Well, I wouldn't call that a mistake

If we apply strict, formal logic here, there is nothing you can pit against yahoo62278 regarding this specific rule. The only thing which is somewhat out of whack here is that you wouldn't really expect only 1 post to be counted in the Gambling Discussion board for a casino signature campaign. Personally, I thought it was a typo on the manager's part. But after it has been made abundantly clear in the thread that it is a correct provision (and twice at that), there is nothing you could do but obey the rules or suffer the consequences

There's something else to add

That is, everyone participating in any signature campaign should be closely following their campaign thread, and keep a weather eye on what the boss has to say there. This specific rule has been explained twice by the campaign manager in the thread, so even if it is against the "common sense", i.e. what is assumed by most (I assumed that too, just in case), any confusion and misunderstanding should have been dispelled

And how does it help you personally?

That is, even if only 5 posts at max were counted in the Gambling board? Proceeding from your own assumption, you should have made 4-5 posts in Gambling and 1 post in Gambling Discussion (i.e. 5 in total to be counted)

The rule is saying that quite explicitly

Another matter it is not what you would normally expect from a casino signature campaign, and in that I agree with you. That's why I felt it would be better to clarify this point further and asked just that. Here's the reply

That's because blockchain oracles are quintessential to smart contracts

As explained in the article, without oracles smart contracts can't do much. Indeed, they can still shuffle funds here and there on the blockchain, but as soon as we need something real, we need information from the world, that is to say, our world, with all its arbitrariness, randomness, half-truths, lies, damned lies, and, well, stats. In a sense, oracles are making smart contracts real as distinguished from the pristine and immaculate world of their self-contained blockchains, which are a thing unto itself (figuratively speaking)

First part of a new article about blockchain oracles added: Blockchain Oracles: Connecting The Worlds – Part 1

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The first part of a new big article about Blockchain Oracles published on stealthex.io. A prologue to this piece about DeFi can be found here. Your feedback is greatly appreciated, as always

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Blockchain Oracles: Connecting the Worlds

Many blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, and most importantly, Bitcoin and Ether, have become notorious for transaction failures, primarily due to scalability issues. And that’s pretty much all when we talk about plain-vanilla Bitcoin and its copycats like Litecoin or its clones like Bitcoin Cash. But with blockchains like Ethereum or EOS, which expand into the far reaches of a new territory known as smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps), this is only the tip of the iceberg. In other words, only a beginning.

What hides below the surface, and thus rarely emerges in public discussions about cryptocurrencies, is the closed-off nature of smart contract-enabled blockchains. To be ever so slightly useful, smart contracts and dApps running on top of them must have access to real-world data which is immensely off-chain, while they are permanently stuck within the constraints of their tiny on-chain world. So how do they escape out of the straitjackets put on them by their restrictive environments? That’s where blockchain oracles come into play.

And what role do they play, exactly?

Enabling smart contracts and dApps to interact with the outside world opens both endless possibilities and a big can of worms. Now that the entire world is made available to a smart contract, it can take an input from an external source of information, make some calculations that require this data or arrive at a decision based on it, and then get down to some work like moving contractually-locked funds from Alice to Bob. Or from Bob to Alice, depending on the verdict. Sounds cool, huh?

But here's the catch. As transactions on a smart contract blockchain are supposed to be irreversible (while the blockchain itself immutable), it can lead to catastrophic consequences if the input has been tampered with or just happens to be incorrect for some arbitrary reason, not necessarily ill in intent. This fundamental problem of internalizing the outside world for on-chain execution of contractual agreements on smart contract blockchains has become most apparent with the advent of Decentralized Finance (or simply DeFi) a few years ago.

DeFi is a promising new kid on the blockchain arena. It hinges on the idea of decentralizing most financial services that we use today, but without a bank or other financial institution in the middle. It is envisioned that with the help of smart contracts and dApps using them we will be able to lend money and borrow with collateralized digital assets, offer and receive banking services including mortgages and insurance, buy and sell digital assets safely on decentralized marketplaces, as well as issue stablecoins and user tokens. Pretty impressive list, isn’t it?

