As the CRW team develops different uses for the system -- it's a platform that includes a "wallet" (functionally limited client software), and 2 layers of servers with a few thousand nodes....

As uses for this cloud are developed, or just connected and permissioned -- it might be that simple.....  then it is worth thinking about what would drive "sustainable value" -- and by sustainable value I am really referring to patterns which can be repeated and which compound such that you can get compounding growth which is supported by the system itself.  In financial mathematical terms this is the Du Pont Equation... 

If the platform is able to deliver uses to people at a cost which is less than what the uses are worth to people -- then the system will be creating wealth, and it would be sustainable. 

This is why for every project, it is all about the uses which can be created.

I would argue that what CRW has built is a sort of organic cloud compute resource which now just needs to be opened up for use in some fashion.  The fact that CRW conceives of the nodes as a "cloud" and as a "resource" and that the systems has a differentiation between the client and server layers is itself interesting. 

feels like the next big opportunity once the cloud is turned on for use will be to evolve the client software.  because the "client" software -- which is really the iOs and the Android apps -- should be able to access applications through the CRW cloud.... or whatever the team decides to call it. 

The goal of every business is to maximize their TAM -- or target addressable market.  The TAM for CRW is anyone who uses the cloud and a smart phone to live their life -- and then to give creative people everywhere an opportunity to develop and distribute and collect payment for their software and services on that platform.  very simple.

looking forward to seeing it all come together.

Prior to leaving the team in September, I held 820,000 CRW tokens.  I had sized the position based on it being 2% of the final token count.

I left the team in September because I had watched my father flatline as his mitral valve blew out and the surgeons rushed in to take him in for emergency heart surgery.  Luckily we already had him at the hospital -- but it's the kind of experience that has a way to cause one to stop and re-assess.

While I believe in crypto and I also believe that eventually pretty much everything will be tokenized -- this and every crypto project is also fundamentally speculative.  And my appetite for speculation changed after seeing my dad's eyes roll up as his heart stopped and they rolled him out to surgery.  After the surgery, he was kept in a medical coma for most of a week, giving the family some time to think and reflect, before they brought him back up.

So I left the team and have been reducing my position since I am no longer actively involved in the project -- and it felt inappropriate to me to sit on a large position in something I was not actively involved in -- that's just my temperament. And the position was also worth a lot of money, some of which I needed to help my family since it doesn't take a genius to figure out that my father might never be able to work again.  

I have not communicated regarding any of my sales with the core team until I was approached today to ask something like "WTF @@%##%&!" ?  

My current position is 175,000 CRW less the Bitrex fee for transferring it out in the last hour or so -- so people can see that if they want to confirm this.

I am sorry that my activities to reduce my position have caused people to attack and disparage members of the core team.   My activities had nothing to do with their efforts and were driven by separate "shit happens" in my own life.  

The core team is making amazing progress -- and I would encourage folks to think about the example of Tezos, who raised a few hundred million for non-existent governance.  I am excited about a few of the things the guys are working on -- but the best part may be having an engineer focused on the governance system now.  Soon Crown will have a crypto system with a multi-tier cloud network, a proposal allocation system to internalize development funding, and a mutli-layer governance structure for allocating proposal funds and also empowering "agents" to act on the network.  Application providers would be an instance of an agent.  Different types of nodes would be other instances of agents -- but the agents like the nodes aren't designated by a vote of the network - so that would create an interesting structure.

My own strategy with Crown at this point is to just hold onto enough of a position to maintain an option on building an application business once that part of the system has been built.  Artem will be able to explain where that is.

Hope that helps explain some of what has been going on in the market to people and also gives everyone a way to monitor at least what I am doing.

yup -- so the idea is to incent the addition of network capacity in the system node layer.

the most interesting part will be what this capacity will be used for over time -- the short-term rewards are just the use of simple skinner box dynamics to draw fourth resources, or bootstrap, what one would hope would be a "cloud" of several thousand nodes of compute capacity. 

