[ANN][FLO] A Worldwide Public Record | Alexandria | ETDB | Medici | 0.15 Segwit

[coinxcoin]

I've been trading flo for a long time and obviously someone bought a huge amount in the several weeks before it was mentioned on this thread on March 11, 2015 or so. Every step you have taken so far is consistent with a pump, and not consistent with a serious project.

Hey man, haven't followed the whole discussion - but for what it's worth, I received a copy of an alpha client for  Alexandria which does actually function, and tracking its network connections - it aims to do what it says and no shenanigans noticed. One of the primary devs has also livestreamed himself coding the project if you want to actually see work being done and get your eyes on some code.

I don't disagree with your points about insider trading - every crypto project will do that. You really think every altcoin needs a new codebase to do their project? The primary reason for launching a new coin is to give yourself as much manipulation potential as possible, not for some new ideal or platform. Maybe 1 out of 100  are legitimately trying to build something on top of the profit potential. All of this is a profit game and until regulation/consequences convince people to not pump/insider trade/build scamcoins, we can only accept it as part of the landscape. That being said - even if Blocktech does own a huge percentage of FLO (or more likely unnamed, officially unaffiliated partner(s) hold it) and this project is all about cashing in on that - the project IS real. I've seen it. I can send you the copy of Alexandria I have if you want (though it may be outdated at this point, I haven't been following so I'm not sure if a newer client is around). Pretty sure it's supposed to be privileged access, and I'm certainly no insider, but if you hang in crypto IRC's this thing was making the rounds.

Again, it's entirely possible and I'd say even basically certain Alexandria is primarily to make them money - but that doesn't mean Alexandria isn't real. That's more than most projects can boast/pump with - at least this manipulation is built on something tangible. If they wanted a fast pump cash-in and escape, they'dve made their own coin. At the very least Blocktech is very public, we know they're doing real work, and we know they didn't have the manipulation/scam potential of launching a fresh coin themselves so we know they're on the hook to WORK to make this profit happen.

I mean, that really leaves us with the conclusion that they're working on a project to get paid from their investments and time spent. There may be a lot more curtains around here, but uh, I feel like Alexandria is about as legit as you get around altcoin projects. Insider trading is a wash because it happens on every coin, every project, every group in crypto. To be expected.

Certainly people need to make money.

When looking at a project like this, one of the most important questions is "Which came first, the idea for the project, or the idea to pump a coin?".

Everything indicates that this is a cheap pump and the so called "block tech" is just the "new idea" they came up with to hang the pump on.

It isn't a revolutionary idea. It isn't even that useful an idea. A person would need to invest a lot of money in marketing to make it sort of work, and even then it wouldn't be likely sustainable for long.

Florin is a coin I've owned for a while. Many coins have cheap pumps associated with them. Usually the devs will step back and not promote pumps. It concerns me that the flo Dev is cooperating with the pump.

Blocktech is a mediocre project, at best, from what has been put out so far.

Your point that 'maybe 1 out of 100' new coin projects are trying to build something... is a bit off. Some projects ate 100% pump. Some are 100% substance. Most are a mix. Block tech looks to be mostly pump with a little cosmetic 'substance'.

My advice would be to make the supposed 'alpha client' public then solicit comments on features. The features and general outline that have been provided so far reflect very little of worth. The basic idea is one of countless ideas that anyone could come up with to develop a datacoin.

[metacoin]

Hmm, Florin existed for a year before Blocktech became a thing, and I've been working on the coin from about a month after its release.

It was my design choice to use Florincoin for Alexandria, amidst a ton of pressure to use Bitcoin and other projects (ethereum, etc).

So far I've been happy with the results. Florincoin's properties make it perfectly suited for a project like this.

I've been posting about Alexandria for months now, here and on twitter, probably ~5-6 months before Devon even made his blocktechceo forum account and started posting in this thread. We had a huge presentation in Vegas (Inside Bitcoins, October 2014). It's been in the news. It was written about in a block chain technology book.


re: "Alexandria isn't such a great idea" -- to be honest most ideas and apps aren't breathtaking on paper. Twitter and snapchat are great examples of this. Execution and network effect play a big role in deciding how long anything stays relevant. The features we've implemented with ferross's webtorrent and the protocol structure that powers alexandria (you can see it in the block chain) are very cool, at least in my opinion.

