Quote from: coinxcoin on June 29, 2015, 02:36:36 AM

Quote from: blocktechceo on May 26, 2015, 10:09:04 PM

Hi CoinXCoin - I wanted to respond a couple days ago, but, ya know... couldn't Wink

Anyway, I can't help but ignore the more trolly parts of your questions that have been asked and answered multiple times, but I'm happy to address a few that I guess we haven't really answered well enough yet.

Quote from: coinxcoin on May 22, 2015, 12:25:58 AM

If you are seriously going to attach florin to a DMCA challenge then you are going to destroy florin. That is obvious.

So at this point it looks like the purpose of Alexandria is to ... ? ? ? ? Give the feds an opportunity to show that they can shut down a coin? ? ? If the florin network is facilitating DMCA violations then anyone using florin runs the risk of criminal charges?

No, I think you're really misreading things here. The purpose of Alexandria is to take advantage of a combination of P2P technologies to give content creators a platform to permissionlessly publish and distribute their work in a un-censorable and permanent way, in which they can monetize directly from their audiences. Because we have zero interest in making it a haven of piracy, our front end requires that the types of media which are most often pirated have been individually authorized by some individual in a position to do so. Publishing a movie requires providing a 'chain-of-authorization' from the IMDBid of the movie to a social media post from someone in it's production credits. Likewise with Music and eventually Shows when we can enroll a few internet tv shows to try the platform out. Videos, Podcasts and other media types require no authorization to be provided, but we plan to combat piracy in these media types through two channels: 1) a clear warning to publishers that interested parties could potentially track their submissions to their IP address and pursue them with DMCA violations, and 2) a list of content ids that we publish to the blockchain as a "piracy list" - all users on our Alexandria web portal will be forced to consider this filter list, so pirated content will not show up for them. Users of the Alexandria client will be auto-subscribed to this list to protect them from unintentionally downloading and sharing pirated media, but since this is open-source software in which forced-rules are just reasons to fork the app and fracture the user base, it really makes the most sense for us to let users of the client disable the filter if they chose (and again have to dismiss a disclosure message about why it would be a bad idea to support pirated content on the platform themselves). This is the route we need to travel, because in order for Alexandria to work as a permission-less publishing platform, there is simply no way to actually block someone from choosing to publish pirated content (since someone truly determined could just copy the format of the messages Alexandria uses to publish on the Florincoin blockchain), and it would be a major flaw if we did no allow users to chose to ignore our filter list, as doing so would make us a very clear central point of failure, which interested parties could exploit to crowbar-engineer certain content they don't like into those mandatory filter lists - by turning it on by default but letting users turn it off if they chose, there would be no significant value in anyone else taking control of our filter lists.

Quote from: coinxcoin on May 22, 2015, 12:25:58 AM

Why not just modify something like bearshare and add a tipping app? What advantage is there in using a block chain and forcing a massive download? It looks like the only reason it is being 'built around florin' is to pump florin.

Because the point was to decentralize all of the parts of a digital content library/market: publishing (the announcing of a piece of media and how to find it), distribution (file storage and sharing) and payments. Distribution is handled through the IPFS DHT, publishing (and commenting) is handled with Florincoin, and payments are handled with Florincoin, Bitcoin and whatever other coins publishers ask to get tipped in. I'm not sure what you are referring to by "forcing a massive download" - if you mean that you are assuming the media file is stored in the Florincoin blockchain, it's not, it is distributed via the IPFS network and only the IPFS id (a 46-character hash) and the piece of media's descriptive info get stored in the blockchain. If you mean that we're forcing the user to download the florincoin blockchain, that's also incorrect. If the user wants to use the app through an entirely decentralized pipeline, it is true that they'll have to have a local copy of the blockchain, as they'd also need a local copy of the Bitcoin blockchain if they want to use it without relying on any 3rd parties at all. But for the sake of convenience and letting people have access to the library through a web browser, we will be running a gateway at http://alexandria.media which returns the same API responses to a users front end that a local wallet would provide, so if they don't want to download and sync the blockchain, they can just have their local client point to our gateway. We're working on a 'keys-only' web-wallet, so that users can publish and comment through the gateway as well, but it's not a super high priority at the moment.

