Messages

At long last, the Forum has been restored!

I will be manually approving all new registrations, to fight spam.

Plus, the forum (for now) is mostly a read-only historical resource.

How do you measure efficiency?

By that I mean, what did you divide by what, to get the factor of 1000?

Forum-use has greatly declined, relative to communication by Telegram, e-mail, GitHub, and Slack.

Instead, new users are encouraged to get themselves invited to: bitcoinhivemind.slack.com

Or find me on Telegram, email, Github.

I don't understand the dual use of the money. If my money is in a channel, I can send it away to Person B, at any time, off chain. However, if my money is securing the blockchain, then these funds are "staked", so that the blockchain can send it away from me (to Person C) if I make a mistake.

Yet, the same 1$ can't go to both B and C. This seems to be a contradiction.

Very similar to this post from 2014.

Doesn't answer the question I asked, however.

"Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government."
-Thomas Jefferson

(re: futarchy?)

Can you walk me step by step of an example of how this works?  In my mind it works like this

1. Oracle R(Real) and Oracle P(Parasite) advertise their services.
2. A company pays Oracle R to get it Data S.
3. Oracle R gets Data S
4. Oracle P steals Data S.
5. A company now pays Oracle P because it's advertising cheaper prices and has good reputation.
6. Oracle P doesn't have information to give and is revealed as a fraud.

I see no way for this game to have an equilibrium of Oracle R's price going to $0.  Oracle P can only make their move after Oracle R has gotten paid, and Oracle R gets to set the price at which it gets paid.  If their are multiple companies getting the same information, it can simply set the price such that many of those companies must pay it.  The only way that this game has an equilibrium of $0 for Oracle R s if you switch step 2 to after step 5.

> Oracle P can only make their move after Oracle R has gotten paid

Wrong. I can say, "Regardless of how many people sign up with Blue Oracle, I (the red oracle) will charge $X and copy the Blue Oracle's answers". You can, indeed, move step 2 to after step 5.


> So firstly, a companies success isn't only dependent on how it pleases the users.

Correct. A much better definition would be "provides a sufficient return on capital employed".

If we distinguish between "flow trust" (restaurant) and "level trust" (bank), my contention is *not* that eliminating the need for "flow trust" has no value. I merely contend [1] that it has very very little marginal value, and [2] the process of removing this trust is abhorrently expensive (given how difficult it is to write secure smart contracts).

Thus, the ROCE of such projects is overwhelmingly unlikely to be sufficient. The opportunity cost of the programming labor alone is relatively astronomical.

> What I'm arguing is that you can't get the former without the latter.  In other words, people won't be able to start viable blockchain business without giving them access to everyone's laboratory.

You may be right about that. I don't think you are, but you might be.

If you *are* right, however, it will just mean that no one ever starts a research laboratory. Instead, people will start something like a lemonade stand. The result will be that decentralized oracles are simply impossible for everyone.

An biological analogy would be that, if cells cannot be forced to cooperate, we will never have multi-cellular life. We will just have single-celled life.

> Because the parasite oracle depends on the real oracle, the real oracle can charge as much as it wants.  They can force entire industries to make smart contracts that collectively pay for the information they need.

The real oracle must work for free, if there exist any parasites. This is because the parasites can steal the labor of the real oracles, for free. So the equilibrium price is zero.

> The real target is companies and industries who can ABUSE brand and trust through economies of scale and aggregation of users.  Amazon does this to it's suppliers, Twitter did this to it's datafeed partners, Facebook does it to it's users, Uber is starting to do this as well.

All of these companies are considered incredibly successful. They delivered high quality products and services to users at unbelievably low costs and tremendous convenience. These companies gave people what *they* really wanted. You seem to want to give them something else, like Google+, which they really do not want.

I don't really understand your Android Phone analogy. Many iPhone owners "jailbroke" their phones to install new apps, and the Google Play store moderates for content (as do the individual developers who write apps). Apps are constrained, by the operating system of the phone, and by the user's choices...one reason for this, is specifically to prevent the apps from interfering with the phone's core infrastructure or with other apps.

> So the miner judgement thing was just an aside - the real idea here was that no matter how good your forecasting is, it will fall EVENTUALLY to a black swan. Relying on prescreening for security is inherently a fragile system.

No forecasting is "required". If there are unforeseen problems, the sidechain is closed down. Given that this closing-down is inevitable, it is simply more efficient to try to anticipate problems. It is also futile to attempt attacks.

