Truthcoin - Bitshares(X) perceived limitations

[hadrian]

Hmm...so prediction markets are awesome...truthcoin is a great idea...toast "wants it to exist"...and a leading dev is apparently willing to jump ship. Why aren't we in on this then? What's stopping us? I still feel like there's this big history between BitShares and Truthcoin that I'm missing...

Perhaps you've not seen this old board...https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=60.0

[nomoreheroes7]

Hmm...so prediction markets are awesome...truthcoin is a great idea...toast "wants it to exist"...and a leading dev is apparently willing to jump ship. Why aren't we in on this then? What's stopping us? I still feel like there's this big history between BitShares and Truthcoin that I'm missing...

[starspirit]

Actually in this discussion on the price feed, Rune is right. Without a price feed, even with massive liquidity, there is no guarantee that the market will form a consensus around the peg price. If the average expectation were that " the price is usually around 10% below the peg" or " the price should be worth close to zero" or " gee this price can move anywhere can't it!" then there would absolutely be no arbitrage opportunity from buying or selling around the peg, only massive risk. Market makers would be forced to trade where the market is, not where some idealised peg is.

What the combination of the price feed and the 30 day short expiry does is forces shorts to only create bitUSD at the peg, and to destroy them below the peg (because shorts cannot (edited) roll until the price is back above the peg).

So even though the bitUSD are still only backed by BTS, and BTS are not fully protected against black swan events, the rules force the hands of the shorts to buy back up to the peg price for as long as they have collateral available.

Im not saying this is the best approach, but its probably the best for now.

[monsterer]

On the contrary there is no benefit to have bitUSD be backed by nothing, but there is significant risk.

Price feed or no, bitUSD is backed by the same thing, BTSX. Not sure what point you are trying to make?

As the volume of the bitUSD market increases, the profit from executing a massive speculative attack would also increase tremendously.

Along with the required capital to pull it off... In any case, you seem to be suffering under the false pretense that the price feed and shorting system makes bitshares invulnerable to attack. The system has been designed to create liquidity walls at the price feed to lessen the odds of a massive sell eating through all the orders and crashing the price. However, the wall still has a volume and can still be eaten through.

Just because there is a feed price, doesn't mean anything is locked, it is still a free market.

With price feeds we permanently prevent such a meltdown from being possible and we ensure that the long term expected value of bitUSD is always 1. If we keep them permanently then bitAssets are and always will be backed by something liquid and valuable at a 1:1 ratio, and they can thus be trusted fully as a store of wealth.

I'm afraid your assumption is incorrect. The feed creates liquidity walls from the shorts at the feed price, but the liquidity is not infinite, it can be eaten through, just like any other order. It reduces the odds by concentrating the liquidity, but the risk is still there.

[gamey]

So as I see it, the only advantage of removing price feeds is to appease religious extremists who hate anything they identify as being "centralized". There's no actual profit motive.

Agreed. You make some great arguments Rune.

The more inputs you have into a system the more combinations of state you have and thus more chances for an exploit to exist.

If everyone uses the same script for their price feed, or if everyone uses the same 2 scripts etc then you can have serious problems. 

IMO there are very practical reasons for not wanting price feeds.  I assume they are needed in this case, but it should be obvious that they are not ideal.  This is not the same argument as whether they are needed, which I have no opinion on.

[fluxer555]

Hire hire hire!

[hadrian]

Truthcoin is underrated. I tried to jumpstart an independent effort with only basic support and it fizzled. We have a c++ implementation of the critical features but no resources to build it.

I want it to exist...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

I just found this post, on the Truthcoin forum, http://forum.truthcoin.info/index.php/topic,6.msg743.html#msg743

The person seems to be available if paid enough, and seems to like POS. They say:

"Dyffy is paying me $1000 a month (minus tax) to build their version of truthcoin.
I am not loyal. If anyone would pay me more, I would work on their ideas instead.

The python version of truthcoin I built is working pretty well. It does all the prediction market stuff truthcoin is supposed to do. We have tested it with 5 nodes at a time. We have run it continuously for 4 days without it crashing.
My head-start on creating this software is very big. It will be multiple months before we see any other implementation start to catch up to where I am.

My guess for the most valuable truthcoin 2 years from now: Majority of coins will be owned by a rich person who can afford legal fees and advertising fees (and possibly mining fees). They will hire me to maintain it. Maybe it will be Dyffy, but I doubt it.

