[ANN] FACTOM - Introducing Honesty to Record-Keeping

[MyFarm]

It's pretty simple what happened.  Bnktothefuture is still an imperfect system and there were fraudulent purchases and/or investors who weren't legally able to invest and that was determined after the fact.

I have zero doubt Factom is 100% in the clear and this is a non-event.

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[GrossBit]

It's pretty simple what happened.  Bnktothefuture is still an imperfect system and there were fraudulent purchases and/or investors who weren't legally able to invest and that was determined after the fact.

I have zero doubt Factom is 100% in the clear and this is a non-event.

I have exposed the facts. Of course the primary culprit is bnktothefuture.

But if you have company A making a share sale through bank B and bank B is acting illegally to sell the shares, or just even breaking (without maliciousness) some rules, shouldn't you expect at least apologies, BOTH from B AND A

(edit:) one more point.

do you REALLY believe NOBODY from Factom was at least interested to check during the sale how much was raised by bnktothefuture, maybe not an daily basis (though i certainly would if i was Factom's CEO !). When checking the figures, i would quickly figure out the actual figure and the one on bnktothefuture site had a material (1M USD) difference... If they knew and didn't intervene, thats an offense I believe. And its very hard to believe nobody knew on their side. see ? No accusation without proof, but for me, this is very fishy.

[MyFarm]

It's pretty simple what happened.  Bnktothefuture is still an imperfect system and there were fraudulent purchases and/or investors who weren't legally able to invest and that was determined after the fact.

I have zero doubt Factom is 100% in the clear and this is a non-event.

I have exposed the facts. Of course the primary culprit is bnktothefuture.

But if you have company A making a share sale through bank B and bank B is acting illegally to sell the shares, or even breaking (without maliciousness) some rules, shouldn't you expect at least apologies, BOTH from B AND A

From Factom?  No.

[GrossBit]

It's pretty simple what happened.  Bnktothefuture is still an imperfect system and there were fraudulent purchases and/or investors who weren't legally able to invest and that was determined after the fact.

I have zero doubt Factom is 100% in the clear and this is a non-event.

I have exposed the facts. Of course the primary culprit is bnktothefuture.

But if you have company A making a share sale through bank B and bank B is acting illegally to sell the shares, or even breaking (without maliciousness) some rules, shouldn't you expect at least apologies, BOTH from B AND A

From Factom?  No.

We have a different view about corporate responsability. In Japan you would see the CEO make a press conference, apologize and bow down deeply in front of TV and cameras, and offer compensation to investors

one such compensation may include the option to opt out.

[MyFarm]

It's pretty simple what happened.  Bnktothefuture is still an imperfect system and there were fraudulent purchases and/or investors who weren't legally able to invest and that was determined after the fact.

I have zero doubt Factom is 100% in the clear and this is a non-event.

I have exposed the facts. Of course the primary culprit is bnktothefuture.

But if you have company A making a share sale through bank B and bank B is acting illegally to sell the shares, or even breaking (without maliciousness) some rules, shouldn't you expect at least apologies, BOTH from B AND A

From Factom?  No.

We have a different view about corporate responsability. In Japan you would see the CEO make a press conference, apologize and bow down deeply in front of TV and cameras, and offer compensation to investors

one such compensation may include the option to opt out.

I understand.  You'll never see that in the USA.  Very different cultures.

For the record, I like your contributions to this thread.  We differ in opinion in some areas, including this one, but that's ok.  

If you'd like to opt out of the Factom share sale, I'll purchase your shares at what you paid for them.  If I knew Draper was buying in, I would have got off my ass and purchased some as well.  I've retired from that arena but I would still follow Draper or Sequioa Capital just about anywhere.

[BrianDeery]

Brian,

I just finished reading the whitepaper.  I am still confused about the servers.  The servers act as a node like in bitcoin.  Are these servers run by people are are they all owned and operated by factom.  Also I read somewhere that there is a limit on the total number of federated servers.  I am assuming a federated server is like a dedicated server, just bigger.  And is there a factom rich list?