However, for all of this to work properly we need trustless and reliable sources of information outside the blockchain that provide inputs to dApps running on that blockchain. DeFi requires trustless data feeds about the state of the world to ensure correct on-chain execution of smart contracts powering dApps. But how do we get these and manage to retrieve external data that cannot be verified through cryptography but that we can still trust and rely on? Entities that provide off-chain data for on-chain consumption are called blockchain oracles. Technically, an oracle is an interface through which a smart contract queries and retrieves information from an external source of truth.

As it turns out, DeFi is not the only field of application where blockchain oracles turn up quite handy, but since their use is most indispensable there, it makes sense to delve deeper into this area.

Oracles of DeFi

Today, the space is crowded with a plethora of players that aim at providing DeFi with so much needed real-time market information, for example, digital asset prices. There are many forms of oracles, but the most important distinction is drawn between centralized and decentralized ones. As DeFi is supposed to be a trustless, decentralized environment, the decentralized oracles are the flesh and blood of this ecosystem, so we are mostly concerned here with this type of blockchain oracles (just in case, there are centralized oracles too).

DeFi platforms deploy various oracle solutions in their pursuit of retrieving real-time information about the market price of digital assets. The most well known among these is the MakerDAO lending platform which uses an oracle module called the Medianizer to obtain the real-time exchange prices. Technically, it is a smart contract that accepts price updates from independent data feeds, discards false ones along with outliers, and calculates the median price (hence the name) to be used as a reference for other smart contracts.

Another blockchain-based borrowing and lending platform, Compound, uses administrators who are holders of the platform’s native COMP token. They manage and control price feeds through aggregator contracts they create. Authorized sources of information called reporters are then queried for reference prices by aggregators which verify the data and calculate median values to be used internally. A somewhat similar approach is utilized by AmpleForth, a developer of a stablecoin with elastic supply, and Synthetix, a platform for creating crypto-backed synthetic versions of assets like commodities, stocks, indices, cryptocurrencies, and fiat.

On the other hand, there are a few blockchain projects that provide decentralized oracle services to other platforms and blockchains, mostly Ethereum and EOS. Such projects as Provable (formerly Oraclize), ChainLink, Band Protocol, Tellor aim at providing blockchain-agnostic protocols that allow query and retrieval of virtually any type of reference data in a standardized manner. As authenticity and veracity of the information retrieved is of crucial importance to its consumers, these projects run their own decentralized blockchains whose primary task is to validate data feeds and check that the information received is authentic and has not been tampered with.

Realistically, these special-purpose blockchains come closest to the implementation of a blockchain oracle idea in a truly decentralized and trustless way.

To be continued

In the second part of this two-part article we will look into other uses of blockchain oracles beyond DeFi, and talk about potential problems and pitfalls of this nascent technology, as well as approaches used to deal with them. Stay with us and remain in the know!

– Why is the CEO of Apple so rich?
– Because he bears the fruit of success!

Well, there are subtle differences in our understanding

As I see it, it is not about certain countries prohibiting gambling. Rather, it is about countries that are banned by Gamdom specifically and people trying to bypass this ban by using VPNs, etc. If it really were the way you see it ("if the resident country of the player prohibits/blocks online gambling"), you wouldn't be allowed to use Gamdom at all, through VPN or otherwise. Since VPN's are mentioned and they are used to hide your country of residence, it is evidently the second case, i.e. the casino doesn't want players from the countries they blacklisted, for whatever reason, and irrespective of whether gambling is allowed there or not. At least, this is what follows from this text

Добавлена первая часть большой статьи про blockchain oracles: Blockchain Oracles: Connecting The Worlds – Part 1

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Обсуждение здесь

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Во время ссоры жена внезапно применила слезоточивый глаз

Did anyone mention competition yet?

For every item in the list posted, there are million other people doing essentially the same in a million different ways. And they are most certainly doing that more effectively and efficiently that a newcomer would do simply because they were in the game and competing with each other for quite some time. And many wannabe millionaires eventually ended up in debt instead of becoming rich and wealthy

But what is the driving force?

