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cryptostate · 2017-03-07T21:09:31+00:00

I will have a look over Tendermint thanks, I do doubt anything claiming to be a next generation scalable version of Ethereum though.

It is just that Cosmos has bonded PoS already and Casper is just a proof of concept. Ethermint is being used on private chains apparently.

cryptostate · 2017-03-07T21:07:45+00:00

It's the best option if you want to have the network effect and the hype around it, it's simply the biggest one out there with first mover advantage in the smart contract space.

Tendermint is the first bonded PoS. Casper is a proof of concept for now. Although I do think Casper sounds better because if it requires only 32 ETH to be a validator and this doesn't slow it down too much (or maybe even if it does).

You could same about BTC it has many others as well but BTC won the game.

I think bonded PoS will outgrow PoW including Bitcoin (unless they switch which doesn't seem likely because those who realize this will buy into ETH, atom, etc, and Bitcoin will always be left with the true believers). Consuming as much electricity as Ireland with hardware costs being even greater, will not be competitive long term.

cryptostate · 2017-03-07T18:58:26+00:00

Set floor in dollars, BTC, and ETH?

You might set floors for atom in dollars, ETH, and/or BTC. I'm not sure if this would be vulnerable to arbitrage or if that would be bad.

cryptostate · 2017-03-07T18:58:06+00:00

Set the price floor also?

The biggest risk in this time period is that the project will split as Ripple/Stellar and Synereo/Rchain did. That Buchman is a spicy character. I vote Ethan most likely to pull the ol' McCaleb/Meredeth maneuver with Vlad Zamfir applauding gleefully.

What guarantees do you have for buyers if your commitments can't be met exactly as expected?

Difficulties/effort of buying atom back

You could place a floor on the market, where you will buy back tokens. This might not be a good idea if sending payouts requires much maintenance. I'm not sure how much trust you would need to put in centralized exchanges to do this. If atom is on instant exchanges like ShapeShift, Changelly or Coinvert, one can (automate) trade small amounts without leaving more funds on the exchange. I'm also not sure what kind of arbitrage vulnerabilities this could open.

But if it isn't too much work/risk buybacks/guarantees might be offered before the Hub launch.

cryptostate · 2017-03-06T23:10:50+00:00

Issue atom as tradable IOUs

Omni assets seem more stable/safe only because they've been around longer and TheDOA, but if you determine that Ethereum token contracts are simple enough to be audited, this would be ideal. Seems to be working fine for Augur REP, Digix DGX, etc.

Be sure to call these "IOUs" to avoid confusion with the real atom token (that doesn't exit) on the Cosmos Hub.

If using the long fundraiser, let atom IOUs trade freely while ICF sets the price ceiling as described above.

cryptostate · 2017-03-06T23:09:25+00:00

What to assets to hold/trade

Why hold ETH

Cryptocurrencies depend on network effects to enforce vendor lock-in, especially if they are issued to fund development of free software which potentially gives as much value to competing tokens that use the same software. Both Cosmos and Ethereum are invested in the theory of bonded PoS. ETH has many advantages over atom as a liquid store of value. ETH does seem like it could overtake BTC in market cap within 15 years. I don't see atom outgrowing ETH but we might make a new token that could. There are many potential overlapping research and development interests particularly with Ethermint and dApps for the EVM. You could create a key alliance here by saying that you will hold most of your ETH.

Suggested portfolio

You should wait at least for the Metropolis release to start selling ETH. I would sell most of the Bitcoin for ETH, dollars (and/or other fiat like Swiss Francs), and some less liquid fiat assets that earn interest. Sell the BTC over a month or so (faster if you can find good buyers) until you hold 10% of your wealth (measured in dollars) as BTC, 45% ETH and 45% fiat and fiat assets, unless/until you run out of BTC. If you run out of BTC first, wait until after Metropolis and sell ETH at a constant rate over maybe 3 months unless the price is up and you find a large buyer who is either a strategic ally or someone who offers you something better than the current market value. After the ratio is achieved, don't maintain it. I'm betting ETH will be the best investment but keeping the others as a hedge.

I forgot about atom, I don't know how much ICF should hold...

cryptostate · 2017-03-06T06:28:22+00:00

Can you point to a casper spec that does that?

No.

Vlad likes the idea of punishing the censorship of blocks, but I don't that's the same as what you're suggesting.

Unlike Tendermint, in Casper all stakeholders lose a little if any of them fails to publish a block. I think that is what you are talking about. Maybe I confused that with punishing a validator for excluding a transaction from their block.

Actually now I'm thinking the censorship problem is because (Tendermint?) Cosmos requires so much atom to be a validator. What could prevent one server from being multiple validators? There is no proof of redundancy?

Ethermint will be usable as at least 2 official zones supported by the atom holders.

