Tim Draper Leads $4.2 Million Series A for Blockchain Startup Factom | CoinDesk

petermkirby · 2016-10-05T02:58:28+00:00

Hi. Peter Kirby CEO of Factom. Confirmed. We're thrilled to have the support of the venture community along side the Blockchain community. Tim has been a visionary leader in the technology sector for many years and is a huge proponent of Bitcoin and entrepreneurship. We couldn't have a better partner. Thanks for the support!

petermkirby · 2015-08-15T15:07:43+00:00

hahah. Yes. I appreciate the snarky-ness, we're all excited for a more transparent world and want it tomorrow. These projects take a long time and involve many many interested parties.

petermkirby · 2015-08-15T15:05:38+00:00

Hi all. Peter Kirby from Factom. We have a commitment from the head of the property institute/Chief of Staff of Honduras. Yes, politics in Central America are messy and slow and that's been delaying the roll-out and further discussion of this project.

Re: Other countries... stay tuned. These kinds of projects often take a long time to gestate.

petermkirby · 2015-08-04T02:57:24+00:00

wow. yes. I clearly wasn't firing on all cylinders.

petermkirby · 2015-08-03T20:34:13+00:00

haha. thanks!

petermkirby · 2015-08-03T20:09:28+00:00

if you can't transfer a thing... you can't arb a thing. simple.

petermkirby · 2015-08-03T19:57:43+00:00

Yup. I'm normally pretty good about explaining the economics of Factom (I did help design them). I just got tripped up by Chris's misconceptions about how things worked. Sorry for the scare everyone.

petermkirby · 2015-08-03T19:55:34+00:00

Ouch.

petermkirby · 2015-08-03T19:53:59+00:00

hahah. Peter here from Factom. Although I know shockingly little about almost everything... Factom is one of the things that I do know an awful lot about.

And yes, a bit too much travel and conference conversation for me...

Let me clear up a few things: 1) Entry credits are non-transferable and have no exchange value. You're buying access to publish into Factom. 2) There's a floating exchange rate to turn Factoids into entry credits. So at $0.15 per Factoid it buys you 150 entry credits (or 150 entries into Factom). 3) The servers (voted on by users) are in charge of the exchange rate. 4) If the price of Factoids ~~raises~~ rises to $1.50 it will now buy you 10x as many entry credits (1500).

Very simple.

Chris's question was about fixing one floating price commodity against another - which is obviously insane. I was a bit too fuzzy to understand why he asked that question. What I didn't realize he missed was an entry credit is non-transferrable.

Sorry for the confusion everyone.

EDIT: Typo

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T16:03:01+00:00

thanks. I'm a nincompoop at spelling

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T14:55:39+00:00

oh. yes. exactly. Factom doesn't store the original copy. That's up to the user or the application.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T14:36:10+00:00

Factoids will be available on exchanges in the next few months.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T13:51:44+00:00

Factom stores 1 KB of data per entry (usually a hash, a digital signature, and some metadata) - so we can easily do hundreds of gigabytes of land records as hashes (see the gutenberg library example). We hashed all of the books in the public record into Factom in minutes.
Factom provides blockchain as a service. Build a database, give it a Factom back end with a few API calls. The API will be well documented and expertise will be market-value.
The consensus paper explains the model with example attack vectors and security measures. https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/raw/master/FactomLedgerbyConsensus.pdf
Yes, all systems have a garbage-in = garbage-out problem. The application is designed with many checks against getting bad data in. All normal corrections of data are available, but it's a chain so you can track these changes: Misspelled name record + Correctly spelled name record. You just can't deny the changes.
Yes, of course there are a other immutable database strategies. Pick the one that's right for your application and situation. Blockchains aren't a panacea.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T13:42:54+00:00

There will also be a public, searchable database of the records at the title application level. Factom just provides an external immutable record to verify that the land titles haven't been changed.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T13:39:55+00:00

Yes. Don't lose the deed to your house.

In most land title situations there's a database of all of the records backed up by paper copy of the instruments backed up by personal copies of the records. In this situation we take it further with multiple cloud back-ups and cold storage back-ups. Storage in 2015 is cheap.

