Author Topic: Explanatory videos  (Read 3412 times)

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Offline cass

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Should the last two paragraphs be included, or should they be the start of a new video on Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Stake?

i would love to see a new POW vs. POS video instead of including last 2 paragraphs on blockchain video
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Offline cass

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What Is a Blockchain?

Imagine you and your friends wanted to start a lemonade stand. 

You each contribute different resources (sugar, lemons, the stand, water, etc..), and in exchange you agree to share the income earned from the lemonade you sell.   

To help you remember how the income is divided you and your friends write down what percent each individual owns in a note book.   

From time to time a new friend would like to invest in the business or sell his or her share to someone else.   

Every time shares change hands you and your friends update the notebook to reflect the change.  Any time someone wishes to transfer their share of the business to someone else they must sign off on the transfer.

This simple system works well until you get hundreds or even dozens of partners in your lemonade stand. 

At this point some people grow concerned that the notebook could be changed at any time by the individual responsible for holding it, and they want more proof that the record cannot be modified.   

To accommodate this demand from the partners, they adjust the data recorded in the notebook such that a change to a single letter on any page would require making changes to every page thereafter.   They then have everyone sign off on each page.   To make things more transparent, a copy of every page added to the network is mailed to all of the partners.

Eventually there may be thousands of parters as your lemonade stand is franchised around the world.  A physical notebook and signatures become too slow, so the business updates its infrastructure to use a virtual notebook called a blockchain, where each page is a block and each block contains a digitally signed transfer request.   

Everyone on the Internet has a copy of this virtual notebook and every transfer request ever made. 

This is a blockchain: a global ledger tracking every change in ownership is a transparent, secure, and inferable way.

Bitcoin Lemonade shareholders decided that they couldn't agree on how to sign off on the ledger, so they decided that each page in the notebook must be accompanied by a winning lottery ticket, and the notebook with the most pages would be considered the official notebook. 

The lottery tickets are payed for with computing power, over and over and over and over and over... until one comes up a winner.  When a shareholder produces a winning lottery ticket that shareholder is paid with new shares in the company.  This system is known as Proof-of-Work and is very inefficient and unprofitable for the lemonade stand.

Some people have recognized the huge waste of resources and decided to replace the lottery tickets with a system where pages are signed off on by an elected board... the way that companies around the world have been governed for centuries. This is Proof-of-Stake.

 +5% impressively simple, yet wonderful metaphorical description of Blockchain
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Offline CWEvans

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I have a PDF presentation to go with this draft:

--- --- ---

What is a blockchain?

A blockchain is...

[snippets of text pop up as the words are uttered]

...a shared public ledger that consists of a sequential record of all transactions, usually in a cryptocurrency system, that records ownership both present and at all points in the past of all units that circulate within that system, in order to mitigate double-spending, which is a core design challenge of distributed, untrusted peer-to-peer protocols, the integrity and the chronological order of which are enforced with military-grade cryptography buzzwords and techno-gobbledygook, hand-waving, and ooohhh...

something sparkly!!!

[Gold Bitcoin disks appear, onee-at-a-time to fill the scree. A 'ka-chink' sound accompanies each new coin image, and they appear slowly at first and faster through the dozen or so events.]

...

Let's try that again.

A blockchain is...

...a shared ledger.

[red arrow pops up]

Period.

...

[first spreadsheet image]

Imagine a spreadsheet with 1.15 x 10^77 columns. To put that into perspective, according to WolframAlpha, the earth is made of approximately 1 x 10^50 atoms meaning that the number of columns is about 3.7 x 10^28 earths' worth of atoms.

Remember, one million is 10^6, and a trillion is 10^12. So, 1.15 x 10^77 is... a LOT.

Each of these columns is like an account that someone controls, and it records how many units--'coins', 'shares', or whatever--one owns...

...and the total amount is known at any moment.

...

This unimaginably wide spreadsheet records every transfer of numbers from one column to another column...

Each row of the spreadsheet is like a sheet of paper, on which all of the transactions completed within some average amount of time are batched up and confirmed in what we call a 'block' of transactions. And, as the number of rows grows, the spreadsheet becomes like a stack of sheets of paper that we call a 'blockchain'.

And, instead of having an individual's name at the head of each column--because coming up with 1.15 x 10^77 unique names would be waaayyy too hard, each column is identified with a unique string of random characters...

