Messages

The crowdsale will almost certainly take place outside of the US. As I am a US-citizen, I might get bought-out before it even begins, or I may avoid participating in the sale altogether. I've also mused on donating the proceeds to a children's hospital (or something feel-good), which would likely allow the crowdsale to go off without interference.

If you end up deciding to give away the proceeds to a charity I suggest you use something more cost-effective than a children's hospital. Giving What We Can and GiveWell have dedicated time and effort into evaluating charities impact/$. Doing so would be both more altruistic and utilitarian.

Hi erb,

Who are you? I was working at GWWC for a few months over the summer. It's interesting someone who knows about them would end up at the forums here, although there is a natural connection due to Robin Hanson (and interesting ideas in general).

http://konradsgraf.com/storage/Monetary%20analsyis%20of%20sidecoins%20KG%2024Oct2014.pdf

Not sure they would be the same. (e.g. 2 days to move off a sidechain if CC runs on a sidechain, different risks perceived by the market)

Thoughts?

there are 790 in the network.
You found a bug. Thank you. I will patch it soon so that you can add your IP.

Awesome. Let me know! Then we can really get to testing.

Thanks!

I added my IP to the list after updating from github, do you see it?

Right now I have 790 blocks. How many are there on the network?

:~/Truthcoin-POW-master$ ./truth_cli.py peers
[[[u'192.241.212.114', 8900], 29.997341544008435, u'65087e220d25be9aa61b48234ab659c746a070879578027b57864690f9679010a9b92c7b', 790], [[u'195.82.116.70', 8900], 19.760000000000005, u'65087e220d25be9aa61b48234ab659c746a070879578027b57864690f9679010a9b92c7b', 790], [[u'192.241.212.114', 8900], 5, u'0', 0]]

Nice new post today but as people have not moved to p2pool so far what makes you think they will do so in the future? I read that people think it increases their variance.

I.e. "The chain continuously regulates its target to keep generation around one share every thirty seconds, just as Bitcoin regulates it to generate one block every ten minutes. This means that finding shares becomes more difficult (resulting in higher variance) the more people mine on P2Pool, though large miners have the option to raise their difficulty, and so reduce the impact of their mining on P2Pool's minimum difficulty."

I've done some reading on common knowledge over the last year when thinking about problems like this. Anything you would recommend?

The obvious advice would be to Wikipedia binge from Market for Lemons, but actually I'm feeling Socratic (who, of course, argued that reading the ideas of others produced only a dangerous unawareness of one's ignorance, and that critically-examined personal experiences were a much better direction), so why don't you just watch The Negotiator, one of my favorite films.

Or, you could watch politicians exploit (or be destroyed by) the difference between common, mutual, and private knowledge on a question by question basis. I found this 'historical' example by clicking through youtube for fewer than 60 seconds.

It is much more fun to "experience" it, I think.

Cool - I'm currently in Mumbai on a metered connection so I can't torrent a movie unfortunately. But yea I get the gist of it as I have noticed this type of stuff my whole life. I have been trying to think of a solution to the problem and finally it seems as though prediction markets as the best idea. Looking forward to playing with the current python proof of concept.

I installed python leveldb and it seems like it is running! What next?

$ python2.7 truth_cli.py start
what is your password?
_\]<Q4^\AkNu
starting truthcoin


elata@delysid:~/Truthcoin-POW$ ./truth_cli.py blockcount
-1
elata@delysid:~/Truthcoin-POW$ ./truth_cli.py  getinfo
getinfo is not a command. use "./truth_cli.py commands" to get the list of truthshell commands. use "./truth_cli.py help help" to learn about the help tool.
elata@delysid:~/Truthcoin-POW$ ./truth_cli.py commands
[u'', u'DB', u'SVD_consensus', u'ask_decision', u'b', u'balance', u'blockcount', u'buy_shares', u'collect_winnings', u'commands', u'create_jury', u'difficulty', u'help', u'info', u'log', u'make_PM', u'mine', u'my_address', u'my_balance', u'new_address', u'peers', u'pushtx', u'reveal_vote', u'spend', u'start', u'stop', u'txs', u'vote_on_decision', u'votecoin_spend']
elata@delysid:~/Truthcoin-POW$ ./truth_cli.py peers
[[[u'192.241.212.114', 8900], 30.0, u'0', 0]]

Can you give me a peer to connect to? At the moment I see this in custom.py:

peers = [['192.241.212.114', 8900]]#,['69.164.196.239', 8900]]

I can run this node all the time if you need. I can give you an IP if you want.

