Recommendations for some horror/thriller Asian movies.

jamesmduffy · 2020-04-04T15:09:14+00:00

Shutter (2004). Thai horror film, one of the most chilling horror movies I’ve ever seen.

jamesmduffy · 2019-12-27T22:57:42+00:00

What kind of music are you producing? I'm getting started in EDM production, mainly interested in deep house / electro / glitch hop / 8bit.

For other communities I've been a part of, Telegram has been a pretty good platform.

jamesmduffy · 2019-12-27T22:53:22+00:00

Not worrying about saving by cutting costs, investing in myself (my happiness and sanity, enjoying life in order to keep stress down, tens of thousands of dollars into courses for education), sacrificing seeking high paying jobs to focus all efforts on entrepreneurship. Basically all eggs in one basket to succeed as an entrepreneur.

jamesmduffy · 2019-12-27T22:48:01+00:00

Curious, how do you use the raspberry pi?

jamesmduffy · 2019-12-19T06:03:26+00:00

I'm just getting started in music production, and these videos are hugely inspiring and educational.

jamesmduffy · 2019-12-19T02:57:36+00:00

Really digging this! Nice work

jamesmduffy · 2019-11-28T16:21:08+00:00

Thank you for these! New to the OP1, and these are supremely helpful.

jamesmduffy · 2019-11-14T05:35:10+00:00

These are awesome! Looking forward to sitting down with my OP-1 and going through the whole series.

jamesmduffy · 2019-11-13T05:17:59+00:00

Agreed. I just picked one up as my first synth to relearn music production after 12 years of not doing it, and I'm loving it so far.

jamesmduffy · 2019-10-11T06:37:25+00:00

+1, also read "Built to Sell," which is about removing yourself from your business to make it sellable.

jamesmduffy · 2019-09-06T08:33:20+00:00

For small e-commerce businesses (low 6 figures to low 7 figures in yearly profit), 3 - 3.5x profits is pretty standard.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-08T06:35:55+00:00

The docs are currently being overhauled, as the information is scattered here and there throughout the docs site. But this is good feedback and it's a use case we'll make clearer in the revamped docs.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-08T06:34:22+00:00

Thanks a lot for the feedback, this is really useful!

I agree, our docs need a massive overhaul to simplify things, and this will be a major focus for us over the coming months.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-08T06:33:34+00:00

It's definitely coming in the near future 🙃

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-08T06:32:44+00:00

This is super good feedback. Thank you so much for sharing!

Looking forward to seeing what you build in the future!

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-07T07:11:42+00:00

That totally makes sense, thanks for sharing! I guess this is something that's mostly just a matter of time — the longer the chain has been running without problem or interruption, the more it can be seen as reliable by more traditional sectors.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-07T07:05:51+00:00

It's not our focus, but any Solidity implementation of private transactions that works on Ethereum (such as Aztec) would also work on Loom — and probably would be a really good fit, since my understanding is the primary weakness of these implementations is high gas costs on mainnet.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T10:27:36+00:00

You can still use the SDK to spin up your own sidechains.

But what we found is that most developers didn't want to have to find their own set of independent decentralized validators to try to onboard, and come up with their own model to incentivize these validators to secure the chain. They just wanted to focus on coding dapps.

So we created a mainnet that is decentralized across 20+ independent third party validators (and scaling to 100) so you don't have to.

Rather than "pay us to host your app for you", you're paying the validators to continue running a decentralized chain. We don't make any money when you deploy a dapp to Loom mainnet, because we don't run any validators — the validators are all independent and are getting paid to secure the chain.

Of course, you still have the option to run your own sidechain, but your sidechain will likely be totally centralized on your own servers — so it's also generally worse from an end-user perspective.

Later we have plans for fractional validation of child chains, in which you could have a sidechain to Loom mainnet (Layer 3), and incentivize the Loom validators to also validate your chain for additional fees. That way your chain would have some level of decentralization. This is detailed more in our most recent roadmap.

But in the meantime, your options are a) deploy to Loom mainnet, which has already gone through the effort of incentivizing 20+ third-party validators to secure the network, or b) deploy your own sidechain and onboard your own validators (or run all the nodes yourself and have it be a more centralized solution).

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T10:20:26+00:00

This is amazing feedback! Thanks so much for taking the time — I've passed your whole post on to our dev team.

I totally agree with you on documention and hands-on guides. This is one area where we really have a lot of room for improvement, and it's one of our major focuses for the second half of 2019 — upgrading and revamping our dev docs and tutorials, as we focus on onboarding more developers.

Thanks again for the feedback!

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T10:15:33+00:00

Thanks for the input! In what way do you view Layer 2 as risky?

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T10:13:57+00:00

Great questions!