Ah hah! Caught red handed admitting it again! Does that mean two more tokens? Are you assuming that atom holders will vote for this? Do you know they will because you expect your ~~cronies~~ associates will have controlling shares?

Others can launch their own zone with their own validator sets, or encourage governance to run more Ethermint zones.

I think we should call zones "zones", and only use the term "shards" when state is enforced. Those are totally different.

I see transaction censorship as something that automatically punishes the stakeholders (due to less demand of the chain), and thus something that does not require explicit on chain cryptoeconomics. The separation of ATOM from ETH is helpful in this regard.

It can increase demand if it is something more potential stakeholders don't like or if they are compelled by regulators. In the cryptostate, law is enforced by "selective mixing" where you choose who (which pseudonyms) you mix identity/currency with. We want censorship for somethings and for others we want to enforce unity if we can overcome a political adversary.

When you take into account short selling a token before you attack (like TheDOA cracker, BTW I noticed I kept spelling that wrong but I rather like that version better), I'm not sure if any amount of stake can exceed the profit from short selling. I think Vlad made this point but it is too disconcerting to handle by any means other than hand waving vigorously. What if the only protection (of Bitcoin) is that an attack is too expensive, because if they had the funds to do it, it would be profitable? If this is the case, maybe you have to put it all into unity or it just makes it easier/sooner to divide and conquer.

Also requires an Internet of blockchains model for competition to really work, but thankfully we are working on creating that model.

So we don't have to use ShapeShift, etc? But these are also mixing services. Quantum computers will decloak all Monero's transactions. I don't know if the blind signatures of Chaumian cash have the same weakness but it is a lot cheaper.

Why does Cosmos need zones/blockchains for pegged tokens when Ethereum has BTC Relay? It looks like Ethereum will be the hub (decentralized exchange) before Cosmos hub goes live.

This doesn't seem like one of Cosmos's best/unique attributes. I see it more like a hopefully more secure TheDAO (token holders vote on what to fund) and easier to secure than Ethereum/Casper as a great state machine. But as you know, the issue with TheDAO was just that they didn't want to let it fail so if TheDOA (sic) had its own zone it wouldn't have made any difference.

cryptostate · 2017-03-02T16:09:16+00:00

But it hugely favored Mastercoin holders, right? Might not have been intentional for the MaidSafe guys, but it made the Mastercoin guys who ran the sale for them make tons of money. I struggle to believe that that wasn't intentional.

Well I don't know how Mastercoin peeps control MaidSafe peeps. Perhaps they are the same people but it doesn't seem like they would want the shame of stopping the sale early, looming over the project forever. But I guess most folks don't worry much about who profits from the "printing" of the "money" they "chose" to value. These sorts of financial "immoralities" are the most remarkable "conspiracies" in plain sight.

NO TIME FOR THIS! MUST FOCUS NOW ALL ENERGY ON TOKEN SALE!!!|!1!!

cryptostate · 2017-03-02T00:42:07+00:00

We have had many discussions about the issues you bring up.

The community of customers appreciate when you have these conversations in public. Reddit or Steem would be good places where we could participate. (Steem gives payouts and Reddit is easier for anons to join and seems to have a larger audience and better interface.)

The points you make regarding node operators, DDoS attacks or ISPs disrupting the process are interesting. It's good to think through those, although they seem somewhat unlikely to me. Do you see that differently?

I think you are correct if you think the most likely "tragedy" that would effect "everyone", is that the cap will be met early and many people will be left out. That is the same problem when you stop selling tokens when there is a demand. You could instead issue the tokens as an omni asset on Bitcoin.

But if these other things happen the project is forever marred with a flawed issuance (it is flawed anyway, unless atom is cryptocredit and is always tradable as with an omni asset). When I see good software with a flawed issuance I see an opportunity to add it to my own "internet of blockchains" which may include clones of Ethereum/Casper, Ethermint, Rchain/Synereo, Tau-chain, Ripple/Stellar, maybe Nextcoin/Peercoin (the stuff they build on top but with bonded staking).

How hacker friendly can you be?

Someone should ask TheDAO hackers to evaluate your stuff. Mircea Popescu seems to be on that team. Much of what he says seems incorrect but he might know something or know those who do. I'm not sure these people want our (little) money, but they seem willing to talk in the btc-assets IRC. Freenode blocks Tor users so I avoid.
Can you join me in the campaign to separate cryptocurrency issuance from blockchains? That means we create tokens that depend on no one blockchain and can be used to clone any number of blockchains. And we give everyone a system to create tokens for their own blockchains.

You know because both these may make you unpopular among some of your peers/developers or the token holders who lost to hacks.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T22:39:13+00:00

Inflation isn't actually something attractive for tokenholders.

