[Crowdfund] User-issued assets, p2p exchange, off-chain transactions, and more

[maaku]

Is Freicoin / this project still actively developed?

Yes, and yes. However it is just the two of us, and unless we meet our donation goal our time is split among many, many different projects, so progress has been slow.

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[jtimon]

Is there any code that actually *implements* ability to trade between multiple block chains in a very simple way?

There's a way to implement cross-chain trades using Freimarkets, but it won't be deployed into Freicoin because it would be very risky for the Freicoin network. We explicitly discourage its use for trades between public chains, it is designed to be used for transactions that involve in-chain and off-chain assets. Read the "Extrospection opcodes" section of the specs:

"The following opcodes assume the maintenance of a discrete set of
observed chains by each chain. If a public chain observes another
public chain, it's validation and security become completely
dependent on the observed chain, and any reorg on the later can
trigger another reorg on the former.

Even assuming that a public chain only observes its own chain, the
opcodes may require full nodes to have more data than it's currently
on the utxo set, opening the door to new DoS attacks vectors.

For these reasons the opcodes are only recommended to be used in
private chains, and even in those cases configure them with caution,
potentially limiting more strictly the standard behavior described
here. For example, in Freicoin their behavior is modified as
described in section \ref{freiExtOpcodes}."
[...]
"In Freicoin, the only observed chain is Freicoin itself. The depth of
the introspection is restricted too. So only the more limited
OUTPUT_SPENT_IN and OUTPUT_EXISTS_IN opcodes are available. Any
use of the generic ones will result in abnormal termination of the
script."

There are better solutions for cross-chain trade:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_5:_Trading_across_chains
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321228

I think I could have something that we can at least try out, but probably has some flaws that may be exploitable, but should easily be detectable in about 2 months for less than 25 BTC (~$20,000USD). Would this be worth applying for a grant to the freicoin foundation, or someone else?

I don't think this is particularly interesting at this point, but that's just my opinion.
You can list any non-profit project related to complementary currencies, free software/knowledge, sustainable development or charities.
From the foundation web:

"Any non-profit organization can be listed to receive donations. If your organization or project is not legally a non-profit but fits the goals of the Freicoin Foundation (stated on the home page) you can still submit a request to receive funds issued by the Freicoin Foundation in proportion to the donations you receive through this web.
[...]
The foundation will complement Freicoin donations with the foundation's issuance funds, increasing the amount by 10%."
http://foundation.freicoin.org/#/donations/join

By the way, people donating Freicoins to Freimarkets should use this address (15xnKvBQVJHuqWbfUbPrTpTLmvEX3x7s6W) so that we get the match from the foundation:

http://foundation.freicoin.org/#/donations/detail/20

[Armando]

Interesting concept. Is IPO still available, or did I missed the boat?

[jtimon]

Interesting concept. Is IPO still available, or did I missed the boat?

This is free software, I didn't knew you could IPO forkable free software until I saw mastercoin, bitshares/protoshares/angelshares/next-name-to-get-more-money-shares and ethereum. It turns out that is possible if you target a greedy and stupid enough audience, but we don't plan to do it.
Maybe after some more mtgox-like fiascos people finally realize what we need and that simply donating to free software development may be a much better way to make the now old p2p market dream a reality than buying promises "while they're cheap".

If you're interested in a quick profit I suggest you "invest" in dogecoin or just pay attention to the next scamcoin release to get early on the zero-sum speculative lottery (actually negative sum since mining costs real resources that are burned forever). There will be more pump and dumps, I'm sure you're not late.

If you're interested in contributing to build something that everyone in the world will be able to use (donors or not) and will last forever (knowledge and code don't perish with time or use), we welcome your donation.

We of course accept Bitcoins, but If you donate Freicoins we will get 10% more than what you donate:

http://foundation.freicoin.org/#/donations/detail/20

[maaku]

Be careful, we don't want to call our potential donors greedy and stupid

Seriously, this should be an educational moment. The only way to make money directly off of a free, p2p, decentralized platform is to leverage the network effect to extract rent from the future economy and pay it back towards early adopters / investors. Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.

We thought this was obvious, but apparently it is not too obvious as other projects have gone on to do just that. In fact they have raised orders of magnitude more than we are humbly asking for, to implement poorly thought out and less capable platforms, in schemes where the anticipated return on investment doesn't make any sense at all. Why? Because any distributed, p2p network platform must be free and fair, or else it will fail. If someone is selling you an investment opportunity in a new open source decentralized platform, you should be very suspicious. Either they are scamming you or they are deluding themselves.

Let's compare the situation with bittorrent, Napster, and other companies of that era. How do you make money off of a free to use, open platform in order to provide a return on investment? You don't, as Napster and others found out. You can try to monetize it by extracting a rent, but then people will fork your code and remove your built-in advantage, or they will release a protocol which is free and fair and can't be competed against (bittorrent). Worse, when you try to make money from the protocol you inevitably introduce some level of centralization which can be exploited by those old industries you are seeking to eliminate. Look to the court cases which did in Napster, for example.

