Messages

> You only have yourself to blame, I'm afraid.

You're being rather obnoxious about this, and I don't understand why. If you'd rather not answer my questions, please don't; perhaps someone else will. I'm not an idiot, I've read your whitepaper more than once, I've read your FAQ and weaknesses section, and I still have questions. Have you considered alternate explanations beyond "Evan is an idiot"? Some obvious ones that spring to mind include:

* I haven't communicated my questions in a way you understand
* You haven't communicated your answers in a way I understand
* The answers exist and are well communicated, but are difficult to find

I was specifically trying to assume the third case when I created the thread. It's not obvious where to find an index of such papers, or whether they exist. What I'm hoping is that the original whitepaper spurred some discussion (probably in the form of forum posts or email threads or irc chats) that is a lot of work to follow, and that someone then turned that discussion into papers that reasonably summarize the state of the art of current (or near-current) research. It seems to me the "papers" section on the website hasn't been updated in quite some time.

Searching "free rider" in the white paper produces no results, "free" produces 6 that look unrelated. I haven't reread the entire thing, but I did skim it and look at every page, and didn't see anything that looked relevant. The paper has no table of contents, and no index that would make finding such things easy if I chose the wrong search terms but knew what good search terms might look like. I've been reading forum posts a bit, but have yet to read all of them. I freely admit my understanding of the state of the art of Truthcoin is neither complete nor fully current; that's why I was asking if there exists a good index of the current state of the art, so that I could get up to speed faster than reading everything that's ever been written, in particular the results of post-whitepaper research.

When Zack started a list of known attacks going, I figured I'd add to it. I'm well aware there has been discussion of some of these attacks before, both the ones Zack listed and the ones I listed. I was assuming nothing I said was novel, merely asking where to find organized info, if such info has been organized.

re: #3, what is the expected sequence of events when one trader is willing to buy YES shares at probabilities as high as 0.51, the price is currently 0.51, a new trader arrives who is willing to buy NO shares at probabilities as low as 0.49, and their willingness to trade is large compared to the amount of liquidity the AMM will provide between those prices? Does this result in more than 2 transactions? Do those transactions leak information in such a way that someone can make informed HFT guesses about the traders intents and make money?

GDP futures generally.

Stock index futures. (Interesting for the same reasons as dollar futures, mostly. Generally, investing in long-term predictions carries opportunity costs, and markets that let me avoid those are useful.)

When it comes to minimum wage, (unemployment) x (min wage) is far from a complete picture. Some more complex stuff is interesting:
(Min wage) x (unemployment) x (GDP)
(Min wage) x (percent below poverty line)
(Min wage) x (Gini coefficient)
Also, it tends to be tied up in a confounding mess with other things. So:
(Min wage) x (election result) x (pick your favorite outcome metric)
Except that the case of "Party X gained power and then went against their usual min wage rhetoric" has strong confounds of "all kinds of other things are weird", you might want:
(Min wage) x (outcome metric) x (some other partisan policy)


(GDP, stock index, or other macro indicator) x (Climate change events)

(Gun control policy options) x (gun-related deaths, total violent deaths, mass shooting deaths)

(Policing reform options) x (Police-involved deaths)

(Automotive deaths) x (stuff about self-driving cars) x (stuff about self-driving car regulation)

(Stock price of $company) x (large-scale data breach at $company)

Something about student loan availability, college tuition, subsidies, etc. I'm not quite sure what I'd do here, but something related to questions like "will paying for people's college tuition make tuition prices go up".

So obviously it imports any attacks that work against Bitcoin, of which there are also some you haven't listed.

Incorrect oracle results are also possible because of simpler attacks than p+epsilon, such as ordinary bribery, and one person / group quietly buying up half the votecoins.

Frontrunning also has some more interesting and complex solutions involving batch market processing; see http://cdetr.io/smart-markets/ for some details and other useful implications.

In addition to simple front running, if all share creation must pass through market orders against the AMM, you get other HFT-ish problems when two people have client-side limit orders that are being reconciled over the course of many small trades. (This assumes there's no way for two limit orders that are large compared to the liquidity parameter to meet on the blockchain.)

There's also the freeloader market problem: can someone create a competing market that is cheaper to operate because it imports the truthcoin oracle results for market resolution without paying for them? Obviously they could do this as a centralized business, but that has a whole host of downsides. But can this be done as eg an Ethereum smart contract? (Counterpoints: will Eth work? Is that contract expensive to run on-chain? etc.) Can it be done as a separate chain, whose only goal is to be a leech?

I'm not sure whether the whole class of problems surrounding poorly resolved vague claims counts as an attack, but I haven't seen much discussion beyond "hopefully authors will learn that's a dumb idea".

Then there's the "unethical claims" problem: I've seen advocacy that such claims should be judged "undecidable", but I suspect the Schelling point and equilibrium behavior is to actually judge them as written. (In particular, I suspect that for any common set of norms, I as an attacker can find a claim where the question "is claim X ethical?" is a divisive question, and that I can often find such a claim where the answer to that depends on what exact event caused the claim to resolve that way.) I'm not sure how much of a problem this really is, but I've seen a lot of people assuming it would be bad. It also leads into the question of "paying for public bads".



In general, it seems that blockchain-level attacks are getting good, thorough discussion, and papers written that summarize the major points. But I'm not seeing that for stuff specific to Truthcoin, which bothers me. But there's a limit when the community is this much smaller.

Is there a good index of papers on potential / actual attacks somewhere?

I only know of a few attacks, and it seems like there's not really a good organized repository with a current list of known attacks and how viable they seem to be.

(I would also want to include proposed attacks that aren't obviously ridiculous, but also don't seem to work.)

http://cdetr.io/smart-markets/

Has lots of really good stuff about batch processing of combinatorial orders, and how that's relevant to derivative contracts on prices of instruments, which can be used to make stable coins in the normal prediction market sense.

Also has obvious extensions to combinatorial prediction markets that aren't about financial derivatives, but those aren't discussed explicitly. Useful for the same underlying reason, though: participants might want to specifically buy a share bundle instead of individual shares.