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[cyberhacker]

poornamelessme, can we please ease up on the restart talk?

Even if you continue telling me to restart everything for another 10 pages,
everyone who supports Elastic Coin can be confident that

- no rules will be changed arbitrarily
- no premine will be done ever
- no companies, no lawyers and no other institutional players will be involved in the development process
- nothing gets restarted

good. we would like to see team page on the website, if possible.

If It is necessary to reserve the left-over ELC for fund pool of future development.  It would be quite easy that Dev buy all the remaining, BTC is going from left to right pocket. and the ELC bought by dev can be distributed as He wants.

just saying.

[cyberhacker]

What if he sells 2M coins and is leftover with 3M? No investor would be happy with that. I'm not so sure any investor would be happy if even 1M was leftover.

If only 2M coins are distributed then its great for the investors, their proportionate amount of ELC in fact gets bigger.

I would love to see bigger Proportion for risk takers

[poornamelessme]

What if he sells 2M coins and is leftover with 3M? No investor would be happy with that. I'm not so sure any investor would be happy if even 1M was leftover.

If only 2M coins are distributed then its great for the investors, their proportionate amount of ELC in fact gets bigger.

[...] organize things in a more professional manner.

Can we settle this restart-talk for now? I do not like to repeat myself over and over again.

Everyone who supports Elastic Coin can be sure that
- nothing will be restarted
- rules are not going to be changed in any way
- no institutional player or lobbyist will be involved in the development process
- there will be no premine in any form

I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. If coins were set aside or the unsold were used for contribution purposes, it wouldn't be a proportional rate anymore... or at least the proportion outlined in the current ICO.

I was just stating to Dazza that you couldn't do what he was suggesting, without restarting things. Simple as that, no need to get defensive or act like I am harping on a restart. I get it, you don't want to restart or change any of the ICO terms ... so was just pointing out why what he suggested wouldn't work.

[poornamelessme]

If It is necessary to reserve the left-over ELC for fund pool of future development.  It would be quite easy that Dev buy all the remaining, BTC is going from left to right pocket. and the ELC bought by dev can be distributed as He wants.

just saying.

And I hope you realize that isn't a good thing.

[cyberhacker]

If It is necessary to reserve the left-over ELC for fund pool of future development.  It would be quite easy that Dev buy all the remaining, BTC is going from left to right pocket. and the ELC bought by dev can be distributed as He wants.

just saying.

And I hope you realize that isn't a good thing.

ANY ICO play that trick, but ELC didn't.

Evil is honest and make it clear rule will not be changed. if there is only 2 million sold, there will be only 2 million in circulation.

That is what i understand from above statement.

I think we should not waste time on this since there is no clue that dev do evil, we would better not ask him to do.

[Dazza]

If It is necessary to reserve the left-over ELC for fund pool of future development.  It would be quite easy that Dev buy all the remaining, BTC is going from left to right pocket. and the ELC bought by dev can be distributed as He wants.

just saying.

And I hope you realize that isn't a good thing.

Why not?  It's his ELC, paid for out of his own pocket.  Why should he not do with it whatever he likes, just as you and I can do whatever we like with ours?

He can't do whatever he likes with the BTC that's gone into the right pocket.  He can only spend that to further the project.  All expenditure should be transparent and he should account to the community for his decisions.

[poornamelessme]

If It is necessary to reserve the left-over ELC for fund pool of future development.  It would be quite easy that Dev buy all the remaining, BTC is going from left to right pocket. and the ELC bought by dev can be distributed as He wants.

just saying.

And I hope you realize that isn't a good thing.

Why not?  It's his ELC, paid for out of his own pocket.  Why should he not do with it whatever he likes, just as you and I can do whatever we like with ours?

He can't do whatever he likes with the BTC that's gone into the right pocket.  He can only spend that to further the project.  All expenditure should be transparent and he should account to the community for his decisions.

Because it's exactly what he said he wouldn't do ... back when we were discussing ways to exploit an ICO.

If a dev buys his own coin like that, he gets both the BTC and ELC. And yes, he can then use the ELC to donate to contributors (as it's like a premine at that point), but it also lowers the proportion of coins all other investors get ... such as if 2.5M are sold to investors, 2.5M bought by dev, it's equivalent to a 50% premine. And ideally that BTC that goes from left to right pocket is spent to further the project, but it's not exactly something easy to verify.

And that said, it's not necessarily a bad idea for a dev to have a small premine set aside to pay out contributors and for promo purposes. I don't think may people have an issue with that.

But to be exact, I was replying to Cyberhacker's statement that it was easy for the dev buy ALL of the remaining coin. That is the part that isn't so good... you don't want a dev buying too much of his own coin like that.

