[Announce] Project Quixote - BitShares, BitNames and 'BitMessage'

[lemons]

It seems very interesting

[cunicula]

Hey, if you are considering investing in bitshares ask for the arrangement I describe here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=298677.msg3205069#msg3205069

Basically, you agree to give up 95% of the returns from your investment in bitshares, keeping only 5% of the original interest they offered.

In exchange, these guys offer a contract (backed by collateral) that protects you from losing all your investment should the bitshares project turn out to be a ponzi.

If they are not willing to do this arrangement (take back 95% of the interest they are offering in exchange for offering ponzi protection for investors), then you should think very carefully who you are dealing with.

If they are willing to offer the arrangement, then you should definitely take them up on the offer. Invest as much as they are capable of backing with collateral / or trusted BTC escrow. As long as the escrow works, it is would be a completely risk free return. (You might even consider leveraging it up).

Disclaimer: I do not have any way of determining whether the collateral / escrow could be enforced. You would have to be very diligent in this area.

[bytemaster]

Hey, if you are considering investing in bitshares ask for the arrangement I describe here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=298677.msg3205069#msg3205069

Basically, you agree to give up 95% of the returns from your investment in bitshares, keeping only 5% of the original interest they offered.

In exchange, these guys offer a contract (backed by collateral) that protects you from losing all your investment should the bitshares project turn out to be a ponzi.

If they are not willing to do this arrangement (take back 95% of the interest they are offering in exchange for offering ponzi protection for investors), then you should think very carefully who you are dealing with.

If they are willing to offer the arrangement, then you should definitely take them up on the offer. Invest as much as they are capable of backing with collateral / or trusted BTC escrow. As long as the escrow works, it is would be a completely risk free return. (You might even consider leveraging it up).

Disclaimer: I do not have any way of determining whether the collateral / escrow could be enforced. You would have to be very diligent in this area.

All dividends and 'interest' are paid according to blockchain rules and the process is 0-sum.   There will be a test network to prove the ideas before anyone is asked to risk their own money.   Anyway, we never take anyones BTC, their USD, or any other asset.  We are merely software developers releasing what we believe to be a useful product to the community.   The worst you could accuse us of is attempting a 'pump and dump' but that accusation would have to infer we are providing no value or utility in what we are producing.   Given that you are attempting to raise money from the public for your own alt-chain promising price stability while violating more economic principals than I care to list right now... I question your motives for attacking us.

So for those of you who doubt our system we provide a very easy way for you to 'profit' if you are right.  You can mine some BitShares, then use them to buy BitBTC and never give us a dollar.   Assuming the value of BitShares crashes relative to BTC after you have bought your position then you will have preserved your BitBTC value plus earned interest all without risking anything other than a couple of CPU cycles.

But... I will go one step further, you (cunicula) can mine as many bitshares as you want, use them to buy BitBTC and then I will personally buy those BitBTC from you with real BTC at face value for as many as you can mine.   Thus, I am not asking you to take any risk in my system at all and giving you an opportunity to earn real BTC for your mining efforts.  

Considering we are not selling BitBTC for BTC I fail to see how you can claim we are a ponzi!  

[cunicula]

We are merely software developers releasing what we believe to be a useful product to the community.  

Do you say this when you sell carding software too?

You are releasing a decentralized Ponzi. That is what your design is. It is transparent. You are a software developer, sure. You are also engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

You do not need to create the bitBTC yourself. You are selling bitshares that can be used to create bitBTC. Someone else can do the dirty work for you. You don't even need to know them to profit from the scheme. It is really nefarious.

[charleshoskinson]

Hey, if you are considering investing in bitshares ask for the arrangement I describe here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=298677.msg3205069#msg3205069

Basically, you agree to give up 95% of the returns from your investment in bitshares, keeping only 5% of the original interest they offered.

In exchange, these guys offer a contract (backed by collateral) that protects you from losing all your investment should the bitshares project turn out to be a ponzi.

If they are not willing to do this arrangement (take back 95% of the interest they are offering in exchange for offering ponzi protection for investors), then you should think very carefully who you are dealing with.

