as you said. I bitch but Bitshares is my biggest investment outside BTC, even though I don't always understand everything from a technical perspective, the quality of his insights into areas I do understand better is astounding & inspiring.

Edit: What's the advantage of holding funds in Bitshares using the trustee model vs. distributing them through a few well known Bitcoin exchanges that have provable BTC reserves & good contingency plans for raids/shut-downs?

807
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 01:58:54 am »
Quote from: bytemaster on March 29, 2014, 01:10:43 am
In bitcoin land, the mining pools are 'delegates' which then direct the voting power of the masses to rapidly resolve forks.   Shareholders should delegate their power in similar ways.

Imo, the mining pools are not 'delegates' directing the voting power of the masses, they are the result of the single biggest unintended major Bitcoin design flaw which allowed hashers to point their power to pools and still earn Bitcoins. That centralisation of power is one of the biggest risks to the future of Bitcoin.

This risk was demonstrated when 1. Ghash.io was used for double spending & 2. Their hashing power grew 15% in the following two months after the incident because enough voting masses (hashers) were obviously only concerned with their short term profitability.

Humans are greedy. Humans when acting as a group almost always choose short term pleasure over long term pain.

I'm pretty sure that any company with a future in this space has to be centred around trusting in maths more than in humans (Whether as voters or leaders) and doing it as decentralised way as possible so that is extremely hard to game or shut down.
 

808
General Discussion / Re: Profits, Performance, Trust & Efficiency
« on: March 29, 2014, 01:16:50 am »
What if there were two keys?

Private Key 1 lets  you use your balance for forging/processing. 
Private key 2 lets you spend the funds.

Private Key 1 can be altered with Private Key 2 making the previous one obsolete.

I don't forge with NXT and support the network because I'm worried about my private key being compromised/hacked if I type it into my computer all the time. But using the above approach (Is it technically possible?) I would be happy to support the network because if my computer was hacked they'd only be able to compromise my processing ability which I'd be able to change back to my control with private key 2 once I noticed someone else was forging my account.

(I'm pretty sure the community would sacrifice cost and efficiency for the sake of a decentralised solution.)


809
DAC PLAY / Lotto POS alt-coin idea
« on: March 28, 2014, 11:45:52 pm »
I had the idea in another thread of a lottery DAC that was a POS alt-coin but with 10% inflation. Where the inflation would be awarded to users in the form of lottery prizes. That way just owning shares would make you eligible for all lotteries and if the alt-coin was popular, then your shares would go up in value even if you never won.

I think people would like to own an 'alt-coin' that had daily prize draws? (Imagine instead of Bitcoin inflation going to miners there was $50 million in prizes awarded every month instead.)

Just wondering if anyone had feedback on the idea?
(obviously a major drawback is that you couldn't select specific numbers, each 'coin' would already have a number assigned to it.)


810
DAC PLAY / Re: Lotto charity fork (pure non for profit and non admin fees) - Thoughts.
« on: March 28, 2014, 11:23:48 pm »
Yes I think any charity that wanted to could list a name and address. So that when you bought a ticket you could just click on an address and they would receive the charity part of your purchase, you might even be able to specify a %? 

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