I would like to restate an assertion I made earlier in the thread.
Factom backs data and eventually, identities.
Data and identities in essence back Factom.
Fiat is backed by nothing.
Bitcoin is backed by electricity usage of an ever-decreasing number of mining operations and is becoming centralized.
What will the currency of the future be? In my opinion, a digital currency that is backed by and backs data and identity in a decentralized manner and can anchor into any blockchain as there is nothing more valuable in the information age.
The Factom team doesn't necessarily intend this. But there is a very real chance of exactly that happening.
I really like this understanding of money creation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3np2ul/is_bitcoin_mining_an_energy_waste_bitcoin_network/cvqzz1vBitcoin is backed by electricity.
People are under the mistaken impression that money creation is a simple matter of running the printing press. If you simply run the printing press the money will very soon become worthless.
Money creation actually involves the act of destroying value from the existing economy and then, in turn, creating new money of corresponding equal value. This transfers the value from the economy to the new money and is the magical moment that represents money creation.
Take a central bank like the Bank of England, for instance. To create new money it doesn't just run the printing press and/or type in a bunch of numbers into one of its member banks' account. In itself that wouldn't represent money creation. The money creation moment is achieved when the BoE buys existing financial assets with the newly "printed" money. Put simply, they remove some existing value from the economy and exchange it for new monetary tokens, thereby magically engendering these tokens with value equivalent to the financial assets that have been removed from circulation.
Take the more ancient process of coin minting if you prefer. Metal ore is removed from the economic system and is no longer available for use in the production of jewelry and such -- it ceases to be useful as metal per se and instead becomes valuable now as money. That economic value that once was present in its use as ore is in an instant converted into a corresponding value as money.
When we say that money is backed by something, the true meaning of that is not that the money is convertible into its underlying asset upon demand. The true meaning is simply that upon creation its value came from the disappearance of value of whatever backed it. The pound is created by removing bonds from circulation, it is backed by those bonds. But you can't exchange your money for those bonds on demand, nor do those bonds safeguard the value of the currency against complete collapse since those bonds are denominated in the very same currency that would be under collapse.
The critical thing is not the convertibility of a money into some other valuable, the critical thing is that when that money was created it attained its value not just from people spontaneously declaring it to have value, but by deriving that value from some other valuable which was "destroyed" in the process, or more accurately had its value "transferred" to the newly created money.
This is precisely what mining does for bitcoin. New bitcoins are created with value because value is destroyed in the form of electricity in the act of their creation, that value is transferred to the value of the newly created coins. Money creation must always have some underlying exchange of value, the fact that this particular form of exchange has negative consequences for the environment is a problem with our current methods for generating electricity, not a problem with bitcoin per se.
Many people have this false notion of money creation as simply a matter of creating new tokens. This is where the whole notion of bitcoin as "monopoly money" comes from. I fear some alt-coins that issue currencies without backing that currency (i.e., destroy some existing value in the process) are going to be in for a rude awakening.
So, if there is one thing that is true about bitcoin, it is most definitely NOT that mining is a liability upon the system. Just the opposite, it is a glowing asset and one of the miracles of the system.
Factoids are not money, but if we wanted to apply this definition, then it is not the data itself the system is securing would back the Factoids. I'm not sure that these mappings work, but what value is destroyed in the system when creating Factoids? In the time up through the token sale, the labor to build the system was value which was destroyed, in the same way that electricity is burned to make Bitcoins. After milestone 3 goes live, the computing and organizational resources (labor) of the Federated Servers will be destroyed to sustain the network. Presumably the marginal revenue above an beyond the marginal cost of running a federated server will be expended to promote the network or promote support for individual Federated servers. Factoids are, however burned when using the system. This is also where the mapping is a bit off. When using the system, the Factoid value is destroyed after it is created, rather than before, like with Bitcoin. Factoids have an economic model that is not based on them being money, thus, talking about them being backed as if they were money seems a little weird. |
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I assume you are trying to move factoids, not make entries. It should take a maximum of 10 minutes. which program are you using to build the transaction walletapp or fctwallet?
