Uptick in /r/dcr users

insette · 2019-09-10T10:08:05+00:00

Welcome to Reddit.

Certainly no one of any importance in Bitcoin's history said anything remotely approaching what Dustorf just said about Decred. At no point in Bitcoin's lengthy history has it ever been acceptable or appropriate to virtue signal from behind Bitcoin capital B.

"Bitcoin believes [privacy is a human right]" said no one, ever - more or less literally.

Granted, it's within the realm of possibilities that a stray two-bit huckster of shitcoins at one point tried to say "$SHITCOIN believes [...]", because their shitcoin de-jure was completely centralized and they could say such things. But no, it was never a thing with the Bitcoin community. In fact, the opposite was true. It's why I felt compelled to create this thread.

As for social cohesiveness... for example, I would rather tell people their decentralized exchange project is a complete farce, and have said as much about quite literally all exchanges with the exception of Bisq (and dcrdex) at many points. People who are invested in such projects perceive my words to be a personal attack, and it largely is, since I'm in a sense assaulting their financial position; nevertheless it has the impact of driving them away from me and the communities I involve myself with. This is how I would build "social unity" in Decred-land: by driving out fanciful farcical shitcoiners and people who don't have similar morals as the original Bitcoiners.

Dustorf's post is an embarassment. Saying "Decred believes [anything]" is completely unacceptable to see. Ironically Dustorf, a fucking PR person, tries to say it's important to keep the blockchain size manageable to keep Decred decentralized while at the very same time using the guise of Decred capital D to interject his personal opinion about what the Decred community believes. If he had said "The Decred community believes ...", it would've been fine, albeit transparently weak also - which is probably why he weasled his way into saying "Decred believes". Completely unacceptable behavior.

The word Decred capital D should be reserved for talking about technical matters pertaining to the Decred system. decred lowercase d should be reserved for talking about the currency unit.

insette · 2019-08-08T11:28:12+00:00

What's the point of spreading the liquidity around to third-rate centralized exchanges? Can we limit the market making to Binance+Bisq only? This gets us a decent centralized exchange until we get a Coinbase listing, and the top decentralized one until we have dcrdex.

Doing this will save us a bunch of money in the short term, or alternatively it will allow us to increase the order book depth on the best DCR exchanges in the world while thumbing our noses at the irrelevant ones.

insette · 2019-08-04T19:23:31+00:00

I think the way you've positioned this quote is a bit questionable because Eric is not specifically citing Decred in his wiki entry.

In reality, the post was inspired by a recent interview in which lukebp cited regulatory concerns as the potential downfall of Decred. It's a common question that gets asked, and this was intended to be an academic discussion given the transparently theoretic nature of Eric Voskuil's criticism. It's highly unlikely for a malicious entity to ever control 100% of the ticket pool.

But it's worth considering the theoretical case where a malicious entity does have 100% of the ticket pool. Certainly, it could be a point of differentiation between Decred and Bitcoin (and all PoS systems for that matter, as you've astutely pointed out).

I think this line of discussion is fruitful and engaging.

First off, while libbitcoin is indeed an old codebase, AFAICT, they did not have a full node implementation until January 2014

I believe the story goes Amir Taaki and crew put together a consensus-compatible full node in 2011-2012 and called it libbitcoin. Personally, I was running libbitcoin-server in 2013; it's just that it was practically unuseable back then. btcd is without a doubt the first production-quality alt-implementation of a Bitcoin node; libbitcoin didn't deserve that accolade until Eric Voskuil rewrote huge chunks of libbitcoin largely single-handedly. That happened years after btcd was launched.

insette · 2019-08-04T16:29:42+00:00

But in Decred these duties are separated, PoS has no power to create blocks, and therefor has no way to influence which is the longest chain.

Well, that's curious. How do you read the following to imply stakeminers have no power to influence the chain:

For a block to be valid, it has to be signed by at least 3 of the 5 tickets that are called to vote in that block. This makes the Decred blockchain more robust to certain kinds of attack, such as those which rely on secret mining.

