Could you respond to this point?

Quote

> The prediction market concept is flexible enough to contain functions for gambling, insurance, and portfolio replication (currency exchange), as well as other functions.

Right, and if I can have lower fees than Truthcoin for my currency exchange by having a special-purpose blockchain (delegates would have lower bandwidth/storage requirements), shouldn't I make my own blockchain and out-compete truthcoin on that one particular area?

The only argument against one blockchain to rule them all is efficiency and resistance to centralizing forces. I think we disagree about the premise here, no?

Sorry, you faked me out there with the ">".

Lower fees are great, as is competition. I meant to say that blockchains are only useful for Value Storage, and Truthcoin can improve on Bitcoin  via a clever escrow. Someone could design a better Truthcoin, or a better Bitcoin, but if they did, the old owners would probably absorb the design ideas into their existing software/ownership structure.

Value storage implies money. Money has a strong network component (you'd want USD if you're here in the States, in Europe you'd need Euros, etc.) I'm not saying that there will only ever be one (optionally, two) blockchain design(s), but that only one (optionally, two) blockchain(s) will ever be in use at one time.

I'm arguing FOR one blockchain to rule them all. If someone argued against it, I would expect them to (at a bare minimum) describe one hypothetical situation where a blockchain would be required that did NOT involve the storage of money (Bitcoin) or escrow of money (Truthcoin).

You don't really go into the problems with "firms".

You should write a paper first about all the problems with centralized entities and then you would have your own critique of your work.

The paper is about DACs relative to firms. I only examine the differences. Perhaps is you who is the hack reader?

I think DACs are superior for virtual entities which have to operate across multiple jurisdiction. The law just cannot keep up with technology. So why would you want to artificially slow the rate of innovation by going with a firm when you can build a DAC without permission and apologize later on?

SilkRoad was a firm, not a DAC. Legal compliance cannot explain the role of DACs.

Innovate and then apologize rather than fear to innovate and have the species go possibly extinct as a result. No one needs permission to make a DAC

See above, you are being illogical.

and it can run independent of human operators someday while a firm will never be able to do that.

This is simply false. As I wrote, Bitcoin is supported by human owner-operators who enjoy the use of the software and economic benefits of money. The employees look and act different but they still directly fulfill that role.

Simplify the thesis and the argument you are trying to make.

Bitcoin's success may never be replicated. It may have qualities/advantages which uniquely apply to money.

Quote from: asenski on June 10, 2014, 10:57:01 am

II even have a prototype for a quantum computing resistant coin.

I'm curious about your quantum computing resistant coin.

This is off-topic, but did you know that, as long as you don't re-use addresses, Bitcoin is already quantum-computing proof.

The correct answer is "around August 20th", until someone trades otherwise.

https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/released-date/

Unless those who say otherwise have some other way of proving that they aren't lying. (I'm all ears).

Quote from: xeroc on May 21, 2014, 07:26:00 pm

once you can spend it .. it will have value and thus might be listed @ coinmarketcap

Yes, the market basically asks when BitsharesX will be liquid.

It's very enticing to make the wager in favor of it being before Sept 1st.

Talk is cheap.

...I would be unable to estimate any dates.   

There's no need for you to worry about that. Estimating the date is what the market is for.

my question is, when will bitshares xt be made liquid?

Their market includes "ability to send BTS". Wouldn't that be the same thing?

Give them a few more weeks and checkout the sources and progress at githib .. they are currently bugfixing

You aren't betting, though? Its free money if you're right.


I myself have no idea when BitsharesX will be released. I know that, in the past, deadlines have been promised and pushed back several months, so I would not be surprised to see them pushed back by months yet again (a la Talebian 'Extremistan'). Instead I noticed that there seems to be investor anxiety, and an interminable debate on this forum as to the release date. This prediction market may be able to solve these problems.

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 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.