If they are willing to offer the arrangement, then you should definitely take them up on the offer. Invest as much as they are capable of backing with collateral / or trusted BTC escrow. As long as the escrow works, it is would be a completely risk free return. (You might even consider leveraging it up).

Disclaimer: I do not have any way of determining whether the collateral / escrow could be enforced. You would have to be very diligent in this area.

We have thoroughly addressed your concerns beyond the point of good taste. You are slandering our company and have used a legal term in reference to BitShares. I am asking you to cease this campaign against our company. We have not accepted any community money. We are running all tests on company resources. We are not premining. Every line of code is open sourced. Invictus does not profit from the use of the BitShares protocol anymore than the developers of Bitcoin profit from it.  

I have no idea why you have decided to engage in this hostile pointless criticism, but it accomplishes nothing  other than destroying your own credibility. We have posted an example research paper discussing the economics our system is based upon:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/6/13%20prediction%20markets%20wolfers/13%20prediction%20markets%20wolfers.pdf

We are going to test every assumption we make with a public testnet prior to releasing BitShares into the wild. I just don't understand how we can be anymore open or transparent in this process? We are being called a ponzi scheme for spending our own money on an experiment?

Have you addressed the communication and ID system we are also building as open sourced projects? We have solved decentralized email and built a better web of trust and we are giving it away for free. But no, all of this is just some elaborate ponzi scheme where we don't take anyone's money, but somehow you lose it? Mr. Jackie Chan has an answer:



Meanwhile, I don't see you addressing the real scams in the market:



You're just pissed off because I went into your thread and corrected your whitepaper for an idea you're trying to raise 300k of community money for. It's amazing that you're this petty, but there is no other explanation.

[cunicula]

It's a ponzi. You are not going to get me to go away by 'addressing my criticisms'

You can get me to go away by:

1) Committing to reimburse your investors in the event that this is a ponzi scheme (I explained how you can do this in my contract)

2) Shutting down your operation.

Otherwise, good luck attracting any investors. LOL

[cunicula]

Your whitepaper describes a design for a ponzi.

Whether it 'works' or not is kind of beside the point.

I went after pirateat40 as well.
I went after another ponzi operator going by the name of starfish.
Much too late to make any difference.

It is too late to go after BFL and I have no way of knowing if that was an intentional scam.

Your scam is clearly intentional. You are a mathematician. You expect me to believe that you don't know what you are doing?

[bytemaster]

Your whitepaper describes a design for a ponzi.

Whether it 'works' or not is kind of beside the point.

Ponzi...

[bybitcoin]

Goldbach is actually one of the hardest problems to resolve in number theory in my opinion. It has some of the deepest connections possible in prime distribution and explaining how factorization changes with addition, which is why Hardy and Littlewood spent so much time analyzing it.

I actually came up with a corpus using Wiles work alongside some insights from Tao to resolve the Goldbach conjecture in a fairly creative way, but it's beyond my current mathematical ability to explore. I would need about ten years and access to some great minds. 

I do not really see how Wiles methods or results could help solving Goldbach's conjecture (but that's the adventurous beauty of math discovery to bring in unexpected relations) but Tao's approach and in general ergodic methods are powerful tools in analytic number theory!
Did you participate in the Quixote project coding too? I know bytemaster is a skilled c++ developer, but I was wondering to know if you just designed the idea and algorithms, or also participated in coding process

[bytemaster]

Goldbach is actually one of the hardest problems to resolve in number theory in my opinion. It has some of the deepest connections possible in prime distribution and explaining how factorization changes with addition, which is why Hardy and Littlewood spent so much time analyzing it.

I actually came up with a corpus using Wiles work alongside some insights from Tao to resolve the Goldbach conjecture in a fairly creative way, but it's beyond my current mathematical ability to explore. I would need about ten years and access to some great minds. 

