Oh I forgot to ask: any suggestion on where else to post this or tips on finding a business partner in Turkey would be very appreciated.

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Ah, sormayı unuttum: Bunu başka nereye göndereceğinize dair herhangi bir öneri veya Türkiye'de bir iş ortağı bulma konusunda ipuçları çok takdir edilecektir.

İngilizce yazdığım için üzgünüm, Türkçe bilmiyorum. Aşağıya otomatik bir çeviri ekledim.

A bit about me: I am a long time Bitcoiner and software engineer. I previously co-founded a Bitcoin-related startup in Silicon Valley which raised 1M$+ in VC funding and got acquired. I also have many open source contributions related to Bitcoin. I recently got into the cryptocurrency ATM operation business in my home country Canada. One of my good friends was interested in starting a similar business in Turkey, so I agreed to become his partner and travelled to Turkey to get the business started.

Unfortunately, my friend had some personal issues and is now unable to pursue the business. I now have 2x crypto ATMs in Istanbul and a relatively expensive due diligence report which was produced by a Turkish law firm. I also bought a house in Istanbul for living and residency process.

Anyways, I am still very interested in starting this business because Bitcoin is the future and I believe it can be very successful in Turkey. But it's going to be difficult alone since I don't know the language and travel a lot. I could hire employees but I'd rather find a new partner who will be truly invested in the business and which I can 100% trust. Ideally, I am looking for a partner that can be on the ground in Istanbul and help setup the ATMs, open an office, etc. I am ready to split the business 50% with a potential partner, depending on what they bring to the table.

My ideal partner (in order of importance):

1) Speaks Turkish and has good command of English.

2) Has experience running a business in Turkey and/or business related degree.

3) Has money available to invest in the business.

4) Has an interest in cryptocurrency and economics.

5) Lives around Istanbul or doesn't mind moving there at least for a while.

6) Has an interest in libertarian/classical liberal ideas.

I'd say at least 4 out of 6 is required to be a potential match. I am offering a 500 USD reward (payable in BTC or by bank transfer) to anyone who refers me to the right person. The reward will be granted if and only if the referred person becomes my partner.

Email btcatmturkey@protonmail.com

Thanks!

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Benim hakkımda biraz: Uzun zamandır Bitcoiner ve yazılım mühendisiyim. Daha önce Silikon Vadisi'nde VC finansmanında 1 milyon dolardan fazla para toplayan ve satın alınan Bitcoin ile ilgili bir girişimin kurucu ortağıydım. Ayrıca Bitcoin ile ilgili birçok açık kaynak katkım var. Kısa süre önce kendi ülkem Kanada'da kripto para birimi ATM operasyon işine girdim. Yakın arkadaşlarımdan biri Türkiye'de benzer bir iş kurmakla ilgilendi, bu yüzden ortağı olmayı kabul ettim ve işi başlatmak için Türkiye'ye gittim.

Ne yazık ki arkadaşımın bazı kişisel sorunları vardı ve şimdi işi sürdüremez. Artık İstanbul'da 2 adet kripto ATM'm ve bir Türk hukuk firması tarafından hazırlanmış nispeten pahalı bir durum tespiti raporum var. Ayrıca oturma ve oturma süreci için İstanbul'da bir ev satın aldım.

Her neyse, bu işe başlamakla hala çok ilgileniyorum çünkü Bitcoin gelecek ve Türkiye'de çok başarılı olabileceğine inanıyorum. Ama dil bilmediğim ve çok seyahat ettiğim için tek başıma zor olacak. Çalışanları işe alabilirdim ama işe gerçekten yatırım yapacak ve %100 güvenebileceğim yeni bir ortak bulmayı tercih ederim. İdeal olarak, İstanbul'da sahada olabilecek ve ATM'lerin kurulumuna, ofis açmasına vb. yardımcı olabilecek bir ortak arıyorum. Masaya ne getireceklerine bağlı olarak işi potansiyel bir ortakla %50 oranında bölmeye hazırım. .

İdeal partnerim (önem sırasına göre):

1) Türkçe ve iyi derecede İngilizce bilmektedir.

2) Türkiye'de bir işletme yürütme deneyimine ve/veya işletme ile ilgili dereceye sahiptir.

3) İşe yatırım yapmak için parası var.

4) Kripto para ve ekonomiye ilgi duyar.

5) İstanbul civarında yaşıyor veya en azından bir süre oraya taşınmaktan çekinmiyor.

6) Liberter/klasik liberal fikirlere ilgi duyar.

