No, it's still not clear how popular oracle feature will be. Yes.

What is oracle?

Quote from: xiahui135 on October 28, 2015, 02:06:28 pm

If there is no mining, how can the node benifit from runing a pow node?

Benefit comes from ability to send transactions.

Quote from: xiahui135 on October 28, 2015, 02:06:28 pm

Basiclly, can you tell how many roles there and how they act and why they join.

One role. Cooperation with peers gives benefits to every participant, this is why they will join.

the motivation for parties to run the nodes is to be able to enjoy a free and efficient marketplace. The parties either have lots of data available to sell or want to buy lots of data or both. But they can't trade their data without Iota because it is either too expensive to trade these kind data in a regular market or there is no place to trade at all. Therefore, the parties will waste their data (income resources) if they don't participate (running nodes because they need to stay online all time to look for trading partners) in a marketplace enabled by Iota. That is  the motivation, namely the opportunity to make profit and money.  It is the ultimate motivation for business activities.

A not very good analogy is uber and airbab markets. Before uber and airbab, those individuals who participate in uber and airbnb could not have the opportunities to offer their services to other people to make money for themselves because there either no such kind market or too expernsive for them to offer their service in the old marketplace. But with the marketplaces enabled by uber and airbnb they can.

PS - this is why I also like Siacoin so much because Sia is building a similar marketplace for the cloud storage industry. Sorry for trying to sell your another coin.

Bts is already a smart contract platform (since cfds are kind of smart)
as for turing completeness: who knows .. mayve someone is already working on a proposal to upgrade the protocol

Did you mean that users can program their own custom contracts in this platform like in Ethereum?

SIA is on Poloniex now - https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_sc

Cheers!

Current Sia's storage limit is 500MB. In the next release (in the mid of August) the limit will increase to 5GB (enough for a dvd) and the upload stability will get much better as well.

As the dev mentioned "So far, out of ~1200 files that have been online for ~8 weeks, not a single file has been lost. This is even without the stability and renewing code which we will be introducing in a few weeks."

testing the wallet now.
here's my address if you got some small amounts for me to play with 393c5fa7f445cc938172f70f8eba3ee2c90049aea7240b5c86a603f9e8c9d24df1048c7ab616
edit: how do you mine in windows?

I think someone will help you on window mining here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.1540

You can get an auto invite and sing up in Sia slack here - https://siatalk-slackin.herokuapp.com
There are more activities on the slack.

So 1000 people with 25% total stake notice that their transactions are not confirmed for a long time. Votes of these people are enough to replace 51 delegates. How will they notify the others that something went wrong?

The same concern has been shared by Vitalik - https://www.zapchain.com/a/FRsI5InA2e

DPOS: not too comfortable with people voting honestly as a security assumption (as I recall, there was an empirical result that showed that due to the mass of people non-voting you only need ~8% of stake to perform a "51% attack"), would prefer it used a more standard BFT algo between the delegates, but otherwise makes sense.