If truthcoin is launched as a proof-of-work blockchain, I expect there to be a period of time about as long as a year when we will need to pay $100-$1000 daily into mining costs. I cannot afford this. Until a rich person shows up willing to pay, I am focusing my attention on proof of stake, which will costs pennies a day to keep operational."

[zerosum]

I really don't understand the hate people have to the price feeds. They seem like an excellent mechanism to me. They currently work great, and in the future there will be massive incentives to improve them in ways that make them more transparent, faster and smarter. I don't see why we should ever remove them unless some major problem arises from them.

It's because they are an outside source; a potential point of failure outside the control of the blockchain.

Ideally, the information which is currently injected into the blockchain would just arrive there, indirectly, through arbitrage opportunity via the efficient market hypothesis.

Sorry, but I have to rant some more about this . Neither of those arguments make any sense to me from a business point of view. The efficient market will not necessarily create arbitrage opportunities because without price feeds the only relation bitUSD has with USD is the name. A severe, but temporary, loss of confidence or perhaps a large-scale speculative attack against the bitasset could make it rapidly go to zero, permanently destroying it. Additionally, without external markets interfacing with the blockchain it becomes completely worthless in general, so theoretically there will always be external poins of failure and price feeds do not really add or subtract from that risk. In practice this risk is solved by diversification, and thus isn't a long term issue.

The general dismissal of price feeds seems to me like another religious fallacy that only exists due to the extremist beliefs of bitcoiners (everything must be non-profit and everything must have maximized decentralization or its a scam and evil!!11), it doesn't actually have a real basis in economics or business practice. /endrant

You can call it a religion if you want. I call it believing the market is the only and the true god.
In that regard bitUSD without price feeds will result in better valuation of the system supporting the bitUSD (aka BTS).
And No, we do not have price-feeds because it is better. We have them because we have them i.e. there is a certain level of concern that without them the peg will not work at the beginning (during the thin market phase).

BTS system working with feeds is already priced in by the market anyway.
I will venture to say that introducing the price feeds is the only reason the price of BTSX stopped its steep climb and even retracted to 7000- 8000 Satoshi.

[hadrian]

@nomoreheroes7 - I wonder if you'd enjoy listening to this episode of 'Let's Talk Bitcoin' http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-episode-117-the-truth-matrix
It's an interview with Paul Sztorc, of Truthcoin. For me it was an outstanding episode, which lead me to a conclusion which agrees with Toast's statement of, "I want it to exist".

It makes since to pay attention to him since hes a decision maker

...? The way some of you guys are referring to this guy makes him sound like some legendary mastermind. I truly feel like I'm missing something here...

And I have yet to see anything that TruthCoin offers that supposedly makes it so much more awesome than BTS. Just prediction markets? (Which I admittedly don't fully understand). If they're that amazing surely BTS would implement them sooner or later?

This feels like a TruthCoin pump thread or something, lol.

Truthcoin is underrated. I tried to jumpstart an independent effort with only basic support and it fizzled. We have a c++ implementation of the critical features but no resources to build it.

I want it to exist...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

I just found this comment by Paul Sztorc on the Truthcoin forum, http://forum.truthcoin.info/index.php/topic,6.msg739.html#msg739

"Money actually isn't the bottleneck, dev talent is. (This thread was started by one of the rare breed of 'good blockchain developers', "toast" from the Bitshares dev team).
Whatever it takes to get 1-2 extremely high quality developers.
(So the answer depends on finding developers and asking them "What do you want?")"

[nomoreheroes7]

So as I see it, the only advantage of removing price feeds is to appease religious extremists who hate anything they identify as being "centralized". There's no actual profit motive.

Agreed. You make some great arguments Rune.

[Rune]

Sorry, but I have to rant some more about this . Neither of those arguments make any sense to me from a business point of view. The efficient market will not necessarily create arbitrage opportunities because without price feeds the only relation bitUSD has with USD is the name. A severe, but temporary, loss of confidence or perhaps a large-scale speculative attack against the bitasset could make it rapidly go to zero, permanently destroying it.

Well, this is obviously not possible at the moment because of the very poor liquidity and lack of decent on/off ramps to actual USD. But once these are in place, and liquidity is decent enough, the likelihood of this kind of attack succeeding diminishes because the advantage to be gained through arbitrage will be huge.

