Questions for the Augur Team

[Bitcoinfan]

Hi those at the Augur team:

Jack, Scott, Joey, etc

1) What are your expectations for performance within the Ethereum network?  How many Transactions per Second (TPS) are you expecting?  Will Ethereum be able to support high frequency trading? 
2) What are the fee costs you expect or even qualitative downsides&upsides that you may anticipate?  How does your network use ether? 
3) Lastly, how is the alpha release in "May" (whenever Ethereum gets launched) going to be different from your Beta release?  Why do you need/fix to add in the 8 months until official release?

[zack]

I am working with the Tendermint team building a proof-of-stake version of ethereum. It is able to spend significantly more time processing transactions per block, and we are making other changes to the EVM to make it faster than ethereum. Augur will work cheaply on the chain we are making.

[joeykrug]

1. It's pretty slow (1999 smartphone as Vitalik always says haha). Since block times are 12 seconds you could only do high frequency trading using something like lightning network, but vanilla eth no. Ethermint will have even faster block times iirc. So it's hard to do TPS estimates a la Bitcoin with ethereum because it's based on gas limits. But if you filled one block with only augur transactions (buying selling shares, etc.) you could fit about 300 tx in. Which gives you 25 transactions per second (this is without Zack's work and without any scalability measures for either eth or augur).

So already better than Bitcoin TPS, and we'll be improving as we implement more scalability measures.

2. Fees for transactions should be pennies (doing the math based off genesis sale that's how much they cost when testing).  I would checkout blog.augur.net (there's a qualitative post I made there why we went with ethereum) and some posts by Jack on improvements to the consensus algo.

So you can use ether to pay for contract execution (but you don't hace to), you can pay with subcurrencies. You can make a market in a subcurrency, so you can use a stablecoin, sidechained Bitcoin, ether, whatever. Speaking of sidechains, I have an interesting idea on how to implement them without the mining concerns expressed on the community, will do a blog post on this soon!


3. So the main thing is scalability additions. There's also the aspect of I want this to be tested really really well. There were going to be some additional features between beta and release, but we're actually a bit ahead on backend work, so they'll probably be mostly all in place by the beta.

[zack]

You can put lightning network channels on top of vanilla eth. I even wrote a card game that uses channels for the moves.

[Bitcoinfan]

1)  So roughly 25tps it sounds like.

2)  I have concerns about this.  So your saying augur will accept any type of coin created on the ethereum network?  So will fees be determined by a base currency-- but this base currency can be anything?  Will people be vulnerable to FX risk depending on the base currency used?  Wouldn't this affect a votecoins payouts, (this screws up Truthcoins Game Theory) if their fees earned are depreciating/appreciating against other reward currencies. 

[Bitcoinfan]

1)  So roughly 25tps it sounds like.

2)  I have concerns about this.  So your saying augur will accept any type of coin created on the ethereum network?  So will fees be determined by a base currency-- but this base currency can be anything?  Will people be vulnerable to FX risk depending on the base currency used?  Wouldn't this affect a votecoins payouts, (this screws up Truthcoins Game Theory) if their fees earned are depreciating/appreciating against other rewarded currencies.

Hey Augur-- Do you understand my question #2?

[joeykrug]

"So your saying augur will accept any type of coin created on the ethereum network?"
Yep

"So will fees be determined by a base currency-- but this base currency can be anything?"
Also yes

"Will people be vulnerable to FX risk depending on the base currency used?"
No, it'd be relative to w/e currency you're using (unless you make CFD markets)

"Wouldn't this affect a votecoins payouts, (this screws up Truthcoins Game Theory) if their fees earned are depreciating/appreciating against other rewarded currencies"

I imagine branches would be able to choose what currencies they want to accept (e.g. sidechained bitcoin, stablecoin, ether).  I'd rather let the market segregate based on currency into diff. branches instead of forcing all branches to accept all currencies (which would make your questions above become serious problems)

[Bitcoinfan]

"So your saying augur will accept any type of coin created on the ethereum network?"
Yep

"So will fees be determined by a base currency-- but this base currency can be anything?"
Also yes

"Will people be vulnerable to FX risk depending on the base currency used?"
No, it'd be relative to w/e currency you're using (unless you make CFD markets)

"Wouldn't this affect a votecoins payouts, (this screws up Truthcoins Game Theory) if their fees earned are depreciating/appreciating against other rewarded currencies"

I imagine branches would be able to choose what currencies they want to accept (e.g. sidechained bitcoin, stablecoin, ether).  I'd rather let the market segregate based on currency into diff. branches instead of forcing all branches to accept all currencies (which would make your questions above become serious problems)

Thanks for answering.  Clears that up.  Last question (or two) for now:  Have you started on the branching mechanisms and will that be targeted in final release?

[joeykrug]

Yeah, branching is already implemented it's just not in the UI yet.  Will add it in beta.