Messages

I am a big fan of this essay:
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

It helped me realize how expensive it is to lock money into bonds. This essay makes it obvious that the Casper POS being designed for ethereum will be more expensive compared to POW.

I have invented another consensus method based on the lightning network. It is more affordable than any other method, by far.
https://github.com/BumblebeeBat/FlyingFox/blob/development/docs/consensus_price.md

I need help from the community to make this document more readable.

I am trying to find a way to bootstrap Truthcoin into existence, to give the coins initial value.

How about a google-maps integrated website, and we use Truthcoin oracle to ask about bus routes and what businesses operate at each address.

Business owners can propose their store as a bet, and pay money to fund the oracle.

I wrote about it here: https://github.com/BumblebeeBat/FlyingFox/blob/development/docs/yellow_pages.md

Using the blockchain to hire software developers will be easy, just use a truthcoin dominant assurance contract. No reputation or trust required.

Using the blockchain to loan money seems impossible to me.

We wont pay taxes much longer.

I know several dozen people who will honestly tell me whether they filed taxes, and facts about how they filed in the last few years.
With this information, I could train an oracle to report on facts about arbitrary people's taxes.
Once such an oracle exists, it becomes possible to offer a new type of insurance.
People who don't like taxes would buy this insurance. To continue getting coverage, they have to reduce how much taxes they pay.
If the IRS tries to punish them for refusing to pay enough, then the insurance will cover the cost.

Once we train an oracle to report on who the IRS is punishing, then this insurance can be 100% on the blockchain, There will be no central authority who could turn it off.
Anonymous traders will offer insurance coverage because they expect to make a profit.

The American book publishing industry is worth more than the movie and music industries combined. The average college student spends over $1000 a year on books.
Most college students prefer to torrent their book when it is available.
Most books are not available by torrent. Why would someone go through the effort and risk of uploading a torrent when they don't get any benefit?
Truthcoin changes the rules. A dominant assurance contract can be created to pay the person who uploads the torrent.

I have implemented 5 separate blockchain so far to discover how to best build truth coin.

1) Basiccoin is a proof of work blockchain written in python. It has an advanced difficulty retargeting algorithm.
2) augur-core is a proof of work blockchain on top of basiccoin that implements a simple version of truth coin
3) slasher is a proof of stake blockchain written in python.
4) FlyingFox is a proof of stake blockchain written in elixir that has some parts of truth coin.
5) flying fox is a blockchain written in erlang that implements the lightning network. It has a scripting language that will allow us to write truth coin bets off-chain, and even judge the outcome of bets off-chain. It has a new proof of stake method optimized for the lightning network.

Good question.
We can't reuse decisions, but we could add more decisions for this purpose. Example decision: "This decision will return true".

If still works, just not as well.
The cost of making the oracle go the wrong way is lower.

Martin Koppelman explains a problem we need to solve for truthcoin to work.
Now that we know we need batch trades to stop front-running, we want to make LMSR compatible with batch trading.

http://forum.groupgnosis.com/t/batch-auctions-and-automated-market-makers/80/2

What's the best way to credit you in the post?

With a link to the software: https://github.com/BumblebeeBat/FlyingFox

Why is Truthcoin more appealing than InTrade?

intrade died.

Why is Truthcoin more appealing than Predictious?

Those are entirely different tools. It is like asking "why are hammers more appealing than saws?".

how putting PM on blockchain makes it more appealing to end users?

It allows us to minimize 3rd party risk.
Paul's 1st pdf goes into more detail.
http://www.truthcoin.info/papers/1_Purpose.pdf

you don't consider my software to be a "major effort"?
It must be because I make it look easy 
https://github.com/BumblebeeBat/FlyingFox

Are you trying to get Paul to publish your essay on the hivemind blog? Or are you suggesting publishing it elsewhere?

Nick Szabo wrote this essay about the history of competing currencies: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

Off-chain things are only possible because on-chain functionality exist.

There is a choice ahead of you.
Calling the 2 options "on-chain" vs "off-chain" was my mistake.
Instead I will call it "naive" vs "correct".

The naive choice looks like this:
trading is broken up into multiple independent interactions with the blockchain. Creating the market, trading, closing the market.
The blockchain needs to remember the state of a market between all these steps.
This choice involves writing code into the consensus protocol to manage the state of the market.
Market scoring rule, and the auctioneer, and the oracle consensus would be written into the blockchain consensus protocol. So none can be updated later.

The correct choice looks like this:
reporting on the outcome of trading is a single interaction with the blockchain that occurs between a pair of users. Creating the market, trading, and closing the market all happens as one step.
The blockchain doesn't need to remember anything about the state of any market.
This choice adds a couple words to the scripting language, very little code needs be added to the blockchain consensus protocol.
The market scoring rule, the auctioneer, and the oracle consensus protocol would be written using the scripting language, so we can update them later.

Maintaining a line of code in the blockchain consensus protocol is about 100x as expensive as maintaining a line of code in the scripting language.

You can't maintain software without help from developers.
The person who wrote the code is the very best for maintaining the code.
Hiring other developers will probably be more expensive than hiring the author.