The general dismissal of price feeds seems to me like another religious fallacy that only exists due to the extremist beliefs of bitcoiners (everything must be non-profit and everything must have maximized decentralization or its a scam and evil!!11), it doesn't actually have a real basis in economics or business practice. /endrant

The price feed and the way shorts work is an artificial mechanism designed to make up for the lack of liquidity and resilience in the market.

I'm not sure what economics or business practices you are referring to?

What i mean is: there is no downside to having price feeds. The risk it adds is practically zero and becomes smaller with every new market that BTS is traded on, and also becomes smaller as we get more and better paid delegates and the price feed software is upgraded. If anything negative happens caused by the peg, such as a delegate screwing around with the feed, the damage will be relatively small and quickly fixed. On the contrary there is no benefit to have bitUSD be backed by nothing, but there is significant risk. As the volume of the bitUSD market increases, the profit from executing a massive speculative attack would also increase tremendously. The risk-reward ratio of executing such an attack probably doesnt stay linear as market cap increases, but the possibility will always be there (unless we get so big the dollar is already dead). If the non-price feed system starts to go astray it could rapidly destroy a bitasset permanently (in fact it could destroy all bitassets since if one goes down everyone will probably want to get out of all other bitassets)

I think it is mistaken to assume that if the peg goes off it will always be perceived as arbitrage opportunities by traders. Since there is nothing fundamental keeping the value of 1 bitUSD at 1 USD, then if a bitUSD price lower than 1 was observed it would be exactly because the markets expected value of bitUSD was not $1, and thus there'd be no arbitrage opportunity. A trader would only move to rectify the peg if they reasoned that they had more information than the market. With price feeds we permanently prevent such a meltdown from being possible and we ensure that the long term expected value of bitUSD is always 1. If we keep them permanently then bitAssets are and always will be backed by something liquid and valuable at a 1:1 ratio, and they can thus be trusted fully as a store of wealth.

So as I see it, the only advantage of removing price feeds is to appease religious extremists who hate anything they identify as being "centralized". There's no actual profit motive.

[jsidhu]

It makes since to pay attention to him since hes a decision maker

...? The way some of you guys are referring to this guy makes him sound like some legendary mastermind. I truly feel like I'm missing something here...

And I have yet to see anything that TruthCoin offers that supposedly makes it so much more awesome than BTS. Just prediction markets? (Which I admittedly don't fully understand). If they're that amazing surely BTS would implement them sooner or later?

This feels like a TruthCoin pump thread or something, lol.

Bts is different and pm are different.. He has done the research noone has simple as that. I would put stock into his decisions abouts pm going forward over anyone elses hacked implementation.

The idea is to use bts to do it not compete against bts

[CLains]

Truthcoin is underrated. I tried to jumpstart an independent effort with only basic support and it fizzled. We have a c++ implementation of the critical features but no resources to build it.

I love you man, but you need to step up and realize that the shortest way to Mars went through PayPal. Trillion dollar DACs are within reach. The whole team needs to think hard about what this means: Everything else is insignificant.

5 years from now you could be a billionaire, that means, you could employ 1000 people with a yearly salary of 100 000$ working 10 hours a day for 200 days each year, for ten years.

[nomoreheroes7]

It makes since to pay attention to him since hes a decision maker

...? The way some of you guys are referring to this guy makes him sound like some legendary mastermind. I truly feel like I'm missing something here...

And I have yet to see anything that TruthCoin offers that supposedly makes it so much more awesome than BTS. Just prediction markets? (Which I admittedly don't fully understand). If they're that amazing surely BTS would implement them sooner or later?

This feels like a TruthCoin pump thread or something, lol.

[monsterer]

Sorry, but I have to rant some more about this . Neither of those arguments make any sense to me from a business point of view. The efficient market will not necessarily create arbitrage opportunities because without price feeds the only relation bitUSD has with USD is the name. A severe, but temporary, loss of confidence or perhaps a large-scale speculative attack against the bitasset could make it rapidly go to zero, permanently destroying it.

Well, this is obviously not possible at the moment because of the very poor liquidity and lack of decent on/off ramps to actual USD. But once these are in place, and liquidity is decent enough, the likelihood of this kind of attack succeeding diminishes because the advantage to be gained through arbitrage will be huge.