[Dazza]

I think we should not waste time on this since there is no clue that dev do evil, we would better not ask him to do.

I do not agree that I have been asking him to do evil.  But I accept that his decision has been made, and that it is final.  We will have to live with the consequences, good or bad.

[cyberhacker]

I think we should not waste time on this since there is no clue that dev do evil, we would better not ask him to do.

I do not agree that I have been asking him to do evil.  But I accept that his decision has been made, and that it is final.  We will have to live with the consequences, good or bad.

sure.

all i want is that he and his team can deliver whatever promised.   

[poornamelessme]

I think we should not waste time on this since there is no clue that dev do evil, we would better not ask him to do.

I do not agree that I have been asking him to do evil.  But I accept that his decision has been made, and that it is final.  We will have to live with the consequences, good or bad.

I should point out that I mostly agree with you by the way. A small premine set aside for giveaways, promotion, marketing, testing and so on does make sense. But again, it wasn't in the original ICO terms, hence why it's not so easy to do at this point.

As for other devs contributing to the coin down the road, I assume they will be paid in BTC, so that part may be easy to take care of. Paying in ELC would be the tricky part.

[poornamelessme]

A small premine set aside for giveaways, promotion, marketing, testing and so on does make sense.

I can only speak for myself: although I have not participated in many crowdsales so far, I have been buying promising altcoins ever since.
First part of a decision, and I am not joking here, was to open up the announcement and do a text search for the word "premine".
A hit would immediately disqualify the coin for me and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

In my opinion premines always had this get-rich-quick connotation. I don't like them.

Most people don't, but when being realistic, most coins do need a small premine to pay contributors and get promotion going. The problem of course is when a premine is like 20-50% of the coin, not some minor percentage.

Besides, a premine in ICO-land is somewhat different than in a traditional coin. As already stated, if we pretend you put some of your own BTC into ELC, then turn around and offer Dazza (or any dev) that ELC for his help, that is the equivalent to a premine. It all gets muddled when talking about ICOs.

I'm not saying you should do this, or change any ICO terms. But Dazza has a point... unless you use BTC for payouts, it's not as easy without ELC set aside.

[nihilnegativum]

Well, it depends on the definition of "compatible".
I am pretty sure that you can take a task from folding@home and have it solved by the Elastic Coin network (or its miners).

I think we are aiming at general-purpose computing.  If it is a task that can be performed by a computer, then we can do that task for you.  But there will be several caveats.

First, as I envisage things, you will need source code, since applications will need to be specially compiled with a compiler which we will provide.  Initially only one programming language will be available.  I'm sure others will join it over time.

Second, "my scheme" for the PoW function which EK and I have been discussing, has an aspect which hasn't been discussed at all so far.  It will vastly add to the storage requirement in the blockchain.  Essentially the entire data-segment of the program that wins the block will need to be stored in order to be able to verify the block.  Consequently we may have to limit the size of that data-segment.  Since I am now convinced that "my scheme" is unworkable and we will have to find a different solution, I don't think this will be an issue, though of course the individual nodes will have their own memory and storage restrictions.

Third your data will be made available at the very least to a large bunch of random people, and probably to the entire general public.  So while it might be possible for us to process your company payroll, it would be neither legal, ethical, nor sensible for you to use it for that purpose.

The hard problem is #2, but I don't think that limitation of size is the right solution, it negates the main functionality of Elastic. Why not have nodes set the limit themselves or something similar? In any case, the problem consists of storage requirement for mostly miners (anyone else will be content to use a lightweight wallet) that already specalize for mining, and probably don't see a problem with adding a disk to their ASIC.

[Evil-Knievel]

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[Evil-Knievel]

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[Dazza]

Have you guys looked into Tau chain https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=950309.0 ?

There are some similarities to ELC such as 'proof of code execution' although I'm not sure if that is used to secure the chain or just get payment. I tried to follow Tau chain / Agoras a while back but a lot of the AI-type stuff just seemed overly optimistic to me.

I had a look at this.

The overview is utterly incomprehensible to me.  There are a lot of buzz words about things I know somewhere between little and nothing about.  I am not competent to evaluate this, though the suspicion is raised that it is meaningless technobabble.

Then I clicked on one of the links, and found this:  The first part of this post makes sense to me, and accords more-or-less with my understanding of how Bitcoin and Etherium work, not that I know much about the latter.  (Or the former, for that matter.) Then we get to this bit:

But it turns out that life aren't so easy. The Halting problem over Turing machines became so famous not because its answer is “No”, but because its answer is both “Yes” and “No”! A contradiction. This situation is mildly called “undecidability”. And this can go arbitrarily far: any such contradiction can be elevated to any statement, supplying a proof that it is true, and also supplying a proof that it is false!

