[ANN] Devest - Decentralized Investment Fund [ICO]

[nikoladevest]

DEVEST

Your autonomous, decentralized investment fund

We are creating a platform which allows for decentralized, completely anonymous (zk), and autonomous, investing on the Bitcoin blockchain. Ownership will be represented through shares. Our goal is to give investors all the benefits of using a mutual fund, such as diversification and scaling advantages, while still maintaining control of their own share. Devescript is the programming language in which smart contracts are written. It is roughly based on Solidity, except Devescript has been tweaked to take into account the different variables when dealing with financial markets and respond accordingly. We have created Devescript to be relatively simple, and user friendly, so that even our users without understanding of code can set up their own proposals, and create their own smart contracts.

Why?

Bringing together investors and venture capitalists to invest in companies, real world stock portfolios or fundraising campaigns. Benefit from the advantages of investing as part of a group while holding your shares directly opens up a whole new world. Using smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain, we can achieve secure and fraud-less investing. You can influence the decision making, and sell your shares when you decide it is time to step out. Without fee’s or annual management costs.

Team

• Nikola Nuspahic - PR & research
• Sergei Inyushkin - Protocol developer
• Pranay Ranka - Protocol developer
• Iram Ishfaq - Protocol & GUI developer

Get your Devest shares using our ICO

The goal of the ICO is to raise working capital for development and growth. More specifically advertisement, development, security, designs, infrastructure etc. Additional funds will be used as initial capital for investing. Devest shareholders will have their vote in where the initial capital will be used for. No shares will be set aside or held for by our developers.

Devest shares are units of measurement used to represent ownership of Devest and are used for voting. Devest shares are tied to smart contracts which are used to set the terms and conditions, such as an escrow fund, for potential investments. In contrary to normal shares, ownership of Devest Shares is fully anonymous and they can be publicly traded at anytime.

The ICO starts 18-06-2016 and ends on 01-08-2016.

ICO address:

Code:

1Es2VEVeDC139XhvZTw48jHn71X5tkebLP

IMPORTANT:
Before investing, please see our webpage: www.devest.io/ico.html

Investors Protection:

While our team breathes the spirit of open-source culture we do believe it's important to protect our early investors. Therefore, this project is closed source for the first months of it's announcement. We do believe, however, that transparancy is key for blockchain technology. Without transparancy we can’t receive any input or help. Nor earn community trust. Therefore, shareholders with more than 1000 shares will still be able to review parts of our code. Once our ICO is finished, we will switch from closed source to open source so that not only our biggest investors but anyone will be able to check out our full code on Github.

*All contributors that invest in our ICO within the first week will receive 10% more total shares.

More information

Website: www.devest.io
General queries: contact@devest.io
Blog: https://medium.com/@Devestgroup

Path Forward

Our Devest team is currently in talk with Bitcoin conference managers to outline the road ahead of us by giving presentations about our project. These presentations will dig more deep into our vision, code and software development goals. These events will be open to public, and hopefully attract many attendees so we can spread the word about our project. To make sure not to miss out keep an eye on our blog, this thread and our website.

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[compmaster]

I like the idea but I'm not sure you are the one to do it... I hope you can make this work.

[st4nl3y]

Another ICO?

[barnes13]

Another ICO?

yes this is ICO, and the ICO has started

but i think still need update from dev and team cause the blog has no post yet

[markus124]

"this project is supported by bittrex"

 Are u guys getting listed in bittrex after the ico then?

[iamnotback]

An interesting read from a guy reddit.  He gave compelling arguments and it does make you think twice about the viability and security of the current smart contract plaforms and DAOs currently in circulation.

Source:   The bug which the "DAO hacker" exploited was *not* "merely in the DAO itself" (ie, *separate* from Ethereum). The bug was in Ethereum's *language design* itself (Solidity / EVM - Ethereum Virtual Machine) - shown by the "recursive call bug discovery" divulged (and dismissed) on slock.it last week.

Here's an excerpt of the post.

Complexity and "Turing completeness" are not the real culprit here - those are all good things that we can have someday. The real culprit is poor language design. Specifically, I would recommend using "functional" (rather than "procedural") languages for mission-critical code which will be driving "smart contracts" - and even better if a high-level "specification" language could be used, allowing formal derivation of a (verifiably correct) program in a low-level "implementation" language (ie, providing mathematical proof that the implementation satisfies the specification - and mitigating the problem where the high-level human-readable "description" is different from the low-level machine-runnable "code"). I suspect many people (raised in a world where JavaScript is the "assembly language of the web") might not know about some of the history and possibly related work. So take this as a stern lecture telling you to take a good look at the history of functional languages (and specification vs implementation languages) as used in mission-critical projects, including finance - which, even when using such tools, are still very hard to get right - as we can see from the decades-long history of failures of major projects in defense, healthcare, aerospace, etc.

I don't think language design can fix "reentrancy-safety". The problem is Turing-completeness which is unbounded recursion. That is not something you can entirely solve with the language design.

If your smart block chain project doesn't know how to explain what I am talking about here, then you should not be investing because they probably don't really know what they are doing. They think they can just slap on a programming language to a block chain. Sorry! The problem is fundamentally insoluble and any breakthrough will have to be a paradigm-shift!

All these Block Chain Alt devs are recreating the mistakes that mathematicians and software engineers have discovered years ago.

And that we all told them back in late 2013 not to do it. I personally told Charles. Vitalik invented "gas" and thought that was sufficient.

Quoting myself from 2011:

Fundamentally, Turing-completeness is one concise requirement, unbounded recursion.

I had already explained why that Reddit post is incorrect:

Just turing complete...

