gjhiggins
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January 18, 2018, 11:50:53 AM |
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An excellent and (rather unusually) well-grounded analysis of the actualité ... Book-Smart, Not Street-Smart: Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts and The Social Workings of Law - Karen E. C. Levy http://estsjournal.org/article/view/107This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the technical form of contract to the exclusion of the social contexts within which contracts operate, and the complex ways in which people use them. In the real world, contractual obligations are enforced through all kinds of social mechanisms other than formal adjudication—and contracts serve many functions that are not explicitly legal in nature, or even designed to be formally enforced. I describe three categories of contracting practices in which people engage (the inclusion of facially unenforceable terms, the inclusion of purposefully underspecified terms, and willful nonenforcement of enforceable terms) to illustrate how contracts actually “work.” The technology of smart contracts neglects the fact that people use contracts as social resources to manage their relations. The inflexibility that they introduce, by design, might short-circuit a number of social uses to which law is routinely put. Therefore, I suggest that attention to the social and relational contexts of contracting are essential considerations for the discussion, development, and deployment of smart contracts.
The core observation: “Smart contract technology, I suggest, depends on a thin conceptualization of what law does, and how it does it by focusing on the technical form of contract, to the exclusion of the social contexts within which contracts operate, and the complex ways in which people use them.” The emphasis is mine, my typical description of the phenomenon is of a “shallow” or “impoverished” mental model - academic terms, not value judgements, btw. (I spent two years being educated in Contract and Tort Law at a UK polytechnic as a mandatory component of an HND in Business Studies, with accounting, economics and marketing being t'others, so I may have an unfair advantage in that I'm not restricted by a “thin conceptualization” in this area.)Cheers Graham
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gjhiggins
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January 18, 2018, 02:43:43 PM |
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#OthersToo Enjoy ... A Short Introduction to the World of Cryptocurrencies Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, First Quarter 2018, 100(1), pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.20955/r.2018.1-16In this article, we give a short introduction to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The focus of the introduction is on Bitcoin, but many elements are shared by other blockchain implementations and alternative cryptoassets. The article covers the original idea and motivation, the mode of operation and possible applications of cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology. We conclude that Bitcoin has a wide range of interesting applications and that cryptoassets are well suited to become an important asset class.
In the Bitcoin system, money creation is scheduled so that the number of Bitcoin units will converge to 21 million units. This limit exists because the reward for the miners is halved every 210,000 blocks (approximately every four years). Correspondingly, miners will be increasingly rewarded through transaction fees. But even today, the quick processing of a transaction can be guaranteed only if an adequate fee is paid to incentivize the miners to include the transaction in their block candidates.
Most Bitcoin users believe that Bitcoin’s limited supply will result in deflation. That is, they are convinced that its value will forever increase. Indeed, up to this point we have witnessed a spectacular price increase from essentially a value of $0 for one Bitcoin unit in 2009 to a value of $7,000 at the time of this writing.
Nonetheless, these beliefs need to be challenged. Bitcoin units have no intrinsic value. Because of this, the present price of the currency is determined solely by expectations about its future price. A buyer is willing to buy a Bitcoin unit only if he or she assumes that the unit will sell for at least the same price later on. The price of Bitcoin, therefore, reacts highly elastically to changes in the expectations of market participants and is reflected in extreme price volatility. From monetary theory, we know that currencies with no intrinsic value have many equilibrium prices.5 One of them is always zero. If all market participants expect that Bitcoin will have no value in the future, then no one is willing to pay anything for it today.
However, Bitcoin is not the only currency that has no intrinsic value. State monopoly currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc, have no intrinsic value either. They are fiat currencies created by government decree. The history of state monopoly currencies is a history of wild price swings and failures. This is why decentralized cryptocurrencies are a welcome addition to the existing currency system.
In the Bitcoin system, the path for the money supply is predetermined by the Bitcoin protocol written in 2008 and early 2009. Since then, many changes have been applied to the Bitcoin protocol. Most of these changes are not controversial and have improved the functioning of the Bitcoin system. However, in principle all aspects of the Bitcoin protocol can be amended, including the money supply. Many Bitcoin critics see this as a major shortcoming. Theoretically speaking, this is correct. Any network participant can decide to follow a new set of rules and, for example, double the amount of newly created “Bitcoin” units in his or her version of the ledger. Such a modification, however, is of no value because convincing all the other network participants to follow this new set of rules will be almost impossible. If the change of the protocol is not supported unanimously, there will be a so-called fork, a split in the network, which results in two co-existing blockchains and essentially creates a new cryptoasset. In this case, there would be Bitcoin (the original) and Bitcoin42 (a possible name for an alternative implementation with an upper bound of 42 million Bitcoin42 units). The market would price the original and the newly created Bitcoin42 assets according to the community’s expectations and support. Therefore, even though in theory it is possible to increase the Bitcoin supply, in practice, such a change is very unlikely because a large part of the Bitcoin community would strongly oppose such an attempt.
