My last 2 cents on this topic...

Signing off.

Scammers take capital out of the ecosystem and spend it on crack, Yachts, booze, and prostitutes.

You personally may get richer (if you are a good speculator), while on average the ecosystem gets poorer, unless of course we are bringing more new fools (and their capital) into our ecosystem from outside of it.

So eventually there could be no ecosystem remaining for you to speculate in.

My opinion is we have a window of time (5 - 10 years?) within which to leverage this opportunity to produce something really significant that could help the world. And to produce a $trillion marketcap.

Any way, please continue what you are doing. Hopefully those who developers who are serious will find a way to operate within this ecosystem so we don't lose the potential.

My 2 cents...

Why are people even excited by this technobabble of marrying several technologies which don't scale? This is not breaking any new ground. It is just an rehashed, mashing together of technologies that already don't work well.

Let's be honest with ourselves about the relevance of your bullshit.

Nobody has solved the blockchain scaling problem yet (except by centralization but that doesn't scale in terms of trust).

When are you fools going to stop rewarding scammers for deluding us with technobabble bullshit?

They already have a $million in funding. That is enough for them to go build a project and launch it. Then they can self-fund by selling tokens on the exchanges in a free market.

Stop handing people $millions for writing a technobabble bullshit whitepaper. You are destroying the ecosystem. The criminals are siphoning off all the capital and none will be remaining. That is why our ecosystem is stagnating. No progress is being made.

An idea popped into my mind.

What if ICO coin buyers vote on each release of the budget. They only get to vote up to the value of the tokens they own. They can vote any fraction of their tokens on any budget release. Once they've voted all their tokens, they can't vote any more.

The approved releases are taken from the pool of BTC. Any of the pool not released after a certain period of time, is returned back to all ICO investors proportionally.

What do you think? See any flaws in it?

One flaw is that it means some ICO owners can hold the other owners hostage, by refusing to fully fund what the developer thought had been raised already. But I am not sure that is really a flaw. It means the devs have an ongoing incentive to perform. I am very sleepy so I might have a major flaw in this idea.

Bitcoin is blasting off, and you are going to be stuck holding an illiquid asset while you watch Bitcoin go up 2X.

Doesn't seem like a good time to be taking that risk, unless it is a "sure thing"^TM.

If the maximum raised was limited to $1 or $2 million, I'd be more positive. But $6 million maximum looks like the devs just want to cash out and go play on a Yacht with your Bitcoin.

Their economic incentives don't always align with the best directions for the development of the coin. Also they may be deficient in technical understanding of complex issues.


Problem is it becomes a centralized resource to fight over. It eventually it will be controlled by those at the top of the power-law distribution. So it will be a "the rich collect rents and parasite" formula. So I don't think perpetual is a good idea. The centralized bootstrap should get out of the way and let the ecosystem fund itself decentralized as Satoshi did when he stepped aside.

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How about decentralized voting by the token owners wherein they vote their stake in the treasury separately from the others, i.e. not monolithic appropriation?

You've asked a good question. You aren't the only person who has this unanswerable question.

I am staying in Bitcoin for the current run. I don't know what I am doing after that. Trying to bust my butt to make a project myself. I don't have a good answer.

Perhaps you can explain why Monero wasn't your choice? As you I presume know, at least its block size adjusts upward due to demand and it is a PoW system like Bitcoin.

Afaik, Bitcoin subsidizes mining farms who have a cost basis per BTC mined which is a fraction of the BTC price.

Bitcoin can handle higher volumes by centralizing mining. It is coming, don't worry. It must.

Dash is already centralized, so whoopie doo. Bitcoin will centralize, then Dash has no advantage.

Anyone can make a centralized ledger and obscure the centralization by replicating 3000 copies of a program controlled by the same insiders and calling those masternodes. The hard part is making a decentralized system that scales. No blockchain has that yet. None.

They can Sybil attack the offerings to buy accounts.


I mean as new blocks and accounts are minted/created, the investors can buy this supply the private key they want for them perhaps. So they own them outright. Buying them from the various minters.


How can you prove in zero knowledge that the private key for the new account has been signed by the key of the minter and not the buyer of the new account?


But you aren't addressing the reason I mentioned that. Refer back to the prior discussion.


It can be a statistically relevant concern as the mining becomes more and more centralized for other reasons.


It is not what they think is better off, but what is actually better off. Economies-of-scale are more efficient at manipulating centralized FUNGIBLE value. Here is that key term fungible again.

Hint: IMO you can't achieve real decentralization until you actually employ a "resource" (an effect actually) that can't be made fungible due to its natural attributes, not some artificial barrier that you try to construct which nature will route around.

For example the act of sexual intercourse is very difficult to centralize or make fungible. No, my design is not Proof-of-I(ntercourse) ... that's NEM.


Now you are telling me new accounts can be sold? So why do you think these won't be power-law distributed? They always are.


If mining is profitable why wouldn't the "attacker" (or natural power-law effect) do this? If mining is not profitable, why would anyone buy new accounts?

I already told you that we don't have to topple FIAT, as it topples itself every damn time throughout human history over and over again:




As for the global economic collapse underway, you need to study history. Total collapse of empires has happened over and over again.


Hey were the personal insults really necessary. Are you trying to have a civilized discussion or be ignored by everyone. Have I made insulting remarks about you in this thread?

If a coin was going to copy Dash and Zcash's model of having some portion of transaction fees (more generally block reward) paid to a governance board which then distributed the funds, who would you trust to be on this board and what percentage of the board's funds would you want paid to the members of this board for their effort to manage the distribution of the funds?