I do not really see how Wiles methods or results could help solving Goldbach's conjecture (but that's the adventurous beauty of math discovery to bring in unexpected relations) but Tao's approach and in general ergodic methods are powerful tools in analytic number theory!
Did you participate in the Quixote project coding too? I know bytemaster is a skilled c++ developer, but I was wondering to know if you just designed the idea and algorithms, or also participated in coding process

The BitShares idea and algorithm were designed by me prior to meeting Charles.   Charles and I have worked together to enhance the explanation of them and to validate the cryptography of the system, but the economics and design of the system is mostly my domain.   Charles is an amazing CEO and is great at raising funds, building relationships, and vetting ideas with.   I would certainly never have gotten my ideas this far without him.   It is really quite surprising that a math guy can be such a people person as Charles is.  He is a very bright guy.

[td services]

Your whitepaper describes a design for a ponzi.

Whether it 'works' or not is kind of beside the point.

I went after pirateat40 as well.
I went after another ponzi operator going by the name of starfish.
Much too late to make any difference.

It is too late to go after BFL and I have no way of knowing if that was an intentional scam.

Your scam is clearly intentional. You are a mathematician. You expect me to believe that you don't know what you are doing?

From what I have seen, following Bitshares from early on, your accusations regarding the integrity of the project and its founders is completely baseless and without merit. You have thoroughly discredited yourself. Too bad, as I thought your observations and proposal of another approach, though I have zero respect for most academic economics departments, could possibly lead to another decentralized p2p trading system. As it stands, though, I do not see your obvious personality defects leading to the successful implementation of a project.

I might add, the exchange of ideas between bybitcoin and Charles regarding math represents the best of what the Bitcoin community has to offer. It has given me even more confidence in the viability of Bitshares and shows the great quality of its founders.

[charleshoskinson]

I do not really see how Wiles methods or results could help solving Goldbach's conjecture

what if you could find a way to represent for n>1: 2n = p1 + p2^r where p1 and p2 are prime and r is a natural number and then show there exists m as an integer such that p1^r + p2^r = m^r. By fermat's last theorem r <= 2 and then show (p1,p2,m) are not a Pythagorean triple thus r =1 implying 2n = p1 + p2 for all n>1.

Tao and Chen's work allow for representing 2n in terms of the sum of a prime and a prime to an unknown power and wile's work allows for someone to discover that magic m which is an integer (all inspired by the Hardy-Littlewood Circle Method and semistable elliptic curves). The triple component should be trivial. That's the best corpus I can provide in this format. The devil is in actually demonstrating these things to be true which requires a mastery of concepts that are beyond my abilities at the moment.

Did you participate in the Quixote project coding too? I know bytemaster is a skilled c++ developer, but I was wondering to know if you just designed the idea and algorithms, or also participated in coding process Smiley

Most of the code I've worked on falls into two categories: data analysis with python and R alongside a CAS like Sage and functional programming for FHE research using Haskell. I'm familiar with some web development concepts with JS, PHP and bots for scraping and also I've done a lot of work with neural networks, but I'm not a C++ developer.

Dan is an expert with modern C++ at the Bjarne Stroustrup level and also has become very skilled at developing p2p systems over the past few years. Outside of helping with the cryptanalysis and vetting the logic of ideas, I can't be much help in writing the core software of Keyhotee and the BitShares protocol.

This said, we are an open source company and I've been investing a lot of time into getting more developers and professionals to come help us make this a reality. We are not dealing with easy problems and we can't possibly have all the solutions. Instead we are aiming for getting a foundation of innovation, iteration and collaboration setup to eventually grow to a solution that works for everyone.

Here is my biggest problem in this project:



I'd have 15 devs if we were doing this in python.