The value of any of these crypto networks is as a sort of open cloud.  the token is simply the coordination mechanism.  the limits are whatever the limits of the "shared imagination" of the community are... but to define a shared imagination one needs a more sophisticated governance system than proof of work, or the current proposal system...

it's not that complicated really -- just have to plan out and game out what a crypto system could be and not get stuck in what any of the existing solutions are.

I'm still fascinated that no one seems to care that the OTC derivatives community that created the financial crisis has seized control of bitcoin... idealism and values can be very plastic when money gets involved -- kind of why you need a better governance system than proof of work to have a genuine shared imagination and evolutionary community.  anyway, life is strange.

All the trolling is interesting.  The only incentive to troll is either: (1) crazy, or (2) talk done the price because someone is buying and then flip the bias and pump the coin.

Given that there weren't any trolls while nothing was being released and that some folks seem to be active now -- it's strangely a sign of a successful release as far as I can tell.

Crypto is weird.  The only thing weirder is the actual financial markets probably, that and certain genre's of instrumental music...

The rewards for an individual system node will be a function of the total number of system nodes -- so one can't make a precise prediction.

With each block, a system node will randomly be selected as "leader" for the that block and that system node will receive a 0.9 CRW reward.   Blocks currently complete about once a minute.

There are 1440 minutes in a day (24 x 60) and very close to 1440 blocks per day.  So each day, the system nodes on the system will receive 1440 different 0.9 CRW rewards for a total of 1296 CRW going to system nodes per day.

And then this is where the math starts to get interesting -- because masternodes require 20x the collateral as system nodes, but receive only 5x the reward of a system node.  Masternodes get 4.5 CRW per block...  and there are currently about 1,200 masternodes. 

Now, if VPS or compute were free and governance voting weren't an "economic asset" -- in a network with the reward and collateral structure proposed for CRW, the equilibrium between the return on masternodes and system nodes is that if there are "X" masternodes, then you would have 4*X system nodes...  in other words -- if 1,200 masternodes stay up, then the return on system nodes will be higher than the return on masternodes until there are around 4,800 system nodes in a zero VPS/compute cost world...  in the real world the return breakeven will depend on the cost of your VPS -- but the equilibrium is probably around 3x as many system nodes as masternodes.

Why more system nodes?
1. In the long term, system nodes should be able to do a lot of grunt work for the network -- so you want more capacity and diversity, more numbers in this layer... and you need to set it up the way you want it when you start, not later.
2. More people have the ability to own smaller stakes, so in terms of building and engaging the community -- you want to have more seats at the smaller collateral level, as way for people to start and get to know the community and think about how they can add value to the network -- what ideas they would like to propose or contribute.

Or that's the way I think of it.  Others may explain it differently.

From my point of view the introduction of system nodes is a bigger deal than I think people realize for several reasons:
1. It creates a dynamic equilibrium between master nodes and system nodes within the network -- there will be tokens to be made by switching between system nodes and master nodes based on the number of system nodes and master nodes.
2. The system nodes will add capacity to the network to support utility applications -- so what is just an NTP server now could be multiple or other packages.  Could be cool to have a relationship with Discord or others to package their server software to run on system nodes. 
3. The API, which will manage applications, payments and sign-in / sign-out or user registration, such that the blockchain can behave as an openPKI for registered applications will connect the network capacity which is being deployed in all these nodes to applications and economic uses.
4. The economic uses will be around compute, communication and commerce... just like the team has been discussing.  The idea that a system should be general use instead of special purpose is another of those important strategic decisions that the CRW team made early based on the simple observation that general use systems seem to always win at the end of the day.
5. But the most important fact is that the system nodes will allow for a whole lot of more people to get engaged in the community... proposing ideas and playing with the code, and offering improvements.

I do think that there is something amazing being built here -- a platform without an agenda, which will be available for people to put in motion.  The only caveat being that the anonymizing features have been pulled out -- so if someone wants to use it to do something that could get everyone else in trouble, the record of it will be there in the chain -- in the long-term the value proposition is usefulness, not anything else.... as I understand it.

Nice work guys.

Makes sense. The more info and pictures / flows for different processes the better. thx for sharing.