1.  By M3, who is a Federated and who is an Audit servers will be voted for by users of Entry Credits.  It could end up being you or me.  M3 will make it a decentralized system.  M2 will be centralized and Factom appears to be choosing who is running those servers.

2.  I suspect initially a Federated or Audit server could be run on a VPS.  I also suspect, in time, Federated and Audit servers will require MUCH MORE computing power as use of the protocol grows.

This is pretty much right, but a few details need correcting.  Think of the Federated servers like you think of bitcoin mining pools.  They are the authorities of how transactions get ordered in the system.  They all work together to build the blockchain.  There can be thousands of bitcoin nodes in the system, that also see all the data.  The bitcoin nodes see all the pending unconfirmed transactions, then after the miners order the transactions, all the nodes save the block which sets the ordering.  It is similar with factom.  All the nodes will see all the data, just like bitcoin.  Unlike bitcoin, the authorities are known in advance, so the order can be determined in real time, instead of probabilistically after the fact.  This gives faster response time.  Like the bitcoin miners, the servers will run the same code as all the other nodes.

Unlike ethereum or even bitcoin, factom nodes & servers do very little validation.  All that is checked is if data was paid for before putting it in the blockchain.  This is in contrast to something Turing complete, or even with a simple script like bitcoin.  All the validation for an application will be done on the client side, rather than on the servers.  Here is a comparison of the approaches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naKvYfYsBQo&feature=youtu.be&t=3476

Even with a very high transaction usage, the bandwidth required will be about that of a High Definition movie or two.  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850070.msg13588841#msg13588841

When the system starts to process more transactions than the average node bandwidth can handle, that is where the p2p network sharding comes into effect.  Since all entries in the system need to declare a ChainID, then there is room for lots of parallelism.  We are anticipating this.  For example, Identities are a big part of how the servers will be chosen and managed.  They are forced to start with 0x888888 to be valid by using brute force hashing.  https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/Identity.md#factom-identity-chain-creation  This will put all identities into an easily identifiable network shard.  Since most people won't care about other people's applications, they only join the network shard that handles their application.  The shard is there for real time communication.  After the blocks are made, everyone needs the directory blocks, but you would only download the entry blocks and entries related to your application.  For now everyone downloads everything.

Myfarm's conclusion about the federated servers being more powerful than nodes will come about if they span different network shards.

We will have 32 federated servers for M3.  More than that and we probably would have coordination issues.  

[Mimir]

Paul Snow has generously agreed to have me interview him for CryptoCompare. First, thanks to tdkmatt for making this possible.

Sounds tremendous.
Its wonderful that Factom employees drop in here to clear things up also, hope people realise they do have dayjobs.

Going to be greedy and ask 2 questions, one was alluded to in another forum which Brian seemed to get the meaning of:

• Could Factom be censored? Don't mean someone randomly spamming my chain with nonsense, I mean an activist in Egypt photographing injustices, expensive as it is to store photos on Factom, it's a price some would be very willing to pay, even twitter routinely censors journalists geographically at the request of governments.
  Once anchored, it's there right? Everything suggests so, just would like to hear thoughts from the top. Also, if the Factom network went down how easy would it be for say a BBC Journo to get this hypothetical photo from the bitcoin blockchain instead?
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/twitter-shouldnt-let-itself-become-a-tool-for-tyrants/2016/10/06/236b5684-8a65-11e6-b24f-a7f89eb68887_story.html
  
  
• The Ethereum network has been under attack for weeks now. How much stress testing have you guys done? I see stress testing for massive amounts of entries on github, but what about get data requests? and are there plans for bug bounties?

Yeah, there's possibly more than two questions there, I'm just going to ignore that fact.

Really good article also, recommended reading.

