Hi Paul. I am a huge fan of your writings, they are extremely well-written and well-argued (and interesting to boot). I really appreciate getting the opportunity to learn from people who are thorough, thoughtful, and truly know what they are talking about especially when there's so much misinformation and disinformation out there. You talked me out of any thoughts I had of participating in the Augur presale, I'm skeptical of presales like that regardless but your posts really were helpful in that regard.
I don't really have a burning question, but I figured I would use my first post on here to ask if you had any thoughts on these two subjects:
1) Spin-off altcoins that begin with a snapshot of the bitcoin blockchain, as discussed here: https://bitco.in/forum/threads/bitcoin- ... ology.462/
My favorite post of yours discussed POW and distribution of coins, where MC=MR no matter what proof of ______ you are using. That was very enlightening, but since it focused primarily on initial coin distribution, can spin-offs that use non-POW blockchains be viable in your opinion? Or are they just inferior to pegged sidechains in every relevant way, since they don't have to worry about distribution at all?
2) A bitcoin network where full nodes may buy/sell transactions and blockchain data from/to miners, SPV users, and other nodes using micotransactions. Justus Ranvier wrote about something like this here: https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/economic- ... discovery/ . I believe it's intended to provide a market based solution to the problem of nodes who receive no reward/compensation for storing and relaying transactions, and the concern that the number of nodes will fall as the costs of running a node increase. It seems like a very intriguing idea, but extremely challenging to implement from a technical and user experience perspective. Also in a way, you could say that we already have a market for nodes. Currently, there are thousands of entities willing to operate a full node for free, including myself. Sure I could probably modify my client to only forward a block or transaction when a 1 satoshi microtransaction is sent my way, but I'm sure I will get no takers as there are still plenty of people who'd do it for free.
And actually one more thing, at http://bitcoinhivemind.com/papers/1_Purpose.pdf you list Predictious and say "Users do not trust." Is there a reason for that besides low volume? I've used that site for several years, and although the volume is minimal I've never had trust issues. I mainly think that there's not enough fish in the bitcoin ecosystem to support large volume on a prediction market yet, and the level of marketing/promotion is very low. I also didn't see that you listed predictit.org on that link, which is a relatively new US based prediction market that I have some complaints about but which nevertheless has a lot of marketing and quite a bit of volume.