What is the main priority?

[tonyk]

As you may have noticed I am really interested in prediction markets and your idea in particular (I have posted under the same handle in all of your threads, in all the forums you have posted your idea that I know of)

What I see is the  main fundamental problem (for which nether you, nor toast seem to care much about) is that your voting shares (truthcoins) is much more akin to the idea of partnership than to share/ is too connected with the idea of somewhat permanent account than freely flying shares.
You have to have studied in relative depth the ideas of Satoshi, but take a moment to look into what is missing from his system (as you do with what is in it) – in no way he did limit one person with one account neither the personal qualities/past behavior plaid any role in his system or the distribution /redistribution of coins. I do not know if this was his plan in particular but the idea of partial anonumity is consistently present (if not leading) principal in the crypto space.

In particular I see the problem in the following:
I have an 'account' with 1 truthcoin with very high rating. What happens if for particular vote I move 10,000 new shares in that account – both scenarios seem unfair:
- if my rating is not waited (with the shares/truthcoins I keep in it) I can make numerous account and move my big number of shares to the one with the highest rating to change particular vote.
- if my rating is waited it is pretty unfair/discouraging to buy new shares/truthcoins because  I have to wait and build reputation with them. Discouraging trading of share is hardly the best quality of an asset.

So my question is:
Have you thought (and if yes are you at all willing to consider) any design decision that do not involve SVD but is more akin/friendly to crypto implementation?
In other words what is more important to you – crypto prediction market; or proving that SVD can be successfully implemented on top of a crypto currency?

[zack]

I have an 'account' with 1 truthcoin with very high rating. What happens if for particular vote I move 10,000 new shares in that account – both scenarios seem unfair:

What do you mean by a "very high rating"? Truthcoins are all identical.

- if my rating is not waited (with the shares/truthcoins I keep in it) I can make numerous account and move my big number of shares to the one with the highest rating to change particular vote.
- if my rating is waited it is pretty unfair/discouraging to buy new shares/truthcoins because  I have to wait and build reputation with them. Discouraging trading of share is hardly the best quality of an asset.

what is a "rating"?
When you vote, your vote is proportional to how many votecoins you have. If you own 5% of votecoins in a pool, then you get 5% of the vote.
The number of shares anyone has purchased in the market does not matter for voting.

votecoins are reputation. The length of time you own them does not matter. If you held it for 10,000 blocks, or only 2 blocks, the votecoins are identical and interchangeable. Truthcoin and shares don't age either. Young and old are identical.

Have you thought (and if yes are you at all willing to consider) any design decision that do not involve SVD but is more akin/friendly to crypto implementation?

How is SVD not friendly to being implemented?
I have never seen a mathematical construct which is more suited for deriving consensus in a group of voters. Is there an alternative which you are suggesting?

or proving that SVD can be successfully implemented on top of a crypto currency?

SVD doesn't need to be "proved"... It is identical to putting any other algorithm into a blockchain.
This is a project to put prediction markets onto a blockchain. SVD is not, nor has it ever been a goal of this project.

You might as well be telling us that addition is too complex to go in a blockchain, and we should reconsider our crazy usage of addition.
2+2=4 <--- example of "addition"

[tonyk]

1. Where did I say complex?

You might as well be telling us that addition is too complex to go in a blockchain, and we should reconsider our crazy usage of addition.
2+2=4 <--- example of "addition"

2. https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/raw/master/docs/Truthcoin_1.1.pdf

(vi) Reputation Based Coin Redistribution (RBCR)
1) After a round of voting, Truthcoins are redistributed among all of the TRU accounts. We know where to send the redistributed TRU, as each Ballot contains a destination address.
2) For each account, smooth (weighted average) the value of the previous block with the value represented by the new reputation block.
3) I chose, arbitrarily, a smoothing parameter α=.1 (weighing the new value 10% and old value 90%). This parameter represents the dynamism of the voting environment: too low and bad agents can coast on inertia without punishment, too high and the network becomes volatile and neurotic.

-----------------------

5) The gradual payout:
a) Rewards past conformity and provides an incentive to get and keep a high reputation.
b) Offsets the constantly-present incentive to be dishonest today, and use that dishonesty to defraud traders by manipulating the Winning State(s).
c) Encourages other behaviors that will maximize the total future trading volume (good judgment, entrepreneurship).







3. AND THANKS FOR THE NICE WELCOME !!!!!!!!

[tonyk]

2+2=4 <--- example of "addition"

BTW I am as proud of this comment of your as you are!

[zack]

It appears that I am incapable of answering your questions.
Hopefully someone else will give it a try.

[psztorc]

tonyk, I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean.

From reading zack's answer, it would appear that he thinks that you've overlooked the fact that the Truthcoin value (or "Votecoins" in the Altcoin version), the literal numeric value (as in, if you own 5 truthcoins, "5") is your reputation. You can transfer it among any cryptographic keys you want, or send/sell that reputation to someone else. This prevents what I call the Retirement Attack, which I describe in my FAQ, among other places.

When you say

I have an 'account' with 1 truthcoin with very high rating.

This leads me to believe that zack is correct, as coins do not have ratings, but increase in quantity as their user develops a relatively-better reputation than rival Voters (whose coins shrink in quantity).

I don't really know what to say about the rest of what you've posted. It seems to me like zack was trying to help you. "Addition" seemed to be an efficient counterexample, as you've claimed some kind of mutual exclusivity or tradeoff between "using SVD" and "building a crypto prediction market", and SVD is part of the same math world we all live in.