Potansiyel bir eşleşme için 6'dan en az 4'ünün gerekli olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Beni doğru kişiye yönlendiren herkese 500 USD ödül (BTC veya banka havalesi ile ödenecek) teklif ediyorum. Ödül, ancak ve ancak belirtilen kişi benim ortağım olursa verilecektir.

E-posta btcatmturkey@protonmail.com

Teşekkürler!

Controversial opinion.

I love Bitcoin the currency, but IMO a major barrier to adoption has been the community's reluctance to embrace "off chain" payment systems. Bitcoin's network is simply too slow and expensive for the majority of day to day transactions. And there are fundamental reasons for that which can't be fixed with a fork or an altcoin. It should be used as a settlement system, for moving between payment systems and for large transactions (e.g. Coinbase -> Hardware wallet, Hardware wallet -> Pay credit card bill, Kraken <-> Binance, etc.).

Now what if Visa added BTC as a supported currency? That would be big for adoption. Consumers could pay their bills directly in BTC. Merchants could receive BTC from Visa. What if some entity (El Salvador?) issued BTC backed bank notes? BTC could be used just like cash. Basically, all criticism about the Bitcoin payment network would become moot. But the "on chain" system would still exist when you need it and the currency would still retain its important properties.

Is the above vision still considered taboo?

No, I haven't seen. The ability to immediately verify a bet was fair is part of the appeal for single player provably fair schemes. That said, it's true that by relaxing this requirement (e.g. having to wait a while before verifying a bet), it'd be possible to show that a site wouldn't have been able to adjust for a player's behavior.

I will have a look at Bustabit's solution, thanks for the reference.

The problem is that if you use Shamir's Secret Sharing and there is a majority of dishonest players, they can collude to reveal your seed before picking theirs (giving them the ability to effectively pick the game outcome). There are indeed solutions using a trusted third party.

Hi all,

I've been trying to develop a provably fair scheme that would work with multiple players (e.g. multiple players each betting on the same coin flip). After doing some research[0][1], I'm drawn to the conclusion that such a scheme is impossible to achieve.

As with the 2 party provably fair scheme, we assume in our model that the "House" knows how each players will bet in advance (because players can be predictable in practice). The coin toss can be represented as 0 = Heads and 1 = Tails. The final outcome is determined by adding up all the coin tosses, checking if it's even for Tails and Heads otherwise (this is equivalent to XORing all the tosses). A commitment is a secure one way function (e.g. sha256(nonce + value)).

1) House, Alice and Bob each pick a coin toss and share a commitment to all (so that they can't alter it during the reveal phase)
2) Alice reveals coin toss
3) Bob reveals coin toss
4) House reveals coin toss

So far so good: all of the participants had an input in the coin toss and none of them could have influenced it somehow in their favor.

The issue arises when Bob is in fact a puppet of the House (e.g. Bob is a fake player controlled by the House). After step 2 when Alice reveals her coin toss, the House knows the final outcome (since it already knows Bob's coin toss). If the outcome is unfavorable (e.g. Alice would win her bet), it could make Bob abort the protocol (e.g. "oops, wifi disconnected"). We either have to continue and ignore Bob's coin toss or we cancel the round.

- If we ignore Bob's coin toss, the House now has a 50% chance to lose instead of 100% if Bob hadn't aborted.
- If we cancel the round, the House can never lose: it could just always have Bob abort when it knows it is going to lose.

There appears to be solutions to this problem if

- Majority of players are honest (e.g. using Shamir secret sharing). but that's an overly optimistic assumption from the point of view of a player.
- A trusted third party is allowed.

Possible line of research: each player picks multiple coin tosses instead of just one. Instead of revealing it all at once, use a fair key exchange protocol to exchange the tosses... This would have some drawbacks as well.

Feedback and thoughts appreciated.

0) https://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~ilanorv/CryptoFinal.pdf

1) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-14623-7_29

edit: this reddit thread appears to confirm what I thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/95d8rd/multiparty_random_number_generation/

I see, so my assumption was correct. I just wanted to make sure it didn't serve some other purpose I hadn't thought of.

I am actually developing a multi party provably fair scheme (e.g. multiple players betting on the same "roll") but I'm slowly coming to the realization it might be impossible At least, not the perfect fairness that 2 party schemes enjoy. continued: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5179222.msg52280258

It was indeed a typo. I know all of this but you haven't answered my question (appreciate the reply though).

Not technically related to Bitcoin but I couldn't find a better place to post.