> This of course is entirely dependent on how far you granularize "something". As a reductio-ad-absurdum, you could use this argument to say that as long as an economy has a single company that could fail, the entire economy is considered fragile. 

Don't you mean "antifragile"? If layer 6 is made of fragile units, layer 7 might be antifragile.

> Over time, we'll figure out which types of walls work, and which walls still give you interaction with the entire ecosystem WITHOUT exposure to the entire ecosystem's risk.

That is what I have already figured out. It didn't take that long. : )

Assuming that "Cryptocurrency" is the anti-fragile layer, that would imply that the individual crypto-currencies are the fragile layer. So, you are arguing that we should try this experiment of yours, allow it to potentially destroy Ethereum and Bitcoin, and then later start up a new 3rd thing "SztorcCoin" which follows my principles, and have it outcompete the failed Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I don't think that money works that way.

Instead, my vision is that sidechain-systems should be the competitors. Bitcoin's 21,000,000 coin units can compete with Ethereum's ~whatever Ether units. If you think that Bitcoin's sidechains aren't good, start up your own Alt-chain with better sidechains.

> Even if there are zero trades and zero trading fees, the oracle still gets paid to judge on the outcome.

Not enough.

Cool. Thanks for engaging. I will watch it later tonight.

> 1. You can't have permissionless innovation without permissionless implementation, because innovation requires interaction with the market.

A good metaphor is starting your own business. Anyone can start their own business, yes. But you should not be able to barge into someone else's pharmaceutical research laboratory and take photos of everyone's notes, and whatnot.

> 2. The parasite contract attack can't succeed at bankrupting the real oracle, because it requires the real oracle to always get paid.

The parasite prevents the real oracle from scaling up -- it can only guard a small amount of value. So it will never truly be useful.

> 3. The type of trust you're talking about (trusting that the system won't fail) is different than the type of trust Ethereum is going for (trusting that people won't control the system for their own gains). Both types of trust can be created with blockchain technology, and neither is the "right way" to use the technology.

One kind of trust is cheap for a computer to create, and extremely useful. The other kind of trust is extraordinarily expensive for a computer to create, and trustlessness would marginally add almost no effectiveness. Each day, people eat in restaurants without paying...until the very end. Or they purchase something online, and pay upfront (and wait -with trust- for it to be shipped).

> 4. The voting mechanism for smart contracts is a fragile way to prevent feedback loops, because it's impossible to foresee all problems beforehand.  Furthermore, miners aren't chosen for their ability to foresee these problems, but instead for their computing power.

Oh, so you agree that there are problems? : )

Miners do not need to "foresee all problems". They merely need to listen carefully to developers complaints, and refuse to incorporate anything which does not get widespread developer support. Because this filter would work, probably no malicious developer will bother trying to write anything which is clearly problematic.

> 5. A permissionless smart contract system is antifragile because many defenses to feedback loops can be created, and over time only the good mechanisms will survive.

It is the reverse -- Taleb makes it very clear that there is a fractal structure: something can only be antifragile if it is made up of fragile pieces. So growth / complexity requires the ability to keep things removed (which will be harder for Ethereum than for Bitcoin Sidechains).

> The argument in "Oracles are the Real Smart Contract" seems to be about turing completeness, but the attack I am talking about doesn't require turing completeness at all. Any cryptocurrency that lets you make bets based off bitcoin/hivemind's state is good enough

Yes, you an use a Turing-Complete computer to make an Altcoin which is specialized for this purpose.

> Mining power doesn't matter. A government sponsored blockchain could be the attacker.

Only by offering prediction market services to the public.

(Mission accomplished!)

> One of us is confused about something.

It is you. The Schelling Indicator has nothing to do with "whether the event happened or not".

You are right that Ethereum can create parasite contracts.

I myself have written extensively about this.

But you said that:

> Because altcoins exists, and because you collect trading fees, lightning network introduces a flaw.

I don't see how the lightning network introduces a new flaw. In fact, it probably helps, because a lot of stuff happens off chain and with incentives for secrecy.

> resolved

Good! Yes, usually people find the following advice to be helpful:

https://github.com/bitcoin-hivemind/testnet-canonical

> Pairs of traders can participate in hundreds of trades, then close their channel as if they had only participated in one trade.

Those trades involve trust. And therefore they reintroduce the likelihood of an exit scam.


> They lock coins on the ethereum side as a promise not to bring each other to trial.

Check the math with a numeric example.

Yes, Ethereum and Hivemind (and Augur) cannot co-exist. Only one can exist.

Fortunately for me, Ethereum and Augur are badly designed, and live in a toxic no-criticism environment.