Sorry this took so long, I was moving across the country and separating stuff between my ex and I
QUESTIONS:
Q1. What can a Lottery Hash Winner actually win? Coins? How many? 37.5 (as per whitepaper's 25+12.5) per block?
Lottery winner hash enables someone with a matching ticket to claim 25 coins (as per wiki; this will be in next version of whitepaper). There is an average of 125 coins generated per block from stake votes.
Q2. If this is a lottery, can you please explain odds/probability of actually winning per ticket?
1 in 65536.
Q3. Why are tickets being sold in different donation brackets have different number of coin values, when in fact coin value will be ultimately determined by market supply/demand?
Tickets sold via the kickstarter are just at predetermined prices to ensure the funding of the project and have nothing to do with what their eventual value might be (which could be $0.0001 USD or $100 USD).
Q4. Is there going to be a cut off $$ donation ceiling or # of tickets sold? Why/Why not?
There is no cutoff for the donation amounts, however we will run out of ticket.
Q5. What is the tentative date this crowdfunding effort will start?
Unfortunately ingsoc has indicated that there are a number of legal things to get around now because this is technically being considered an investment in a number of jurisdictions. Until this is ironed out and we have a country willing to host the funding, this is a little up in the air, but it should be soon.
Q6. Where exactly (URL?) will this take place? kickstarter.com ?
Depends on the question above -- we're sorting out the legalities.
Q7. How many days/weeks will it run for?
30-60 days, but it's likely all the tickets will be sold within a week or two given the current interest.
Q8. "Tickets are private keys corresponding to a stakeholder vote", which according to the whitepaper can only be exercised after 29 days (whitepaper: page 4 section 2.).... is that after 29 days from genesis block, or every 29 days?
This was adjusted to ~45 days. Ticket generation occurs on a per block basis, so it's ~45 days worth of blocks after the ticket was submitted to the blockchain (and so the first ones will mature ~45 days after the genesis block).
Q9. To get coins out of these tickets, the whitepaper suggests that we (ticket holders) have to perform specific actions, like vote on blocks. How exactly does one vote on a block?
See the wiki:
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Netcoin_Proof-of-Work_and_Proof-of-Stake_Hybrid_Designhttp://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Algorithms_for_PoS_Voters_to_Assess_the_Validity_of_PoW_BlocksBasically, PoW miner submits block to network, PoS miner checks to see if it also saw the same Tx, then validates with a PoS subblock. The PoS subblock is where the PoS miner's coins are generated.
Q10. Assume I have $5,000 I want to throw at this. That puts me in the first bracket with 9,216 tickets or private keys. What tools will I have to possible manage / make sense of that many private keys?
The private keys will be shipped to you via PGP. After that you just feed them to the client who can import them in an automated fashion, and set the client to automatically mine PoS blocks.
Q11. With 9216 private keys, I have upwards of 65,536 blocks I can vote on. That means I have to sit there and manually vote on at least every 7 blocks on average? Or, at 30 blocks per hour (pg.5 of whitepaper), this means I have aprox a 2 minute window to vote on each block, and assuming I can do this in about 15 seconds, with 9216 private keys that means I have to be glued to my computer for at least 138,240 seconds or 38.4 hours. This sounds like WAY too much work for a $5,000 donation. Why do I have to work at all to give away my money? Why can't you just give us X # of coins per Y # of $ donated? I'm probably grossly misunderstanding all of this, but if I am even partially right, this sounds way too convoluted/requiring too much effort on behalf of people that want to give you $.
Block voting will be automated and extensively tested, but of course you can manually vote on blocks too if you want (or just set the client to accept any blocks seen on the network).
http://www.netcoin.io/wiki/Algorithms_for_PoS_Voters_to_Assess_the_Validity_of_PoW_BlocksBasically the only work you have to do is leave your client running with the private keys. The block voting just ensures a consensus network of transactions, so PoW miners can no longer ignore or cherry pick transactions -- if you submit a transaction to the network and the fee is high enough, it can NOT be ignored by the PoW miner, at least with the proposed automated PoS voting (unlike Bitcoin, where the PoW miners can do whatever they want to the transaction tree).
