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Do people ever lose their social security number?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071110064211AAxQ7vk
It looks like you have to go to a place like the DMV to get a new card.

With a blockchain of this sort, several government officials would use their separate private keys to build transactions capable of more powerful things. They will make you a new address with your new password, and delete your old address.

I hope that citizencoin will not exist. I am willing to go to great lengths to stop it from happening.
I think our best chance is to build really good pseudo-anonymous blockchains like bitcoin first. They will be hard to compete against.
The bigger head-start we get, the better.

Citizen coins give a horrifying amount of power to the government.

Since you cannot get a new address, it is possible to attach a criminal record to your address.
It is possible for government to turn off a person's ability to spend money, or confiscate it all.
With bitcoin-like systems, you can only count votes based off of how invested a person is. Similar to a privately owned business, if you own 1/13th of a business, it makes sense that you should have 1/13th of the say in what happens. This type of voting is essential for private property and liberty.

With citizencoin it is possible to count one-vote-per-person. There is no object that is owned between everyone this way, and there never will be. This type of voting is not done to make decisions on our own property, rather this type of voting is done to decide how we should use someone else's property.

For example, with one-vote-per-person they might vote on how much taxes to gather from each social class.

Bitcoin is to anarchy what citizencoin is to statism.

An oracle has much less inventive to be honest than the truthcoin voters.
If an oracles lied, everyone would fall for it, and the oracle could use this situation to earn money.
If a truthcoin voter lied, no one would fall for it, and the voter loses reputation for nothing.

If you are a voter, then you are in a pool of voters. Maybe you are 1 of 100.
You can cast 1 vote for free, but you cannot cast 2 votes without knowing someone else's private key.

If you only own 1 of the 100 votecoins in a pool, then you can only cast 1 vote out of 100 on decisions that were asked of your pool.
If you owned 5 out of a pool of 200 votecoins, then you can cast 5 votes out of 200 on decisions that were asked of your pool.
I expect the largest pools of votecoins wont get bigger than 1000.

By destroying 1000 truthcoins, you can produce a bunch of votecoins of a new type. Each set of votecoins is like a new color of colored-coins. Someone may create a pool of votecoins for basketball, and give the coins to a bunch of people who are knowledgeable about basketball.

When you ask a question, you select a type of votecoins to ask. The question you asked is decided by all the people who own votecoins of the type you selected. If you want to ask who won a basketball game, it is best to ask the basketball-votecoin holders, instead of the hockey-votecoin holders.

There are strong incentives against trying to commit collude and do a 51% attack. If 2% of the colluders decided to create a counter-collusion, they could trick the tricksters.

Every voter has an incentive to trick the other voters into voting the wrong way. Whoever votes best gets the biggest prize, whoever votes worst pays the biggest penalty.

Inventions like the stirrup, trigger mechanisms for crossbows, gunpowder, nuclear bombs, all changed the world.
Do you also think the Manhattan project was done for "fun"? That USA spends 1/2 of federal taxes on war for "fun" of being scary?

When the dominant weapon was something that every individual can own and afford, then hierarchies stops mattering, and free markets take their place. When the dominant weapon can only be owned by a government, society swings the other way. Centralized institutions get control of everything.

A famous essay about this: http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm

War is currently at about $2 trillion annual. Assassination markets will be more efficient, so I expect the cost of war to go down a couple orders of magnitude to maybe $10-100 billion per year spent into assassin markets.
Depending upon how many assassin markets are competing for customers, between 0.1 and 10% of this money will go to a group of between 2 and 10 developers.

I expect prediction markets to be 10-100 times bigger than assassin markets.

I thought it was good. Pushing people to look at the docs was critical. Your docs are the quickest way to get a person up to speed.
And you mentioned some exciting applications.

blockchains that I expect to exist in the future:
1) store of value (bitcoin)
2) prediction markets
3) bounty market/assassination market
4) anonymous mixing. use bitcoin which is tainted with your identity to buy anoncoin, participate in a mixer, then use your now anonymous anoncoin to purchase bitcoin.
5) forum/social network/blogging (bitmessage and twister are early examples)
6) p2p games of perfect knowledge, particularly games which are resistant to artificial intelligence: go, chess, 6-in-a-row, amirra, goofspiel, civilization
7) slot machine games: blackjack, satoshidice, etc.
lotteries
9) votecoin. one address per citizen. This type of coin is evil. My hope is that all the good developers will refuse to make it.

I expect every blockchain to have coins with an exchange rate against bitcoin.
I do not expect anyone to use side-chains.
I do not expect any of this to be built on top of bitcoin.

I spend my time trying to make a very simple blockchain which can be used as a starting point to build any of the blockchains listed above. https://github.com/zack-bitcoin

His suggestions to make oracles lower-cost are interesting.
Instead of having english directions: "Check who won the basketball game", it could be a piece of code that automatically checks several locations on the internet.
This would allow the votecoin holders to verify decisions much more efficiently, if they do not have to read them.
It also protects the votecoin holders from risk, because everyone's software will give the same result. They will always have 100% consensus.

Perhaps 2 types of decisions should be available.
low cost decisions written in a forth with web-scrapping libraries built in, and verified by software.
high cost decisions written in english, and verified by humans.

I am very excited to be working on a project that even Gavin cannot comprehend.

There are 2 types of prediction markets, one of which is designed for being using similar to how kickstarter is used. It is for gathering funds for a public good.

We should find the 1000 most profitable textbooks, and created a prediction market for each textbook. Each market should reward whoever is first to provide a torrent to the book.

This would bring a large amount of attention to the project, it would ruin some predatory industries, and it would allocate the initial funds.

Many people hate this man, but some may choose to look at him as a hero.
Could a prediction market be used to fund a public good, where the public good is an underground-railroad to save Bourque from the cops who want him dead?

It costs money to make a decision, and there is no time left to profit with. Each decision created can only increase the amount of money that voters earn. The smaller number of voters who do vote on these decisions will take all of the reward?

It is possible to make someone lose a little votecoins, but because the smoothing parameter alpha=0.1, they are bounded on how much they can lose in a single round.

probably there are still things I don't understand...

The problem you describe: What if many decisions are added at the last minute, and voters are punished for not voting on them?
The solution you mention: Don't punish voters when they fall for this.
My alternative solution: Stop accepting new decisions towards the end to give voters ample time to vote.

I was studying physics until I dropped out of my undergrad last year.
Robin Hanson who invented LMSR had degrees in physics.

I have a basic understanding of "prisoner's dilemma".
What does a person read to learn game theory? What part of game theory matters for PMs?

My understanding of ethereum might be wrong, if so, I hope someone corrects me.
I think that a custom blockchain would have lower fees than building it on top of ethereum.

Particularly the PCA (Principle Component Analysis) step takes about 60 seconds. If it was in ethereum, this step would be very expensive, because every ethereum miner would have to go through the entire 60-second computation. Everyone who ever downloads ethereum in the future will also have to go through the 60-second computation in order to verify old blocks and continue downloading.

By putting truthcoin into it's own blockchain, and using POS rather than POW to verify blocks, most people never have to compute the 60-second PCA. Only the handful of proof-of-stake miners who sign that block, and the next few blocks.

truthcoin as I am currently making it will support multisig for every type of money.
votecoins can be held in a way so that any 2 of 3 people can use them to vote, or spend them.
Shares from markets can be owned by 20 people, such that any 13 of them can spend it or sell it.

Is this a bad thing that I should remove, or should I leave it this way?