 
  

[bybitcoin]

@bytemaster: sorry to guess wrongly, actually I have seen you discussing technical stuffs with bitfreak in his thread, that made me first guess that you are the math guy, so I directed my first post to you. Then Charles came in and by the real name from coindesk news I got to know he is the math guy, and then by the well known math selfishness, I supposed the creation should be his work
@Charles: unfortunately your trick is not correct and won't work for solving Goldbach's conjecture, sorry for extending this off-topic here, but I try to explain why: you want to prove for a particular n>1 there are two primes p1 and p2 so that 2n=p1+p2. By Chen's result we know there is an r (r<c where c is an upperbound) so that there are prime numbers p1 and p2 that 2n=p1+p2^r. So here you suppose there could be an integer m so that p1^r+p2^r=m^r  BUT STOP, WHY?! Since p1 and p2 and r are fixed from the previous equation for 2n and not arbitrary, you will not certainly be able to deduce the existence of an m such that p1^r+p2^1=m^r for general (but fixed for each n) p1, p2 and r, other than when r=1, but that is exactly what you want to prove then after by the help of this trick

[charleshoskinson]

@Charles: unfortunately your trick is not correct and won't work for solving Goldbach's conjecture, sorry for extending this off-topic here, but I try to explain why: you want to prove for a particular n>1 there are two primes p1 and p2 so that 2n=p1+p2. By Chen's result we know there is an r (r<c where c is an upperbound) so that there are prime numbers p1 and p2 that 2n=p1+p2^r. So here you suppose there could be an integer m so that p1^r+p2^r=m^r  BUT STOP, WHY?! Since p1 and p2 and r are fixed from the previous equation for 2n and not arbitrary, you will not certainly be able to deduce the existence of an m such that p1^r+p2^1=m^r for general (but fixed for each n) p1, p2 and r, other than when r=1, but that is exactly what you want to prove then after by the help of this trick Wink

What if we know something about the factorization of n and also about p1 and p2. I actually don't rely upon the chen result to prove 2n = p1 + p2^r rather a different method that tells me a lot more about (n,p1,p2), which in term is useful in discussing m.  The key is the relationship of (n,p1,p2,m) and this is why the problem is so interesting to me. It's expressing a relationship between a particular factorization, a Diophantine equation and prime distributions.

Another way to look at my approach is to start with a process from an arbitrary n to generate several special sets of the form (n,p1,p2,r) and then use the process to show m must exist by a reductio ad absurdum argument. This is a specific m in relation to a specific p1 and p2, but the process generates these sets for all n. Then show not a triple inferring r = 1.

I'd go into more specific details, but this isn't the forum and honestly these things are best discussed in person or over skype with a wacom tablet.

[bytemaster]

@bytemaster: sorry to guess wrongly, actually I have seen you discussing technical stuffs with bitfreak in his thread, that made me first guess that you are the math guy, so I directed my first post to you. Then Charles came in and by the real name from coindesk news I got to know he is the math guy, and then by the well known math selfishness, I supposed the creation should be his work

Its Ok... I spend most of my time in engineering getting the Warp core to work, while Kirk gets all of the credit for saving the day.   The two of us working together is what makes this enterprise so unique.

[bybitcoin]

I can tell you 100% surely that there is no way to deduce from 2n=p1+p2^r  the existence of such m (actually when n is an odd number then p1 and p2 should both be either in the 4k+1 or both in the 4k-1 form and that will result in m^r not divisible by 4 while m is an even number, obviously impossible)
But yes this off-topic discussion may be a noise for the general audience and let's quit it here

[charleshoskinson]

It seems the proposed corpus fails due to a fairly trivial structure property I hadn't considered. I was busy building a bounding argument for generating p1,p2 and r off of a given n and hadn't even considered that they are either both congruent to 1 or 3 creating the obvious problem (4k1 +1)^r + (4k2 +1)^r cannot sum to a number that is divisible by 4. Feels pretty idiotic on my part honestly.

[bytemaster]

Teaser Screenshot of latest work on Project Quixote...

You will have to wait until C3 to see the rest

[charleshoskinson]

http://www.reddit.com/r/BitShares/

by popular demand

[cunicula]

Ponzi schemes have a precise definition in economics. I explain the definition in the other thread.
I also show that bitshares meet the definition of ponzi in a pure BTC economy.

Bitshares is also a ponzi in the real world economy as well, but using the definition to demonstrate this is more complex. Not all bitAssets are necessarily ponzis, but it is very easy to show that bitBTC are a ponzi.