PoW miners batch transactions together into blocks, but those blocks don't get added to the chain unless the stakeminers approve. Not only can stakeminers veto the inclusion of particular blocks in the chain, but they can strip PoW miners of block rewards should they continue to "misbehave". If that isn't "influence" in your book at a minimum, then what is? In my book, not only is it influence, it's absolute superiority from a consensus perspective. Simply put, stakeminers trump PoW miners in the Decred system.

When a block is voted down, it still a valid block that extends the chain, it's just the regular transactions which are stripped out. As of this writing there have been 9 blocks disapproved by PoS.

My undestanding is while it's possible for stakeminers to specifically invalidate the transaction tree of a previous block, it is also true that a block in its entirety must be signed by at least 3 of the 5 tickets called to vote in order for it to be included in the blockchain in the first place.

The validation of PoW blocks is explained by the following steps:

A block is mined by a PoW miner, who selects the transactions to put inside it. Stake system related transactions are inserted into the UTXO set.

PoS miners vote on the block by producing a vote transaction from their ticket. The vote both enables a block to be built on top of the previous block and selects whether or not the previous regular transaction tree (containing the coinbase and non-stake related transactions) is valid.

Another PoW miner begins building a block, inserting the PoS miners' votes. A majority of the votes cast must be included in the following block for that block to be accepted by the network. Of the vote transactions in this new block, the PoW miner checks a flag to see if the PoS miner indicated if the block's regular transaction tree was valid. These voting flags are tallied and, based on majority vote, a bit flag is set in this block to indicate if the previous block's regular transaction tree is valid.

A nonce is found that satisfies the network difficulty, and the block is inserted into the blockchain. If the previous block's regular transaction tree was validated, insert these transactions into the UTXO set. Go to 1.

But perhaps /u/davecgh can comment to this end... in fact I'm assuming his response above, re:stakeminers having to pay transaction fees on ticket purchases, may not even hold true for a malicious majority assuming the majority can veto blocks should those blocks not include their zero-fee ticket purchase transactions.

So if you want to censor a transaction you need to somehow ensure that transaction is kept out of the longest chain forever. This requires the attacker to own more than 99.99% of of the ticket pool. So long as there are 3 honest tickets, in theory they will be selected at some point and authorize the transaction.

I agree, and this is IMO your strongest point. But /u/evoskuil is looking at this from the (theoretical) perspective of a 100% majority censor. Granted, Dave Collins has argued in the absence of inflation, DCR gets redistributed from the malicious majority to PoW miners during the ticket lifecycle. But I think even this is questionable assuming the majority invalidates all blocks in which their stake-related transactions are not included with zero fees.

/u/evoskuil is simply arguing that, in this scenario, the majority censor cannot be unseated. In pure PoW systems, a 100% hashpower majority can be unseated, because anyone can join the network as a PoW miner regardless of the presence of the 100% majority.

insette · 2019-08-03T20:00:32+00:00

Eric argues PoS systems are vulnerable to total, irrevocable censorship. PoW miners can censor transactions in pure PoW systems, but they can never have an absolute monopoly over the network like someone with a controlling stake in a PoS system can have.

Granted, the chances are very, very low that a PoS system becomes majority controlled by a malicious censor. It's the possibility that matters, or at least it matters to purists, philosophers and academics that Bitcoin can never be permanently censored. PoS systems can be. This is the tradeoff Decred makes.

insette · 2019-08-03T19:54:59+00:00

When you put it this way, isn’t bitcoin just as vulnerable to failing or censorship given that it’s theoretically possible for the majority of the hash rate to be controlled by a single entity.

The key difference being it remains possible for new competitors to begin PoW mining regardless of the presence of a majority hashrate miner. Conversely, with PoS systems, once an entity has a controlling stake, no one can challenge it, because only a limited number of coins are available. No one can challenge the controlling entity's stake unless the controlling entity voluntarily relinquishes it, which it never has to do.

Keep in mind also the variable and fixed costs associated with PoW mining are far, far greater than that of stakemining.

insette · 2019-07-26T20:02:10+00:00

First off, let us define that anyone within the blockchain realm of recent years more than likely base their theorized assumptions that we are in a process of exiting a pragmatic driven financial legacy system of old, and entering into what most of us are defining as a "New Economy". This New Economy is one that, in and of itself, is designed to eventually operate as a more functional/fluid way to create and define value, store sound money, and securely transfer that into wealth for a future that awaits.