Nice to see you back. If you have time, could you drop a link to a page that explains what hashing the Factom system uses once an Entry Credit is used? Is it SHA-256 or something else? Thanks.  It is a bit more complicated than that. I refer to it as a mangrove of Merkle trees. I was being extra paranoid, and everything is covered by two hashes. https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/factomDataStructureDetails.mdEach entry has a SHA512 then that is fed back in at the beginning to a SHA256. Feeding the SHA512 into SHA256 at the beginning further increases the difficulty in finding a collision relative to putting it at the end. It gets rid of any midstate optimizations an attacker would have if we just tacked the sha512 result onto the end of the entry when feeding it into SHA256. http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36558/what-is-a-midstate-how-does-using-a-midstate-speed-up-hashinghttps://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/factomDataStructureDetails.md#entry-hashThe directory blocks and entry blocks reference both the previous serial hash as well as the previous Merkle root. Even if someone was able to find a SHA256 collision for one piece of data, it would also need to simultaneously have a hash collision when hashed in a different way, which is radically more difficult. The factoid blocks have essentially segwit built in. Factom had implemented segwit before it was called segwit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3tgmch/bip62_dealing_with_transaction_malleability_has/cx6osvx?context=3I did have an oh-shit moment when I learned Satoshi created an unsafe implementation of Merkle trees. Thankfully, the earlier paranoia stops any attacks. https://github.com/sipa/bitcoin/blob/584a358997e52a87e8c5402269c7fb3784ed2065/src/core.cpp#L227We started off using SHA3 for some parts, but then NIST dragged their feet when we were building our system. We ripped it out when different libraries in different languages were giving different results. https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/32m07b/has_the_nist_controversy_totally_stalled_sha3/If you look closely, Ethereum doesn't actually use sha3, because the standard changed after they wrote their libraries. They use a pre-release version of keccak, which uses non-standard libraries. I's probably OK, because there were complaints that the standard change decreased security. |
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I submitted a transaction via factom-cli almost an hour ago and it still hasn't been reflected in the factom.org block explorer or with 'factom-cli balances'. How can I troubleshoot this?
I assume you are trying to move factoids, not make entries. It should take a maximum of 10 minutes. which program are you using to build the transaction walletapp or fctwallet? |
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I don't think any company would be crazy enough to send their Chief Scientist to another Country to train a 2 day course when a critical milestone still hasn't been released?? Unless it's coming before June 20th,
makes you want to go hmmmm...
This could be exciting. I presume you are referring to Thaddeus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVzw912wPoThe lightning network might be a lot closer than we think. |
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I Just visit the Entry credit store and found out that the Entry credits got cheaper ( a lot cheaper )
Wasnt the price 1000 entry coins for 20$ ? Now for $20 you can buy a total of 4000 entry coins.
No wonder the price is tanking like crazy.
Now you need at least more then 3,5k entrys each block to keep the dollar mark to level out with the inflation, this actually is
insane that they didnt even told anyone or keep a bloq post they just changed it. Is this a way to stock pile a lot Fct for themself.
At Tierion they still ask $25 for 1500 records a month.
Can we have feedback on this Factom Team, and what are the Future ideas about this can you just keep lower it and actually burn our coin price?
Do you actually care about investors that supported your project ?
I used to like this project a lot, but there to lazy to make any comment on the forum that can take up to 10 minutes, Bloq post are almost not made.
We heard the community and took action. ...
What i dont understand is if the retail price is much more expansive then the Factoid price atm,
...
So if your all selling the Entry coins now and burning your factoids for that, doesnt that mean that your taking a profit on top of your
factoids and for every entry coins you sell you can buy more coins?
....
Indeed the margins were at a high level. Factom, Inc margins are now lower. Wholesale prices ($/EC at the protocol level) have stayed the same since the community responded 2 months ago. |
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I thought it was a good idea to reference a decade and a half old internet meme in the article.  |
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> So I tried this and it is still auto-closing. I've tried with and without my PIA vpn on
to be clear, open the windows cmd prompt. it should be interactive. you should be able to type "dir" and it will show a list of files. Then type "factomd". the cmd window should stay open even if factomd quits. This will allow you to see the error messages.
> I noticed I don't have a factomd.conf file in the .factom folder. Could this be my problem? The terminal barks about this in the beginning.
It uses the internal config file if you don't provide one, so that is ok. The config file is only useful if you are doing weird things.
> EDIT: Thought I would just add that within .factom, the ldb folder is only 112MB and the data folder 481MB
hmm, you might be using an old version which disconnects sporadically. the data folder is more for debugging and generates thousands of tiny files. the latest version doesn't make this folder by default. try deleting the data directory too. It can generate so many files that it exhausts your filesystem inodes. The windows installer should show which version of factomd you are running. another way to find the version is to run factomd, fctwallet, and then "factom-cli properties" all in different terminal windows.
>EDIT3: Looks like I am still missing a NONE.conf file?
>Also do I need to place an argument after factomd so it doesn't do this "initialize only" state?
Those are vestigial errors. they do not mean anything.
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It is about 1.8 GB now.
