Quote from: luckybit on January 02, 2014, 05:33:32 pm

Here is a version of based on the GPLv3 template which anyone can help me complete and edit.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yEGecQg78tiH81PQdgroaJklwPHTtfm1UFphC4g_BEg/edit?usp=sharing

I filled some of it in but anyone else is free to join in. If there is a lawyer here, please change the language or fill in this license. I'm not a lawyer and did the best I could based on the GPLv3.

Great work but you may want to read the first line of GPL before Preamble, that's why i chose to structure mine differently. Mind if i purger yours for some clauses? Also you may want to read the article bytemaster linked.

Lets work together on this and split the bounty. A third party (Bytemaster) should review both of licenses to determine which direction it should go. Perhaps a combination of both is best. Then we edit it in a shared document and use comments to discuss it so that anyone can review our work and see what our thoughts were on the forum.

I actually think that a "mentor" should be a fix role assigned to someone inside the DACP (industry) or inside a DAC. So if a newcomer is convinced of the ecosystem and has past experience in the movie industry, he joins a DAC and in the first maybe 60 - 90 days he is simply being shown around and taught how everything works. Then after this short learning process it gets to the "doing" part. The best about this all is that basically after 6 - 9 months of working in a DAC, anyone can take a new apprentice and teach them the in's and out's of a DAC.

I think you're focused more on the teaching aspect of it while I'm focused more on the economic allegiance aspect of it. The economic allegiance allows for a guild to form where members pay dues. It also allows for mentorship to form where members pay for leadership. It's not just about teaching because some things cannot be taught. It's also about social organization which always starts with mentors and apprentices and progressively gets more complex from there.

The mentor is someone who is more knowledgeable, experienced, and can teach, that is part of it. The other part of it is something a lot more simple where you have people who share a mission or set of moral or political principles which they want to act out through how they invest. So if a person is an environmentalist they might not want to invest in certain kinds of DACs.

In the real world when you have an economic allegiance between family members such as father and son then the father is expected to protect the son for a period of time until the son becomes strong enough to protect himself. In the world we live in where people expect the government to be their parents they have the instinct to seek protection from some other more experienced stronger individual.

In my opinion they must pay for this. Leadership should not be a free service. If someone feels they need the protection of another they should be willing to pay the price in the form of a commission, a fee, a percentage. Otherwise it is wild west and everyone for themselves.

Therefor, a mentor does not need to be paid or an apprentice does not need to pledge to give a % of his earnings to his assigned mentor. A mentor is simply someone that acts on behalf of the DAC/DACP, and by teaching the newcomer about what they exactly do, he and his DAC will benefit as they have a new participant that is working collectively with the others on creating a greater output for everyone involved.

But then it's not an economic allegiance. It's just a friendship. An economic allegiance is contractually binding where you pledge allegiance to a particular individual, guild, ideology or whatever.  If you pledge economic allegiance to anything then you're agreeing to pay the %. It is that due paying process which creates social structure in society on the most basic level. It can also be a donation to a particular non-profit, a commission, but in the code it would be described as paying the % to the (placeholder).

The direct compensation for the mentor could be points or a badge that indicates that he had taught people in the past.

But once again you're now making a mentor nothing more than a buddy. A buddy is not an economic allegiance and makes no real economic difference or social difference. Friendships without contractual allegiance cannot form a social entity or institution. A corporation or firm exists because of the contractual allegiances and without it there is no real loyalty.

So how do you have loyalty or allegiances? You use contracts. You pledge allegiance to a particular social order which could be whatever you choose. This is sealed economically into the blockchain. At any time you can break allegiance, but there would be some cost associated with breaking allegiance.

If we look in the real world we see allegiances all the time. Look at marriage for example where you have two adults forming a union and an economic tie to each other. This is a form of economic allegiance to the family structure. You also see economic allegiances in gangs when you have different gangs following their own form of order within the wider system. You see it in corporations as well when corporations form alliances. You see it with brokerage firm, where brokers get commissions. You see it in professional organizations where people pay dues for membership.

All of this becomes possible with an economic allegiance system and more. The power of the economic allegiance system is specifically in the ability to pledge allegiance to an entity, policies, or set of principles. In my opinion the ability to do so is critically important in society because it exists in nearly every culture on the earth in some form or another.