How do we know that a copy of the transaction history--the blockchain--is correct?  Well...

[copies of spreadsheet pop up around the world]

...because ANYone, ANYwhere in the world can have a copy of it, and if a copy does not match everyone else's, it gets ignored. As long as 50% +1 of those confirming transactions agree one a particular copy of the blockchain, that one *IS* the correct version.

Because everyone is looking over everyone else's shoulder, no one needs to TRUST anyone else, and if anyone fiddles with the numbers in his or her copy of the blockchain, everyone else will know it and ignore that copy.

[red arcs bounce around the globe]

And *THIS* enables us to transfer numbers from one column to another column, no matter... where... in... the world... the parties are... who... control a given column in this immensely wide transaction record.

[hold on final image with multiple red arcs]

...as if national boundaries that keep people apart did not even exist.

[pause]

How do you secure a blockchain?

Today, there are two general categories of solutions:

Proof of Work and Proof of Stake.

First, with Proof of Work transaction processors confirm the validity of the most recent transactions; whereas with Proof of Stake transaction processors confirm the validity of the most recent transactions.

Next, with Proof of Work the transaction processors record that block of transactions on a page; whereas with Proof of Stake the transaction processors record that block of transactions on a page.

Then, with Proof of Work the transaction processors keep buying lottery tickets that until one eventually buys a winning ticket which is expensive, very tedious, and wasteful; whereas with Proof of Stake the transaction processors take a vote among the holders of the units in the system, like a one-vote-per-share election in a company.

Finally, with both Proof of Work and Proof of Stake the transaction processors add the new page to the stack of all previous transactions and start a new block.

After all that is done, the winning Proof of Work transaction processor collects a prize of some arbitrarily predetermined units for having been the lucky lottery winner; whereas the Proof of Stake transaction processor whose turn it was to confirm the current block receives a share of the transaction fees generated by that block of transactions.

The major difference between Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, is that Proof of Work vests the voting power in the hands of the transaction processors, who might not even hold any units--'coins', 'shares', or whatever one calls them--in the system; whereas Proof of Stake works like conventional corporate governance, in which each unit-holder gets to vote in proportion to his or her stake in the system.

To learn more...

...visit... BitShares.org

Offline Empirical1

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This seems to be the thread for videos ideas.

I posted this in another thread, but I think these two paragraphs by Bytemaster would make a great Bitshares X teaser/sales/advert.


BitShares is a revolutionary new bank and exchange that could rival the value of the largest banks in the world such as JP Morgan and Bank of America in just a few years. How could this new upstart grow so quickly?  BitShares offers a bank account that earns 5% interest where funds can be transferred in minutes anywhere in the world with more privacy and security than a Swiss bank account.  Your account can never be frozen, your funds cannot be seized, and the bank can never face collapse due to loan defaults or fraud.  All of this is made possible without requiring any employees, lawyers, regulatory compliance, vaults, buildings, and other infrastructure required by traditional banks.  Unlike existing banks, you can hold your balance denominated in gold, silver, oil, or other commodities in additional to national currencies while earning 5% interest. 

In addition to acting as a bank, BitShares also serves as an exchange where currencies, commodities, and stock derivatives can be traded with most of the features used by professional traders including shorts and options.   The Bank takes a cut on every transaction and pays 100% of these transaction fees as dividends to the shareholders.  BitShares can achieve this feat using the same technology that makes Bitcoin possible, irrevocable decentralized automated consensus forming.     

For a quick comparison of BitShares to Bitcoin you can view Bitcoin as stock in a company that earns no profits, pays 100% of its revenue to security guards, and then debases shareholders by 12% per year to fund security.  Despite the inefficiencies and costs, Bitcoin has grown to be worth over $12 billion dollars in less than 5 years.   How much more valuable would Bitcoin be if it could turn a profit while offering far more powerful services?    The value of owning shares in this new Bank will exceed two times the value of all balances of in gold, silver, oil, and currency accounts.  If the largest banks can achieve deposits of over $1 trillion dollars with no meaningful interest, how many deposits could BitShares attract and what would that mean for the value of the bank?

As for the explanations of blockchains and ledgers, I think the comparison to real ledger books and the analogy to lottery tickets almost seems harder to follow than a basic technical explanation, (& I'm not technical)  but I've just read them quickly I'll try look at again later. 