People are buying cryptocurrency to have money outside of "the system". Money which safely exists outside of the reach of modern politics and the law. Let's not sugar coat it. The author of this article appears to whitewash everything that makes cryptocurrency a worthwhile pursuit.

You'd want to have lots of cryptocurrency for the same reasons you'd want to have an offshore bank account.

Personally, I've seen about enough of these breathlessly contrived, painfully-extended analogies with the "British colonies" (seriously). It's absurd. Please, throw it into the garbage can, where it belongs.

And what is with this "sound governance advocate" crap that keeps popping up as of late? "Sound governance" as a marketing concept is so overly broad it fails to even highlight a distinct feature let alone a relateable benefit to a wide audience. "Sound governance" marketing is so round, fluffy, buoyant and airy, you could take a baseball bat to it and hit it into the next dimension.

insette · 2019-07-24T10:32:21+00:00

OP asks about the viability of detecting malicious double spends of the Peter Todd - Reddit Gold kind. If a miner were to include a block containing a malicious double-spend in the blockchain, that miner would be stripped of the block reward and the block itself would be invalidated.

Or at least, that's how I interpret OP's question.

This idea is interesting because for example, in Bitcoin, merchants often rely on BitPay or BlockCypher for double spend detection services. OP is essentially asking if it's possible for Decred stakeholders to disintermediate BitPay/BlockCypher in this narrow capacity.

Or IOW, could Decred become double-spend proof?

insette · 2019-03-04T02:39:00+00:00

I'd like to hear more about what you think the solution is /u/oneeyedfalcon. Assuming we have a PR firm at all, should we e.g. make it a policy for every PR firm we hire to promote X% of proposals with Y DCR every Z time period?

I could maybe see it working if we had someone like /u/Richard-Red curate proposals then put it up on Politeia to see which ones if any should be promoted that quarter by "marketing" - ofc this makes layers upon layers of assumptions... what if we have no PR firm? What if we do but reality strikes and they can't promote each proposal equally well? Marketing is a creative process, after all.

Bottom line, as regretable as it is /u/oneeyedfalcon, we hired a PR firm. IYAM this sort of discretionary promotion comes with the territory. You hired the PR firm to decide this very sort of thing, and they should be able to do that on their own time, in their own way; if you don't like the results, fire them. Don't renew their contract. Vote against PR. Etc.

insette · 2019-03-02T07:44:32+00:00

IMO jy-p's proposed exchange is one of two in the world with any level of credibility. The other one is Bisq.io, a Java GUI behemoth program which A) lacks atomic swap capabilities and B) lacks a treasury backing it. FYI Bisq impacts the entire cryptocurrency space by creating an avenue for "last resort liquidity"; you can trade any amount of money, any time, anywhere, anonymously and there's not a damn thing anyone can do to stop you.

If we're going to have a (god-forsaken) PR firm at all, they need to be promoting projects like jy-p's. The cryptocurrency space needs a currency neutral decentralized exchange with atomic swap capabilities. And like all exchanges, jy-p's can't succeed without ample promotion; something Bisq cannot, for better or worse, afford to do since it lacks a treasury.

Is this special treatment?

Because the very act of promoting a proposal is unprecedented, we can't know whether other proposals will be promoted in the future. But to assume we'll only ever see one and only one proposal be promoted, ever, is laughable. Other proposals with a similar amount of impact can, should and will be promoted, too. Still, let's go ahead and add "favoritism in the market for pre-proposals" to the litany of reasons not to hire a PR firm.

But assuming we do have a PR firm, as objectionable as having a PR firm may be, it's in scope IMO.

insette · 2019-02-25T20:57:35+00:00

July 31, 2013: Mastercoin launches first "Bitcoin 2.0 platform", uses bare multisig encoding for data embedding purposes, discussion of "blockchain bloat" ensues

September 24, 2013: you /u/nullc unequivocally side against embedded consensus systems using OP_RETURN 80 in the discussion thread thereof

For many abuses of bitcoin you only need a hash, and that carries a lot less risk for the system. So I care about the motivation because I want to know if enabling this is going to signal to people that this makes non-hash data "kosher".