So it's not really about receiving the badge or symbolic medals. It's a way to form economically allied  groups and factions within DAC space. So for example say one group within the DAC ecosystem supports a certain political principle but then later on another group does not support that particular political principle. At this point they are going to want to form distinct political factions. This would mean certain DACs would be favored over other DACs based upon whether or not those DACs support the principles of each of these particular factions. A mentor would be someone who has been around long enough to have an understanding of the political factions within the larger DAC ecosystem.

To take it further, assume in the future that the demographics of DAC participants we have now isn't the norm anymore. Right now the demographic is majorly anarcho-capitalist and fairly radical. In a few years that won't be the case anymore and you will have some DACs which have anarcho-capitalist designs and some which don't. This is guaranteed to happen and by having the economic allegiance system you can set it up so that if someone arrives into the ecosystem from their particular political views they can connect with their guild which represents their political faction in the economic ecosystem.

They can then invest only in the DACs which the guide decides is in support of their principles. They can work only for the DACs which fit with their particular political principles. They would be able to find a mentor immediately who shares their concerns and their political principles. Because you have to remember that crowd funding DACs is about money and eventually its going to become a political debate as to which DACs to invest in and which not.

Now let me go into some details of the intricate possible features of the economic allegiance system.

1. If you're a mentor you can also be an apprentice to someone higher than you.
2. If you're an apprentice and you break allegiance with your mentor then anyone underneath you is also broken from your mentor. Your apprentices go with you.

To put 2. into context, if you're a mentor with 100 apprentices in an allegiance to make you the apprentice of a mentor with 10 apprentices, then that mentor definitely wants you to keep your allegiance and will give you every possible incentive to keep allegiance to him because he will be receiving a % from 110 apprentices. But if you break allegiance then he goes back down to 10 apprentices, and if he's totally corrupt he could end up with 0 apprentices as they could all break allegiance with him to side with a better mentor.

That is the power of the economic allegiance system. You have non-coercive decentralized leadership. You have the incentive for people to want to be good leaders built in. Anyone can change their allegiance at any time and being a mentor is a privilege not a fixed status. You become a mentor with thousands of apprentices below you only if you're a great leader.

I prefer to get rid of the word "worker" entirely from our lexicon and replace it with participant. We participate in the creation and operation of the DAC. We participate and aha we own, but this way of thinking about it probably isn't going to make sense to our society built up of workers and bosses.  I'm just suggesting this is how I would internally describe the worker. All participants are initially treated as functional equals and there is no coercion if the system works right. This does not mean all participants have equal roles or positions because reputation should matter, just that the framing of the word participant and the DAC itself should not view one participant as the boss of another.

Anyone who has a mentor chooses a mentor because they think or feel like they need one. Perhaps the mentor can help them become a better investor or invest in their behalf as a broker. Maybe the mentor has legendary moral principles or just understands the principles of the DAC ecosystem. These things will take a while to teach and one of the mistakes of the Internet generations was that the old school or old guard did not pass down the value of privacy to the later generations. Privacy mattered until it didn't and now it's an uphill battle to convince people the value of privacy.

An example of how the economic allegiance system could work in a practical example. If you and I are mentors and we value the principles of open source, privacy, free markets and free software, then as mentors when we invest it's because we have done due diligence and people trust our decisions. The apprentice will not know how to avoid scams, will not know the reasons why open source, privacy, free markets or free software are so important, they will be the mainstream adopters who are currently on Facebook and Twitter who don't know the DAC value system.

That is really just one practical example. There are many many other examples and its very flexible. I also don't want to imply that every DAC should have the same value system or same principles. Some people will want to invest according to their principles though and that must be allowed.

I sent my PTS 30 seconds before midnight GMT, but Coinplorer shows the transaction time at the first confirmation after midnight GMT.  (BTSBlock appears to be down at the moment, so I cannot check if its reporting of the transaction time is different.)

Blockchain.info shows my BTC transaction time when the transaction was sent (0 confirmations).

Which time counts for being included in a particular day's auction, when it is sent or when it is first confirmed?  If it's the latter, that could adversely affect auction sniping.

This is why if you're smart you should send early in the day rather than late.

Quote from: luckybit on December 30, 2013, 08:49:43 am

It's just my preference. I would never suggest that anyone create a private key on closed source software. By default I assume if its not open source it's got a backdoor otherwise it would be open source. I admit this is a paranoid point of view and it's probably safe to generate a private key on Windows 8 if you never connect that computer to the Internet and only use it for the purpose of key generation.

OS X is closed source software.

It was open source and based on FreeBSD. I was not aware that it's now closed source. I take back everything I said about OSX and will not use it. Apparently they did a sneaky bait and switch tactic because when I used OSX in 2005 it was open source.