Moreover, the same critique can be raised against any current government-operated fiat currency system. For example, since the Second World War, many central banks have become independent in order to shield them from political interference that yielded some undesirable outcomes. This independence has been given to them by the respective parliaments or related institutions and can be taken away if politicians decide accordingly. Political interference in the fiat currency system can be interpreted as a change in the “fiat currency protocol.” Undesirable changes in fiat currency protocols are very common and many times have led to the complete destruction of the value of the fiat currency at hand. It could be argued that, in some ways, the Bitcoin protocol is more robust than many of the existing fiat currency protocols. Only time will tell.
Cheers Graham
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d5000
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January 18, 2018, 04:42:37 PM |
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Graham, a little question:
If I build a CONSTRUCT query to return a whole block B from the RDF chain hosted by Fuseki, is it enough to query the following: 1) all triples where block B is the subject (block header stuff) 2) all transactions where block B is an object, and the triples where these transactions are subjects 3) all inputs and outputs where one of the transactions included in 2) act as subjects, and the triples where these inputs and outputs act as subjects
or are there more things I have to query?
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muf18
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January 20, 2018, 09:54:20 AM Last edit: January 20, 2018, 11:07:50 AM by muf18 |
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d5000
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January 20, 2018, 02:37:14 PM |
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Looks like their Slimcoin client stalled (has happened before). Or had you communication with them and they said that it was stopped? If not, I'll communicate with them. Has your problem with Coinhouse been solved? If you got no communication I will delete all links to them, until they solve it.
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muf18
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January 20, 2018, 05:21:56 PM |
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They respond, but still didn't fix it. I informed bchain info about a problem: Sent to info@bchain.infoHello, We would like to know, why Slimcoin block explorer: https://bchain.info/SLM/Don't work from 5 days? Is there any problem with Slimcoin client? We will help, if there is any problem. I'm writing in charge of Slimcoin community.
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muf18
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January 20, 2018, 10:32:26 PM |
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Coinhouse response:
Well it a bug in the wallet getbalance rpc command doesn't work
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gjhiggins
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January 21, 2018, 02:48:57 AM |
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Coinhouse response:
Well it a bug in the wallet getbalance rpc command doesn't work
Anyone else experience this issue? Cheers Graham
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muf18
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January 21, 2018, 09:44:55 AM |
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Question : "Why other exchanges didnt have a problem"
Coinhouse I have no idea but it looks like the wallet isn't function I am going to do more research. And since I didn't really got a respons I wasn't also able to fix this.
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psycodad
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精神分析的爸
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January 21, 2018, 10:26:44 AM |
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Coinhouse response:
Well it a bug in the wallet getbalance rpc command doesn't work
Anyone else experience this issue? Cheers Graham Nope, works just fine here: time slimcoind getbalance xxxxx.67799000
real 0m0.053s user 0m0.007s sys 0m0.005s
I'm tempted to bet on them having staking on...
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gjhiggins
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January 21, 2018, 12:36:47 PM |
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Nope, works just fine here:
Thanks for the confirmation that it works for someone else other than me. I'm finding it a persistent issue with exchange technical staff failing to understand the necessity of providing even the basic information (that would enable the problem to be reproduced), let alone raise a github issue - as anyone with even a pinch of common sense would do. I'm tempted to bet on them having staking on...
