A Call to the Truthcoin Prediction Market

[santaclause102]

Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk!

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!?   

"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! 

[bitcoinba]

So Paul (or Bitcoinfan),

What would you need to roll your project into Bitshares assuming Bytemaster agrees to said needs?

I have a genuine interest in the develop of this type of business on this platform. Feel free to use PMs if the forum venue is too public.

I just think it would be valuable to know exactly it would take to get to the next step, and see what you and other potential DAC developers really want in order to combine forces.

[Empirical1]

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:

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!

[oco101]

Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk!

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!?   

"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.

[Bitcoinfan]

Here are the challenges I see:
  a) With SVD you need to keep peoples individual votes secret and this is a challenge for a DAC
  b) Someone with a large stake can swing the consensus and pull everyone to his position.
  c) On a DAC there is no way to recognize individuals and track reputation (required to punish them in the future)

I will take a shot at addressing B and C, as A is really out of my realm of technical expertise. 

B)  Only somebody with greater than 51% ownership in the coins can manipulate the results in their favor.  Given that PTS/AGS is distributed, I don't this will be a factor.  Paul has a graphic that shows even with a 50%/50% tie, SVD becomes the tiebreaker because the Truthcoin voters who voted Yes matched more closely together (Figure 3- Plot of Judgement Space-- in the whitepaper).  Paul has used this analogy to describe SVD: Think of equal set of marbles on each side of balance scale.  At the beginning they all weigh the same.  However, when the ballots are counted, one side suddenly tilts-- because that bucket of marbles react more closly to each other (eg. greater correlated votes) thus having a tendency to become heavier.  The other side are recognized as false submission and is ignored by the program.  Now the SVD function doesn't just take place on one matured contract, instead it uses the entire dataset of queued votes that are awaiting extrapolation.  If you wanted to manipulate one contract of your choice towards your favor, your bound to fail, since the rest of the voters have a correlation tendency across the ballot population.  Your cast is seen as noise and therefore tossed out.  This comes with a price, as you also face as loss in Truthcoins because of the failure to vote in sync with the other Truthcoins.

SVD is commonly used in image restoration to remove the blurry and grainy noise from a picture.  Using SVD, these study demonstrate how discernable images are brought to life, revealing things we didn't know were there beforehand.  In Truthcoin, SVD parses out the unnecessary, similar to the delicate features on a face portrait, only then can we see the underlying picture-- the remaining honest votes. 
 
http://jase.esrgroups.org/papers/4_3_4_10.pdf
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~nagy/courses/fall06/ID_lecture1.pdf


C)  You are only deducted at the end of that ballot roll call.  How much you are deducted depends on your results from that single period of voting.  This discourages votes against the grain.  The reputation is not a credit score, and does not carry into the future.  Any Truthcoin holder, I think would be more concerned about the value for which your coins could sell for.  Honest voting encourages trust in the system, and greater market traffic within the network.  You have more to gain with a periodic, and ever growing cash stream. 

Also if you tried to form a cartel of voters to fraud the results, you are faced with the dilemma that your friends will not vote with you and take your coins.  For the forum readers, look at section Voting Strategy in Paul's whitepaper.  He has a very interesting piece about this. 

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/Truthcoin_1.1.pdf

[AsymmetricInformation]

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!?   

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:

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").

Which seems to hit on some insecurities I've seen voiced on this forum. At the time, I personally did not believe that BitShares would succeed in tracking the value of underlying assets.

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.

Edit: fixed quote attribution

[Empirical1]

Wow, I just read your thread on Bitcointalk!

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!?   

"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. 

[AsymmetricInformation]

Have you considered using bitshares_toolkit and partially honoring ags/pts? Sounds like it could be an ideal fit, depending on what you've already finished. We can chat on skype if you want

I'm a professional statistician/economist, and that involves a lot of programming, but I really don't consider myself a professional programmer. I care a lot about this project, enough to contribute my own money and time and/or fundraise for it, and hire someone to help finish it and/or manage a team who will help finish it. I'm open to any avenue of getting the help that the project needs to be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

- if it does work, the consensus algorithm could have other applications that could be useful in insurance and legal decision making.

It does.

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.

You should skip to 'Voting Strategy' in the whitepaper, and there's also a little flowchart with a fictional conversation which might make the idea a little more accessible.

[Empirical1]

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.

[toast]

Have you considered using bitshares_toolkit and partially honoring ags/pts? Sounds like it could be an ideal fit, depending on what you've already finished. We can chat on skype if you want

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[AsymmetricInformation]

Hello.

I am the author of the Truthcoin whitepaper, and (as always) I am happy to answer people's questions about the project.

Currently the design (and some proof-of-concept code for the novel ideas) is essentially finished, but it would take a professional-level effort to actually bring the project into existence. Of course, many design choices (Merged mining, Bitcoin) are extremely flexible as they have nothing to do with the underlying goal.

The 'coins' of the project represent reputation, and earn dividends as the network performs. They could therefore be distributed at launch to the investors who made the development possible.

These are all great questions that are addressed in the whitepaper.  I will ask Paul if he would like to respond to your questions here.

Yikes.. I just realized I didn't read the white paper (just your post).... I will go through it at some point soon.

My apologies.

It took me a long time to write! I tried to get all the typos / confusing areas in v1.1, but writing really is a process of continual improvement.

how would I use TruthCoin for my project?

https://github.com/jaybny/fantasybit

I'm not sure. What does your project require in order to work? You might fork the project, give yourself permanent dictatorial voting power, and thereby create and arbitrate the (extremely high) number of contracts you'd seem to require to get all of that data about fantasy points in there. Your ideas sounds like a business (centralized agent in a decentralized economy), the management overhead of that data seems high.

[SatoshiFantasy]

how would I use TruthCoin for my project?

https://github.com/jaybny/fantasybit

[bytemaster]

These are all great questions that are addressed in the whitepaper.  I will ask Paul if he would like to respond to your questions here.

Yikes.. I just realized I didn't read the white paper (just your post).... I will go through it at some point soon.

My apologies.

[BldSwtTrs]

I think I need to clarify something very important.   Decentralization is a means, not an end.   I want to create an entire video addressing this concept because decentralization is kind of a religion that has taken on a life of its own and become an end to itself.

There is a good blog post on that subject, that's worth reading it : http://bitcoinism.blogspot.fr/2014/03/decentralized-applications-its-time-for.html

[BldSwtTrs]

This is very interesting.