I recommend Linux or FreeBSD. FreeBSD if it is available for FreeBSD otherwise Linux. Do not trust anything closed source.

http://slashdot.org/story/06/05/17/1453206/mac-os-x-kernel-source-now-closed

Just thought I'd throw this out there also...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-30/how-nsa-hacks-your-iphone-presenting-dropout-jeep

I'm not sure any operating system can protect you from the NSA if they want to break into it. The best advice I can give is to compile it yourself, run it on a raspberry pi, and never connect it online for any reason. Even that probably wont be enough if the NSA specifically has you on their list of targets.

The python port of BitMessage to Mac OS X was very difficulty and buggy.

As someone who does cross-platform development, C++ is by far the best choice.  You discover your bugs at compile time and have the power to easily tweak things for each target.  With other systems you discover your bugs at runtime and often are helpless to fix the platform specific quirks that result.

Of course this is your opinion and you're right that Bitmessage is buggy. This is why I said there has to be a secure standard library base made by programmers who know how to write secure code. From what I see of Vatalik Buterins design spec he knows how to design secure code. It's modular, it's flexible, it utilizes virtual machines, it could probably do process separation and sandbox techniques to limit the risks of a bug doing any real damage.

I favor something like python for these reasons:
I think when you use simple to read code you have more eyes who can debug it.
I think when there is a lot less syntax you have less lines of code to debug.
I think when code is beautiful it is a lot easier to maintain.

So despite the problems with Bitmessage those are not problems inherent in the design of Python but problems inherent in Bitmessage and the style they chose to design and code it. I will accept we disagree on this and it's really a subjective matter anyway. If you're most comfortable with C++ then of course for you it's the best, but I think there are a lot more people who can debug/audit a Python script with maybe 50 lines of code than a C++ full fledged compiled application with hundreds of lines of code.

Does anyone know more or has any thoughts about this project:

http://vbuterin.com/ethereum.html

I've been looking at it over the past few days.
It's extremely flexible, powerful, modular and potentially secure. These are the features he has over Bitshares and Mastercoin.

The main key to whether or not it will be a success will be based on how easy or difficult the scripting layer is. My opinion on it is that they should go the Python route which is to have a virtual machine with a very easy to use scripting language on top. If we have to write assembler code that might be okay but it could mean fewer people can take advantage of the extreme flexibility and turing completeness.

Python is turing complete and simple. If we could have something simple like that or something simple like the Linux bash scripting then it will work extremely well and probably become a success. If the virtual machine is designed to make it extremely cross platform so it can run on anything then it could be like python in that aspect that it can be ported to everything.

C++ in my opinion has its limits. It's hard to port C++, hard to debug it, and it's a compiled language which means you have to worry about all the security issues yourself. Python code is easier to secure because there is a lot less syntax, it's easier to debug, it's more portable, but it's interpreted so it's also not as efficient or fast as compiled languages which are optimized specifically for the hardware.

I await the release of Ethereum but those are my thoughts on it based on my current understanding of what it wants to do.

IMO this sort of project should NOT be using a turing-complete language as the foundation. Bitcoin's scripting language was designed to be not turing-complete for a reason. We want our protocol language to be good for correctness proofs, not malware.

Python is turing complete but also one of the easiest languages to write secure code in because the syntax is simple and beautiful. I think if the syntax for the turing complete scripting language is simple, and if it's easy to see what it does, then it's very hard to write malware. Interpreted scripting languages in my opinion are a necessity for contracts and should not be limited because of a fear of difficult auditing. Instead we should make the scripting language so simple and so well designed that you don't have these issues. There also has to be a standard code base which people can use which is secure by default.

This is something which in my opinion can be built, has to be built, but will not at all be easy to build. And from what I saw on the site they want to use some sort of assembler type code which is not going to be easy to deal with. On the other hand its using a virtual machine so if you do process separation, isolation, sandboxes and other techniques you can prevent malware.

I confident that if designed with security in mind malware can be prevented. I don't think Bitcoin was designed as well as it could have been and was hacked together in a lot of ways using a compiled language such as C++ which while efficient is often difficult to port, difficult to debug, difficult to secure.

Use Apple OSX or iPad tablets. Avoid Microsoft because it's hidden source. Ubuntu is okay but it depends. Virtual machines are risky because random number generation is infeasible on virtual machines.

Generate your keys somewhere else. Software backdoors? Compile everything yourself. Hardware backdoors? Nothing you do can protect you from that.