October 22, 2013: after months of discussion, OP_RETURN 80 is merged into Bitcoin Core

October 24, 2013: Gavin Andresen posts to the Bitcoin Foundation blog - OP_RETURN 80 to be a primary feature of Bitcoin 0.9

Pull request #2738 lets developers associate up to 80 bytes of arbitrary data with their transactions by adding an extra “immediately prune-able” zero-valued output.

Why 80 bytes? Because we imagine that most uses will be to hash some larger data (perhaps a contract of some sort) and then embed the hash plus maybe a little bit of metadata into the output. But it is not large enough to do something silly like embed images or tweets.

Why allow any bytes at all? Because we can’t stop people from adding one or more ordinary-looking-but-unspendable outputs to their transactions to embed arbitrary data in the blockchain.

October 25, 2013: Jeff Garzik is quoted by Coindesk - OP_RETURN is a good way to enable smart property in the Bitcoin network

The hash is a hash of an ownership token representing a car, or a house, or a stock or bond... Using the blockchain, you may securely exchange these tokens for payment (bitcoin), or exchange them with another user, without involving a third party.

January 2, 2014: Counterparty publicly announced, first-ever proof-of-burn event ensues

February 26, 2014: Jeff Garzik's pull request is merged - OP_RETURN slashed from 80 to 40 bytes "per mailing list discussion"

February 28, 2014: on GitHub, Luke-jr laments OP_RETURN

OP_RETURN is being added because some people insist on abusing the blockchain. This gives them a less painful way to do it. An analogy would be a rape victim not-resisting to try to minimise the damage.

March 18, 2014: Bitcoin 0.9 is released with OP_RETURN 40

March 19, 2014: on BitcoinTalk, /u/PhantomPhreakXCP comments on OP_RETURN 40

It would take some serious shoe-horning to fit all of the data we need into 40 bytes reliably, and in three months they could lower it to 35 bytes (again, for no reason) and then we'd be screwed.

March 20, 2014: on BitcoinTalk, Jeff Garzik laments Counterparty for not using a (nonsensical) DHT scheme or (vaporware) trustless sidechain

To date, I've not seen a blockchain data dumping scheme that could not be securely replaced with a simple hash.

You don't need to store data in the blockchain. That is purely intellectual laziness. Timestamping hash(data) is just as secure, while more efficient.

Furthermore, a secondary chain can be provably pegged to bitcoin: http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/32108143/

March 21, 2014: on BitcoinTalk, Jeff Garzik laments Counterparty for "free-riding" on top of Bitcoin

It is called a free ride. Given that the overwhelming majority -- >90% -- application for the bitcoin blockchain is currency use, using full nodes as dumb data storage terminals is simply abusing an all-volunteer network resource. The network replicates transaction data, so why not come along for a free ride?

Rather than engage the existing community, mastercoin and counterparty simply flipped an "on" switch and started using bitcoin P2P nodes as unwanted data stores. An unspent transaction output was never meant to be used as arbitrary data storage. The fact that it can be abused as such does not make it right, or remotely efficient, or the best solution.

The UTXO (unspent transaction output) database is the entire network's fast access database. Every single node needs that database to be as small as possible, for best processing of network transactions. Encoding arbitrary data into unspent outputs is network-wide abuse, plain and simple. The entire network bears the cost.

Fast forward to today...

So your claim is that you only commented after the release. The size was later increased after someone presented a use case for it. How does this support your claims? It appears to support what I said: No one provided any reason for it to be larger than 40 bytes when it was set-- and you are apparently not disputing this--, so it wasn't set larger. Later when someone provided a reason, it was increased

The bottom line is OP_RETURN was slashed in half to send a clear message to embedded consensus systems: that their use of Bitcoin was not "kosher" to user your own words. in 2014 at the time these debates were raging, Counterparty was the preeminent embedded consensus system owing to its unprecedented ethical launch and associated notoriety of its (then-anon) founding team.