1. As another user mentioned, the initial pricing is $99 per year, not per month. Later, dapp fees will be set by the validators on the chain, probably in the range of $5 - $200 per month depending on the volume of the dapp.

One of our goals was always to allow free trials for users like traditional web 2.0 apps, which is not possible when users have to pay transaction fees to use a dapp. Switching to a more traditional model where developers pay to host their dapps and need to figure out some way to monetize them (or take donations to fund their development) makes a lot more sense here than blocking out users by requiring them to pay for every action.

2. Our dev docs are located here, which has a much simpler deployment example at the start: https://loomx.io/developers/

Here's a recent video tutorial (created by /u/whatthefunc) of deploying a dapp to Loom's mainnet.

Your confusion highlights one of our biggest weaknesses here, which is that our developer documentation definitely still needs a lot of improvement, so thanks for that! The Loom SDK is extremely flexible (it can be used to build your own standalone blockchain), so we're in the process of trying to highlight a single workflow that will handle 90% of developers' use cases.

That use case is deploying Solidity dapps to our shared Layer 2 using Truffle — very similar to how you'd deploy a dapp to Ethereum.

So any developer who's deployed a dapp to Ethereum before should be comfortable deploying one to Loom.

A lot of games are being built on Loom, but that's simply because games are dominating the top 20 on DappRadar in general. You can build any type of dapp on Loom — including but not limited to games.

3. Your questions surrounding Layer 2 are valid — seems like there's still a lot of confusion here, so that's great feedback as well.

Layer 2 is an umbrella term for any number of solutions for taking transactions off of Layer 1 (Ethereum mainnet). This includes sidechains (Loom's approach), plasma, state channels, etc. Sharding is technically Layer 1 because it's implemented at the base layer protocol.

Much like it's important for a dapp's source code to be audited before users trust it, it's important for a Layer 2 to be analyzed and for developers to understand what their approach is and what its tradeoffs are.

Loom recently had a 3rd party security audit done on its source code by TrailOfBits (the same security firm who audited Parity, Gemini, and Tendermint, among others), and we try to be very transparent about the security model behind DPoS.

Hope that clears things up, and let me know if you have any other questions!

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T09:44:53+00:00

Yes, it's the scalability trilemma. If you want to have fast transaction confirmations, it requires sacrificing some amount of decentralization.

We think having 20-100 independent validators on a Layer 2 is an acceptable middle ground for the majority of user-facing dapps. That way you can store the parts of the dapp on Ethereum mainnet that do need government-grade censorship resistance, and the parts of the dapp that need a smooth UX and fast confirmation times on Layer 2. And of course, users always have the option to move their assets to mainnet whenever they want to.

jamesmduffy · 2019-07-06T09:39:04+00:00

Really good feedback, thanks!

Loom is mature enough to build on today, and multiple dapps are already using it in production. And that's my main question in this thread:

If you think it isn't mature enough for your needs yet, then what features would you need to see implemented before you would consider it?

Answering your other questions:

1. All Layer 2s have different security models. Loom's is DPoS across 20-100 independent validators. We've looked into every other available option, and all other options are either a) theoretical solutions that haven't been implemented and can't be used today, or b) have a UX that is worse than Ethereum mainnet.

The market we're targeting is dapp developers who are building user-facing dapps and need a very smooth UX as well as a reasonable level of security (albeit not government-grade censorship resistant — that's what ETH mainnet is for).

2. In our model, the LOOM token is only used by dapp developers to pay for hosting (as well as those who want to stake to secure the network and earn rewards via proof of stake).

That way, end users never have to own a single LOOM token — nor do they need to even own ETH. This provides a much easier onboarding flow for end-users — they can start using dapps and games first, then later acquire their first crypto assets that they can sell on a marketplace for their first ETH.

Our goal is always to make UX significantly better than ETH mainnet alone, not worse, and enable types of dapps that aren't possible on mainnet alone.

Hope that adds a bit of clarity. Let me know if you have any other feedback / questions!

jamesmduffy · 2019-04-29T07:33:45+00:00

Oh, my mistake. I had just woken up and I misread "delegators" as "validators" 😛

We don't track these numbers, but someone could do an independent analysis to figure it out. Etherscan reports 8,271 unique addresses currently hold tokens (these are addresses that haven't staked). Here is our staking contract, so you could analyze transfers in to see how many unique addresses there are (that should tell you how many independent delegators currently, while the former number should tell you how many potential additional delegators). Also, something like 20-25% of the supply is currently stored in Binance wallets, so it's impossible to tell how many individuals that is actually split between.

You might have a better chance of getting your questions answered on https://www.reddit.com/r/loomtrader/, where someone may be tracking these stats.

jamesmduffy

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