[Jjtjjt]

Brian,

I just finished reading the whitepaper.  I am still confused about the servers.  The servers act as a node like in bitcoin.  Are these servers run by people are are they all owned and operated by factom.  Also I read somewhere that there is a limit on the total number of federated servers.  I am assuming a federated server is like a dedicated server, just bigger.  And is there a factom rich list?

1.  By M3, who is a Federated and who is an Audit servers will be voted for by users of Entry Credits.  It could end up being you or me.  M3 will make it a decentralized system.  M2 will be centralized and Factom appears to be choosing who is running those servers.

2.  I suspect initially a Federated or Audit server could be run on a VPS.  I also suspect, in time, Federated and Audit servers will require MUCH MORE computing power as use of the protocol grows.

This is pretty much right, but a few details need correcting.  Think of the Federated servers like you think of bitcoin mining pools.  They are the authorities of how transactions get ordered in the system.  They all work together to build the blockchain.  There can be thousands of bitcoin nodes in the system, that also see all the data.  The bitcoin nodes see all the pending unconfirmed transactions, then after the miners order the transactions, all the nodes save the block which sets the ordering.  It is similar with factom.  All the nodes will see all the data, just like bitcoin.  Unlike bitcoin, the authorities are known in advance, so the order can be determined in real time, instead of probabilistically after the fact.  This gives faster response time.  Like the bitcoin miners, the servers will run the same code as all the other nodes.

Unlike ethereum or even bitcoin, factom nodes & servers do very little validation.  All that is checked is if data was paid for before putting it in the blockchain.  This is in contrast to something Turing complete, or even with a simple script like bitcoin.  All the validation for an application will be done on the client side, rather than on the servers.  Here is a comparison of the approaches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naKvYfYsBQo&feature=youtu.be&t=3476

Even with a very high transaction usage, the bandwidth required will be about that of a High Definition movie or two.  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=850070.msg13588841#msg13588841

When the system starts to process more transactions than the average node bandwidth can handle, that is where the p2p network sharding comes into effect.  Since all entries in the system need to declare a ChainID, then there is room for lots of parallelism.  We are anticipating this.  For example, Identities are a big part of how the servers will be chosen and managed.  They are forced to start with 0x888888 to be valid by using brute force hashing.  https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/Identity.md#factom-identity-chain-creation  This will put all identities into an easily identifiable network shard.  Since most people won't care about other people's applications, they only join the network shard that handles their application.  The shard is there for real time communication.  After the blocks are made, everyone needs the directory blocks, but you would only download the entry blocks and entries related to your application.  For now everyone downloads everything.

Myfarm's conclusion about the federated servers being more powerful than nodes will come about if they span different network shards.

We will have 32 federated servers for M3.  More than that and we probably would have coordination issues.  

Thank you Brian for your time and patience.  It is much appreciated.

[Mimir]

When the system starts to process more transactions than the average node bandwidth can handle, that is where the p2p network sharding comes into effect.  Since all entries in the system need to declare a ChainID, then there is room for lots of parallelism.  We are anticipating this.  For example, Identities are a big part of how the servers will be chosen and managed.  They are forced to start with 0x888888 to be valid by using brute force hashing.  https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/blob/master/Identity.md#factom-identity-chain-creation  This will put all identities into an easily identifiable network shard.  Since most people won't care about other people's applications, they only join the network shard that handles their application.  The shard is there for real time communication.  After the blocks are made, everyone needs the directory blocks, but you would only download the entry blocks and entries related to your application.  For now everyone downloads everything.

Myfarm's conclusion about the federated servers being more powerful than nodes will come about if they span different network shards.

We will have 32 federated servers for M3.  More than that and we probably would have coordination issues.  

Mental note: read all the comments before commenting yourself

[crazyivan]

D-lux, question for Paul I think we all care about a lot.

Will M2 be available during Q4 of 2016? If yes, can he specify expected month. Since we have 2.5 months till the end of the year, this should not be a big time speculation on his behalf.