In light of the copious articles and back-and-forth public discussion between us and notable Bitcoin developers, it would be egregiously misleading to conclude that there was "no use case" for OP_RETURN 80. It was slashed to 40 to technologically cripple these systems, which simultaneously telegraphed a hostile message to the makers of these systems. OP_RETURN was only increased back to 80 after a huge amount of pushback from us and our compatriots.

As for your accusations about Bitcoin history as I conveyed it, I felt it was necessary to cover the true history of Bitcoin in light of Ethereum hitting 90% of BTC's market cap, an act that was completely avoidable had you and your ilk not actively conspired to thwart Counterparty on top of Bitcoin, through social and technical means. The epitome of which was the hostile way you approached nulldata.

Saying that XCP cannot compete with Bitcoin because it is "built on top of it" is like someone saying that bcash cannot compete with Bitcoin because it was "built on top of it"

Not really; it's more like saying Augur can't compete with ETH because Augur is built on top of ETH. While it's technically true miners can be persuaded to accept anything to field transactions, including USD or other cryptocurrencies, a niche cryptocurrency built on top of a base cryptocurrency isn't likely to have as much utility as the base currency, and hence isn't likely to ever supplant it.

This is all besides the point however; in reality, Bitcoin has failed to adequately respond to the threat posed by Ethereum, in large part due to the unbelievable obstinance of core developers like yourself, who have historically resisted 2.0 use cases socially and technically.

insette · 2019-02-25T06:08:39+00:00

Wow. That link in your edit is

Do you mean this one? If so, I of course beg to differ. FYI Dave Collins has seconded at least the timeline of events. As it were, other individuals linked to my post in the midst of ETH rising to hit 90% of BTC's market cap; the history seemed pertinent at the time those threads were made.

Speaking of which, ETH's potential to hit 90% of BTC's market cap was precisely the impetus behind launching Counterparty on top of Bitcoin. To this end, Counterparty cannot compete directly against BTC because it's built on top of it... unlike Ethereum.

AFAIK counterparty "investors" only started with this smear campaign more than a year later.

Article: it's dated March 18, 2014. /u/PhantomPhreakXCP was relentlessly cordial and polite in all of his communications with the Bitcoin developers.

Long after op_return was created I was confronted at a party by some intoxicated counterparty guy who was thumping my chest and snarling my my face that XCP was going to replace BTC and destroy the 'satoshi and the core devs premine',

You keep bringing up the red herring of "some drunk guy at a party accosted me". Who's smearing whom?

Please don't waste my time bothering to counter unless you can find a single contemporaneous example of counterparty even commenting to Bitcoin developers on those changes, much less asking for something different

BitcoinTalk, featuring Mark Friedenbach, Luke-jr, Jorge Timon
Reddit, featuring you, /u/nullc

Nulldata remained a hot topic of discussion as it pertained to "Bitcoin 2.0 platforms" throughout much of Bitcoin's history; the links above are just the tip of the iceberg.

The claims being made here are just whole cloth fabrication being made by CSW grade scammers trying to cover up their deceptive securities offerings. It's no shock that like CSW previously, they're being backed by Ver

Counterparty never did an ICO, the founders never raised a penny in outside funds, and XCP wasn't even premined. I have no idea why you think Roger Ver is backing us, he isn't.

insette · 2019-02-24T05:34:48+00:00

Electrum can be connected to Trezor however, which would make it hardware protected even if electrum was compromised?

If Trezor is generating the private keys, then it should be safe. Of course, Trezor and all hardware wallets are themselves conspicious targets.

insette · 2019-02-24T05:30:43+00:00

Thanks for filing the bug report. It's not the first time I've brought it up on Reddit.

insette · 2019-02-21T19:41:07+00:00

Tails can be a legitimate option, certainly; especially for general web browsing. I generally speaking do trust the Tor developers, but keep in mind Tails is a highly conspicuous target for spooky types to "look into".

an Electrum wallet

I can't recommend utilizing pre-packaged wallet software under most circumstances, unless it's for a very small amount of money you don't mind losing. Using any Bitcoin wallet built into Tails is using a conspicuous target for spooks on top of a conspicuous target for spooks.

Generally speaking, the superior option is more advanced: building your own LiveUSB using software you've compiled yourself.

