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Hello everyone,

I did a few (seemingly-simple) things at once:
1] Updated the forum to its latest version.
2] Added a new theme ("Thing").
3] Tried to have two domains share one IP (a common practice).

However, clearly I made some mistake, or there is some bug in the newest SMF software, or some buggy interaction, because (as many of you have emailed me to say) strange things have starting to happen.

So, I've reset a bunch of those things, and I encourage you (if you've visited the forum before) to clear your browser's data. Now, forum.truthcoin.info is the 'official' URL again, and hive-mind.info simply (independently) points to the same IP.

So everything should (?) be back and we can slowly walk forward.

Haha, no it isn't.

Haven't you understood anything I've written, in the whitepaper or on the blog?

Namely http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/contracts-oracles-sidechains ?

What are you thinking of adding a second sequence number to, txs?

Yes.

Right now, in bitcoin, adding a signature to a tx can change it from invalid to valid. You cannot change the amount of money that goes to each output. The only thing you can change by applying the signature is making it valid.

Some txs require signatures from multiple people. Once such a tx is part way signed, if you want to edit the contents of the tx, you have to have everyone re-sign the tx.

So if there are 5 things we are betting on, and I want you to commit to paying me if I win, then there are (5^2) - 1 different transactions you need to sign.

Maybe you are proposing that Hivemind will have a version of bitcoin script where adding a signature can change the amount of money that goes to each output, which would be a very radical change to bitcoin.

Yes, the "new tx types" of Buying and Selling are very much unlike what Bitcoin usually does. But they are just one tx, one signature, per bet.

If you added the better lightening network to truthcoin, maybe they would eventually put it into bitcoin too.

The thing is, we already reused some stuff in Truthcoin that LN actually uses. Moreover, the bets need to accumulate trading fees (and have the new tx types, and their data fields). These are small changes, but they might warrant a completely different LN. That's all I mean.

The forum is really buggy for me lately. I have to use my browser memory to find long URLs that point to this website, just to see the page.

Me too, not completely sure why.

Hivemind does not necessarily need to use the Bitcoin lightning network. I do think it will require a newer lightning network, perhaps even a second 'sequence numbers' field or something.

I think it is a good idea, but I don't think it will be cheaper than PoW.

The (very clever) overlapping benefits of storing money (as stake "deposit" and as payment channel facilitator), won't overlap in the MC=MR sense. People will find the process of running channels to be a really great deal: channel fees + transaction fees + coinbase rewards! So huge sums of money will be poured into channel-creation, and locked there for a long period of time. One thing is that, since we don't yet have LN channels, we can't observe the replacement of (larger) transaction fees by (smaller) channel fees. My guess is that the LN effect will be independent of how the LN might be double-used for consensus.

(And of course you'll still have the Tendermint long-range Ask-a-Friend problem).

If you only intend to deploy this idea after the PoW has created the initial distribution of coins, then, I expect this to resemble what will happen anyway (LNs collecting many transaction fees).

Nice interview. You were pretty vague about the timeline. I have two questions, being ignorant about sidechains. (1) How likely is gmaxwell / Blockstream / whoever to get a working sidechain implementation within 1 year? (2) Assuming that happens, how likely is truthcoin-cpp to be at a "beta"-level release stage within 2 years?

(1) Hard to say. They'll want to carefully think through a number of security issues before Doing Actual Things (like making an OP_SPVPROOF or whatever), so it really depends on how much time they put into it. Unfortunately they've been distracted by blocksize and many of them are interested in other things (confidential transactions, etc).

(2) 99%.  I would say 90% it will be at beta level by October 4th.

I hope that the betting leading up to the 2016 American presidential election will have distributed prediction markets.

I as well.

Myself on Epicenter Bitcoin 
https://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/097/

Its been several weeks without a response, so I'll bump this again with comments on the others.  Unless you truly do have an answer? 

I thought I'd already agreed it was a good idea (to do later).

Given the cost structures of both, there will likely be both centralized PM's and decentalized PM's.  If decentralized PM's finds competition from centralized PM's, I'm advocating non-expiring LMSR as the solution for viability. 

Economically, decentralized PMs can't compete with centralized PMs. However, PMs create power/influence (they can tell us who to elect) so regulators will always want to capture/control them, impossible with decentralized.

This is the point.  I'm not sure Bitcoin solves any pressing problem if its not going to see greater adoption globally? It's store of value is only good to a niche market (eg. dark markets).

You don't think it will see greater adoption? The global black market is interpreted as being an annual +$10 trillion.

Bitcoin stability is a problem that is stifling adoption. It will miss out on this if another bankcoin, Fedcoin, Paypal coin, or cryptocurrency can leverage the network effects of USD, RMB and bypass the need for bitcoin's reason of being.

The deflation *is* the killer app. http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/deflation-the-last-word

In essence, Truthcoin does not do stablecoins.  It's costly to replenish hedges periodically and to withdraw funds before the resolution period.

The convenience yeild of the USD (what you call the cost of "replenishing hedges") should be the same, whether the MSR expires or not, right? It is driven by the technical inferiority of the BitUSD. http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/bitusd/

That is exactly what I am building. I have discovered some limitations that we need to be aware of, since we are to move bets off-chain:
1) The person operating the MSR can lie about the volume of trades.
If we charge him a fee based on volume, he will lie downward to shrink the fee. If we don't charge a fee based on volume, he will lie upward to look more popular.
2) The MSR is a parasite contract. There is no way to force him to pay a volume based fee to the oracle because we cannot measure the volume of bets. so the oracle is not being paid.

Why do you use language like "there is no way"? Have you investigated and disproved my sequence numbers suggestion:

Also, my understanding is that LN relies on incrementing the sequence number...we might, if we wanted to, force a higher trading fee as the sequence number increases.

I suggest you provide the proof, before you make claims of that strength. If you don't have the proof, you should really throw in more "I think that..." 's or people reading this will misunderstand your self-interpretation of the strength of your argument.

I simply mean a lightning network with a MSR, that is publicly usable (that anyone can open a channel with). Then most trades might take place off-chain.

A channel means 2 people can give money to each other, and gamble with each other multiple times, without writing _anything_ to the blockchain.

"Gambling" and "voluntarily sending money" are two different things. For starters, how do the 2 people decide who won the gamble?

Also, again, your other points assume that the channel is private, while market work better when they are public. I don't think anyone will want to use a private channel when there is a public channel.

Also, my understanding is that LN relies on incrementing the sequence number...we might, if we wanted to, force a higher trading fee as the sequence number increases.

I'm not sure that that's right. LN's reduce transaction fees for miners, yes, but they do not eliminate them. My intuition is that there will still be transaction fees in proportion to the usefulness of each market. After all, doesn't someone need to place a big trade to "open" the market up, and buy 10 million of "Yes" and 10 million of "No", and send them to the hub, so that the Hub has them to debit/credit people? And won't multiple hubs compete, and some will do arbitrage against the actual non-Hub blockchain itself?

I think you would be much better off "generalizing the payment channels to Lightning Network type idea", and not messing with other factors.

Each LN hub can be like the minor stock exchanges (BATS, EDGA, ISE, IEX), and publicly offer everything with a lot of server uptime and better connectivity, etc. Individuals can conduct arbitrage among hubs (same as they do now among different exchanges). So you get the large public markets, which is what everyone wants.

Isn't the LN concept awesome?

But surely they can be in channels and also be "public" in the sense that no one is excluded from looking at prices, or trading?