That is, are they intentionally limiting cash turnover or are they doing that for some practical reasons which have nothing to do with phasing out cash? As far as I remember, you always had to pay some fee after reaching a certain limit of money withdrawn. Rates are different across different banks, but that was always the case. I've been using payment cards for like 15 years, and all this time withdrawing cash has been a pain in the ass (above certain amount)


I'm using cards myself for the simple reason they are more convenient. But I always have cash in my pocket, to be on the safe side if something is out of whack at the cashier's

Did you read it yourself?

And, more importantly, did you understand the meaning of this text? You are prohibited from using "the services as anonymizing proxy, VPN or the like in order to bypass the law resulting from the blockade by Gamdom.com countries". Well, it could be written in better terms and wording indeed, but the meaning is still pretty clear. In simple language, you can't use VPNs and similar services if your country is blacklisted by the casino. Let me explain in case there's a difficulty. It is not the use of VPNs as such that is prohibited here, but their use with the aim of bypassing these country-specific restrictions

The devil is in paying precious attention to detail, as always

If we look at it from an evolutionary point of view (which is probably shared by the Chinese authorities), thousands of those that have died (even millions) would only make the Chinese economy better in the long run. How come? Mostly for two key factors or reasons

First, if they didn't spend a lot of resources trying to save those people, the resources are effectively saved, all things considered. And then, if it is old and weak that are dying (which seems to be the case), it is actually good for the economy, and can be a big head start in the new, post-Covid world. America is likely going that route as well

You think of a computer as a highly advanced calculator, and you would be right if computers were only about that. But things change dramatically when we start to talk about a very specific kind of computers, i.e. artificial neural networks. They replicate in metal how human mind works, and given enough nodes (neurochips), number of connections and signal speed, they will be able to do any task that a human being can potentially do. They could even "think" without being aware of the entire process (though who knows)

And then our days are numbered

To be clear, I'm not challenging this point

But what is luck, either good or bad? What we call luck is essentially variance. What is the opposite of variance in the gambling context? Right, the house edge. So what it seemingly comes down to is the stand-off between variance and the house edge. What does it tell us in practical terms? That to successfully work against the house edge we should employ variance

However, variance itself is a two-edged sword. Recall, there is good luck and there is bad luck. But if we think in terms of variance, we will immediately see that it is a false dichotomy or dilemma, as searching for luck is not the same as keeping variance bridled -- unleashed enough to overcome the house edge and still restrained so as not to become bad luck

Most certainly, that amounts to flushing money down the pipe

What you and your little bro should really stack up is knowledge, skills, family, health, friends, community in general (aka being a good Samaritan). Ironically, you don't even need money for that (though you may need it to, say, fix your broken health, with varying results). These are the most valuable things, but to acquire them you should continually exert yourself, both physically and mentally. In any case, in a real worst case scenario ("everyone for himself"), all these foods will be quickly taken away by ruthless gangs. But if stacking up canned food gives you peace of mind, which seems to be the case here and elsewhere, then definitely go for it

China is not a socialist country

It runs a highly disguised and deeply entrenched form of state capitalism (since Deng Xiaoping's times) where the top political bosses of CPC are just like regular Western elites, although with a bit of a national tint. As I'm inclined to think, any country that declares socialism eventually ends up with the worst form of capitalism in pretty much the same way we end up with extreme nepotism when trying to implement genuine meritocracy. This is the key to understanding "Chinese socialism" (by removing the veil of words that lost their meaning)

– What does a house wear?
– An address!!!

This casino has been around for pretty long

And they are certainly aware of both the existence of public (read, free) VPNs and the people using them. Long story short, if this were the problem in the way you mean it, it should have long been made known. Just think about it, why would a casino want to ban such users if for many a gambler it is the only way to play there? Why would they shoot themselves in the foot? I'm 100% sure most casinos have implemented devices and techniques for tracking multiple accounts without relying on the IP address of the player (or on it alone)