The general dismissal of price feeds seems to me like another religious fallacy that only exists due to the extremist beliefs of bitcoiners (everything must be non-profit and everything must have maximized decentralization or its a scam and evil!!11), it doesn't actually have a real basis in economics or business practice. /endrant

The price feed and the way shorts work is an artificial mechanism designed to make up for the lack of liquidity and resilience in the market.

I'm not sure what economics or business practices you are referring to?

[jsidhu]

It makes since to pay attention to him since hes a decision maker

[zerosum]

the tried-and-true security model

Unfortunately, those are the words of the mastermind of the project in question.
If not spoken directly by him, then spoken by his mouth-piece....


and yes, so often people are so close to the truth and then again so far from it.
Pretty sad when you think about it.

[starspirit]

Could something like the Votecoin concept be used as an alternative to the bitAsset price feeds? The key difference I can see is that prediction markets are predicting the outcome of an event at a certain time, whereas bitAssets need a running consensus.

[luckybit]

Turing complete scripting should make prediction markets possible.

[zerosum]

@ Rune
Totally no need to hire him.

It is all in the white-paper. And it is not much - combination of simple ideas and pretty benign math, put in an academic language.

0.02BTSX

[zerosum]

its a pretty cool idea and I did email stan about trying to integrate prediction markets via bts toolkit but he didnt get the email and didn't respond back when asking what his email was...

My team @ syscoin is in talks with truth coin dev and he wants to collaborate.. and its actually a very cool idea... the idea is we would dev and use him as a theoretical resource since he did alot of research on prediction markets that you can read up about on his github.

I think he hung out on our dev mumble session for about 3 hours and basically answered a thousand questions about truthcoin.   Unfortunately he did not get to learn very much about bitshares at least during that session.

He (the main guy behind truth coin) spent months on this forum, so I am pretty sure he is totally aware of the whole workings of the BTS system as far as pegged assets (bitAssets) go.
I also find the idea of prediction market as DAC very interesting. (although all my attempts to get an answer on 'what is the GREAT benefit of it being on a blockchain, instead of being regular brick and mortar business' were never answered; the best I got was that I am stupid. Which I am and I do not argue with, but is not answering my question what so ever.)
That being said, I do not see why this prediction market should not work on a blockchain also, and do it well.

[edit] @toast
I know that he will likely say 'no' to money, but what else is not true? (I have my opinion, but I do not thing that is what you meant).

[toast]

I've talked to paul and both of those are false =(

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[Rune]

its a pretty cool idea and I did email stan about trying to integrate prediction markets via bts toolkit but he didnt get the email and didn't respond back when asking what his email was...

My team @ syscoin is in talks with truth coin dev and he wants to collaborate.. and its actually a very cool idea... the idea is we would dev and use him as a theoretical resource since he did alot of research on prediction markets that you can read up about on his github.

I think he hung out on our dev mumble session for about 3 hours and basically answered a thousand questions about truthcoin.   Unfortunately he did not get to learn very much about bitshares at least during that session.

If he really is smart and knows what he's doing, we should hire him. He won't say no to money, and it would be a waste to implement something like this as POW.

[jamesc]

its a pretty cool idea and I did email stan about trying to integrate prediction markets via bts toolkit but he didnt get the email and didn't respond back when asking what his email was...

My team @ syscoin is in talks with truth coin dev and he wants to collaborate.. and its actually a very cool idea... the idea is we would dev and use him as a theoretical resource since he did alot of research on prediction markets that you can read up about on his github.

I think he hung out on our dev mumble session for about 3 hours and basically answered a thousand questions about truthcoin.   Unfortunately he did not get to learn very much about bitshares at least during that session.

[jamesc]

Lol at POW being "tried-and-true"...by that logic so are dial-up modems.

And the rest of the claims sound like crap too.....
I call shenanigans.

Funny... I came up with one of those two, sorry off topic: I just explained to someone that Apple pay is like plowing the field by hand when we've already invented the tractor...

[Rune]

I really don't understand the hate people have to the price feeds. They seem like an excellent mechanism to me. They currently work great, and in the future there will be massive incentives to improve them in ways that make them more transparent, faster and smarter. I don't see why we should ever remove them unless some major problem arises from them.