Bitshares learned that if you let everyone vote, you end up with rigor mortis due to political turf battles, i.e. a power vacuum. So for Steem they did a sneaky stealth "pre"mine to make sure the principals control 80% of the money supply. Essentially they copied Dash which has a sneaky "bug" "pre"mine so that the insiders got a huge portion of the tokens and thus control the money supply and voting (probably via proxies so they can hide their control).

So in lieu of doing some scam like those, the only way I can see to make a governance work is to permanently install trusted board members and then pre-program in the protocol to dissolve the entire funding source after a set period of time once the initial bootstrap development is completed. Perhaps a 2 - 5 year period. What do you all think?

Feedback please. Ideas?

Those doing governance would need to be very technical so they understand the visionary developers. Yet they need to be solidly grounded. And they need to not have a conflicting agenda.

The first person who came to my mind is @smooth, but he has conflicting vested interests.

P.S. I am not saying it is a good idea to do because it involves centralized trust (and don't we want decentralized and trustless?), but during bootstrap stage possibly it can help to have a funding source. I am starting a discussion if anyone is interested to discuss.

P.S.S. Feel free to discuss legal implications as well if you want. Note that providing the illusion of (i.e. ostensibly hiding the ownership of your masternodes via proxy owners, etc.) decentralized voting that the Steem and Dash scams do, is probably intended to be a way to avoid issues with the law about investment securities.

And don't forget the high school level math error for the probability of attack for the security in the InstantX white paper that I discovered and Evan couldn't refute.

Afaik Dash's core technology is barely functional trash (or has that recently changed?). Their UIs may be good (?), I've never looked. They are reasonably better though at marketing to the speculators.

Hopefully Dash will get some serious competition from some serious technology in its claimed areas of superiority within this year, coupled with some serious marketing. And we can put this Dash "scam"embarrassment to death finally. Since I am responsible for helping Evan see his CoinJoin error at the start and giving him the inspiration for masternodes, then I guess I am responsible for this debacle. So perhaps I feel a duty to end it as well.

Good luck with your Dash investment. I think you actually may profit quite well in the near-term.

If Edgeless drops that to 2500 BTC, they will win this competition easily and reach their maximum easily. If they leave it so high, they may end up like Ark.io and only get 1000 BTC or less (and possibly be underfunded leading to failure). But I don't know for sure because there are a lot of speculators who are not calm, cool, level-headed, and who are easily swayed to swing the bat at lower odds of success.

Too much money upfront can be an incentive to never finish the project.

Both have a maximum that is way too high:

If Edgeless drops that to 2500 BTC, they will win this competition easily and reach their maximum easily. If they leave it so high, they may end up like Ark.io and only get 1000 BTC or less (and possibly be underfunded leading to failure). But I don't know for sure because there are a lot of speculators who are not calm, cool, level-headed, and who are easily swayed to swing the bat at lower odds of success.

Too much money upfront can be an incentive to never finish the project.

Both have a maximum that is way too high:

And what happens when the escrow people have different judgement than some or many of the ICO investors?

Discord? "Oh well"? Suckers!

And what happens when the escrow bean counters are not visionaries and screw up the developers who want to remain fleet footed and flexible?

There is no governance that solves the problem of giving developers $5 million and then expecting them to meet some pie-in-the-sky promises. Much better don't give a lot of money for promises. The developers need $300,000 for 12 months with 3 developers, then okay. Or you've got industry savant s/w engineers so they need $500k for a year of development, then maybe okay. But $5 million?!?

I developed CoolPage (a million user product) in my Nipa Hut in the Philippines while eating rice and salt. Nobody gave me a damn penny. Then I released and earned up to $100,000 a month (inflation adjusted).

Work before pay. Money down only before panty down (because men lose interest after they cum).

The OpenSha.re domain has been registered. That is the open blockchain project name (unless we think of a better name). We have also a very brandable 5 letter domain for one of the user face "apps" (also a website) for the masses, but I will not announce it yet. We don't know what the token is named yet, but we are thinking SHARES.

On marketing to the masses:

I as I explained near the bottom of my prior post, I don't think advertising is what wins but rather a superior fit of the product to the market.

Dash is doing a very good job of explaining the reason crypto-currency hasn't been adopted and thus their marketing to speculators is excellent.

But afaik where Dash is failing is in actually solving the problem they correctly identified and enumerated. At the 7min point in the Dash video, Dash is incorrectly applying a model of the credit card and Paypal advantages over prior payment systems.

But there is no way that crypto is going to be significantly more secure in the eyes of the masses than Paypal. And the switching incentives they propose are not powerful and sufficient motivators for the masses.

I have a plan that addresses precisely this chicken-and-egg dilemma. As I have said many times before, the way to bring the masses onto crypto is to provide something they want which requires or works significantly better than legacy systems in some important way with crypto.

So while we can say Dash is doing a good marketing job of pulling the wool over the speculators eyes, afaik they have absolutely failed in terms of achieving any adoption amongst those outside of our speculation ecosystems.

I think Coke had better distribution.

For me it is mostly in the logo and fact that I grew up seeing logo on gas stations in the Old South this so Coke is tied into my hot summer refreshing soda (i.e. it is tied into my tradition and familial memories):



The Pepsi logo is horrible:



Edit: confirmed my intuition:



And this is true also, that I drank 4 or more bottles of Coke per day in my youth, so I liked the taste was not too sweet and more acidic:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/pepsi_paradox_why_people_prefer_coke_even_though_pepsi_wins_in_taste_tests.html

My gf says Coke tastes better. So instead of marketing, it may be that Coke has the superior product and can just keep a consistent marketing and product, which is why they are more trusted and favored.

So please don't attribute too much to marketing.

You were nearly spot on:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=495527.msg6247919#msg6247919