As far as releasing the alpha client goes, I don't really care if someone posts the binaries here, but it's not doing us any favors. It's too early in the software's lifecycle to reach a wide audience. If you're in the alpha group, you're already going into it with the mindset that the software is not released yet; that message could be lost to users who happen to stumble upon it without context.

[coinxcoin]

Also ISOHunt has $100,000 bounty on development of a truly decentralized, unkillable torrent service called OpenBay. So while this project isn't following the guidelines of that project (working directly on OpenBay), the idea is not exactly worthless.

You mean
http://cointelegraph.com/news/113370/isohunt-giving-away-100000-for-improvements-to-the-piratebay-source-code
and
https://github.com/isohuntto/openbay
?
Quote from the latter "Isohunt team is closing down the Openbay project support and the competition itself because of the very low activity on the project. We’ve got hold of the developers that took part in the competition and offered them a long-term cooperation.
We are very disappointed that your activity lowered to such a level that even a 50 000$ reward couldn’t motivate you."

Again, there are lots of huge opportunities with datacoins. Some ideas people will come up with are likely to succeed, others not. Even if this were one of the better possible datacoin ideas, which it probably is not, the pumpiness of the project puts a person off.

re: "Alexandria isn't such a great idea" -- to be honest most ideas and apps aren't breathtaking on paper. Twitter and snapchat are great examples of this. Execution and network effect play a big role in deciding how long anything stays relevant. The features we've implemented with ferross's webtorrent and the protocol structure that powers alexandria (you can see it in the block chain) are very cool, at least in my opinion.

I support free sharing and so on, so if the project is serious then I'd support it. Comparing it to twitter is a stretch. You and others talk about your project. There are articles like http://bitcoinmacroeconomics.com/2015/04/17/alexandria-v0-4-alpha-florincoin/ which are embarrassing to even read and http://bitcoinist.net/exclusive-qa-with-joseph-fiscella-florincoin-and-decentralized-applications/ which kind of foreshadows a pump rather than any serious project.

It looks exactly like a pump built around a coin that has been thoroughly bought up by the pumpers. Please describe exactly what the project is expected to do, in less than 200 words, if that isn't too much to ask.

[metacoin]

If anyone wants to join the slack to contribute to development, PM blocktechceo or me with your email and we can add you to the Alexandria slack discussion. You'll also be able to download the alpha releases.

The code is not readable in the format OBS outputs to livecoding.tv . I may try again on twitch.tv or another streaming service or with another local client (though OBS seems to be the best by far).

I could always try developing on my Windows machine, OBS works fine there...

[worth]

I support free sharing and so on, so if the project is serious then I'd support it. Comparing it to twitter is a stretch. You and others talk about your project. There are articles like http://bitcoinmacroeconomics.com/2015/04/17/alexandria-v0-4-alpha-florincoin/ which are embarrassing to even read and http://bitcoinist.net/exclusive-qa-with-joseph-fiscella-florincoin-and-decentralized-applications/ which kind of foreshadows a pump rather than any serious project.

It looks exactly like a pump built around a coin that has been thoroughly bought up by the pumpers. Please describe exactly what the project is expected to do, in less than 200 words, if that isn't too much to ask.

Everything I've seen you say about Alexandria seems to be based on the idea that its purpose is to do something like replace the Pirate Bay. It can be used that way, but that's more of a "bonus feature" than the intended use case.  Here's a new video interview that might help you understand it better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzG7i-eThnw

I've been aware of the project for something like a year now, and I personally accumulated FLO through both mining and buying it up in small amounts gradually over the last 10-12 months.  I did this because I saw the potential in the project for guarding against censorship and rewriting of history, as well as the potential for content producers (like myself as an educator, or like my brother who is a musician) to publish and monetize their content directly to an audience.

I'm not the only person who did this.  

I also know that a lot of people in the #Coinmarkets IRC channel bought up a ton of it right before it went onto Bittrex, and a bunch who grabbed it right afterwards. So that may account for what you're interpreting as the devs trying to engineer a pump.  

