Presentation Draft

[psztorc]

My interview on LTB did generate some Investor-Interest. It got me thinking, and so today I drafted a presentation on Truthcoin's private valuation.

It's hardly my best work, from any viewpoint (presentation skills, econ skills, etc), but I thought I'd throw it out there to let everyone (investors, coders, testers, commentators) know what they might be a part of.

I'm mostly not sure what we'd do with any money we got, without a CTO to hire/manage programmers (and how exactly do we find him/her? ...ideally an investor would just choose). Money for liquid initial markets will probably be a must, but it would cost a fraction of what would be spent on paychecks (I had imagined I would do it myself).

https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/raw/master/docs/TruthcoinValuable.pdf
https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/raw/master/docs/TruthcoinValuable.pptx

Again, maybe a 3 hour effort!

[zack]

Coinjoin doesn't belong in your paper. A market "This market expires in state 1" is not a valid mixer.

I don't think it makes sense to have a CTO or CEO for a project like this. There is no reason for any hierarchy to exist.
What do you mean by "hiring" programmers?

We are not building a factory and hiring people to man the assembly line, we are trying to do science. Science isn't something that you can pay someone to do by the hour.

The way to get things done is to create bounties. Investors donate to whichever goal they care about most, and whoever achieves the goal gets to keep all the donations.

[psztorc]

Coinjoin doesn't belong in your paper. A market "This market expires in state 1" is not a valid mixer.

I can't remember what I was thinking for this. I think maybe it was supposed to be 2 markets about the same coin-flip (or difficulty, or whatever), one Yes/No on Heads, the other Yes/No on Tails. I suppose it all goes back to the original keypair, though. I guess I should remove it if I can't even remember what I was thinking.

I don't think it makes sense to have a CTO or CEO for a project like this. There is no reason for any hierarchy to exist.
What do you mean by "hiring" programmers?

One skill which I need, but don't have, is the ability to assess the programming work done by other people. One job which I must do, but have no desire to do, is manage an organization's day-to-day. The CTO and CEO examples are purely functions of my own preferences and abilities.

There is no reason for any hierarchy to exist.

Currently, there is a hierarchy with two levels: myself (the original designer / GitHub account owner / forum administrator), and "everyone else". Surely, that could be improved?

What do you mean by "hiring" programmers?

Paying people for their time, or per contribution, with USD, or rewarding them after the fact with VoteCoins.

We are not building a factory and hiring people to man the assembly line, we are trying to do science.

The design is already completed, now it needs to be built. The "discussions" on this forum, with really only one exception, have not been a mutual exchange of ideas. Instead, people post questions, and get responses either from me directly, or from someone else who is getting the information from what I already wrote. The Science Phase (unfortunately) seems to have ended long ago.

Science isn't something that you can pay someone to do by the hour.

I disagree (I myself am paid this way). But, anyway, I probably wouldn't (only) pay people by the hour. In fact I probably wouldn't know what to do, which is why I want a CTO.

The way to get things done is to create bounties. Investors donate to whichever goal they care about most, and whoever achieves the goal gets to keep all the donations.

Again, I don't agree. Firms are just more productive then a decentralized ad hoc group, particularly with difficult-to-assess contributions on a new and unique task like this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Moreover, why would an investor care about funding one part (useless without the whole). Would need to be some extremely complicated network of assurance contracts. Enforcement, even tracking, these contracts would be difficult. I'm open to your ideas, but I just don't believe them (empirically, look at Bitcoin and Gavin, for example). Can you maybe send me a resume of your work on several successful software projects/organizations?

You are jumping to the conclusion that I want to throw a trillion dollar IPO and set up grey cubicles or something. As I said above,

everyone (investors, coders, testers, commentators)

the idea is to get more people involved, which includes volunteer coders.

[martinBrown]

The way to get things done is to create bounties. Investors donate to whichever goal they care about most, and whoever achieves the goal gets to keep all the donations.

Again, I don't agree. Firms are just more productive then a decentralized ad hoc group, particularly with difficult-to-assess contributions on a new and unique task like this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm Moreover, why would an investor care about funding one part (useless without the whole). Would need to be some extremely complicated network of assurance contracts. Enforcement, even tracking, these contracts would be difficult.

Mike Hearn pointed out why bounties suck in this recent interview (at about 33:40). Basically the first-come-first-serve nature encourages corner cutting as aggressively as possible by rewarding those who finish first and release rushed low-quality work, at the expense of those work slower but produce something of much higher quality.