Victory Road

[psztorc]

For this project to be successful, we must:

1. Build a Quality Product
2. Convince People to Use It

As far as 1 goes, my current experiences lead me to believe that more "buzz" must be created. Over the last few months, many people contact me via email to say the same thing: that they just heard about the project and are very excited about it and want to help. Not enough people have heard of Truthcoin.

For 2, we have several strategies available to us. To attract traders, we can create our own heavily-subsided markets, topically popular markets (sports, politics), or arbitrage-heavy markets (finance, stock prices). This will cost some $ but is more than worth it. If successful will it would make $$ (so may even be self-financing). The LMSR helps us a great deal in this area.

Hard to be more specific at this point in time. As we move farther down the road, we can more clearly see the next challenges.

[toast]

This will cost some $ but is more than worth it. If successful will it would make $$

How would it make money? Capital appreciation? Bitcoin is unprofitable without constant infusion of capital, are you going with that model?

Consider the DAC *metaphor* for truthcoin. The first thing you did right is that you are not paying miners more than TC is making as income from fees. So you are cash-flow positive once you are off the ground, except that cash isn't being funneled to further the project but sort of spread out to whoever can afford to run the miners profitably.

Now you need something analogous to capital infusion. I've suggested mastercoin/AGS style fundraiser as a way of initially allocated the initial <votecoins/truthcoins I forget>.

In our dpos chains we have the ability for delegates to pledge some of their "miner revenue" to particular causes to help build the DAC.

I don't think this is possible in any system where you can't "downvote" the pool operators, since they will just offer their revenue to whoever supports them.

I think if you made a POW variant where all hashes still contribute to security but you can hash "for" or "against" a pool operator, then the pool operators are forced to do something to further the cause of Truthcoin with their income.

[psztorc]

This will cost some $ but is more than worth it. If successful will it would make $$

How would it make money? Capital appreciation?

No, I am referring to the fact that Authors are rewarded with some of their Market's Trading Fees. I am saying that, although liquid markets would cost Truthcoin to start, they might net make more Truthcoin than was spent.

Now you need something analogous to capital infusion. I've suggested mastercoin/AGS style fundraiser as a way of initially allocated the initial <votecoins/truthcoins I forget>.

It was Votecoins. I think it is a good idea. Given the history of Altcoins, I personally am not comfortable taking anyone's money, which I have deliberately avoided doing for a long time. Perhaps some other individual can provide guidance/take-responsibility for this aspect.

[psztorc]

I will be editing this on an ongoing basis, I think.

A few people/groups are pretty far along in their coding. In my opinion, the path to a fully successful implementation likely involves the following:

Development Phase

• I have written the whitepaper, and reference implementation of the 'business logic' for the PM-administration. Please use this forum to discuss any points of confusion or improvement.
• You must develop an application which meets standards of security, user-friendliness, stability, etc. which constructs the bittorrent P2P network. This includes choice of chain-rule (I strongly recommend proof of work), hashing algorithm, block time, etc. Again, my overwhelming recommendation is to copy Bitcoin in all respects, as it avoids a lot of work and imports years for security-auditing.

Testing Phase

• To encourage testers, release a version and give away the CashCoins freely. However, maintain a constant record of the Votecoins, and which Decisions / Markets were popular.
• Begin compiling a 'launch menu' of great Decisions and Markets, to immediately encourage traders/users to get on board. This would include finance Markets (to hedge the TRU price, or save in crypto-"BitUSD"), historically popular Markets (on sports/politics), and socially-beneficial Markets (conditional CEO/president, disasters). Ideally, a simple script would create and broadcast them all, and this script would be updated as new Markets prove themselves worthy of being present at launch (and rerun upon each new test).
• Frequently start over.

Network Phase

• The true challenge (without Sidechains) is getting people to switch networks from Bitcoin to Truthcoin, without breaking either network if some people choose both.
• Choose a future Bitcoin block, which will be mined roughly 1 month from the end of the Testing Phase, and say "everyone who owns Bitcoin at this time will own an equivalent amount of Truthcoin. If using PoW, set the difficulty equal to ~ 75% of the Bitcoin difficulty at that time.
• To onboard a network of Votecoin owners, hold a fundraiser at around the same time (end of Testing Phase), to auction off a percentage of Votecoins ( possibly, all of them ). Use the funds to reward contributors, and pay for the Launch Menu (see above).

Growth Phase

• Possibilities abound. Collaboration with outside versifiers (ie "Political FactCheck will determine that X was a lie", "Science Auditing Firm will find that these results fail to replicate", "X Song to make top 100 playlist"), sports being broadcast alongside win% or conditional win%, suing corporate Board-of-Directors if they fail to follow PM advice.
• Technical needs: convenience for voters ("voter dashboard"), Trader "views" (ie ways of looking at high-dimensional markets), and "arbitrage assistant (for markets about the same thing (for example, the crypto-exchange rate) but in different markets and at different times.

[zack]

Why POW probably wont work.
Imagine if I had a cage where I kept a lion, and I purchased a tiger kitten. I decide that the lion is surviving pretty well in the cage, so I will keep the kitten there too. Too bad for me, my kitten will die. The existence of the lion makes the cage very different. The tiger kitten could have survived if it was alone, and it could have grown big.

The first truthcoin I make will be a POW, so if I am wrong, we will find out quickly.

bittorrent P2P network

"bittorrent" is a typo? http://www.bittorrent.com/

Your plan looks good.