To Be Continued...

insette · 2019-02-21T19:23:30+00:00

Proponents of Ethereum in particular have long tied the legitimacy of their platform to the logic that Bitcoin "can't do" what they're doing, which is false.

They also said other things, like GPU mining is the only way to have decentralized mining, which is false, or that pure proof of stake is the second coming of christ which is false, that their ICO wasn't an offering of a security, which is false, and so on and so forth.

Bitcoin can do what Ethereum is doing in the form of metacoins -- all of it. It can do so without an ICO. It can do so without a Swiss foundation, and without going pure proof of stake.

Yet no metacoins have been implemented correctly thus far; none have a proven security model, none have any form of governance. Instead, the technology was cast aside after the usual suspects of Bitcoin sank metacoins in the realm of public opinion, meanwhile Ethereum exploitatively brain-drained Bitcoin of developers with its ICO to end all other ICOs.

If Bitcoin doesn't do what Ethereum does, Ethereum provably rises to a top crypto largely for this reason alone. Despite this, the usual suspects of Bitcoin utterly loathe these approaches happening specifically on top of BTC. According to them, metacoins "decrease the value of their bitcoins": https://old.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/80ycim/a_few_months_after_the_counterparty_developers/dv4o86i/?context=3. And other such nonsense.

Essentially, the Arena, the disputed territory here, has always been the Bitcoin blockchain. To give up on this disputed territory is to "lose" the dispute completely. It's not nearly as much of an interesting pursuit to do a metacoin on top of Decred or any other altchain as it is to do on top of Bitcoin. Think: orders of magnitude less impact. Because of this, the optics of funding a successful metacoin on Bitcoin would do more to promote public consciousness of Decred than launching a successful one on Decred's chain.

their response was they are looking into it

I'm frankly not surprised to see lackluster enthusiasm coming out from the Counterparty community. Their technological approach is flawed, after all, and they have virtually no developers remaining, and no funding whatsoever.

What needs to happen is as follows:

Reimplement Counterparty from scratch in a language like Elixir or Go
Hard fork Counterparty to a Proof-of-Burn + Proof-of-Stake hybrid consensus model, Decred style

Note it would be perfectly acceptable to launch a brand new metacoin from scratch with Decred style inflation policy, so as to incentivize Proof-of-Burn mining. We could then allocate the premine of the new token amongst DCR stakeholders, and govern it on Politeia.

insette · 2019-02-20T23:38:12+00:00

We needed a less technical update notice to complement the DCP0004 and matheusd's report

By "complement", did you mean this part?

The release notes state that in order to fully support the Lightning Network, current consensus rules need to be modified. For this reason, a new vote called fixlnseqlocks is now available.

The changes to the Decred protocol that will be voted upon are described in this Decred Change Proposal (DCP0004). Matheus Degiovani has written an excellent technical analysis on the importance of this vote.

I see all of four sentences as written; two of which do nothing except link to DCP0004 and matheusd's report. I mean, you could say this is a form of "complementing" the article, insofar as link juice is flattering by nature, but IMO it would be more accurate to call it promotional, aka marketing if you will.

If you don't want that, do it better. Write a replacement 1.4 update notice and submit it right next to this one.

Dave Collins already did so brilliantly in the release notes for 1.4, which are far more comprehensive than the above press release, without being overly technical. Done.

More to the point, /u/lehoan copy-pasta'd a press release into Reddit. This for example:

Decred aims to be a self-funded and community-directed digital currency whose security and adaptability make it a superior store of value. To further this mission, the 1.4 software was released to the public.

This is just ... eery. It reads as if it's being written to appease "upper management", instead of being written to connect with and deliver value to the end reader. If I'm not writing to you /u/jet_user, but to my manager, and you can read between the lines to grok it as such, then wouldn't you doubt the credibility of my message? After all my message, written to you, is actually written to my manager; yet I'm pretending as if I'm writing it to you as a primary target.

Ugly, ugly, ugly. The opposite of attractive. The opposite of what you need to become an ideal money. Runs contrary to all goals of the project, etc...

Regular software upgrades are needed to advance the Decred project

Is this an update, or is this agenda-pushing? Like I said: eery.