Q12. If a lottery ticket holder can only collect his coins by voting Yea on a block, why would anyone with piles of lottery tickets ever vote no on any block off the start here? Which then begs the question, why bother with voting at all if all votes are going to be Yea's so people can collect their coins. Clearly, I'm very confused.
Maybe I forgot to indicate it in the wiki -- stakeholders voting Yea on a block with majority Nay votes have their rewards destroyed, so voters have an incentive to vote with the majority. You can always vote in all PoW blocks if you like, though, so long as you don't worry about having your rewards destroyed if you aren't voting in the majority.
Q13. Page 5 of whitepaper states that a block must be signed by 5 different signatories (people?). What happens if not all 5 sign it? What if only 3 out of 5 sign it ever, do those 3 people get their coin rewards or do they have to wait around to be compensated until all 5 sign it?
Signatories = tickets. You need a majority of tickets signing to pass the block -- if only 2/5 votes, the PoW miners will continue hashing old work to get a new PoW block with a new lottery winner number.
If 3 out of 5 sign it, the block is included in the blockchain as either valid (Yea) or invalid (Nay), and the ticketholders for these 3 tickets get their reward. PoW continues from this new block.
PoW doesn't have to wait around for 5 people to sign it, but the block header includes a hash of the ordered subblock headers of the previous voters. So, if 3/5 sign and the PoW miners generate a new block from only these 3 votes but the PoS miners see 5/5 signatures, the PoS miners will probably reject this block that only includes the 5 votes. Network propagation is pretty fast (~seconds), so as long as the PoW miners give themselves a few seconds they shouldn't need to worry extensively about stales from voting. This does introduce a type of attack where someone tries to mess with the network by submitting PoS votes late and forcing PoW invalidation via PoS, which will need to be addressed at later steps (probably a similar solution to transaction time evaluation as described in the wiki can be used). Whether or not anyone would actually want to perform this attack (and potentially forfeit PoS coins) is arguable as well, but there does need to be a safeguard against it.
Q14. I am confused with the very first 2 lines of the web page:
"For the first ~45 days of the coin (32,768 blocks), there will be no lottery hash winners chosen. To safeguard the network, stakeholder tickets for these blocks will be issued via the crowdfunding platform, in proportion to the quantity pledged."
First sentence says there will be no lottery hash winners "chosen". Chosen by whom/what - yes I read they will be 'randomly selected', is this randomness the same mentioned in the whitepaper? Then second sentence says to safeguard the network tickets will be issued from crowdfunding... so how exactly does crowdfunding secure the network when he with the most $ gets the most votes? Also if the first 45 days of blocks will be exclusively allocated to crowdfunding pre-assigned ticket holders, how exactly does this incentivise any mining?[/quote]
For the first 45 days I haven't exactly decided how to select ticket winners. We will have the unusual event in which we have exactly 5 tickets available per block (there will be a lot of variance on the actual chain after 45 days) and that we have 5 tickets for any possible lottery winner hash. For the chain to keep going, then, we need to select each lottery winner hash ONCE AND ONLY ONCE for any given block. You can use the current selection method as stated before with a rollover if you hit any lottery winner number that's already been selected before, ensuring that we hit every lottery winner hash once. There needs to be a way to deal with absentee voters at this stage as well. The algorithm as described in the wiki already does, but if we're selecting each ticket once that means eventually we'll come back to those same tickets and at some point the holders will need to vote to keep the chain going -- I guess we can do some kind of checkpointing for the first 45 or so days that is only active when we have a case of PoS tickets never being claimed, just to ensure the chain runs smoothly until we begin to accumulate more PoS tickets via generation.