Thanks for the update.  From the activity in the GitHub, it looks like we are close to being able to play with the System Nodes in the testnet to work out the bugs?  Is the planned collateral requirement for the System Nodes still 500 CRW? thx.

Makes sense. Thx!

Nice to see different local communities getting set up.  

For the dev team -- anything more that can be discussed in terms of what the original "skeleton keys" are evolving into, specifically around how the network will "license" different "agents" to enable the different capabilities discussed in Atomic, but in a what should be amore distributed and resilient way than other solutions?  A drawing or 1 pager on this would be awesome to help people (including me) -- understand....

Also -- this helps the developing network of ambassadors start to plan how an initial communications and education role in a local community would be able to develop into a business.  Snoops 2nd reddit update expressed that better than I ever could.  

Love seeing the consistent progress from Ashot on the system nodes.  Would just be great to have some visibility for the community into the work Artem & Chaositec are doing as well.  

I don't think people who haven't been to one of the meetings quite get the scope of the project, and the potential of using different keys to unlock different capabilities within a crypto systems -- and not just using the keys to sign a transfer of tokens, but having more uses for the keys and more uses for the tokens too....

And when you think of it that way it is also obvious why having a cryptographer like Artem involved now is essential (thank you defunctec!).  

I've had to step back from actively working on CRW for personal reasons -- but this project is different than anything else I've come across in crypto, and has much more potential than anyone really appreciates (in my opinion).  

Every other decent project I looked at (including bitcoin and ethereum) has been "captured" by some limiting factor -- either a fundamental architecture problem or an core economic community or interest group or a specific application.  By building on lessons the core team learned from other projects and also just working quietly during this year's coin frenzy -- Crown may be in the process of managing to sneak up on the competition... or that is what I would like to believe.

I tend to read and think too much -- but the problem that we are really trying to solve with these networks isn't a "token" problem -- but to create a system for managing a Common Pool Resource -- a commons.  First off, you can't create a commons with an ICO -- it has to be built on top of a community... The most iconic work on this subject is probably Elinor Ostrom's nobel prize winning notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom -- and her principles for the management of common pool resources.  And within this -- all these guys who want to create a new internet are kind of screwing up too... sorry IPFS...  you aren't creating a network -- you are using a network to create a common pool resource.  The problem has been a problem of composition / framing...  and damn I have taken a beating from some for making this point -- because most of us have only read about one thing or another and we are too specialized in our knowledge.

A crypto-commons or kerckhoff social network (fuck the whole crypto-currency thing -- it's so 2009)... but a crypto-commons which is a common pool resource managed by the governance structure of the network and with it's resources allocated by the token which is intrinsic to the network... and where that commons has an interface on iOs & Android (2.6 B smart phones at current count) --- well this is a new sort of nervous system for, well, the world... and that is when your Ostrom needs to be informed by Stuart Kaufmann's insights into networks, complexity and evolution.  I was introduced to Kaufman by someone I met on the Crown Mattermost who used to work with him decades ago and suggested that an understanding of Kaufmann's work was what I was missing.... and he was right.  The key to Kaufmann is in understanding the characteristics of different network structures and the range between rigidity and chaos -- which helps one think about how to structure a network which is a mix of stability and chaos... or where you push the edges of the network to the edge of chaos, but keep the core of the network stable... there are plenty of examples of this in nature... the book to start with on Kaufmann is probably At Home in the Universe -- chapter 4.  Kaufmann's insights on networks actually help explain why 2 tiered governance structures are so common and stable -- a unified structure is too rigid, but as you get into 3 or more layers -- it gets exponentially more complex (roughly) to get agreements, so it becomes to unstable -- so 1 is too rigid, 3 is too fluid.... and it turns out that golidlocks was wise beyond her years.  

Then the final step in the back ground stuff -- is that Kaufmann ultimately connects to the importance of the sacred -- or something which is taken as given at the core of a system.  I think of this in terms of Gödel's incompleteness theorem -- we must start with an assumption and that assumption is what is sacred... for Crown, the assumption that I imagine that it starts with is that human agency and freedom are what is sacred -- or what is assumed to be good.  And this is where I lose many folks... and where I think most of crypto would say I am full of shit... but this is where the opportunity is too...  because there is some reason everyone is doing this?  For many it is probably a sort of gambling addiction and just fun -- but we are playing with amazing technologies which can do a lot more than laundering money and avoiding taxes or providing amusement...