Could someone explain the rationale for requiring a client seed as part of provably fair schemes?

Assuming the server seed commitment is known before placing a bet, the server can't alter the outcome in any way. Is is the idea that a server could predict betting patterns for an individual user (and shuffle cards / pick numbers accordingly)? That's the only thing I could think of which a client seed does prevent.

I have a more technical question here. Could someone explain the rationale for requiring a client seed as part of the protocol? Assuming the server seed commitment is known before placing a bet, the server can't alter the outcome in any way. Is is the idea that a server could predict betting patterns for an individual user (and shuffle cards / pick numbers accordingly)? That's the only thing I could think of which a client seed does prevent.

A bit confused by this thread... Did anyone ever recover their coins? I had about 10 BTC there 

Also had ~10 BTC on Crypto X Change 

I had about 10-20 BTC on Tradehill which I was never able to recover. I still have the private key that sent a 10 BTC deposit (not sure if there were more). I tried reaching out to Jered Kenna back in 2013 but he never replied. Also talked to Adam Stradling at some point and he told me he basically didn't know anything and to talk to Jered. At the current price of Bitcoin, 10 BTC would be a life changing amount of money for me and I'm wondering if I should pursue this recovery quest...

Anyone else in the same boat? What would you do?

Pretty easy to understand once you understand that all money is a bubble (and I don't mean that in a bad way).

The idea behind sidechains is interesting, it solves the "transferring value off Bitcoin" part but it doesn't solve how hypothetical sidechains would be secured however. The sidechains don't benefit from Bitcoin's large mining network.

FCT = factom? I'm not convinced about Factom. It doesn't achieve decentralised consensus AFAICT and requires trust in a specific network of Factom servers. It is federated at best.

That being said, I'd love to be proved wrong.

Thanks, I have heard about it but haven't read the white paper. If I understand correctly it seems to be similar to IPFS but with a built in mechanism to reward peers for bandwidth/storage. It looks interesting and seems to solve a real problem.

Could it serve as a "data layer" for an arbitrary "blockchain" database however? Seems like this would only be possible if the Storj blockchain maintains some sort of ordered index of all files stored within the network (and ensures that unavailable files are removed from the index when they become unavailable). Is that the case?

Recently, there's been a few books and some startups based on the idea of "blockchain" based databases (not altcoins). Some people talk about private blockchains. Microsoft has a "Blockchain as a Service" offering (I read the marketing page and still couldn't figure out what that was). Factom bills itself as a "scalable data layer" for the blockchain. MediaChain is building a "blockchain" for media attribution. "The Business Blockchain" by William Mougayar talks at length about how blockchains will revolutionise business without ever addressing the technical challenges. Chain.co " partners with leading organizations to build blockchain networks that transform markets" (what does that mean?).

I read the Factom paper and wasn't convinced. I like the "anchoring to the Bitcoin blockchain" approach but without a decentralised consensus mechanism of the Factom chain itself, it doesn't seem like much more than a glorified Bitcoin based time stamping system.

MediaChain is even worse in that it hasn't even addressed the consensus problem in their white paper at all, arguing that such a thing will only be needed for "scaling". As far as I understand, MediaChain is the central authority which decides which chain is valid, which is kind of the anti thesis of a blockchain. They might as well have written a REST API.

I don't mean to sound so pessimist. Notable exceptions are Ethereum which has interesting technology and addresses the decentralised consensus problem. Or "colored coins" which leverages the Bitcoin blockchain and has interesting applications.

Anyways, I'd love if someone could convince me otherwise. Am I wrong in my analysis? Are there "blockchain" based database that sound promising?

Hey guys, I was referred here by gmaxwell. I have come up with a similar protocol although I'm not sure it is implementable in Bitcoin script. One noticeable difference is that mine was designed to support arbitrary odds/payouts. I haven't had time to study the protocol proposed here in detail but it seems quite similar to mine (will comment here when I do). https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=893077.0

By the way, has anyone worked on an implementation of this? I'm not sure the increased security would make up for the inconvenience of having to wait for block confirmations for the average gambler (except maybe for large bets).

As far as I know, this is not possible because Coinbase doesn't hold each user's fund in distinct private keys. Rather, every user's balance is mixed up together and some percentage of that total balance is actually in "cold storage". If you want to own your private keys, you will have to make a transaction from Coinbase to an address you control.

Cool project, will play with it some more later. Do the commands like sendrawtransaction actually relay the transaction to the network?