Common Confusion: The Two Coins

[psztorc]

One confusing thing about my project, which has confounded even extremely intelligent people, is that there are two units of account moving at once (in addition to the accounting going on within each Prediction Market). It was even difficult to explain:

Old Usage (Bitcoin-Focused Whitepaper):

1. "Coins" are exactly like Bitcoin (and, in the whitepaper, were Bitcoin), you use them to make trades in PM, to create PMs, to pay PM and Miner fees.

2. "Truthcoins" or "voting shares" or "reputation" are the ownership layer, they do the work of Voting on Outcomes, and are redistributed through RBCR. The exponentially-smoothed largest-eigenvector of the vote matrix.

[3+...] When you Buy or Sell in a prediction market, you are buying and selling tokens. These were historically known as shares (ie 43 shares of 'Barack Obama wins', "selling 17 shares at $.45/share"), and there were at least twice as many of these as there were markets (1 'yes/no' pair for this, 1 pair for that, etc.), and they all had to be kept separately from each other, as each was of course a different asset.

New Usage (Altcoin-Focused Truthcoin.info):

Now, with the heaviest of hearts, I'm going to change the wording to one that is probably more consistent with the average cryptocurrency-user's preconceptions. The primary reason for this change, is the abandonment of the use of Bitcoin as the Marketplace's currency, in this new (Altcoin) project.

Here goes: Within this forum, the names are Truthcoin (or just 'Coin', or 'Cash', or 'TRU', note that this is completely the opposite of what was originally the case)CashCoin and VoteCoins (which define the branches, do the work of Voting, and collect payment in Truthcoins). This leaves open the creation of branches ("Votecoin:Sports"). Finally, to avoid screwing this up any more, the States of the Markets which individuals buy and sell will retain their original name of Shares.

Unless there is a riot, I will be editing the whitepaper to use this language (and regrettably, remove the word "Bitcoin"). I'm open to suggestions, but we'll need to coordinate eventually and Dictator's Choice is often the most efficient way of getting that done. I'll try to rip off this band-aid as quickly as possible.

Name	Layer	Usage
TruthcoinsCashCoins	Currency/User	Transfer Value, Make trades, Create PMs, Pay Miner fees for inclusion of TX.
Votecoins	Owner/Employee	Vote on Decisions, Participate in the Consensus Mechanism (and RBCR), Earn Fees as payment.

Edit: I have updated again, changing Truthcoins to CashCoins. I think this is an even better fit, but, more encouragingly, this terminology emerged spontaneously from a conversation I was having with a large group, suggesting to me that it is much more reliable.

[martinBrown]

I find that naming scheme even more confusing. I would prefer to keep the name Truthcoins as the tokens which do the judging/voting, RBCR, etc.

The tokens for placing bets on events could be called FutureCoins (or futures, future-shares, etc). This would align with the better with the FutureCoin paper (which outlines a decentralized prediction market, but not decentralized event juries). The token names should emphasize that the defining feature of TruthCoins is decentralized adjudication of event outcomes after-the-fact, and users act as juries who get rewarded for reporting the truth. While the betting-tokens (FutureCoins, or PredictCoins) are used to place bets that are predictions of the future.

Another concern is that using *coin in the names of both tokens would tend to cause the additional confusion that they are two separate alt-coins. Every other alt-coin has only one token. But TruthCoin has two tokens working together on the same chain. I'm not aware of anything similar.

[zack]

In namecoin, when you buy a unique name, it works the same way a coin does. You can spend it to someone else.
In namecoin, you can turn some units of value into a special coin.
In truthcoin, you can turn some units of value into a pile of special coins.

What do we call the protocol? Truthcoins and votecoins are 2 types of tokens that exist in _____ protocol.
I think that the protocol has been called "truthcoin" so far.

Maybe it should be "Psztorc's Blockchain Protocol for Prediction Markets 0.0"
So the namespace is clear for more people to invent things like this, and for Paul to add updates to his idea later.

[ghabs]

"Psztorc's Blockchain Protocol for Prediction Markets 0.0 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Factor Analysis" 

I've been conceiving of the protocol & project as "truthcoin", & I suspect that most of the existing buzz/brand recognition is still tied to truthcoin, so it would be costly to rename that aspect of it. Also bitcoin the protocol and Bitcoin the store of value have set a precedent for that type of naming convention.

Regarding the two tokens I like Truthcoins and Votecoins, or Truthcoin and Repcoin, or Predictcoin and Votecoin.