OK I'm on a metered connection at the moment. What is the safest way to send FCT from my Factom address without downloading the blockchain? if you want to use fctwallet (no GUI) you can modify the line FactomdAddress in the factomd.conf file in the .factom directory to point to a public factom client. I'd have to do some digging to find one right now. https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomCode/blob/master/factomd/factomd.conf; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
; Configurations for fctwallet
; ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Wallet]
Address = localhost
Port = 8089
DataFile = fctwallet.dat
RefreshInSeconds = 60
BoltDBPath = ""
FactomdAddress = localhost <Change this to an IP address
FactomdPort = 8088
Another option is to construct the transaction in walletapp and submit it anyways. If you haven't moved the factoids in a while, then there would not have been any balance changes in the interim, so it wouldn't make any difference to walletapp. I have not tested if submitting a transaction without having the whole blockchain works, but it might. I give it a 75% chance it will work. you will have to look at http://explorer.factom.org to see if the balance changes on-chain. If it doesn't work, then you can build, sign and export the transaction in walletapp. the current fees are 0.0078 if you have 1 input and 1 output, so the output should be less than the input by at least that much. It will export text that looks like this: 020154d73e17b301010083dceb9400646f3e8750c550e4582eca5047546ffef89c13a175985e3202
32bacac81cc42883ad93d200646f3e8750c550e4582eca5047546ffef89c13a175985e320232baca
c81cc42801718b5edd2914acc2e4677f336c1a32736e5e9bde13663e6413894f57ec272e28526099
edb105194f86bff145224c4a610e5d28995537acc8476d4efba5a7c77220a8066215a7bf4f8fbd05
5b8c34c1b6a79b1f90b486a6c4235c7c6e4d65c103
you can PM this to me and I will broadcast it. It has a 12 hour timeout though. |
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I'm new to Factom. Trying to set up the wallet and my factomd keeps shutting itself down. Is that normal? This is where it quits...  It then scrolls something too fast for me to see before shutting down. I don't think it can finish syncing the chain. EDIT: This is what I'm trying to follow (for windows) https://www.factom.com/howto/binaries-install-guide/It says download factom.msi but I couldn't find it on the site. I had to google to find it here... http://factom.org/downloads/Maybe it is too old? It says last updated 2-11-16 That is the default screen that it should show when it is downloading the blockchain. to see the progress, open a new terminal window and type it will show how many blocks have been downloaded. When it has the same number as http://explorer.factom.org/ is showing, then you have the whole blockchain. once you get the whole blockchain, click on the other desktop shortcut. this will load walletapp, which opens a webpage to manage the wallet. if it scrolls and closes, then it is displaying a message, then windows is closing the terminal. try opening a terminal window from the run dialog. then start factom with this will keep the window open and you can see what it is complaining about. |
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Very bad that now can not see the exact amount factoids that remained. Before this could be done through the Factom explorer, but somehow this line was removed from there.  run factomd and fctwallet then run: |
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From the FAQ:
"What if Factom is being used to record a series of events, and an event is recorded incorrectly? How do I fix that?
Factom reflects the way the real world works. An incorrect record can be updated with a new entry in the same chain. Pretty much any mitigation technique for errors used today would work in Factom… That is, except for changing historical journals. Factom doesn’t support denial a denial that an error occurred or a denial that an error was fixed."
Not sure what the bolded is trying to say.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pathelland/2007/06/14/accountants-dont-use-erasers/ |
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Could you please link me to such a comment as I can't seem to find it.
https://www.youtube.com/v/X3rM2TQJt7o&start=314&end=359&version=3Let me expound on why I like the analogy. Factom is being built by experienced professionals with a history of delivering finished products. The median age of the team is probably around ~40 years old. Factom is a protocol optimized for securing truckloads of data, in order to deliver useful business/societal value. It is operating at the frontiers of technology as well. Factoids are not trying to be money. They are to serve as the hardware reward mechanism coupled with the user antispam mechanism. Factoid value is a prediction on the use of Entry Credits. This is in contrast to Bitcoin being money; a store of value with lunar potential. That being said, I am predicting many Entry Credits will be used. |
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Excellent Analogy! You are showing the space shuttle: a 40 year old space truck which never goes to the moon. It goes up and down to get useful work done. Sometimes it touches a high geostationary orbit, but comes back down right after. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_transfer_orbit |
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Need some assistance.
I had to reboot my PC and perform some system maintenance, now my FCT balance is showing 0 and no transactions are listed. I had 60 FCT in my wallet before I shut the wallet down and rebooted my system. This didn't happen to any other altcoins I have. I made no changes to the FCT wallet before this system maintenance either. Any suggestions?
Factomd looks to be synching the chain block 38141 as of writing this but when I run the wallet app it shows 0.
Is the wallet showing zero balance for the expected address, or is it not displaying the address at all? If you know the addresses, check the balance on http://beta.explorer.factom.org/ or http://explorer.factom.org/ |
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The leaked files show the firm regularly offered to backdate documents to help its clients gain advantage in their financial affairs Thanks! I hadn't noticed this. I am also working on a blogpost about trusted timestamping as a possible motivator for Bitcoin. I will use this as an example of the failures of trusted timestamping. |
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