Edit: Hmm not as easy as it looks to explain blockchains and mining simply. That's quite a hard one. GL
« Last Edit: April 12, 2014, 10:32:31 pm by Empirical1 »

Offline CWEvans

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Should the last two paragraphs be included, or should they be the start of a new video on Proof-of-Work vs Proof-of-Stake?

Offline CWEvans

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What Is a Blockchain?

Imagine you and your friends wanted to start a lemonade stand. 

You each contribute different resources (sugar, lemons, the stand, water, etc..), and in exchange you agree to share the income earned from the lemonade you sell.   

To help you remember how the income is divided you and your friends write down what percent each individual owns in a note book.   

From time to time a new friend would like to invest in the business or sell his or her share to someone else.   

Every time shares change hands you and your friends update the notebook to reflect the change.  Any time someone wishes to transfer their share of the business to someone else they must sign off on the transfer.

This simple system works well until you get hundreds or even dozens of partners in your lemonade stand. 

At this point some people grow concerned that the notebook could be changed at any time by the individual responsible for holding it, and they want more proof that the record cannot be modified.   

To accommodate this demand from the partners, they adjust the data recorded in the notebook such that a change to a single letter on any page would require making changes to every page thereafter.   They then have everyone sign off on each page.   To make things more transparent, a copy of every page added to the network is mailed to all of the partners.

Eventually there may be thousands of parters as your lemonade stand is franchised around the world.  A physical notebook and signatures become too slow, so the business updates its infrastructure to use a virtual notebook called a blockchain, where each page is a block and each block contains a digitally signed transfer request.   

Everyone on the Internet has a copy of this virtual notebook and every transfer request ever made. 

This is a blockchain: a global ledger tracking every change in ownership is a transparent, secure, and inferable way.

Bitcoin Lemonade shareholders decided that they couldn't agree on how to sign off on the ledger, so they decided that each page in the notebook must be accompanied by a winning lottery ticket, and the notebook with the most pages would be considered the official notebook. 

The lottery tickets are payed for with computing power, over and over and over and over and over... until one comes up a winner.  When a shareholder produces a winning lottery ticket that shareholder is paid with new shares in the company.  This system is known as Proof-of-Work and is very inefficient and unprofitable for the lemonade stand.

Some people have recognized the huge waste of resources and decided to replace the lottery tickets with a system where pages are signed off on by an elected board... the way that companies around the world have been governed for centuries. This is Proof-of-Stake.

Offline CWEvans

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Charles if you don't mind please post here when draft complete

I'm also working on some others including "The Six Regulators and the BitElephant," "What Is a BitAsset," and the 'Insurance'/Mutual Aid Society (BTS MAS) thing.


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Charles if you don't mind please post here when draft complete


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Offline bytemaster

I believe I have the simplest explanation of the block chain without any need for jargon.   Charles Evans is writing it up for me.

Every company needs to track who owns what shares in the company.  They generally do this with a ledger that records every time shares trade hands.  This ledger could be viewed as a stack of papers each of which documents as many trades as can fit on that page.  Imagine someone wanted to change the ledger, they could add or remove pages or change the balance on any page.   If it were challenged in court, how would the judge decide which ledger was the original?  Generally speaking the longest ledger with the most pages is considered the most complete so long as everything balanced out and every transaction was properly signed by the previous owner of the shares.

To help secure the ledger every page references the page before it so that changing even a single number on an earlier page in the ledger would require making changes to every page after it.   Generally companies have an elected board member sign off on every page, but bitcoin shareholders do not want to trust anyone with such a role, but they still need to agree on some way to add pages to the ledger that become difficult to forge.   So, they came up with a solution: anyone can add a page to the ledger if they can attach a winning lottery ticket.  In exchange for attaching the winning lottery ticket they get paid with new shares in the company.   As a result of this system people all over the world are buying digital lottery tickets from their electric companies in the hope of getting paid to add a page to the ledger.  The more people that are buying lottery tickets to less likely it is for any one of them to win.

Because every page in the ledger references the prior page, someone would have to win a lot of lottery tickets to change the ledger and produce a taller stack of ledger pages.

Is this the exp or is cw Evans writing something different? 