The project is not a finished product yet, but it is a real thing; I was invited into the private alpha a few weeks ago and have used it and have it installed on the computer I'm typing this on.

[coinxcoin]

The trading for quite some time involved someone putting up heavy sell walls to squeeze others into selling. When a person would buy into one of the walls then the higher ones would disappear. So it was only one person buying in quantity for quite a while, or a group of people acting together. Not a bunch of independent buyers. I won't push the issue.

If this is just a florin pump, and that is what it appears to be, my advice would be to drop it now and find a more promising application to integrate into the coin now before data coins proliferate. A lot of high powered genuine innovations are going to come into data coins eventually. Coins that get sidetracked into pumps will be left in the dust.

Alexandria project needs to either be explained better, if there is something being misunderstood, or it should be minimized. I watched about half the video until the player crashed and the guys seem mostly sincere but there is no substance to the project they describe. Some vague platitudes but no actual original ideas.

[URSAY]

my advice would be

You have 12 posts

[coinxcoin]

my advice would be

You have 12 posts

+1

You are not able to substantively answer serious questions, so you try to distract people by pointing out that you have more posts than me? Seriously? Something is very not right here.

Can you summarize what Alexandria offers in a short paragraph? I've read a bunch of interviews, watched a bit of video, researched a bit and it doesn't actually seem to have anything real except for using phrases like "free speech" and so on.

Again, can you summarize it in a short paragraph without hype.

[coinxcoin]

Alexandria project needs to either be explained better, if there is something being misunderstood, or it should be minimized. I watched about half the video until the player crashed and the guys seem mostly sincere but there is no substance to the project they describe. Some vague platitudes but no actual original ideas.

The ideas may not be new, but please point me to any other project actively developing those ideas daily with tangible progress already available and proven. Where is Alexandria's competition?

Developing which ideas daily?

"Tangible progress already available and proven" where?

[URSAY]

Developing which ideas daily?

"Tangible progress already available and proven" where?

See post from dev.  You could ask for access and answer your own questions.  Then again, if I was the dev, I'm not sure I'd give access to someone who seems unable to research the available info and come to their own conclusion.  Pointing out potential problems is not the issue.  The issue is that you do not seem like a person interested in solutions or even doing your own research.  If you are unwilling or unable to do your own detailed research then why should you expect someone else to be obligated to do that for you?

If anyone wants to join the slack to contribute to development, PM blocktechceo or me with your email and we can add you to the Alexandria slack discussion. You'll also be able to download the alpha releases.

[worth]

my advice would be

You have 12 posts

+1

You are not able to substantively answer serious questions, so you try to distract people by pointing out that you have more posts than me? Seriously? Something is very not right here.

Can you summarize what Alexandria offers in a short paragraph? I've read a bunch of interviews, watched a bit of video, researched a bit and it doesn't actually seem to have anything real except for using phrases like "free speech" and so on.

Again, can you summarize it in a short paragraph without hype.

You have 14 posts total, 10 of which are in this thread repeating the same thing. That is what's being pointed out.

Alexandria allows for direct publishing of media to an audience without censorship through DMCA takedown or beause the company in control of the platform dislikes the content. It gives the potential for direct revenue for content creators in an environment that has made it increasingly difficult for musicians and other creative people to make money from their work. It allows for the archiving of information in a decentralized fashion to prevent "data loss" like the original Library of Alexandria. 

You have been given multiple explanations and links to more info. The potential seems obvious to me, and has for the better part of a year. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

[coinxcoin]

Alexandria allows for direct publishing of media to an audience without censorship through DMCA takedown or beause the company in control of the platform dislikes the content. It gives the potential for direct revenue for content creators in an environment that has made it increasingly difficult for musicians and other creative people to make money from their work. It allows for the archiving of information in a decentralized fashion to prevent "data loss" like the original Library of Alexandria.  

You have been given multiple explanations and links to more info. The potential seems obvious to me, and has for the better part of a year. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Okay, now there are two fairly consistent descriptions, yours and the one by cryptolemaik that follows yours. I've followed links, watched videos, read interviews etc and the 'project' seems to change dramatically.

If you are seriously going to attach florin to a DMCA challenge then you are going to destroy florin. That is obvious.

