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#71
Advanced / Novel Bearer Assets
Last post by psztorc - April 27, 2016, 05:22:02 PM
Over two years ago, Dr. Shiller at Yale wrote a mostly-wrong NYTimes piece about Bitcoin.

( It is 'mostly-wrong' because the central premise "it doesn't really solve any sensible economic problem" doesn't square with the empirical evidence. )

However, he does bring up some "quirky" ideas, for potential Event Derivative assets:

Quote

* ...since 1967 in Chile, an inflation-indexed unit of account called the unidad de fomento (U.F.), meaning unit of development, has been widely used. ...  In this way, it is natural and easy to set inflation-indexed prices, and Chile is much more effectively inflation-indexed than other countries are.

... Consider rents. Increases may seem unfair to tenants, yet they may be needed to offset inflation. In Chile, a landlord can easily set the monthly rent for the tenant in U.F.s and then never have to change it, reducing the potential for errors, delays and misunderstandings. The name "U.F." reframes people's thinking so that keeping real economic values stable is natural and easy.

* ...you would just check off a box indicating whether your payment was in dollars or pesos or euros — or baskets. If you check "baskets," the computer would calculate the amount of local currency the recipient would need to buy that basket at that time, and it would transmit it, too.

* A third improvement would be to move beyond just one new unit of account to a whole system of them, so that we could have baskets for different purposes. There should be senior baskets representing items consumed by older people in one day in a given country, as well as subsistence baskets representing the consumption of the poor. There should also be a day-wage unit of account representing a day's work by an average unskilled wage earner.

And there could be a "trills" unit — a concept that Mark Kamstra of York University and I have been advocating — that represents one trillionth of a country's most recently estimated annual G.D.P. There should also be a unit that grows or retreats with per-capita daily consumption. This could be used for pension and Social Security payments as a form of intergenerational risk-sharing: The idea is that payments to older people would rise and fall with overall consumption. With many kinds of baskets, it will be easier to set prices and make contracts that are sensible for the long term.


The great irony is that all of these are possible with Hivemind, which is itself only possible because of Bitcoin. "it doesn't really solve any sensible economic problem", indeed!
#72
Design / Incentives / Game Theory / Re: Trusting Pools vs Oracles
Last post by psztorc - April 27, 2016, 04:45:00 PM
There are several differences:

1. Mining pool operators can not steal your money, unless they are re-spending money which they owned pre-attack. Oracles can screw up your bet, and steal the money you've wagered.
2. Mining pool operators do not necessarily own mining hardware.
3. The act of mining is expensive, whereas voting is compulsory (ie, "failing to vote" is expensive).
#73
General / Re: How can I get some truthco...
Last post by psztorc - April 27, 2016, 04:39:33 PM
There will exist a mechanism to transform BTC in to Truthcoin's "CashCoin". So, you should just buy more BTC.

Unless you would like to become a reporter. I haven't decided how the VoteCoins will be distributed. It wouldn't hurt if you helped with the code.
#74
General / How can I get some truthcoin?
Last post by blackhatzw - April 27, 2016, 03:39:01 AM
How can I get some truthcoins? Can I buy some or mine?
#75
Off Topic / Re: I am selling Augur REP
Last post by zack - April 26, 2016, 01:51:59 AM
Joey agreed to help me sell my rep, so we dont have to use an escrow.
The only rule is that you can't re-sell the rep until after the distribution of rep to everyone.
#76
Design / Incentives / Game Theory / Trusting Pools vs Oracles
Last post by Thortalp - April 24, 2016, 09:15:40 PM
What effectively is the difference between trusting third party oracles and pool operators? There is a difference in what you trust them with / what they can do if they collude.... But no one can say that Bitcoin is trustless...
#77
Outside Work / Re: SVD alternatives
Last post by zack - April 20, 2016, 03:00:04 PM
I wrote my alternative to SVD in the scripting language of flying fox.
https://github.com/BumblebeeBat/FlyingFox/blob/development/src/vm/fff/oracle.fs

This way we can update it later, to make it more like SVD perhaps.
#78
Outside Work / SVD alternatives
Last post by zack - April 16, 2016, 06:06:07 PM
I heard that Augur was using some other algrithm instead of SVD.

making SVD deterministic, and having it be a part of an erlang release for flying fox is very difficult.
Existing SVD algorithms use mutable lists, which erlang does not have.
The C version isn't deterministic.

So I rolled something similar to SVD that is easy to write in erlang.

I let oracle participants choose between 4 things. true/false/need more time/bad question.

I use the weighted mode to decide which of the 4 is correct.

Next I calculate new weightings for each oracle participant. Every question they got wrong lowers their power to 9/25ths what it was before.
Unless they choose "need more time" and the outcome was true/false, or if they choose true/false, and the outcome was "need more time". In those cases their power only lowers to 3/5ths what it was before.

I use the new weightings to re-calculate the outcomes of each decision.
This is the final outcome.

Is this a reasonable alternative to SVD? Are there any negative repercussions to doing this?
Should I have the constant 3/5ths be a variable based upon the number of things they are betting on or the number of oracle participants?
#79
Off Topic / Re: consensus method even chea...
Last post by zack - March 18, 2016, 04:01:25 PM
The mechanism I posted before I only capable of measuring when the price goes down.
We need a separate one to measure the price going up.

Mining should be split into 2 transactions. The first transaction is an auction, only a finite number of people can mine a finite amount of coins. The second transaction is where they provide the work they signed up to provide.

90% of the time we sell coins at the current price.
The last 10% we sell variable numbers of coins for very short periods of time at slightly below the current price.
We look at how much of a fee the miners are willing to pay for the privilege of mining these more affordable coins. Based on this fee, we can see how the price of the coin would change in response to changing the rate of production. It is the supply/demand curve.

Once the curve is measured, we can choose the next price to sell coins at. Optimizing for the two goals of increasing the market cap, and increasing the price per share.
#80
Outside Work / Reputation value
Last post by zack - March 13, 2016, 10:45:33 PM
The validators need to be over-paid.
So about how much should the market cap of reputation be?

For Augur, the market cap is around $40 million right now.

What volumes of trading are we expecting on the prediction markets? What is the market price for making a trade? 1%? 0.1%?