So how do you make money off of a new distributed, decentralized, free and fair p2p platform? You build new services on top of it, and monetize that. Freimarkets adds new capabilities which will be the foundation of hundreds of companies seeking to monetize asset issuance, smart contracts, and distributed exchanges. Many of these companies will go on to become worth hundreds of millions of dollars in separate industries, and the one thing they will have in common is that they will all use the same underlying free and fair, open-access network protocol, just as every bitcoin company today uses the bitcoin network without paying rent to Satoshi.

So here's a suggestion: donate some percentage of what you are willing to invest to the crowdfund address in the OP, then split the rest of your funds across various companies seeking to use the Freimarkets network once it is completed.

[jtimon]

Yes, of course, probably I was too harsh or not enough clear. Investing to get profits is not greedy or stupid.
But as you explained very well, you cannot monetize it DIRECTLY.
At the same time there's hundreds of ways (and probably more we don't know yet) to monetize the network INDIRECTLY.

[Explodicle]

Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.

Says the man sitting on a huge pile of Freicoins he earned just as much as any pre-mined coin developer. Of course, this time it's different because charity is good and lending capital at great risk is evil. You're entitled to seigniorage because you hold a moral high ground - you're a better person than those evil Bitcoin speculators.

Gee where do I send my money.

[maaku]

Off topic but I'll address it. The foundation funds are only spent through community mechanisms, e.g. matching donations. Neither Jorge nor I have any significant control over the destination of those coins.

[jtimon]

Unearned rent is evil, and extracting it to provide a return to investors is unethical behavior. We will have no part in that.

Says the man sitting on a huge pile of Freicoins he earned just as much as any pre-mined coin developer. Of course, this time it's different because charity is good and lending capital at great risk is evil. You're entitled to seigniorage because you hold a moral high ground - you're a better person than those evil Bitcoin speculators.

Gee where do I send my money.

Of course he's not entitled to seignoriage. As explained many times, if we used that money to directly fund freimarkets or to pay for freicoin websites domains or hosting, it would be trivial for miners to deploy a softfork that impedes those coins to ever be moved again, thus the coins would become destined to be destroyed by demurrage, with the only side effect that it would take more than 3 years for inflation to disappear. Your opinion is that the seigniorage should be burned in mining subsidies and I respect that opinion, but you have to face that it is not shared by the majority of the freicoin community. Like I was told when I wanted Bitcoin itself to have demurrage: go ahead and fork freicoin to create an altcoin with demurrage and 100% issuance through mining subsidies.
Apparently we made a terrible choice with the name of this proposal. We hoped that "free markets" would be something appealing for the cryptocurrencies community, but people seem to interpret it as if the proposal were coupled with Freicoin, which is not. So, please, go to a freicoin thread or to the freicoin forums to criticize the freicoin foundation since as maaku says this is off-topic for this thread.

Going back on-topic, even if I considered that using the seigniorage of a new currency (it would have to be another one, not freicoin) to fund development (like mastercoin or etherum) as something reasonable, legit and moral; I would feel bad asking people to "invest" in something that I consider a terribly stupid business model.
Being free software, nothing prevents other people from forking ethereum from day 1 (maybe with some more sensible choices like changing the PoW to SHA256 to enable merged mining with Bitcoin), thus relying on currency speculation for profits is far more risky than most of these "investors" think and developers are not being clear about this (to be fair, maybe they don't understand this themselves).

Venture capitalists should look for more clever ways to monetize an open network like freimarkets: issuing gold deposits crypto-certificates, becoming a fiat or bitcoin gateway, selling smart locks or smart cars, creating a p2p lending site on top of freimarkets smart contracts, acting as an internet notary for legal contracts behind the issued assets, providing a secure storage service for windows users...
What I think is that these "investors" are in fact risk averse but they just don't understand the real risks of their "business model".
Freimarkets is not a business and thus lacks a business model, but there's many potential business models to be built on top of this infrastructure.

[Explodicle]

Off topic but I'll address it. The foundation funds are only spent through community mechanisms, e.g. matching donations. Neither Jorge nor I have any significant control over the destination of those coins.

Whether or not there is matching is irrelevant - the foundation must decide either which charities are elligible, or who gets to vote on which charities are elligible. And the decisions to hold the coins pending a full plan, and to give them to charity, were both made without a vote.

Your opinion is that the seigniorage should be burned in mining subsidies and I respect that opinion, but you have to face that it is not shared by the majority of the freicoin community. Like I was told when I wanted Bitcoin itself to have demurrage: go ahead and fork freicoin to create an altcoin with demurrage and 100% issuance through mining subsidies.

Seigniorage is the difference between the cost to acquire a good and its market value. If Bitcoin has any seigniorage at all, it tends to zero just like mining profits. That's such a far cry from 80% seigniorage that when you first said this to me months ago, I was so disgusted that I remained silent until now.

There are two reasons I haven't forked:
1) I'm not skilled enough to maintain it properly.
2) I'm not convinced that demurrage is beneficial in the first place.
If anyone reading this does start a "equal rules for all" fork, please PM me and you'll have found your first speculator.