So at this point it looks like the purpose of Alexandria is to ... ? ? ? ? Give the feds an opportunity to show that they can shut down a coin? ? ?  If the florin network is facilitating DMCA violations then anyone using florin runs the risk of criminal charges?

Why not just modify something like bearshare and add a tipping app? What advantage is there in using a block chain and forcing a massive download? It looks like the only reason it is being 'built around florin' is to pump florin.

As for "Archiving information in a decentralized fashion"... Why? ? ? ? I saw the example about, for example, keeping a record of global warming, There are like 20 million servers that are plugged with this kind of information. You are saying that if there was some question about the veracity of information stored by major organizations then they could go to "the Alexandria project" and it would have reliable information because.... why? ? ? ? ? ? ?

"Like the original library at Alexandria" is funny. Could you please explain the similarity?

This all looks still like a massive mound of shit. But I still have quite a few FLO so maybe I'll ignore it until I sell.

[blocktechceo]

Hi CoinXCoin - I wanted to respond a couple days ago, but, ya know... couldn't Anyway, I can't help but ignore the more trolly parts of your questions that have been asked and answered multiple times, but I'm happy to address a few that I guess we haven't really answered well enough yet.

If you are seriously going to attach florin to a DMCA challenge then you are going to destroy florin. That is obvious.

So at this point it looks like the purpose of Alexandria is to ... ? ? ? ? Give the feds an opportunity to show that they can shut down a coin? ? ?  If the florin network is facilitating DMCA violations then anyone using florin runs the risk of criminal charges?

No, I think you're really misreading things here. The purpose of Alexandria is to take advantage of a combination of P2P technologies to give content creators a platform to permissionlessly publish and distribute their work in a un-censorable and permanent way, in which they can monetize directly from their audiences. Because we have zero interest in making it a haven of piracy, our front end requires that the types of media which are most often pirated have been individually authorized by some individual in a position to do so. Publishing a movie requires providing a 'chain-of-authorization' from the IMDBid of the movie to a social media post from someone in it's production credits. Likewise with Music and eventually Shows when we can enroll a few internet tv shows to try the platform out. Videos, Podcasts and other media types require no authorization to be provided, but we plan to combat piracy in these media types through two channels: 1) a clear warning to publishers that interested parties could potentially track their submissions to their IP address and pursue them with DMCA violations, and 2) a list of content ids that we publish to the blockchain as a "piracy list" - all users on our Alexandria web portal will be forced to consider this filter list, so pirated content will not show up for them. Users of the Alexandria client will be auto-subscribed to this list to protect them from unintentionally downloading and sharing pirated media, but since this is open-source software in which forced-rules are just reasons to fork the app and fracture the user base, it really makes the most sense for us to let users of the client disable the filter if they chose (and again have to dismiss a disclosure message about why it would be a bad idea to support pirated content on the platform themselves). This is the route we need to travel, because in order for Alexandria to work as a permission-less publishing platform, there is simply no way to actually block someone from choosing to publish pirated content (since someone truly determined could just copy the format of the messages Alexandria uses to publish on the Florincoin blockchain), and it would be a major flaw if we did no allow users to chose to ignore our filter list, as doing so would make us a very clear central point of failure, which interested parties could exploit to crowbar-engineer certain content they don't like into those mandatory filter lists - by turning it on by default but letting users turn it off if they chose, there would be no significant value in anyone else taking control of our filter lists.

Why not just modify something like bearshare and add a tipping app? What advantage is there in using a block chain and forcing a massive download? It looks like the only reason it is being 'built around florin' is to pump florin.