Quote from: coinxcoin on May 22, 2015, 12:25:58 AM

As for "Archiving information in a decentralized fashion"... Why? ? ? ? I saw the example about, for example, keeping a record of global warming, There are like 20 million servers that are plugged with this kind of information. You are saying that if there was some question about the veracity of information stored by major organizations then they could go to "the Alexandria project" and it would have reliable information because.... why? ? ? ? ? ? ?

In an archiving sense, the function that Alexandria can provide is to show a proof of publishing with a timestamp - it could be used for tweets, documents, news reports, etc - anything in which there is possible value in being able to point back to prove something was said at a certain time in a certain way at some specific time in the past. Your question about why anyone would trust that "the Alexandria project" would have "reliable information" suggests that you think we would be relying on our reputation for anyone to trust the information, but in fact it is the indelible and permanent nature of the record (I'll go out on a limb and assume that you understand that one of the most basic functions of a blockchain is that past entries in its ledger can't be changed after the fact) that gives it 'trustworthiness' and value. How much value it has will be entirely up to the people who chose to use it. It sounds like you don't think you'll be one of them, which is fine of course Wink

This function was born from the idea of capturing and storing everything mentioned on a social media platform about a given topic so that the 'immediate records of history' can be preserved in a decentralized and non-destroyable way for future use. Twitter is a great platform for sharing micro-news about things that interest you, and its a great way to get a sense of what other people around the world are saying about various topics right now - but if I wanted to try to browse and understand what kinds of things were being said about something by the whole of twitter at some past time period, this gets much more challenging, especially since tweets can be deleted. Like the media publishing aspect of Alexandria, this functionality relies on a blockchain for publishing and a DHT for distribution of actual content - in this case, the content is the raw archives of captured tweets and the publish message points to the archive on the DHT and includes plain-text summary information about the archive to make indexing, browsing and searching the data faster. The idea is to be able to store archives about the world scraped from 'the public forums' of our time.

Quote from: coinxcoin on May 22, 2015, 12:25:58 AM

"Like the original library at Alexandria" is funny. Could you please explain the similarity?

We chose the name as an homage to the ancient library of Alexandria, because it is known to most people for two reasons - 1) it was a great historical example of a monumental effort to collect as much recorded knowledge and history as possible for the benefit of its people and future generations and 2) most of its contents were unfortunately destroyed, a failure made possible by the fact that it was centralized.

Quote from: coinxcoin on May 22, 2015, 12:25:58 AM

This all looks still like a massive mound of shit. But I still have quite a few FLO so maybe I'll ignore it until I sell.

Sorry you're not a fan of the project - to be honest, you've actually been pretty rude, but I must admit I don't spend much time in the BCT forums myself, so I guess I'm not too desensitized to coin trolls yet Wink

But, hopefully my answers can be of value to others who are a bit more open minded about new things. Have a great day, and enjoy your FLO.

The one positive thing is that at least you tried to directly answer the questions I thought were substantive. The project itself does not look like it provides too much imho but if you take even the worst idea and directly approach the real questions then you may end up with a real project.

I've actually been warming up to this project...
Ever since I realized that there is a lot of niche content where DMCA is irrelevant...
I even watched your 30 minute presentation to that Bitcoin meetup...
(Please keep that 9/11 Truther nonsense to yourself, just say you were in the US Army and leave it at that).

If you even casually follow legal takedowns of pirating sites...
You would realize that publishing a "piracy list" that can be ignored by forks offers little protection...
Even if you manage to personally avoid prosecution (big if, Hollywood will sue you just to slow you down)...
$100,000 of scrypt hashing power from a rent-a-botnet will blow FLO to smithereens.

On the bright side...
Imagine a world where you streamed a hot cam girl to talk dirty to those horny guys are the Bitcoin meetup...
I really hope you are not a prude, because this project could be a real player in the lucrative adult cam niche...
Random financial data really has no value... but the world is full of weirdos spending big $$$ for kinky live interaction.

http://www.alternet.org/inside-rapidly-growing-cam-industry-thats-changing-porn-industry-we-know-it