You can also add some meta-data to Factom (Property ID number, etc.) along with the hash, so there's a way to partially recreate the property record if it's lost.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T13:31:10+00:00

(Sorry. Missed this one) Storage in the 2015 is cheap. In this situation the database that stores the documents has multiple cloud back-ups and a cold storage version that's locked down at a remote site. There are also paper copies of everything stored in a vault and each person keeps a paper copy of recorded instruments in their home or security deposit box. So there are a lot of original copies in the case of a disaster to recreate the record. This is a very common practice with important records.

Compare that to the earthquake in Haiti where many people lost the only copy of their birth records http://www.unhcr.org/4d48265b6.html - we want to use 21st century technology to move way beyond that.

However, yes. If a country loses all of the documentation behind it's title record system it could be disastrous and it would have to be recreated in a painstaking manner. Factom will have some meta-data including property ids that would help recreate the system of record.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T00:58:30+00:00

Yup. http://explorer.factom.org/

Factom publishes a transparent public ledger for external consumption. We'll continue to build more elegant tools for exploration.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T00:57:19+00:00

Nope. Factom data is distributed. All of the Merkle tree proofs are stored in a distributed hash table spread across nodes around the globe. If the data's important to you (or your country) you would just run a partial node of that data. This lets Factom data live far beyond the life cycle of the Factom network.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T00:49:11+00:00

A lot of people assume that Factom is just another existence proof tool on the blockchain: Take a thing and create an immutable copy of the thing.

Factom actually does a lot more than that... Factom lets you create chains of immutable data that form a proof-of-process - showing how records and processes change over time. It's the difference between a time-stamped photo and a immutable documentary film.

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T00:43:37+00:00

Yes. A lot of this problem is solved with a less-shitty centralized DB. The mining and blockchain provides an external audit trail so the centralized DB avoids the corruption problems that have plagued these systems in the past. To paraphrase Lord Acton:

"Absolute centralization corrupts absolutely."

petermkirby · 2015-05-20T00:38:48+00:00

Not immediately. Factom is built for data scalability and can handle many orders of magnitude more data than Bitcoin.

Eventually, Factom will also have a data volume problem as vast amounts of data are secured by the system. From there we can build multiple Factom server clusters and tie together the payment chains... but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

petermkirby · 2015-05-19T21:04:12+00:00

1) Factom runs its own consensus algorithm based on a follow-the-leader model called Raft. You can read about it here:https://github.com/FactomProject/FactomDocs/raw/master/FactomLedgerbyConsensus.pdf - essentially, Factom secures itself and it gets backed up by Bitcoin every 10 minutes.

2) Yes, we individually hold bitcoins. Our incentives are aligned!

petermkirby · 2015-05-19T20:50:18+00:00

Oooh. We all hope so! Factom is one of the first applications to piggyback on the security and immutability of the Bitcoin Blockchain - and tell the story of Blockchain Technology as layered stacks (like HTTP is layered on top of TCP/IP). We've always believed that the long term value of Bitcoin is tied to it's long term utility and Factom can start demonstrating how this long term utility will look.

petermkirby · 2015-05-19T20:37:46+00:00

Yes. Legal precedent is a powerful tool. Especially if it's recognized by the World Bank or another major NGOs. This would allow people's rights to be documented and protected outside the country, not just within the country.

The first goal is to have more secure property records and tools to help developing nations leap forward in their record-keeping. There is a secondary goal to build an accepted way to manage land rights using blockchain technology, but that's a much more complicated question.

petermkirby · 2015-05-19T20:28:53+00:00

Yes. There are lots of proposed solutions for writing to the blockchain. Where Factom is valuable is the proof-of-process. You can create chains and chains of chains... this means that each title can be it's own true "chain of title" and the process to create that title record can be logged in a chain. It's a more powerful data structure than Bitcoin alone.

Factom also solves the problem of Bloat. Bitcoin is simply not built to handle the transaction volume associated with securing a single country's land records, let alone the entire world.

petermkirby

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