Because the point was to decentralize all of the parts of a digital content library/market: publishing (the announcing of a piece of media and how to find it), distribution (file storage and sharing) and payments. Distribution is handled through the IPFS DHT, publishing (and commenting) is handled with Florincoin, and payments are handled with Florincoin, Bitcoin and whatever other coins publishers ask to get tipped in. I'm not sure what you are referring to by "forcing a massive download" - if you mean that you are assuming the media file is stored in the Florincoin blockchain, it's not, it is distributed via the IPFS network and only the IPFS id (a 46-character hash) and the piece of media's descriptive info get stored in the blockchain. If you mean that we're forcing the user to download the florincoin blockchain, that's also incorrect. If the user wants to use the app through an entirely decentralized pipeline, it is true that they'll have to have a local copy of the blockchain, as they'd also need a local copy of the Bitcoin blockchain if they want to use it without relying on any 3rd parties at all. But for the sake of convenience and letting people have access to the library through a web browser, we will be running a gateway at http://alexandria.media which returns the same API responses to a users front end that a local wallet would provide, so if they don't want to download and sync the blockchain, they can just have their local client point to our gateway. We're working on a 'keys-only' web-wallet, so that users can publish and comment through the gateway as well, but it's not a super high priority at the moment.

As for "Archiving information in a decentralized fashion"... Why? ? ? ? I saw the example about, for example, keeping a record of global warming, There are like 20 million servers that are plugged with this kind of information. You are saying that if there was some question about the veracity of information stored by major organizations then they could go to "the Alexandria project" and it would have reliable information because.... why? ? ? ? ? ? ?

In an archiving sense, the function that Alexandria can provide is to show a proof of publishing with a timestamp - it could be used for tweets, documents, news reports, etc - anything in which there is possible value in being able to point back to prove something was said at a certain time in a certain way at some specific time in the past. Your question about why anyone would trust that "the Alexandria project" would have "reliable information" suggests that you think we would be relying on our reputation for anyone to trust the information, but in fact it is the indelible and permanent nature of the record (I'll go out on a limb and assume that you understand that one of the most basic functions of a blockchain is that past entries in its ledger can't be changed after the fact) that gives it 'trustworthiness' and value. How much value it has will be entirely up to the people who chose to use it. It sounds like you don't think you'll be one of them, which is fine of course

This function was born from the idea of capturing and storing everything mentioned on a social media platform about a given topic so that the 'immediate records of history' can be preserved in a decentralized and non-destroyable way for future use. Twitter is a great platform for sharing micro-news about things that interest you, and its a great way to get a sense of what other people around the world are saying about various topics right now - but if I wanted to try to browse and understand what kinds of things were being said about something by the whole of twitter at some past time period, this gets much more challenging, especially since tweets can be deleted. Like the media publishing aspect of Alexandria, this functionality relies on a blockchain for publishing and a DHT for distribution of actual content - in this case, the content is the raw archives of captured tweets and the publish message points to the archive on the DHT and includes plain-text summary information about the archive to make indexing, browsing and searching the data faster. The idea is to be able to store archives about the world scraped from 'the public forums' of our time.

"Like the original library at Alexandria" is funny. Could you please explain the similarity?

We chose the name as an homage to the ancient library of Alexandria, because it is known to most people for two reasons - 1) it was a great historical example of a monumental effort to collect as much recorded knowledge and history as possible for the benefit of its people and future generations and 2) most of its contents were unfortunately destroyed, a failure made possible by the fact that it was centralized.

This all looks still like a massive mound of shit. But I still have quite a few FLO so maybe I'll ignore it until I sell.

Sorry you're not a fan of the project - to be honest, you've actually been pretty rude, but I must admit I don't spend much time in the BCT forums myself, so I guess I'm not too desensitized to coin trolls yet  But, hopefully my answers can be of value to others who are a bit more open minded about new things. Have a great day, and enjoy your FLO.

[metacoin]

Have you ever wanted to view the historical hashrate, market data, or connection count of Litecoin, Dogecoin, Myriad, or another coin that doesn't have this data widely published? It's important for us to record this information in some form. Analyzing properties of many different coins will result in a better understanding of the effect of difficulty on volume and exchange rate, for example.

So here's the beginning (maybe version 0.05) of the first plugin for Alexandria:

https://github.com/metacoin/flo-market-data

This market data program will collect info from Cryptsy, Poloniex, and Bittrex and store it in a local SQLite database. It'll also create an HTTP API to interface with other programs, such as the main alexandria process. Soon, alexandria will have the capability of communicating with this plugin (and many more!) to create archives of this important data that users voluntarily store in the block chain.

With plugins like this, Florin can contribute to keeping history honest.