You just have to step into a different frame and imagine what could be if you start with the idea that human agency should be sacred and encouraged, and that we have a network structure which can be designed with evolutionary principles to be both self-governing and stable at the core and dancing on the edge of chaos with different agents out on the edges, and owned by no one, but governed by itself following the principles we have learned from observing the goverance of other common resources in societies over centuries.

Just an idea... this is the shared imagination referred to in the first of the crown papers.  But it doesn't exist yet -- people have to build it.

Nice work guys.  I know this is complicated but also know that you are close to having it wrapped up.  Keep up the good work.

and yes -- the papers are vague and dated at this point.  but the ideas and principles are genuine and haven't changed -- and the points in the knowledge are all still relevant.

we have learned a lot since last December when most of the papers were drafted...  apologies that their isn't more technical detail yet -- our documentation and specification deficiency is something that a few of the new team members will be able to address.  the new guys just don't quite have the confidence yet to fully assert themselves but I think they will get comfortable soon.

people seem to be thrown by a friendly, relatively humble group of people working on a crypto project and it takes them a while to believe that is actually what's going on...

good questions -- will check out SIA. 

in terms of applications -- just think of the nodes as gateways -- we are just using them to do payment and user management -- treating the blockchain as an open pki... in terms of how the applications will be implemented or provisioned -- there are no specific constraints beyond that a user is functionally signing on to a cloud application.  That application may or may not be provisioned and managed by the masternode.

We have preferences -- ideally people would run open source applications and all the resources would be provisioned by the masternodes... but we also do not believe in telling the node operators how to run their businesses beyond requiring them to comply with the relevant laws.

And yes -- all user data in applications would need to be encrypted at rest with the keys in the possession of the user not the application provider or the node operator.  This is a US legal requirement and I believe also applies in the EU and is just a best practice. 

Hope that answers things.  I'm on cali time and need to crash... feel free to join the mattermost (mm.crownlab.eu) and keep asking questions or offering ideas.  That's how we learn and improve.

g'night!

What is tricky is that we are trying to create a distributed structure -- but the network itself is the "central" dependency.  Try not to think of what we are doing in terms of what ethereum created with contracts -- that is a horrible bastardization of things (IMHO).  All we are trying to do is to create a system of bilateral at will agreements which could be rescinded by either party at any time.... so that a "contract" in the Crown Network is deliberately fragile, whereas a "contract" in ETH is like Proud Words in Carl Sandburg's Primer Lesson....  The contracts in the Crown sense are just a multi-sig process used to represent or reference a specific text or legal agreement which exists in a storage structure off chain.

What all this begins with will be a non-profit being formed in a given legal jurisdiction, and that non-profit making a proposal to the network to represent it / or act as an agent of the network in specific ways, in the relevant legal jurisdiction. The idea is to create a "legal template" for a non-profit and then allow those by-laws / articles of incorporation / etc... to be cloned or copied in different legal jurisdictions.  No agent of the network would ever have an exclusive geography, so there could be multiple competing "agents" offering the same services -- like licensing masternodes or titling assets or whatever process they designed.  The initial focus is on trying to get non-profits set up for the US, EU and UK as we also develop the software capabilities which we need the legal functions we believe this structure will provide.

So around the core network, we would hope to develop another layer of non-profit entities in different geographies which provide a "bridge" between the ability of hashes to represent information the blockchain to record and secure information, and different legal systems.  We have landed on this solution because of the obvious problems with having one non-profit foundation as the "exclusive" representative of the network -- as is the standard currently in leading projects.

