A lot of the coins being released require a successful oracle algorithm in order to be successful. I had two questions about this. First, what do you think the best oracle algorithms out there are and why? Who is thinking about this in the smartest way that you've seen? Second, what do you think the most important past work / literature is on oracle algorithms that are byzantine fault tolerant?

To be clear to everyone, by "oracle" I mean a Byzantine-fault tolerant system for creating agreement about "real" events that have occurred outside of the blockchain. For example, all stable-coins require a fault-tolerant oracle to tell the system what the right value is to peg your currency to (e.g., the system needs to "know" what the value of USD is in a decentralized, trust-less way or it can't work). All prediction markets have to have a oracle system (e.g., if you create a prediction market for "Donald Trump wins election" then you need a decentralized, trust-less way of ensuring that the contracts "know" who actually won).

Let me state my bias upfront: I think Blockstack is a fantastic project. I also think that most people that I know will not understand the project. I want better understand why and how regular people may or may not become users of Blockstack.

For the purposes of this discussion, let's please assume that people are motivated by (i) money, (ii) power, (iii) sex, (iv) ease of access, (v) efficiency and (vi) conformity with others. Let's also assume most people are deeply ignorant and irrational and don't understand or care about the importance of network security, even when this puts their own self-interest at risk. Let's also assume people are amoral and don't care at all about liberty or any values unless it advances their own personal gain.

If we take this view of humanity to be true, why will anyone use the Blockstack browser over its key alternatives? These alternatives include (i) the normal internet and (ii) Tor. I agree that Blockstack is censorship resistant and far more secure (which by my value system is extremely important), but I'm skeptical that regular people care about these things. I think it's potentially valuable for criminals, but criminals already have Tor. If this is true, why will Blockstack be adopted? A possible reason is that people may adopt it if there were a decentralized P2P service that was of significant value to users that can only be accessible via the Blockstack browser (e.g., decentralized AirBnB). Another reason is because the price could go up which people like because most people are greedy. I am wondering if there are others that I'm not thinking of. Curious to hear the thoughts of the people on this forum.

I recently read the whitepapers of both Basecoin and MakerDAO as well as past work on stablecoins (bitshares and seignorage shares). If it is true that they can create a stablecoin, then I think we can all agree that this is of value. I see these both as interesting economic experiments and I wanted to discuss them in that light. In particular, basecoin sounds quite similar to seignorage shares and makerdao sounds like a much more complex version of bitshares. This is not necessarily a criticism -- these are all experiments and the scientific method says we should make small changes to past experiments to better understand reality.

With that framework in mind, what I want to discuss is a few things:
(1) To what extent is Basecoin similar to seignorage shares? To what extent is MakerDAO similar to bitshares? What are the differences?
(2) Why did seignorage shares and bitshares succeed or fail?
(3) [Synthesizing 1 & 2] What are the key reasons to believe that the differences that Basecoin & makerdao have with past work are sufficient to solve for the problems experienced with past work?

Looking forward to hearing what you all have to say.

This is probably obvious to some of you on here, but I'm a beginner. I recently read the lightning network whitepaper and its very unclear to me how the lightning network addresses the double spend problem without broadcasting transactions to the public blockchain. Can someone explain this to me?

To use the example in the white paper, if Alice and Bob are sending BTC back and forth to each other through a secure payments channel, I agree this provides Byzantine fault tolerance in a two-person economy of just Alice and Bob. Moreover, I agree this solves for scaling issues currently present in Bitcoin. My understanding here is that the net result of Alice and Bob's transactions are posted to the network at some later date, which is what solves the bitcoin scaling issue. That said, if the transactions of Alice and Bob are not immediately broadcasted to the network, then why can't either of Alice and Bob double spend with another party, Cindy? Provided that either of Alice and Bob transact with Cindy before the wallet states of Alice and Bob are broadcast via the blockchain, then there is no way for Cindy's wallet to be "aware" of whether Alice / Bob's wallet state has sufficient bitcoin for a transaction with Cindy. For this reason, I don't understand how double spending is avoided and why Cindy can be sure that Alice / Bob aren't cheating Cindy in a transaction.