I think a simple movement of arrows to show transfer of ownership in a video could help this explanation of what ledger technology really does to remove middlemen


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Charles is working with that analogy to improve upon it by converting it into a script for an animated video.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

bitbro

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I believe I have the simplest explanation of the block chain without any need for jargon.   Charles Evans is writing it up for me.

Every company needs to track who owns what shares in the company.  They generally do this with a ledger that records every time shares trade hands.  This ledger could be viewed as a stack of papers each of which documents as many trades as can fit on that page.  Imagine someone wanted to change the ledger, they could add or remove pages or change the balance on any page.   If it were challenged in court, how would the judge decide which ledger was the original?  Generally speaking the longest ledger with the most pages is considered the most complete so long as everything balanced out and every transaction was properly signed by the previous owner of the shares.

To help secure the ledger every page references the page before it so that changing even a single number on an earlier page in the ledger would require making changes to every page after it.   Generally companies have an elected board member sign off on every page, but bitcoin shareholders do not want to trust anyone with such a role, but they still need to agree on some way to add pages to the ledger that become difficult to forge.   So, they came up with a solution: anyone can add a page to the ledger if they can attach a winning lottery ticket.  In exchange for attaching the winning lottery ticket they get paid with new shares in the company.   As a result of this system people all over the world are buying digital lottery tickets from their electric companies in the hope of getting paid to add a page to the ledger.  The more people that are buying lottery tickets to less likely it is for any one of them to win.

Because every page in the ledger references the prior page, someone would have to win a lot of lottery tickets to change the ledger and produce a taller stack of ledger pages.

Is this the exp or is cw Evans writing something different? 

I think a simple movement of arrows to show transfer of ownership in a video could help this explanation of what ledger technology really does to remove middlemen


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Offline bytemaster

I believe I have the simplest explanation of the block chain without any need for jargon.   Charles Evans is writing it up for me.

Every company needs to track who owns what shares in the company.  They generally do this with a ledger that records every time shares trade hands.  This ledger could be viewed as a stack of papers each of which documents as many trades as can fit on that page.  Imagine someone wanted to change the ledger, they could add or remove pages or change the balance on any page.   If it were challenged in court, how would the judge decide which ledger was the original?  Generally speaking the longest ledger with the most pages is considered the most complete so long as everything balanced out and every transaction was properly signed by the previous owner of the shares.

To help secure the ledger every page references the page before it so that changing even a single number on an earlier page in the ledger would require making changes to every page after it.   Generally companies have an elected board member sign off on every page, but bitcoin shareholders do not want to trust anyone with such a role, but they still need to agree on some way to add pages to the ledger that become difficult to forge.   So, they came up with a solution: anyone can add a page to the ledger if they can attach a winning lottery ticket.  In exchange for attaching the winning lottery ticket they get paid with new shares in the company.   As a result of this system people all over the world are buying digital lottery tickets from their electric companies in the hope of getting paid to add a page to the ledger.  The more people that are buying lottery tickets to less likely it is for any one of them to win.

Because every page in the ledger references the prior page, someone would have to win a lot of lottery tickets to change the ledger and produce a taller stack of ledger pages.



For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline graffenwalder

Maybe a video that shows a glimpse of future possibilities while keeping it lite.

Shown in headlines:
2020. Whitehouse staff member accidentally put white house on bitshares real estate.
President .......... No choice but to move out, after being sold for 1 btc/x amount bitusd

2027 Bitshares music and bitshares video run Sony out of business.

Running a blank now, maybe someone else can come up with other stuff for this video.

End the video with Reimagine everything.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2014, 04:32:17 pm by Graffenwalder »

Offline MktDirector

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My plan is to release at minimum one video per month until we have a collection of videos to explain the various concepts and DACs in the ecosystem. We're working on scripts for the following right now:

What is bitshares.org? (all about the organization/ecosystem/parterships of bitshares)
All About Decentralized Autonomous Companies. 
BitSharesX, a decentralized bank & exhange. 

Once I've run the scripts by bytemaster and he thinks they are technically accurate, I'll post them here to get everyone's inmput. My general thought is to start high level concepts and work down to specific DACs. 

Any ideas for further videos? Post em here, I'm all ears.   
B

bitbro

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What else can we expect?

Can we explain ledger technology and potential use with a little more sophistication?


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