It's because they are an outside source; a potential point of failure outside the control of the blockchain.

Ideally, the information which is currently injected into the blockchain would just arrive there, indirectly, through arbitrage opportunity via the efficient market hypothesis.

Sorry, but I have to rant some more about this . Neither of those arguments make any sense to me from a business point of view. The efficient market will not necessarily create arbitrage opportunities because without price feeds the only relation bitUSD has with USD is the name. A severe, but temporary, loss of confidence or perhaps a large-scale speculative attack against the bitasset could make it rapidly go to zero, permanently destroying it. Additionally, without external markets interfacing with the blockchain it becomes completely worthless in general, so theoretically there will always be external poins of failure and price feeds do not really add or subtract from that risk. In practice this risk is solved by diversification, and thus isn't a long term issue.

The general dismissal of price feeds seems to me like another religious fallacy that only exists due to the extremist beliefs of bitcoiners (everything must be non-profit and everything must have maximized decentralization or its a scam and evil!!11), it doesn't actually have a real basis in economics or business practice. /endrant

[jsidhu]

I thought BM used to discuss this sort of idea so that you can buy insurance against earthquakes or natural disasters etc.. I remember reading  about that.. this was all related to prediction markets.. the thing with it is. it would be a fork of bitshares since all of the assets would be prediction markets... unless there is a distinction in bitshares between prediction and pegged assets or something.

[monsterer]

Here's their whitepaper: http://www.truthcoin.info/papers/truthcoin-whitepaper.pdf

Interestingly, they have a LMSR market maker built in to the protocol to take the other side of every trade, providing liquidity.

[Ander]

Truthcoin is underrated. I tried to jumpstart an independent effort with only basic support and it fizzled. We have a c++ implementation of the critical features but no resources to build it.

I want it to exist...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

Can we work on implementing something like this in bitshares in the future?

Prediction markets would be an excellent feature to have.

[toast]

Truthcoin is underrated. I tried to jumpstart an independent effort with only basic support and it fizzled. We have a c++ implementation of the critical features but no resources to build it.

I want it to exist...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[monsterer]

I really don't understand the hate people have to the price feeds. They seem like an excellent mechanism to me. They currently work great, and in the future there will be massive incentives to improve them in ways that make them more transparent, faster and smarter. I don't see why we should ever remove them unless some major problem arises from them.

It's because they are an outside source; a potential point of failure outside the control of the blockchain.

Ideally, the information which is currently injected into the blockchain would just arrive there, indirectly, through arbitrage opportunity via the efficient market hypothesis.

[starspirit]

BitsharesX (in at least most of its quickly-mutating versions), is unlikely to gain widespread acceptance for several reasons, the chief of which is DPoS, which makes highly flawed assumptions about human nature, is explicitly plutocratic (and not capitalist), has market-design-features which sap needed liquidity, employs Soviet-style price fixing (which retards the flourishing of the crucial BitUSD), doesn’t scale (technically it may scale…recall this is a micro-econ blog), and is simply/cheaply attacked (or, at least, completely re-centralized) by finding/threatening/murdering 76% of the “delegates”.

I think our market design is likely not optimal and some liquidity will be lost to this (and we could probably do without feeds with a better design -- not that they're really an issue for anyone other than delegates), but the rest of the points just sound like they're from someone who hasn't thought very deeply about these things.

It's really quite trivial and obvious that DPOS just organizes the centralization that would be present in any system rather than allowing it to form in an ad hoc and likely less secure fashion.

I don't go for labels much, but one aspect of the new system that might appear plutocratic is the ability of larger stakeholders to vote a level of dilution on everybody else, whereas a more free market approach to dilution would allow individuals to determine how much of their own capital they are willing to dilute. Not saying its easy though...

[Rune]

I really don't understand the hate people have to the price feeds. They seem like an excellent mechanism to me. They currently work great, and in the future there will be massive incentives to improve them in ways that make them more transparent, faster and smarter. I don't see why we should ever remove them unless some major problem arises from them.

The important thing is that we move away from trading BTS on centralized exchanges and only ever use them to gap the asset -> bitasset  barrier. The price feeds can simply measure the bitasset pegs, then multiply it with the current internal market price and put the feed at that level. This would enable internal price discovery and would ensure that any sudden breakdowns of the peg would be swiftly corrected.