Masternode operators will be able to get a license to offer applications to the Crown Network from one of the non-profits representing the network -- a privilege which really just lets them define and collect fees and then be the "bridge" to applications which the node operator may or may not also be provisioning.  But then the masternode can cancel the license, or the non-profit can cancel the license.  There should probably be some cause for cancellation -- but I would rather not put any requirement in -- I would rather conceive of these "contracts" as bilateral at will agreements.  In this way, the non-profit is responsible for itself and the masternode is responsible for itself.  A key function of this structure is to be able to isolate legal risk and responsibility -- a notable weakness of the existing "smart contract" structures and a feature which seems more dumb than smart.  We need this sort of structure because although the network is global, legal systems and jurisdictions aren't -- so you need to be able to have a structure that can be as messy as the map of legal jurisdictions.  This is abhorrent from a logical elegance perspective -- but it is very human.

Hope that makes some sense.  It all gives me a headache and I am looking forward to getting the different pieces of this system up and running so that we can see how it works and adapt.  

I don't think we really know what will work yet -- all we are trying to do with Crown is set up a platform that will let a bunch of people run a bunch of different experiments.  This is the big idea.  All the other crypto projects seem to think the answer is for them to push their one brilliant idea on the world.  Crown is about building something to let everyone in the world be able to come and try out their brilliant ideas -- because we are just smart enough to know that there are a lot of people smarter than we are... and we are actually curious what people will do with it.

But we also want everyone to be able to keep whatever they create -- and that doesn't work if we piss off every government in the world -- so we are trying to create different bridging structures.  But the idea in the long-term is to help create new legal interpretations and not to just passively interpret the law.  It all ends up being complicated, but it's a fun puzzle.  

In terms of how this would work with a distributed app running across many nodes and jurisdictions -- well, it would work the same way it works now -- that distributed app is actually under the purview of every jurisdiction it is operating in.  We won't be changing anything about the basic structure of law.  I would point out that if you understand how jurisdiction works, then you instantly should see how ethereum cannot ever be legal.... or the only legal use of ethereum is as a corporate or state control system within a jurisdiction, because it's absence of a concept of jurisdiction means that it cannot (as currently architected) ever be able to bend to the differences in legal codes in different states. The implicit assumption of ethereum is that nation states will bend to it. 

In the system we are attempting to build for Crown, each masternode has the responsibility for complying with the laws in it's legal jurisdiction -- or where the individual or business running the node is domiciled/operates.  If an app needs to run across multiple jurisdictions, then that is a consideration for the application designer.  It is not an issue for the network -- the network will have set up a contract structure to protect it from these risks.    As a practical matter, as long as an application isn't facilitating criminal activity, which would be a violation of the licensing agreement and if a masternode ran an application that provided support for a criminal network, it would be the responsibility of the non-profit which issued the license to rescind it...

This whole discussion can get heated and idealistic -- but we are just trying to be pragmatic and take the world as it is, so that we can play a role in creating what it will be. 

Chaositec can respond more specifically, but I believe what you noticed were the thrones hosted on NodeVPS coming back online.  So those aren't actually new nodes -- just a new server and programming backend to add capacity at NodeVPS...

sounds perfectly fair to me, and appreciate your directness. 

we won't ever all agree -- that would be boring -- but we need to be able to share perspectives and listen and try to learn from each other.

thx.

Slightly non-topical, but worth considering:
All the plays in Shakespeare's First Folio were there because Shakespeare never owned them... the Kings Men did and so there was an incentive to try to figure out how to profit from the plays after Shakespeare's death.... as long as the Kings Men were still kicking around... and so you created a book for subscriptions which was composed of plays, something not done before.  

Plays were published in quartet form I believe... paperback book equivalent that wouldn't last... so many plays from the time are lost... but not those in the First Folio... not the plays by Shakespeare which Shakespeare didn't own...

So when I link the ideas of Distributed Ownership -- or really the absence of ownership beyond the holding of individual tokens -- in a crypto project, the social basis for this is to create incentives which are not anchored to any one person or group....  and this is an evolutionary process -- so you start with proven models POW, POS, and mix them and evolve from there.

But what may be useful to consider is the end goal, which may or may not ever be reached -- which is a distributed cacophony of interests balanced in a community development and discussion process.  Not utopian -- messy and confusing -- but not reliant an any one group either.  