[jesselivermore]

Just an FYI.  I still like this coin a lot.  I grabbed a bit of BLK many days ago due to the chart and made an easy triple.  Those profit coins I'm taking back here.  I'm happy to have 2 percent, but would be delighted to have 5 or 10.  Yes I believe.  So drop your asks and lower your bids - I'll be happy to take them all.  No, I've never sold one FLO :-)

thebitcoinchannel.com
nasamoonhoax.com
brotherjohnf.com

[Zer0Sum]

Have you ever wanted to view the historical hashrate, market data, or connection count of Litecoin, Dogecoin, Myriad, or another coin that doesn't have this data widely published? It's important for us to record this information in some form. Analyzing properties of many different coins will result in a better understanding of the effect of difficulty on volume and exchange rate, for example.

So here's the beginning (maybe version 0.05) of the first plugin for Alexandria:

https://github.com/metacoin/flo-market-data

This market data program will collect info from Cryptsy, Poloniex, and Bittrex and store it in a local SQLite database. It'll also create an HTTP API to interface with other programs, such as the main alexandria process. Soon, alexandria will have the capability of communicating with this plugin (and many more!) to create archives of this important data that users voluntarily store in the block chain.

With plugins like this, Florin can contribute to keeping history honest.

That data belongs to the exchanges that provide it (I'm sure that's made clear in their Terms of Service)...
Real world exchanges are just as obsessive as Hollywood in terms of owning their content...
So the first plug-in for Alexandria is all about pirating financial data.

But not to get side-tracked... the Dev really should adapt his last post for his web site...
As opposed to making vague statements like "imagine a world with fairies and unicorns".

Also, the Dev appears to be asking for donations to build this thing...
Should this project not be structured as an investment in some way?

It's possible that some people may think pay-as-you-go for "long tail" torrent content is a good long-term investment...
So why have you structured this as a "charity" with your group as the beneficiary? Or is it all an elaborate pump for FLO?

[metacoin]

That data belongs to the exchanges that provide it (I'm sure that's made clear in their Terms of Service)...
Real world exchanges are just as obsessive as Hollywood in terms of owning their content...
So the first plug-in for Alexandria is all about pirating financial data.

I'm not sure how archiving a public API is equivalent to piracy. Nevertheless, I'll send the exchanges each an email and ask them if they feel strongly one way or another about volunteers backing up their historical API data in the block chain. I'm glad you brought this up, because it's possible they're not OK with it, but I suspect it'll be cool.

But not to get side-tracked... the Dev really should adapt his last post for his web site...

I'm not sure which site you're referencing, florincoin.org or florincoin.info? Adapt my post for what exactly?

As opposed to making vague statements like "imagine a world with fairies and unicorns".

If you're talking about my description of the flo-market-data project, I described a problem I've had several times before and created a solution for it. It's not an imaginary solution either, you can read the code yourself!

Also, the Dev appears to be asking for donations to build this thing...

Blocktech is spearheading the development of Alexandria, I'm no longer working for Blocktech. Recently and in the future, all of the hours I spend working on this project come out of my own free time.

[blocktechceo]

Also, the Dev appears to be asking for donations to build this thing...
Should this project not be structured as an investment in some way?

It's possible that some people may think pay-as-you-go for "long tail" torrent content is a good long-term investment...
So why have you structured this as a "charity" with your group as the beneficiary? Or is it all an elaborate pump for FLO?

We're asking for donations because it isn't ready to be pitched as an investment at the moment. We are working on some things that we believe may make it an investable thing, and if we do, we'll let users who have donated know that they are eligible for a cut, and specifically announce the opportunity. Since that isn't in place yet, and we were in need of some financial support while we were finishing the beta, we made the request.

I'm done repeatedly defending that this project is not just some "elaborate pump for FLO" as a few folks like to call it. It will be released publicly soon enough, and you can make up your mind for yourself at that point. In the meanwhile, if people want to assume it is a pump, they're free to do so.

[metacoin]

There is a new private alpha release if you haven't seen the twitter/Slack notifications yet, log into Slack to download the newest version of Alexandria.

If you're interested in alpha testing, please send myself or blocktechceo a private message.

[AikaPool]

Hi!

Please add to OP new pool - http://aikapool.com/flo



Thanks!