[thisisausername]

BitsharesX (in at least most of its quickly-mutating versions), is unlikely to gain widespread acceptance for several reasons, the chief of which is DPoS, which makes highly flawed assumptions about human nature, is explicitly plutocratic (and not capitalist), has market-design-features which sap needed liquidity, employs Soviet-style price fixing (which retards the flourishing of the crucial BitUSD), doesn’t scale (technically it may scale…recall this is a micro-econ blog), and is simply/cheaply attacked (or, at least, completely re-centralized) by finding/threatening/murdering 76% of the “delegates”.

I think our market design is likely not optimal and some liquidity will be lost to this (and we could probably do without feeds with a better design -- not that they're really an issue for anyone other than delegates), but the rest of the points just sound like they're from someone who hasn't thought very deeply about these things.

It's really quite trivial and obvious that DPOS just organizes the centralization that would be present in any system rather than allowing it to form in an ad hoc and likely less secure fashion.

[jsidhu]

Lol at POW being "tried-and-true"...by that logic so are dial-up modems.

And the rest of the claims sound like crap too. Fiat 'name only' assets? They trying to claim they can offer actual USD in a decentralized manner or something?

And I'm pretty sure price feeding has been proven necessary...the market just doesn't work otherwise (at least for now).

I call shenanigans.

You need to read up about it... ie: doctors tell you to do something for you're well-being but it is incorrect and you end up in worse health.. you trust the doctor as a professional but a prediction market would allow for a greater truth.

"Is 1 beer/wine a day good for you?"
"Who will win the next presidential race?"
"Who should be the next president of the United States"


so on and so on... it allows to find a greater truth in a trustless manor.

The guy who wrote that didn't understand what BitShare's is all about, business on the blockchain and not prediction markets.. a bitasset with fiat makes sense in that context... although predicition market assets make sense in another context using the same framework... so if they work in counison then bitshares becomes more than just business, and would have to have seperate distinct section of the framework (or forks) to dedicate to the niche's.. business/truth in knowledge/currency etc.

What I was interested about was building the prediction market for the purpose of voting in this framework... applied to a single problem may help put the technology to use instead of trying to generalize and solve all of the world's knowledge problems at once.

"Should this feature be merged into BTS?"
"Should this developer get funding to develop a marketplace DAC like open bazaar for bts"?

[jsidhu]

its a pretty cool idea and I did email stan about trying to integrate prediction markets via bts toolkit but he didnt get the email and didn't respond back when asking what his email was...

My team @ syscoin is in talks with truth coin dev and he wants to collaborate.. and its actually a very cool idea... the idea is we would dev and use him as a theoretical resource since he did alot of research on prediction markets that you can read up about on his github.

[Vizzini]

Beware Sztorcs bearing gifts. Academia hatches plenty of ideas, few of them practical.

[nomoreheroes7]

Lol at POW being "tried-and-true"...by that logic so are dial-up modems.

And the rest of the claims sound like crap too. Fiat 'name only' assets? They trying to claim they can offer actual USD in a decentralized manner or something?

And I'm pretty sure price feeding has been proven necessary...the market just doesn't work otherwise (at least for now).

I call shenanigans.

[gamey]

Last I heard Truthcoin guys were around here trying to get a developer to work on their project. 

The comment just strikes me as standard crypto-coin FUD.  Once you are tied to bitcoin wagon, you have to serve the koolaid.  You'll see it anytime you are around a group of bitcoin people.

Price fixing probably refers to the price feed aka "training wheels". 

[questionsquestions]

Someone is hawking a new coin called Truthcoin (http://www.truthcoin.info/) that has been proposed as a sidechain to Bitcoin. One of the benefits that Truthcoin has over BitsharesX is apparently:

...the BitAssets of BitsharesX, but done right (no soviet-style price fixing, or fiat 'name only' assets, and no swapping out the tried-and-true security model with what someone had for breakfast today)...

I am not entirely clear on what this statement means, so perhaps someone can clarify? I am aware that no crypto-currency is perfect, so the points leveled by the Truthcoin author may well be valid and I would be interested to know - if they are - are there any proposals in the works to address them?

As an aside; I also though DPos as one of the potentially best consensus algorithms that currently exist today. Far less wasteful than Proof of Work and with built in determinism to ensure fast and  consistent block creation times.