[psztorc]

To answer your question, though, the main priority is to establish a useful and censorship-resistant prediction market.

I would abandon SVD if I had something better.

[tonyk]

tonyk, I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean.

From reading zack's answer, it would appear that he thinks that you've overlooked the fact that the Truthcoin value (or "Votecoins" in the Altcoin version), the literal numeric value (as in, if you own 5 truthcoins, "5") is your reputation. You can transfer it among any cryptographic keys you want, or send/sell that reputation to someone else. This prevents what I call the Retirement Attack, which I describe in my FAQ, among other places.

When you say

I have an 'account' with 1 truthcoin with very high rating.

This leads me to believe that zack is correct, as coins do not have ratings, but increase in quantity as their user develops a relatively-better reputation than rival Voters (whose coins shrink in quantity).

I don't really know what to say about the rest of what you've posted. It seems to me like zack was trying to help you. "Addition" seemed to be an efficient counterexample, as you've claimed some kind of mutual exclusivity or tradeoff between "using SVD" and "building a crypto prediction market", and SVD is part of the same math world we all live in.

Explain what you mean by this:

'5) The gradual payout:
a) Rewards past conformity and provides an incentive to get and keep a high reputation.
b) Offsets the constantly-present incentive to be dishonest today, and use that dishonesty to defraud traders by manipulating the Winning State(s).
c) Encourages other behaviors that will maximize the total future trading volume (good judgment, entrepreneurship).'

If for some strange reason you have decided that 'reputation' is your synonym of choice for '# of shares/coins' explain how:
The gradual payout provides an incentive:
- to get high number of coins
- to keep  high number of coins/shares.

[zack]

In order to create a prediction market, you need a decision that it depends upon.
In order to ask a decision from a group of votecoin-holders, you have to pay a fee.
After the decision is expired, the fee is distributed to the votecoin holders who vote upon this decision.

Votecoin holders have an incentive to keep their votecoins and participate in votes, because they can collect the reward of truthcoins.
Another incentive, is that the best voters' votecoins will grow, while the worst voters' votecoins will shrink after each round of voting.

Truthcoin holders have an incentive to keep their truthcoins, because the truthcoins can be used to bet in prediction markets. When you bet, your truthcoins become a larger number of shares.

Share holders have an incentive to keep their shares, because the shares might eventually turn into truthcoins.
You can use the shares to bet in other prediction markets. When you bet, your shares become a larger number of shares.

[psztorc]

Is it not obvious that the Bitcoin payouts are proportional to your ownership of Truthcoin? (We have no way of knowing anyone's identity).

So you have more Truthcoins if you past-conformed (than if you didn't), and you'll continue to own Truthcoins if you get and keep an honest reputation (vs. otherwise).

Bitcoins are gradually paid out to Truthcoin holders, but the coins themselves, logically, must be purchased at a given time, which provides Voters with a long-run orientation (those interested in short term gain can sell, see about 'Retirement Attack').

[psztorc]

FYI zack is using the 'official' terminology of Votecoins and Truthcoins, but I switched back to the whitepaper terminology because you were quoting it.

zack, although your post is mostly correct, I think your last paragraph has errors. The shares are per-market, ie a share of "Hillary Clinton wins". I don't really see how/why you would use such a share "bet in other prediction markets", you'd just sell the share for Truthcoin and use that (?).

[zack]

(I have old versions of the PDFs, so my page numbering might be bad)

2_Types.pdf
Example 5b - Adding a Link

5_PM_Manipulation.pdf
page 4, Augmentation

Maybe I am misunderstanding something? How do these examples work then?

[tonyk]

So you have more Truthcoins if you past-conformed (than if you didn't), and you'll continue to own Truthcoins if you get and keep an honest reputation (vs. otherwise).

WAW WAW WAW .
So 15 lines of this whitepaper are dedicated to explaining that if you have some money X and you lose some money Y, you will have less money Z (i.e.Z<X) ??
Sorry for my total and utter confusion but I never expected that this amount of writing will be spent explaining the above and or this will be claimed as a 'benefit of the proposed system'; Assuming that anything written must have some reason for inclusion and that reason is not something obvious for 5 year olds, lead me to totally misinterpreting your system/proposal...

Namely I understood that the account/s will have 'reputation'. The vote (and or the payout) will be function of (reputation, # shares); Building/keeping reputation will allow the account holder to get the max payout for that particular # of shares...

[tonyk]

The previous topic cleared out of the way (even without me and even I suspect zack reading this:
http://forum.truthcoin.info/index.php/topic,15.msg38.html#msg38)



Do you really need 2 coins? (I.e. what is the problem of using voitecoins for payments?)

And if yes why?

[zack]

I suspect it is possible to build it with only one type of coin, but there are several disadvantages to doing that.

1) It is nice to have specialized groups of voters for each topic. One team of voters could do basketball game outcomes, another could do weather. That way the total number of decisions they have to pay attention to doesn't grow too large.
2) most people don't leave their computer powered on 24/7. If 70% of coins were turned off, then anyone with only 30% of the coins would be able to 51% attack every decision.
3) It is nice to shuffle votecoin ownership based upon how accurately they vote. If votecoins and truthcoins were the same thing, then users would be losing money when their computer is off, because they are failing to vote.