Thx for making this possible D-lux.

[boestie]

D-lux, question for Paul I think we all care about a lot.

Will M2 be available during Q4 of 2016? If yes, can he specify expected month. Since we have 2.5 months till the end of the year, this should not be a big time speculation on his behalf.

Thx for making this possible D-lux.

you start to annoy me.

[crazyivan]

D-lux, question for Paul I think we all care about a lot.

Will M2 be available during Q4 of 2016? If yes, can he specify expected month. Since we have 2.5 months till the end of the year, this should not be a big time speculation on his behalf.

Thx for making this possible D-lux.

you start to annoy me.

There s a button for that. Please use it.

[nowhere man]

D-Lux,

my question would be something along these lines:

After M3 is released and everything is up and running, what sort of demand for entry credits on a monthly basis does factom believe is achievable and attainable. I guess I'm asking, what is their yardstick for success in terms of entry credit demand.

Many many thanks if you can ask this on my behalf. I think this info is crucial for hodlers of factoids.

All the best

[crazyivan]

Another message to the manipulator who s constantly trying to activate as much as possible sell triggers by staging these fake dumps:

I        AM         NOT       SELLING        UNTILL         THE       PRICE        AT     LEAST    DOUBLES        SO    GO   SUCK    A    DICK!


Sincerely,

Crazyivan

[Freckleg]

Doubles? Why sell anything before 0.05?

[daburone]

Few questions for Paul:

1. Will you guys be doing another bnktothefuture campaign in the near future?

2. Are you willing/able to help facilitate block-trades of FCT, i.e. if I wanted to buy a significant amount OTC from a dev or another early investor?

3. Have you guys been looking into Dubai (I assume you've read the recent news)?

Keep up the good work!

[tempus]

Few questions for Paul:

1. Will you guys be doing another bnktothefuture campaign in the near future?

2. Are you willing/able to help facilitate block-trades of FCT, i.e. if I wanted to buy a significant amount OTC from a dev or another early investor?

3. Have you guys been looking into Dubai (I assume you've read the recent news)?

Keep up the good work!

Damn, you was faster. ;-) 

I also wanted to ask Nr 3 because I've read that article which is really interesting. And: Paul Snow was in Dubai in 2015 (see comment below: "This is from Dubai Bitcoin Conference"):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2x8cbd/paul_snow_explains_factom_and_why_its_important/

[siaubas]

Another message to the manipulator who s constantly trying to activate as much as possible sell triggers by staging these fake dumps:

I        AM         NOT       SELLING        UNTILL         THE       PRICE        AT     LEAST    DOUBLES        SO    GO   SUCK    A    DICK!


Sincerely,

Crazyivan

Maybe you should stop encouraging the manipulator.

[AlanX]

Few questions for Paul:

1. Will you guys be doing another bnktothefuture campaign in the near future?

2. Are you willing/able to help facilitate block-trades of FCT, i.e. if I wanted to buy a significant amount OTC from a dev or another early investor?

3. Have you guys been looking into Dubai (I assume you've read the recent news)?

Keep up the good work!

1.   First of all, I focus on technology development.  Secondly, decisions about fundraising and finance tend to be things we can't talk about until decisions are made.

2.  We are not able to facilitate block trades of FCT.  Our focus needs to be on technology development.  

3.  We are aware of the announcements coming out of Dubai, and we are looking into those opportunities.

Paul

[syfare]

Another message to the manipulator who s constantly trying to activate as much as possible sell triggers by staging these fake dumps:

I        AM         NOT       SELLING        UNTILL         THE       PRICE        AT     LEAST    DOUBLES        SO    GO   SUCK    A    DICK!


Sincerely,

Crazyivan

Maybe you should stop encouraging the manipulator.

True, if you are in for the long term, stop looking at quotation every minutes ... Best way to panic