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Hi those at the Augur team:

Jack, Scott, Joey, etc

1) What are your expectations for performance within the Ethereum network?  How many Transactions per Second (TPS) are you expecting?  Will Ethereum be able to support high frequency trading? 
2) What are the fee costs you expect or even qualitative downsides&upsides that you may anticipate?  How does your network use ether? 
3) Lastly, how is the alpha release in "May" (whenever Ethereum gets launched) going to be different from your Beta release?  Why do you need/fix to add in the 8 months until official release?

a sub paragraph talks about Truthcoin as well. Thought you should see before you wrote your own blog post about sidechains. 


https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/20/bitcoin-maximalism-currency-platform-network-effects/

As far as I understand NXT, Counterparty, and BitsharesX are having exactly this: a decentralized marketplace/order book and a automatic matching by the blockchain/the consensus mechanism.

I think the comparison is not the same.  NXT, XCP and BTS are only expected to handle several thousand different assets. TC on the other hand, since it is a information market can accommodate for millions upon millions of different prediction markets.  This is the way I've thought about it.   I'm sure NXT, XCP, or BTS asset ledger handle this type of volume with code tweaks, improvements in bandwidth, hd capacity, etc, but a bid ask table is always going to be demanding and limiting on a blockchain.  LMSR can handle this stressed usage right from the start.

LMSR is a move forward because its as simple as things can get.

Would have thought there would have been more contributors to this list.  Guess its not fair to put that on everyone, when I haven't given a list neither!  Here are some things I've been noting as useful as of late.

Weather Related derivatives have been one of the fastest growing financial instrument types.  Although they seem to be specific and deal with payoffs based on temperatures and less on insurances on scenario type events.  These will be particularly useful out of the gate.  Some examples detecting Or Predicting Major Weather Or Natural Event that will probably be entered into Truthcoin:

Drought in California ends in year 2XXX.

Category 5 hurricane makes landfall in New York by the year 2020.

San Francisco Bay area will face one major earthquake >8.0 on the richter scale by 2030.


Other:

Currently Nuclear power plants cannot be insured, so a good prediction market for this might be the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plan (America's largest power plant by net electrical generation) will be forced to shutdown for good for whatever reason (maintenance issues, catastrophic event, political seizure, etc).

Manhattan will suffer power outage in summer that will last greater than 24 hours.

California will split into 5 states by the 2024.

Purchasing reputation is a type of sybil attack (similar to ballot stuffing). This is often one of the first issues brought up as a weakness in TruthCoin's use of voters, especially when considering the possible scenario where TruthCoin might be used to adjudicate the outcomes of bets denominated in bitcoin. I'm not sure that the current docs are clear enough on how TruthCoin prevents such sybil attacks.

Another problem that I have with TruthCoin though... Doesn't it assume that someone could "buy truth"? Let's say that TC's market cap is 1M ether. I could then create a contract for 2M ether, and buy enough TC to swing the vote in my favour? I'd lose my all TC because of that, and probably kill te whole TC currency, but i'd be awarded for 2M for the contract fulfillment. In oher words - Isn't TC feasible to protect a contract only up to an amount of TC's market cap?
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From your reddit page
This seems to me a desirable limitation. If a judge (or set of judges) is refereeing a prediction market where there's more money at stake on its outcome than the lifetime salaries of the judges, that's precisely the kind of situation in which retirement attacks are most likely.
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This is the same concerns brought to light about all proof of stake coins.  If you skim the bitsharestalk forums, its discussed there also.  Yes, theoretically purchasing 51% percent would make this possible. 
But no it would seem you cannot buy up all the TRU that you want.  Your restricted by the scarce supply of votecoins and the subjective value holders of those votecoins. IF the original distribution of votecoins is dispersed widely enough, can you purchase all 51%?  There will always be a large collection of holders who will not be selling, preventing anyone from achieving 51%.  And because you have not guarantee of acheving 51% stake, all it would do would drive up the price of the votecoins.  Votecoin squatters who rely on the income stream to pay for their bills and provisions may not give it up so easily.
You would either drive up the price so much:
1) You would bankrupt yourself first trying to achieve 51%
or
2) The expected gains of 51% from fixing a $30MM PM would immediately start diminishing rapidly the closer you get to 51%, until the votecoins are more expensive then gaming the market. 


Let's say you had enough money to buy every home in Boston at the current market rate, and you started with the East side of the city.  You started buying every home there.  Some people have been living there for years, and don't want to sell at the current market rate (value is subjective) and you have to pay 10% above the appraisal.  Neighbors would find out and immediately, the surrounding neighbors prices would drive up, and people would start holding out, seeing that historically prices have been going up.  Other speculators will come in and start buying up land at astronomical levels since they are attracted by the unbelievable returns-- thus thrwarting your mission to buyout all of Boston.  You find in your self driven asset bubble, you've attracted competitors which was opposite of your original intent to gain a 51% majority.  The only way you could buy up all the property in Boston is if you had an unlimited supply of money or had the ability to confiscate property and fix prices (imminent domain), eg. if you were the government.  Otherwise you would have to believe that half of all holders will give up their stake in votecoins. 

Paul's interview with Adam B Levine is now on Let's Talk Bitcoin.

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-episode-117-the-truth-matrix

Article on Gavin's view on Ethereum.  Truthcoin is also mentioned briefly.   

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/gavin-andresen-outlines-bitcoin-2-0-without-ethereum/2014/06/09

Maybe some developer could answer this.  Could a semi-fork be possible, where the votecoin will be forked into two seperate branches, but still use the same truthcoin pool.  like an embedded exchange.

This is an interesting proposition.  This branching issue seems solvable with the Bitshares toolkit. Since the Bitshares Toolkit is moving to a relational database,  its possible to have a function that splits off in a branch. (Although I think it should have to satisfy certain parameters first; not just anybody can split off into another fork.)  When a branch happens, it writes a whole new table and copies all the previous information.  This will allow for the branching effect.  The two tables will have same public key identifier, except now the new table will have distinct table identifier for say TruthFinance shares.  (Or just a new column in voteshares table would be enough.)  This creates a subnetwork, but can still can still share the Truthcoin monetary supply. 

Maybe the delegated proof of stake can help with the logistical problems like who and how to branch.  The requirements for branching could be something on the lines:

1)  At least a 51% agreement by all voteshares in that branch (this can be proposed at any bi-weekly ballet).  The voteshares would also have to cast a representative vote to a delegate
2) The top ten delegates votes on whether to branch or not.
 
Once both Voteshares and Delegates agree on branching for it to happen it can then be executed by the program.   

I suppose once your in a small subnetwork like TruthSports.Basketball.College-- the requirements for branching into TruthSports.Basketball.College.Big East are not as large as the Truthcoin Politics, since you are dealing with a smaller niche network.