This is laid out in the papers that no one reads...... or at least which are poorly written enough that few seem to get it.

Anyway, interesting to think about past models which have worked and survived and few enough seem to be aware of the role of ownership structures in creating the Shakespearean canon...  

It is useful to step back and remember that in changing methods of exchange and transaction costs, we aren't talking about peevish little projects or goals -- but literally will be monkeying with and are monkeying with the fabric of societies.  

Crown's modest initial goal is to pry open access to applications and the cloud a little bit.  Then we will go from there.  In a sense the project flips ETH on it's head -- instead of centralizing compute on the blockchain, the goal is to let the blockchain open the door to distributed compute resources.

So instead of Shakespeare's plays being owned by the King's Men -- the idea is to publish an evolving folio of applications, with distributed access and distributed right and heterogeneous implementations.  It will be new and messy and fun... just like life -- or a trip to the theater in Elizabethan times.    

I would just like to state that I appreciate infernoman not resorting to namecalling and also admitting when he realized he was in error -- it is one of the characteristics that makes him good to work with.  

I would also like to point out that computergenie started this thread by accusing the coin of "robbing" miners, and clips the thread in his successive responses -- which doesn't facilitate discourse.

Computergenie has not made any incorrect statements -- but he even correctly identified identified that the key to a coin or crypto project is the community and Stonehedge agreed and invited him to join the discussion and community on Mattermost.  I haven't checked there, so I don't know if that has happened - but I believe that speaks to where the Crown team is coming from.  

And I know infernoman has been sleep deprived and deluged with inquiries -- so I also give him a pass for swinging at a deliberate insult online.

And I find that the smartest people are the ones who are able to recognize their mistakes, take responsibility and pivot.

Computergenie - you are correct that what makes a project is the community and that makes a good community isn't a bunch of weak people who need agreement -- but people who are ready to be challenged, test their ideas, adapt and respond.

This is what creates long-term survival and the ability to do this is why Crown will be a long-term alt-coin.  

The fact that mining hash is variable and so Crown has followed a strategy of being merge-mined and added DGW, and split the block reward between "trons/thones/nodes" and miners is because of the variability of the hash rate for small coins.  No one is being robbed -- that in itself is a strange sort of "entitlement" -- as though miners "own" the project.  In fact the power of the project is that no one owns it and your implicit belief that miners should own it is mal-adaptive to the crypto community -- if anyone owns any of these projects it will kill the project in the long run -- strange its ability to innovate.  I would argue that is part of what Bitcoin is struggling with -- this mal-adaptive belief you unwittingly expressed to start the thread.

To protect the long-term nature of the Crown project, the team had to rely on long-term participants -- which is where the nodes come in.

Anyway -- it's also worth going back to what mining originally was for Satoshi -- which was just a social hack to distribute coins to new users and build the community -- another point of failure is the emergence of ASICS and the concentration of mining which has choked off the building of the crypto community rather than acting as a vector of expansion.  So while mining still serves a purpose for security -- it does not provide community expansion (social hack) or any mechanism for long-term stability for new projects.

Anyway -- welcome to the community everyone.  Delighted to have discussion and be challenged, it means people are listening -- but dislike mean people, stupidity and the inability to consider ideas in a broader context.  Worth taking a look at the Dunning Kruger effect on this -- we all have to be aware of where are blind spots and biases are or fall prey to that one.

We can all make perfectly accurate statements and also be completely wrong from time to time.  I'm actually wrong most of the time -- I just try to be wrong in new and interesting ways each time.    Crown would love to have a long-term stable mining base -- but the technology and economics of mining don't seem to support this, and that's just the world we live in.  Anything can be ASIC'd... and once it is then mining is an arms race -- not a distribution vector to add new users.  So mining only serves one of its two original purposes -- security -- and so it doesn't EARN the whole reward.  This doesn't seem to be a conclusion unique to Crown, but rather the way the crypto community is evolving in response to survival pressures.

Hope that makes some sense.  If I'm wrong in any of this, please let me know.

Thank you stonehedge....