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4op2es/the_bug_which_the_dao_hacker_exploited_was_not/

I haven't studied the specific vulnerability in this case[1], but I think it has to do with the contract code doing mutability aliasing on global state. So this is an issue of synchronizing mutability aliasing.

For example, imagine if some intended to be atomic operation[1] of a check for sending of ETH out of the contract had not set a global count of sent before some recursion which enabled sending more ETH out, thus exceeding the threshold.

So the Reddit post seems to be somewhat clueless about the actual issue. Functional programming and static typing is orthogonal to the issue of dealing with global state and mutability aliasing. I had just finished analyzing this issue at the Rust-lang forum and in my private discussion with keane recently. Although Rust can statically check mutability aliasing, this is restricted to disjoint data structures. We concluded that some semantics can't be modelled with a static checker. Mutability aliasing is thorny issue and I am not familiar enough with Coq to know if it can model it. I would need to really dig into the details of this and study it before I can comment with high degree of confidence.

[1]

http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao-exploit/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHcLKrkwPLQ#t=730 https://github.com/LeastAuthority/ethereum-analyses/blob/master/GasEcon.md#case-study-the-crowfunding-contract-example https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/16/scanning-live-ethereum-contracts-for-bugs/#what-about-the-recursive-race-problem-in-thedao

[Mr.Ease]

I like the idea but I'm not sure you are the one to do it... I hope you can make this work.

That is exactly what i thought after reading your post... and it made me laugh 

[iamnotback]

They are making the same mistake as The DAO in pooling all the funds together, which is a broken game theory. The investors are better off investing in separate projects.

Also putting this on the Bitcoin block chain means they can't have Bitcoin verify the order of events on their smart contract logic. This is the same problem Counterparty has.

Don't fall for this. These group obviously doesn't really know what they are doing.

[iamnotback]

Vitalik
https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/19/thinking-smart-contract-security/

"However, it does show that there is a fundamental barrier to what can be accomplished, and “fairness” is not something that can be mathematically proven in a theorem"

well yes it can:

If you hold a system will function in a particular way and it does then that is fair, and you can mathematically prove it
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4opjov/the_bug_which_the_dao_hacker_exploited_was_not/
TL;DR - Complexity and "Turing completeness" are not the real culprit here...

How many times am I going to have to repeat myself and link to my explanation that the quoted Reddit above is INCORRECT!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1505886.msg15273470#msg15273470

Vitalik is correct. The Reddit post is not. Period.

Turning-complete programming on a block chain can't be guaranteed to be secure. There will always be a gap between "intent" and "execution".

The fundamental reason is tied into the Halting problem, in that one can't prove an absolute negative, e.g. prove that no dinosaurs are still alive any where in the universe. It is undecideable.

Fundamentally this is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the fact that time is irreversible so entropy is unbounded. The only way that wouldn't be the case would be if the speed-of-light was not finite, but then the past and future would collapse into the same infinitesimal point of nothingness and nothing could exist.

Theorem provers such as Coq produce output that is not Turing-complete. Yet that isn't even relevant, because "intent" can't be absolutely quantified in code or specification because interpretation is relative, i.e. the only account of history which is 100% certain doesn't exist (people will disagree on what happened because no one was every where in real-time, i.e. the speed-of-light is finite).

If you can't grasp this, don't fret. It requires a high level of intellect and also understanding of several fields including computer science and physics.

The bottom line is that Turing-complete programming on a block chain is "a can of worms" which is what we all told Ethereum since back in 2013 when Vitalik first proposed it.

[mirador17]

Investors Protection:

What about escrow?

[CryptoMaik]

Investors Protection:

What about escrow?

And Closed source? ...Strange...you better go "in the real world" for crowdfunding. This is the wrong place

Everything in this business is normally open source

[andrepierre]

Another day and another ICO, newbie dev, no escrow and bad ann.

At least make a proper effort and do some planning!!!

[CoinManiac1]

Another ICO. The Russians are making a killing in ICO.  . Lisk, Waves, Now Devest

[rindo]

Another ICO. The Russians are making a killing in ICO.  . Lisk, Waves, Now Devest

see the price BTC rissing again...many people making new coin

[deliveryman]

if they will use blockchain timestamping proofs from what i can read from the 'code' on the website then it might be better then counterparty. need to know more in detail about this.. need to wait for a presentation or something. dev can u eleborate more on this?

by the way dont bother with the trolls, thanks for the clean announcement thread, i hate all those shitty announcements these days with insane amounts of pictures and 'trying' to convince people to buy in.

[FrostyFlint]

Investors Protection:

What about escrow?

And Closed source? ...Strange...you better go "in the real world" for crowdfunding. This is the wrong place

Everything in this business is normally open source

It's not closed source, they say they will share the code with large investors. Kinda smart to avoid people creating bad clones. Nxt also did this and it worked out pretty well.

[enet]

Interesting, but I think you need to start with some more things to show and escrow is the standard. This is more like early idea stage. Probably also not the best time for the concept with the massive failure of DAO.

[enet]

It's not closed source, they say they will share the code with large investors. Kinda smart to avoid people creating bad clones. Nxt also did this and it worked out pretty well.

Nxt failed. Open source - always.

[robelneo]

They had an awesome team on board http://www.devest.io/theteam.html it's what makes this ICO credible but of course we need more information and their Ico is quite expensive minimum is 1 bitcoin think not every body can get in..

[FrostyFlint]

They had an awesome team on board http://www.devest.io/theteam.html it's what makes this ICO credible but of course we need more information and their Ico is quite expensive minimum is 1 bitcoin think not every body can get in..

if 1 btc = 100 shares then 0.1 btc will probably be 10 shares and 0.01 btc is 1 share, i dont read anywhere that there is a minimum? can u link me