I s'pose it could be an issue with the default slimcoin branch or maybe a locked wallet makes a difference. Cheers Graham
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d5000
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January 21, 2018, 01:38:24 PM Last edit: January 26, 2018, 01:16:55 PM by d5000 |
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@muf18: Maybe ask Coinhouse to provide a full "getinfo" string (result of command "getinfo" in the Console or "slimcoind getinfo" when using the command line/daemon) so we can see if they are 1) on a wrong block height (e.g. on a fork, or stuck) and 2) if they are using a recent version or an outdated one. It would also be interesting to know the deposit address where you sent the Slimcoins, so we can see if they sent the SLM to another wallet or if they're "stuck" there. Normally exchanges, once coins are deposited, transfer the coins to their main hot & cold wallets, so if they're still on the deposit address then there's probably something wrong with their system. PS: I spotted something I believe a slight inconsistency in the RDF graph of the blockchain (in the ontology the inconsistency seems to not exist): When I query the "proofhash" of a block, I get a simple string/hexBinary with the hash. But if I query the "blockhash" of a transaction, I get an incomplete URI of the block object itself. e.g. for block 1 in a text file containing the beginning of the SLM blockchain: :proofhash "000006e022fc5e432e55cd61885d6ab9bb2ad6d5cef943f0e397ee21fe37b5db"^^xsd:hexBinary ;
while if I look at the transaction 9f18572d7c68a866a487d93669856a060d64a08f689bf032fa66bcba442f7c8b, included in that same block, I get: :C9f18572d7c68a866a487d93669856a060d64a08f689bf032fa66bcba442f7c8b a :Transaction ; :blockhash <C000006e022fc5e432e55cd61885d6ab9bb2ad6d5cef943f0e397ee21fe37b5db> ;
the hash being correct, but the format different. The format, unfortunately, is also different from the block RDF node URI itself. Is this a bug to be fixed (it makes CONSTRUCT queries more difficult) or does it have a deeper meaning? http://purl.org/net/bel-epa/ccy#blockhash (and #proofhash too) says that the range is a simple "string", that would be an indication for it to be a bug ... Thanks PS2: The line in blocknotifybase.py that adds blockhash seems to be: for txk, dt in txkeys.items(): if txk in ['blockhash']: self.g.add((txnode, CCY[txk], URIRef(ccy_urif.format(tx.get(txk)))))
Edit 3: I don't see nothing strange in this part of the code, as the CCY URI prefix seems to be added here; but the result of a SPARQL query is still different (the "blockhash" value is different to the format of the block as a subject). An example to show what I mean: When I query this: PREFIX ccy: <http://purl.org/net/bel-epa/ccy#>
SELECT ?tx ?block ?b WHERE { ?block ccy:height 1 . ?tx ccy:time 1401311603 . OPTIONAL { ?tx ccy:blockhash ?b . } }
I get this result: { "head": { "vars": [ "tx" , "block" , "b" ] } , "results": { "bindings": [ { "tx": { "type": "uri" , "value": "http://purl.org/net/bel-epa/ccy#C9f18572d7c68a866a487d93669856a060d64a08f689bf032fa66bcba442f7c8b" } , "block": { "type": "uri" , "value": "http://purl.org/net/bel-epa/ccy#C000006e022fc5e432e55cd61885d6ab9bb2ad6d5cef943f0e397ee21fe37b5db" } , "b": { "type": "uri" , "value": "C000006e022fc5e432e55cd61885d6ab9bb2ad6d5cef943f0e397ee21fe37b5db" } } ] } }
being "b" a value for the blockhash property, but in a different format than "block".
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eddycurrent
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January 22, 2018, 08:59:56 AM Last edit: January 22, 2018, 09:36:36 AM by eddycurrent |
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Hello all, I have been thinking about how to upgrade Slimcoin's UI, and wanted to get an idea of what the community would like in terms of look and layout. Do we want a smoother look like the Magicoin wallet or a crisper look like the Monero wallet or the Bytecoin wallet. The other aspect is do we want a vertical layout like Monero and Bytecoin or horizontal like Magicoin? Any input will be appreciated. Also, I just tested the ssl fix. I still have one error: src/bitcoinrpc.cpp: In function ‘json_spirit::Object CallRPC(const string&, const Array&)’: src/bitcoinrpc.cpp:4665:58: error: no matching function for call to ‘boost::asio::ssl::context::context(boost::asio::io_service&, boost::asio::ssl::context_base::method)’ ssl::context context(io_service, ssl::context::sslv23);
Regards
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ojeck
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January 23, 2018, 04:50:22 AM |
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muf18
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January 23, 2018, 10:21:36 PM |
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Thanks.
I'm raising with yobit, issue, to their mail, still having received any response, so I sent new mail.
I hope they will respond soon, it's more than week now after I have made a proper request (14.01).
Sorry for delay, and if it's my fault (but I don't know where I have made exactly everything like it should be), I'll try to do next time better.
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gjhiggins
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January 24, 2018, 04:30:20 AM |
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Also, I just tested the ssl fix. I still have one error:
An overlooked instance of the deprecated usage, I committed a fix. Cheers Graham
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