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sangaman
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Joined: Fri Sep 25, 2015 1:18 pm

Re: I am Paul Sztorc, creator of decentralized Prediction Market concept Hivemind, and other cool things! AMA

Tue Dec 22, 2015 5:19 am

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.

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psztorc
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Re: I am Paul Sztorc, creator of decentralized Prediction Market concept Hivemind, and other cool things! AMA

Tue Dec 22, 2015 7:16 am

Hi sangaman,

You're welcome! : )

> 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?

In my opinion, no they can not.

I anticipated this response, and attempted to respond to it in these sections:
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-and- ... o-problems
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-chea ... -mr-right-

The thing is, if it is 'free' to create a spinoff, then it will be hard for ownership to ever diverge from the main Bitcoin chain...everyone will be spinning off. If the new chain always = the old chain, then there's no point to having the old chain at all. It is consequentially equivalent to only ever being able to run a single full node of each chain type.

> Or are they just inferior to pegged sidechains in every relevant way, since they don't have to worry about distribution at all?

Sidechains are better, because they actually let you get something done; you can work *with* the Bitcoin blockchain.


> 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.

I'm very excited for Bitcoin creating a kind of 'buyer-side net-non-neutrality', which I think will be a great, great thing for everything, including Bitcoin itself. The vision is a high-speed, reliable TOR, which allows content creators (ie servers) to (micro)charge for serving content. This would help Bitcoin privacy and security immensely.

It seems, from Justus' article, that he feels that the blocksize is a kind of production quota which serves no long run purpose. He would like to remove the blocksize altogether. However, I couldn't understand how any of his proposals solved the core externality problem: that nodes must store all transactions, yet get no transaction fees (and yet, miners get all transaction fees, and don't even need to store all transactions).

Clearly, he (like everyone) would like to "internalize the externality" which is the best (and only) long run solution, but a solution which does this would involve miners paying all node-operators to offset the total cost of starting up a new full node. I don't think anyone has figured out how to do this. In fact, I don't think anyone really knows a way of measuring the total cost of starting up a new full node.

> 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?

That was based on my subjective assessment of the site when I wrote that section in mid-2014. It was based on my browsing the site, reading comments and asking around.

> 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.

I'm virtually certain that that is New Zealand based. I will add it to the list, however. And I should add that Lumenlogic eventually became https://hypermind.com/hypermind/app.html .

sangaman
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Sep 25, 2015 1:18 pm

Re: I am Paul Sztorc, creator of decentralized Prediction Market concept Hivemind, and other cool things! AMA

Wed Dec 23, 2015 4:40 pm

In my opinion, no they can not.

I anticipated this response, and attempted to respond to it in these sections:
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-and- ... o-problems
http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-chea ... -mr-right-

The thing is, if it is 'free' to create a spinoff, then it will be hard for ownership to ever diverge from the main Bitcoin chain...everyone will be spinning off. If the new chain always = the old chain, then there's no point to having the old chain at all. It is consequentially equivalent to only ever being able to run a single full node of each chain type.
OK yeah that's a good point. Makes it near impossible for any spinoff chain to have value, I guess there would need to be a network effect that creates inertia but getting there is a tall and/or expensive task.
I'm very excited for Bitcoin creating a kind of 'buyer-side net-non-neutrality', which I think will be a great, great thing for everything, including Bitcoin itself. The vision is a high-speed, reliable TOR, which allows content creators (ie servers) to (micro)charge for serving content. This would help Bitcoin privacy and security immensely.

It seems, from Justus' article, that he feels that the blocksize is a kind of production quota which serves no long run purpose. He would like to remove the blocksize altogether. However, I couldn't understand how any of his proposals solved the core externality problem: that nodes must store all transactions, yet get no transaction fees (and yet, miners get all transaction fees, and don't even need to store all transactions).

Clearly, he (like everyone) would like to "internalize the externality" which is the best (and only) long run solution, but a solution which does this would involve miners paying all node-operators to offset the total cost of starting up a new full node. I don't think anyone has figured out how to do this. In fact, I don't think anyone really knows a way of measuring the total cost of starting up a new full node.
I suppose it would take some system of miners paying nodes to accept and propagate their blocks? And the fee would be larger for larger blocks. I can only imagine that such a service would be valuable in the seconds after a block is found while the orphan risk is real, and I suppose that doesn't solve the entire externality issue,
That was based on my subjective assessment of the site when I wrote that section in mid-2014. It was based on my browsing the site, reading comments and asking around.
I've never had any issues at all in close to 2 years, just my 2 cents.
I'm virtually certain that that is New Zealand based. I will add it to the list, however.
They have some association with a university in NZ for legal reasons I believe, but they only serve US customers and have physical offices in DC. I've seen them, actually.



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Re: I am Paul Sztorc, creator of decentralized Prediction Market concept Hivemind, and other cool things! AMA

Mon Aug 19, 2019 10:09 pm

What do you think will happen after bitcoin halving in 2020 price wise? Is it priced in?
Whichever chain wins,the world wins Image

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robinvinz
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Re: I am Paul Sztorc, creator of decentralized Prediction Market concept Hivemind, and other cool things! AMA

Fri Apr 10, 2020 3:50 am

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