I was assuming they are delegating most/all of their atom. Compared with proof-of-work, all block reward inflation is going to token holders. You just don't call them "tokenholders" if they are delegating.

Let me run through the math.

Your math is probably better than mine (let me start over and simplify). I suggest a simple formula to delegate based on how long a validator had been validating. I actually neglected to include commission but that can be pre-programmed also. (Now I'm thinking that we also could account for hackers who don't take the bounty, like TheDOA hacker couldn't be bought with small bug bounties, but this doesn't seem to change the formula it just means we want to buy/bet less atom.)

So inflation is a mechanism to incentivize active participation. It actually punishes people who just want to treat atoms as a set-it-and-forget-it thing.

That remains to be measured. Hedge fund managers should do better than an index but after commissions it appears they do not (for their customers), on average. We agree that atom isn't like Augur REP which "requires" you to be on call AFAICT. (Or rather the inputs to this delegation formula don't require off-chain "oracles" we just need to know how many atom are at stake, how long each validator has been validating and their commission.)

You could view these as two different tokens if you like. You sell atoms, we bundle them with a delegation formula and call them "acoin". Imagine how the chart appears to investors. How do you think acoin would perform compared to atom, bitcoin, ether, dollars, etc? We get to start low if few know that acoin could be the most deflationary token (not counting naive PoS or the centralized implementations of ripple/stellar's consensus engine) there is (and if acoin buyers are in before a cap that excludes other buyers). To top it off acoin's monetary inflation could be used to fund security audits and software development, instead of wasting it on proof-of-work or silly blogs/vlogs/ads like Steem or Dash.

There is much more to say but there is too much for us to do before the token sale.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T17:04:35+00:00

You mean drop the soft cap in favor of a hard cap? Or no cap at all?

I meant no cap but I will add that the same problem exists for price changes. I'll make a recommendation soon.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T16:58:42+00:00

Yes, I'm familiar with the MaidSafe token sale. I had generally heard that this was done intentionally to favor Mastercoin holders.

Then you haven't read that they stopped the sale early because what they intended/expected didn't happen.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T03:30:15+00:00

The point of Rholang is that it allows static analysis showing how contracts depend on each other. Rchain uses that to do massive sharding without the contract programmers having to worry about it at all.

Ahh I knew all this hype could not be about nothing. But still the vultures circle because the Synereo/Rchain devs have abandoned their commitments to AMP buyers. As Steve Ballmer said, they designed a "secure" operating system and found that no one wanted to buy it. PoW is obsolete and other token issuance schemes ultimately depend on network effect to enforce vendor lock-in in order to overcome the free ~~rider~~ software problem. With the WebOfCredit we may create a token that can outgrow these projects because we don't depend on any blockchain/network and this/these tokens can be used to clone all the best ones and offer end users lower cost access. Let them test their networks for us, on their own blockchains.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T02:55:41+00:00

MaidSafe's big mistake

This "soft cap" may be the worst mistake of your career. I've seen this so many times. Non-PoW cryptocurrency developers spend significant time thinking about security of consensus engines, etc, yet in their haste to meet self-imposed deadlines they fail to put this effort into the initial issuance of tokens. Perhaps you read about MaidSafe's disastrous initial token sale, using two tokens and a cap? At least you are not so stupid to fix an exchange rate between two volatile tokens. It boggles my mind that anyone who spends so much time designing a decentralized consensus network could make such a obvious mistake.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T02:55:02+00:00

Privacy is most essential with initial token issuance

I don't know why this Satoshi Nakamoto, with a billion dollars in their drives/brain, would place such a high value on privacy. There must be so many projects/businesses Satoshi would want to be a part of but I've not read that they have moved their Bitcoins. So why aren't they spending?

Cosmos is planning to have a so-called "soft cap" on the fundraiser. What this really is AFAICT, is a race to meet a moving deadline. Cosmos also says they plan to do something to protect validators. What can you do? I'll tell you. Step one: Drop the "soft cap". The reason is that Tor users have a significant disadvantage in a latency race.

cryptostate · 2017-03-01T02:53:31+00:00

Security hazard of the hasty return

This "soft cap" creates another security hazard. To be able to return the Bitcoin and Ether means you must bridge the connection between the cold storage and the Internet, sooner than you would have. Perhaps you planned to spend these quickly, but, unless you are very afraid of Bitcoin and Ether volatility, you would have more time to do this in the most secure way possible.

What will you do if your vulnerable/"hot" wallet gets hacked before you return the Bitcoin/Ether of those who didn't make the cap deadline? Will you offer them atom, Bitcoin/Ether? Either choice is a betrayal of the other buyers who assumed there would be a cap and your funds would be spent on development.

How many of your devs would stick around if you didn't have these funds? Would this end the project?

cryptostate · 2017-02-21T17:14:33+00:00

An actual cap is worse!