Nonsense.  The situation is called "undecidability" because there is no way to decide whether an arbitrary TM halts or not.  The answer is not both "yes" and "no".  It is one or the other, but we can't tell which.  You should also understand that undecidability is not just a statement about our ignorance.  It is built into the mathematics.

Undecidability is not a problem for the programmer.  It's his job to ensure that his program is decidable, and that it does what he wants it to do.  Undecidability is (potentially) a problem for the people who run programs supplied by others.  Etherium's solution to the halting problem - aborting the program when it runs out of "gas" - is the same as ours, and it is the correct solution.  However the halting problem is not the only undecidable problem in computing and the issue will recur for us.

Because of such pathologies, we can never trust a proof over a Turing complete language.  Completeness here happens to be precisely the completeness Godel spoke about, when he proved that any language that is expressive enough to describe arithmetic, must be either inconsistent or incomplete. Since Turing complete languages are also “Godel-complete”, they are provably inconsistent.

Utter balderdash.  Turing-complete languages are languages which can compute anything a TM can.  Godel-completeness means that any statement expressible in the language is also decidable in it.  The very existence of undecidable problems shows that TMs are not Godel-complete.

At this point, you can stop reading.  The author, who also appears to be the project leader, does not know what he's talking about.

[Cryptorials]

Have you guys looked into Tau chain https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=950309.0 ?

There are some similarities to ELC such as 'proof of code execution' although I'm not sure if that is used to secure the chain or just get payment. I tried to follow Tau chain / Agoras a while back but a lot of the AI-type stuff just seemed overly optimistic to me.

I had a look at this.

The overview is utterly incomprehensible to me.  There are a lot of buzz words about things I know somewhere between little and nothing about.  I am not competent to evaluate this, though the suspicion is raised that it is meaningless technobabble....


...At this point, you can stop reading.  The author, who also appears to be the project leader, does not know what he's talking about.

Thank you for that Dazza. My own non-technical opinion when I was considering buying into their crowdsale, based only on intuition and not any actual understanding, was also that it was a lot of 'technobabble' as you say, and that the they would not be able to do what they were saying they were going to do, but I was never sure and it seemed to contain some interesting ideas so its good to hear a more knowledgeable opinion about it.

[Dazza]

Second, "my scheme" for the PoW function which EK and I have been discussing, has an aspect which hasn't been discussed at all so far.  It will vastly add to the storage requirement in the blockchain.  Essentially the entire data-segment of the program that wins the block will need to be stored in order to be able to verify the block.

We have to use the "checkpoint" scheme as already known from Bitcoin.
Checkpoints have to be set on a regular basis, so that it will be not required to keep track of everything that took place before that. We need to come up with a smart way to do it "decentralized". At least if we go the traditional blockchain approach.

For different schemes however, different opportunities may arise.

Bitcoin is limited to 1MB per block and it already amounts to over 50GB in total.  Our blocks could be hundreds or thousands of times larger, under "my scheme" as I've been thinking about it.  And that's without handling any more transactions per second than Bitcoin.

But there's a solution.  Just eliminate any and all variables not read in the PoW.  This would have the additional advantage of eliminating the "nonce" used by the attacker to effect the "run once, hash many times" attack I described earlier.

Still too much data?  Then disallow it.  That segment can't win the block, no matter what the hash value.  Try again.  Ironically this is most likely to happen in loops which do incremental reads, such as, for example, computing SHA-256.

[Dazza]

Thank you for that Dazza. My own non-technical opinion when I was considering buying into their crowdsale, based only on intuition and not any actual understanding, was also that it was a lot of 'technobabble' as you say, and that the they would not be able to do what they were saying they were going to do, but I was never sure and it seemed to contain some interesting ideas so its good to hear a more knowledgeable opinion about it.

Well I'm not that knowledgeable.  I just skipped over what I couldn't understand until I found something I could.  It's still possible that someone in that project is doing cool.  I mean, it's not as though our white paper, or for that matter, our website is particularly impressive.

[Dazza]

I thought about some kind of Opt-In encryption at some fixed fee. People can decide if they want the extra encryption at the cost of a decreased mining speed or not. What do you think about it?

Until someone figures out a practical way to do this workers will have to be able to see the data they're working on.  Are we planning to subject miners to security vetting?

If not, then this problem is unsolvable.  At the very least, nobody here is going to solve it.

[Evil-Knievel]

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