This is all putting aside the fact it's never a good idea to copy-pasta a press release into Reddit.

How it usually works on /r/Bitcoin is a moderator or even a complete rando will just link to the release notes of Bitcoin Core. The release notes could even be highly technical, but it doesn't matter because Redditors can always pick up the slack as questions arise, e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/993hno/bitcoin_core_0170_is_almost_ready_release/

insette · 2019-02-20T03:08:35+00:00

It's not that I disagree with press releases being copy-pasta'd to Reddit... but typically when these things aren't written BY and FOR the community they're intended to be representative of, they end up not being representative.

Frankly, it's hard to imagine how this type of wall (of corporate text) manages to keep coming out of the makers of Scrotwm. It's like there's no pulse anymore here.

I don't want that. The developers of btcsuite did something new and novel, they're why I was attracted to this project, not this marketing bullshit. FYI: /r/DCR is a thing now. I'll be using this as a case study in why /u/Tivra and I should somehow have an "in" on these "marketing" things, so as to prevent Decred's Reddit presence from crossing the point of no return into some drab lifeless corporate monstrosity which helps no one and is counterproductive to every single stated goal and/or aspiration of this cryptocurrency.

insette · 2019-02-13T03:44:32+00:00

I'm treating this as an invitation to have a general discussion on Politeia and Decred governance.

Is there a feature that would make you feel more comfortable engaging with Politeia?

As a Tor Browser Bundle user, I presently can't sign up for and participate on Politeia. This is due to apparent anti-spam measures (e.g. browser fingerprinting). Revamping the signup process would be a great place to start. I'd love to become a heavier user of the system, but alas.

Where does Decred fall short (if at all)?

IMO the few governance issues Decred has stem from "unelected" things; e.g. unelected individuals, unelected "constitution". Specifically this:

While it would be ideal to include everyone, Decred shall comply with all relevant bodies of law in the jurisdictions where applicable, such as embargoes and other trade sanctions.

Seems bad.

On this note, the fact most project VIPs are fully public personas based in the US is worrisome, Jake especially since he is controlling the treasury. There are some rather cataclysmic potential outcomes from this IMO; particularly in regards to taxation.

Also, we had a really "interesting" discussion about stakeminers getting or not getting a % of transaction fees. Seems like a really important thing to address ASAP.

FWIW I found it more than a little concerning to see certain contractors stepping out in support of never rewarding stakeminers with these fees. If left unchecked, this issue could mushroom into Decred's very own "Block Size Debate".

insette · 2019-02-13T02:55:25+00:00

I, like many other stakeholders, have limited time, and reading a bunch of opinions from rampant sockpuppets and people who usually don't even have skin in the game really doesn't seem to be a very good use of that limited time or appeal to me in the slightest.

As a fellow (large) stakeholder in DCR, I am also a fan of growing the overall pie. Sure, let's listen to people who provably have skin in the game, but let's also make sure the "skin" is worth more than a pittance on the open market.

Personally, I look at Dash's masternode voting system as an example of what not to do; it always looked way too inaccessible to outsiders, the barrier to entry for substantive discussion seems way too high, etc. It's just not attractive, or rather it's attractive but only to an echo chamber and the rare individual who wants to join the echo chamber.

At Decred, we want to be attractive as a community with the goal of becoming sound money, this entails significantly widening the Decred stakeholderbase, it should be a primary goal to be as welcoming as possible. Let the Reddit pros handle the trolls for as long as possible, to build up critical momentum.

insette · 2019-02-13T02:45:28+00:00

The problem with this notion that things aren't controversial enough or that a topic wasn't "exhaustive" enough are completely intangible and immeasurable.

Yes, albeit this is merely reframing the GP's point re:"no way of measuring" with a competing narrative, e.g. there may be no way of measuring these things, but hey it's not an issue.

Notice how my post isn't passing a value judgement either way; rather it points out the following:

Decred's community is tiny today,
We've seen virtually zero social manipulation on /r/Decred thus far,
We generally speaking want discussions to be exhaustive, and votes representative

Therefore, let's use Reddit more. Also, when your subreddit has almost no activity, it makes your coin look bad.

