Into (reader can skip this)Everyone has been picking on Etherium lately. To me, this suggests a growing fear that Eth may *gasp* be extremely useful, and *double-gasp* might, possibly
uniquely have the ability to challenge and destroy Bitcoin's hard-won network effects.
Just for kicks, I'm going to propose my own Ethereplacement : Trutherium! No, its not a joke, but its pretty close because I have essentially no cryptography experience and barely-acceptable coding skills (especially compared to this crowd). Honestly, though, I've mostly been waiting patiently to say "Trutherium" for a few days now...they both contain "th"! My joke idea should be easy to criticize if you're knowledgeable, so please don't hold back.
MotivationGavin's
Bit-Therium, is pretty cool (the same Bitcoin we know and love, with Etherium). However, he assumes a majority of trustable oracles, which
I don't like. Oracles should have to buy-in/sell-out to discourage Sybil/retirement attacks, should suffer if they try to attack the network (successfully or otherwise), shouldn't know what other oracles plan to do, should have an incentive to hide what they plan to do..
Oh, I'm describing part of my own project there.
Sketch of the IdeaWith Truthcoin, we have reports combined into a consensus via eigenvector. The economics of it were finely-tuned to prediction markets, but can substitute PM-States for contract-states, LMSR for arithmetic-accounting, and the user-generated 'Votes' for contract resolution reports made by oracles. Complex payouts could be built into the Market section, with several Decisions being assembled Wall-St-style into 'derivative' contracts (to build polynomial payoffs for example). The fee structure could be set to auto-.5 if not enough fees had been paid, or to predominantly rely on the listing fees (not trading fees).
Wednesdays are busy for me...might write more about this later. Again, I don't take this very seriously, having watched mission-creep steal the life out of many a good project. I just thought I would join the club, because I don't believe in trusting oracles.