~/Truthcoin-POW$ python2.7 truth_cli.py start
what is your password?
_\]<Q4^\AkNu
starting truthcoin
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/process.py", line 258, in _bootstrap
    self.run()
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/database.py", line 70, in run
    import leveldb
ImportError: No module named leveldb
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 850, in emit
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "truth_cli.py", line 114, in <module>
    main()
  File "truth_cli.py", line 83, in main
    daemonize(lambda: threads.main(p))
  File "truth_cli.py", line 6, in daemonize
    if pid==0: f()
  File "truth_cli.py", line 83, in <lambda>
    daemonize(lambda: threads.main(p))
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/threads.py", line 49, in main
    tools.db_put('test', 'TEST')
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 122, in db_put
    def db_put(key, dic, DB={}): return s_to_db({'type':'put', 'args':[str(key), dic]})
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
  File "/home/ftp/elata/Truthcoin-POW/tools.py", line 117, in s_to_db
    return s_to_db(c)
...

Had to Ctrl+C at that point.

ok, I added six to the readme.

"python2.7 threads.py" is not the correct command. Sorry the readme was wrong.

"python2.7 truth_cli.py start" will start the node. I updated the readme just now.

Thanks so much for testing it out and telling me what happened. I am in desperate need of people like you.

Glad to be able to help! Should I wait for an upgrade or try running this version?

I got to talk with Robin Hanson with video-chat. He thinks truthcoin is a good idea.

Cool! What were his thoughts?

Cool! I think I got it to work. I had to install six for python2.7 with pip. So "pip install six". The problem was some libraries were installed on 2.6 and some on 2.7. So I selected 2.7 as the version to run and made sure everything was set up there. Are you also running on 2.7 or do you use 2.6? Just cleaning up some extraneous data on the system and I will report back soon.

:~/Truthcoin-POW$ python2.7 threads.py
:~/Truthcoin-POW$

Edit: Turns out it crashes. Here's the log file. Anything else I should look at?

$ cat log
ERROR:root:list index out of range
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "threads.py", line 94, in <module>
    main(sys.argv[1])
IndexError: list index out of range

Thanks! I should read his blog more frequently as I've only really been through a few posts. I met Robin Hanson a few months ago when he was speaking at FHI (the talk was on the economics of ems which are future brain emulations as he is coming out with a book on this topic soon). I should have asked him about Truthcoin but I wasn't aware of it at the time. Has anyone gotten to speak to him about it?

Well I have the signing keys of the bitcoin devs and use that to verify that packages have been released by the core team. So the distribution mechanism in this way is centralized for me. I store wealth in the btc blockchain as opposed to dogecoin because it isn't how many blocks exist but the hashing power used to create them, plus the network effects of bitcoin make it *the one*.

Thanks for the reply!

Is there a link for Dyffy or any posts they made somewhere? Who runs it?

I am somewhat skeptical of changes to the POW hash function mainly because I don't think they have been necessary in the altcoin world (although I do not believe in alts in general -- Truthcoin is of course different as it is not really an alt). I think merged mining is always better as then you get the benefits of the bitcoin blockchain. In one of his papers, Poelstra mentions a few things to watch out for such as ease-of-verification, progress-freeness, optimization-freeness, and simplicity (mainly to avoid centralization).

POW is expensive but using resources in the real world seems to be the only way to protect decentralized consensus networks. I think Truthcoin might be hard enough to implement so why not stick to POW and use merged mining? Trying to create dedicated hardware at this point would be additional capital cost and be further centralization.

Would it be possible to do POW with a private blockchain at first for testing purposes?

Edit: Merged mining : http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining

Merged mining is dangerous unless all miners jump in as it would make it easier for one to do a 51% attack. (Like what Luke-Jr. did to CoiledCoin.)

Tried to get this up and running on Debian but no luck. Anyone know the equilavent package names on Debian? There was no libpython-dev. I was only able to get pip installed, not pip2.

https://github.com/Gallopsled/pwntools/issues/147

$ python2.7 threads.py
...
ImportError: No module named six.moves

$ python2.6 threads.py
...
ImportError: No module named cdecimal