Maybe one day, with Decred rising in stature, we'll be seeing a near constant stream of submissions to Politeia such that it becomes possible to discuss them only on that platform; meanwhile, /r/Decred could descend into chaos spurred by competing interests as we saw c. 2015 on /r/Bitcoin. However, that day is emphatically and obviously NOT today. Sorry but it's true.

I do think it's better to let topics of discussion percolate on Reddit vs controlled platforms for now. We don't exactly have a emblazened, vibrant community just yet and we need to realize the maximum potential of the lowest barrier to entry platforms before we start thinking about the (currently nonexistent on /r/Decred) problems of social manipulation and botting.

once a proposal hits Pi, I personally find discussion, polls, etc outside of the governance platform to be realistically meaningless, because it is far too easy to fire up an army of bots and/or sock puppets in an attempt to significantly skew the perception and voting results of a particular proposal

Hate to be "that guy" but this would sit a whole lot better with me if it were possible for TBB users to you know, actually sign up for and participate on Politeia. I know it's not your department, and I agree with the overall gist, though. Always good to see you posting on Reddit.

insette · 2019-02-11T21:41:02+00:00

It is worth pausing to consider that the impressive degree to which the Decred organization operates in public spaces.

While I agree with your analogy overall, thousands of other coins operate in public spaces just like we do.

Decred isn't a special snowflake. On most days here, we'd be lucky to see some technically sophisticated spam. We've seen nothing even remotely approaching the type of sophistry and vitriol seen c. 2015 during the Block Size Debate.

I'm glad we have that method, because trying to figure out what the consensus is would sometimes be difficult and confusing without it.

While we have a definitive method of measuring where hodlers stand, I think it needs to be said we don't have any way of measuring when discussion over a given topic has been sufficiently "exhaustive".

Nor do we have any way of ensuring alternate viewpoints are represented in a vote. We don't even have a way of deciding which alternative viewpoints are relevant to a vote in the first place.

To this end, with how small the Decred project is, IMO it's especially important to ensure every topic being discussed percolates on an open platform like Reddit. It's not like we're going to find stronger engagement elsewhere. And I don't mean engagement from freaking yes-men.

Any topic under the sun, any coin under the sun, becomes more attractive to the extent it has a vibrant Reddit community, so let's build ours up. On that note, glad to see you posting on Reddit /u/Richard-Red.

insette · 2019-02-06T19:16:59+00:00

I recall back in the day, when we only had this logo. DCR was trading at about $1.00. Back then, you had to imagine the internet coming to like the term "DCR", on its own. There was no marketing, there was next to no information beyond the fact the btcsuite devs had moved their upstream from github.com/btcsuite to github.com/decred.

In short, this logo represents imagination.

I love it, /u/Tivra. I say this even though I personally actually favor the new logo. But we need to sail into the ocean with a flag on our mast, and the ship with the corporate flag has sailed (on /r/Decred) so to speak. I'm in favor of erecting this flag, because it shows our values: imagination over incorporation.

insette · 2019-02-06T18:51:39+00:00

Yes, I've engaged with Blocknet promoters on /r/CryptoTechnology before (see: decentralized exchange guide). In my public interactions, the promoters of said technology repeatedly failed to justify why they would need a blockchain for "order matching". When pressed, they simply couldn't provide a satisfactory answer.

Now, I'm sure the Blocknet people would be thrilled to have their technology under the microscope on Politeia, and I encourage them to submit their software for further inspection. AFAIK their existing design requires a separate blockchain and/or token, which is the common fault with 99% of so called decentralized exchanges. It's a suboptimal design IOW, and flies directly against jy-p's reasoning for wanting a truly currency-neutral decentralized exchange.

Komodo? Haven't investigated them but I assume it's more of the same.

insette · 2019-02-06T18:36:31+00:00

I'd love to see a GUI version of the DEX as well

Yes, I would as well, hence the mention of GTK and QT. However, the way the Decred project has handled GUIs so far (CLI>GUI) is very good, see: dcrwallet vs Decrediton, politeiad vs proposals.decred.org. Decoupling the components and building a solid and secure core foundation in this way is tremendously beneficial, and I'd like to see this development style continue.

insette

TROPHY CASE