So, please, go to a freicoin thread or to the freicoin forums to criticize the freicoin foundation since as maaku says this is off-topic for this thread.

Apparently maaku thinks the "evil" of Bitcoin speculation IS on-topic since he brought it up. I've tried to bite my tongue, but this is so blantantly antagonistic that I just can't leave it be. So by all means, discuss the crowdfund/software and keep your moral judgements of the Bitcoin community to yourselves.

[jtimon]

I answered to the rest here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89843.msg5512319#msg5512319

So, please, go to a freicoin thread or to the freicoin forums to criticize the freicoin foundation since as maaku says this is off-topic for this thread.

Apparently maaku thinks the "evil" of Bitcoin speculation IS on-topic since he brought it up. I've tried to bite my tongue, but this is so blantantly antagonistic that I just can't leave it be. So by all means, discuss the crowdfund/software and keep your moral judgements of the Bitcoin community to yourselves.

Maaku didn't talked about bitcoin speculation at any point, we were talking about mastercoin and ethereum speculators (among other similar projects) who seem to ignore that their code can be forked.
I feel part of the Bitcoin community (maaku is actually developing bitcoin core functionalities) and I think you just misinterpreted our claims.
We're NOT attacking Bitcoin and in fact I don't think anybody would have believed Freicoin was even possible at all. So I'm really thankful to Satoshi and the bitcoin community for making a demurrage p2p currency possible in the first place. If the community had accepted a demurrage hardfork for Bitcoin when I proposed it there would have been no need to create a new chain or a Freicoin Foundation at all. No bad feelings about that though, I respect the community decision (unlike you do with Freicoin's community decisions).

[Explodicle]

Maaku didn't talked about bitcoin speculation at any point, we were talking about mastercoin and ethereum speculators [snip]

Just so I'm 100% clear - which assumption was incorrect?
A) Maaku was saying ALL unearned rent was evil, not just those projects
B) You and maaku think that the income one gains from deflation or increased adoption is unearned rent

No bad feelings about that though, I respect the community decision (unlike you do with Freicoin's community decisions).

I used to respect the Freicoin community's decisions while I felt I was a part of it. That ended with the beta, when you guys drastically changed the scope of the project. If the Bitcoin developers decided one day that everyone should start trusting them even though it wasn't absolutely necessary, how would you feel?

[maaku]

I said that unearned rent is evil, and I stand by that. You should be able to make money by lending money, for example, but not the excessive interest rates credit card companies require because of a government-enforced monopoly on banking. If the p2p lending market were deregulated then interest rates would be much lower, and there wouldn't be such a massive ongoing transfer of wealth from the indebted poor to these companies. That system is evil.

I'm not sure what "unearned income" means. It sounds like a Marxist concept I do not subscribe to, namely that any income not resulting from actual labor is somehow unearned. I don't think that is true - if I lend out money with some risk, I deserve to be compensated for that risk. (As an aside, with unperishable currency like bitcoin I do pull in an unearned rent here due to the power relationship of having coins, separate from the opportunity cost of lending them out. Fixing this is the reason for demurrage currencies like Freicoin.)

The problem is that in the construction of a free and fair, decentralized, distributed, p2p, merged mined side chain for asset issuance and smart contracts - like Freimarkets - there is no room for the people who created the side chain to profit from its use, short of intentionally limiting the system in such a way as to require use of your pre-mined currency (a la XRP), or mandating some sort of centralized transaction tax, either of which could be just as easily removed with a fork.

With pegging and gateways there is no need for another non-perishable, mined currency, and any sort of usage tax on a p2p network is unfair and users would rightfully revolt against. So your best hope is that the network effect of people using your software will prevent people from switching to an unencumbered fork. But given that you are providing no direct service to the people using your chain (or it wouldn't be p2p), that is the definition of an unearned rent, and something I would find unethical to take part in.

[jtimon]

So, in summary, you misinterpreted what he meant by rent (Adam Smith divided incomes into profits, wages and rents).
Bitcoin early adopters, for example, are not receiving rents on bitcoin rises because anyone could have buy them too (in in fact they're talking a big risk by putting their money on a new technology that could fail). Those are profits, not rents.
Ripple Labs, Mastercoin or Ethereum business/funding models are basically rent-seeking on free software (something that intuitively shouldn't be possible).
In contrast we (or colored coins developers like @killerstorm) are just asking for donations to pay our wages.

[Explodicle]

I'm not sure what "unearned income" means.

It was a mistake I corrected a couple minutes after the post - I meant to type unearned rent.

With pegging and gateways there is no need for another non-perishable, mined currency, and any sort of usage tax on a p2p network is unfair and users would rightfully revolt against. So your best hope is that the network effect of people using your software will prevent people from switching to an unencumbered fork. But given that you are providing no direct service to the people using your chain (or it wouldn't be p2p), that is the definition of an unearned rent, and something I would find unethical to take part in.

Ok, so Bitcoin speculators aren't getting unearned rent, right?

[maaku]

Correct, but now that there are free and fair p2p issued currency anyone issuing a new one would be trying to collect a rent - forcing everyone to switch over to a currency which benefits you when free and fair alternatives exist.