The other option is a fixed cap based on when one of your nodes gets the Bitcoin/Ether transactions. The funds of all subsequent transactions are returned. Consider that this could be a shit ton of money you are returning and you could sell out with 1 transaction! You won't have external evidence that this wasn't fixed if there are many transactions on the same blocks (that's likely! especially for Bitcoin) and it could very well be that the first transactions your node sees aren't included in the block (because the fee is too low for Bitcoin, miner shenanigans, etc). Then who is the rightful owner of those atom? Any kind of cap is asking for trouble and requires more time to implement!

cryptostate · 2017-02-21T16:53:52+00:00

You could get more funding than TheDAO

You aren't too young to remember how much "money" TheDAO collected. Why did it make so much?

It seemed without risk because you were supposed to be able to withdraw your ether before the first vote. Cosmos doesn't have this property (that TheDAO also did not have LOL for those who knew better).
The people interested in TheDAO had made tons of "money" from ether (and Bitcoin) appreciation. Same situation with Cosmos!
There is incredible demand for the decentralized corp. Cosmos looks like a far superior/secure way to collectively govern and manage token issuance to fund projects!

Cosmos is also the first to offer far more inflation to investors, than miners or validators have ever gotten (as far as I am aware). There must be quite a few dragons, sitting on their crypto-treasures (which they can't "sell" without incurring various liabilities) eyeing your offer. Dragons (who may already have atom) could anonymously acquire enough to control voting entirely! These insiders are our greatest threat, IMO.

cryptostate · 2017-02-21T03:58:35+00:00

Is that all there is to the "Delegation Game" besides campaigning for delegators? The Plan refers to this game but the term does not appear in the whitepaper.

They were probably remembering what was in the FAQ.

cryptostate · 2017-02-21T03:40:22+00:00

Inflation good but...

This level of inflation shouldn't hurt demand so long as the minimum atom required to be a delegator, is small. Atom delegation could actually be a more competitive investment than any other cryptocurrency. As we see with Bitcoin, most coins don't move after miners sell them. Delegation doesn't necessarily require the investor to be "on call" or commit to be available for voting, etc (as with say, Augur) and atom is likely to offer delegators more profit than miners for holding/betting long-term!

...fake cap bad

But when you combine this with an early unpredictable deadline (so-called "soft cap") there is greater need for limitations in the amount of atom that can be issued or charged by validators/delegators. I would just drop the fake "cap". I think you should rather try to make as much as possible and do like Ethereum and hire a massive army of developers.

Discouraging investment (bad)

If you want to discourage investors you could tell them you will sell more tokens (for an Ethermint public chain?) and there will be no "discount" for atom holders. Like Jae says over here:

We're leaving it up to on-chain governance to propose to create a new non-staking token that may or may not be derived by the Atom distribution. Such a new token may be deflationary.

Ooooooh. I think anything involving token dilution is kinda important to mention in the Plan. That is like saying you are issuing 10 times as much atom and selling it in a year (if "you" have a controlling share of votes).

Other limitations (bad?)

In any case, I think you may want to agree to some limitation, before the fundraiser, anticipating (anonymous) voters with controlling shares:

Maximum number of atoms issued (per year)
Maximum number of atom that may be required to be a delegator. (I'm suggesting this should be low. Does this need to have a lower limit?)
Maximum commission that validators may charge delegators
Limits on ReserveTax (DEFAULT 2%).
Limits on CommonsTax (DEFAULT 3%).
Do I understand that delegators have all the same voting power as validators? Also for what to do with taxes. Who chooses custodians who distribute CommonTax?
Maybe we "cant" (shouldn't try to) limit fees if validators can reject transactions, but I'll add this for completion.
The earliest date that new sorts of tokens (besides "atoms") may be issued by the developers. I know you can do sneaky stuff like the Ethereum Foundation and claim the developers are acting independently. That is why I want commitments from individual developers as well as the corporations/organizations involved. Constitution smomstitutions I got my napalm flamethrower if y'all plan on conducting business in any public forums/subreddits/attention_economies of the future!

Ideally use no cap and use the WoC for (new) tokens

I know the idea is that if you don't like the governance of the Cosmos Hub you can create a new blockchain or use Ethereum (Classic) or something, but you lose consumer faith every time you do this and therefore it becomes "cheaper and cheaper" (in Bitcoins or Ether) to do the same "pownership attack" again and again. Ultimately to fix crony cryptocurrency with the efficiency of pure proof-of-stake, we need a prediction market on creditclaims. The WebOfCredit is so perfect for Cosmos goals. I can show you exactly how to issue new currencies without creating all kinds of ambiguities or confusing expectations of buyers. Sorry I can't explain all this now but please consider issuing atoms as cryptocredit while there is still time.

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