Quote from: JohnXJ on July 05, 2016, 08:36:25 AM

Nice platform, i like it, but is it possible to make a data feed in Augur with
for instance an -hourly fiat exchange rate update-?

Thanks! We're trying to keep the basic interface simple and functional for the time being, so if we did add something like that, it would be down the road when we're adding visual bells-and-whistles.

Quote from: Ilsk on July 05, 2016, 10:59:21 AM

I understand that there is no need to rush and you want to be sure the product is safe and secure, but could you give us an approximated ETA for the release of the platform with actual REP token on it?

We'd really like to have the live platform out before the U.S. elections. However, it's hard to give an actual ETA because it totally depends on how our security audits go. This is our first time going through a formal security audit, so we don't have a good sense of how long it will take / how much iteration (if any) will be needed to "green-light" it.

Quote from: Ned Kelly on July 06, 2016, 05:48:58 AM

1) Why not to make this platform completely separate from ETH or any other DAPP system. Just make your own DAPPs system, POS based, with shareholders as nodes in it. And since Etherium was/is going to switch to POS, level of security should be the same.

2) For deposits you can use Bitcoin lightning network (in the future) or any other crypto-currency.

It will make the market:
1) independent from ether or other currency.
2) more income for shareholders.
3) more intensive for them to run a node - more security
4) faster speed of network.

Of course, it will only work if the project team would be independent from ETH team. Otherwise, it would be a conflict of interest as in case of The Dao and the recipe for disaster.

1) The reasons we decided to build Augur on top of Ethereum (rather than as an independent blockchain) are detailed in this blog post. The very short reason is, building on Ethereum allowed us to focus solely on our business logic, without needing to program, deploy, and secure our own blockchain.

2) Augur will ultimately be currency agnostic. It will support all tokens that use Ethereum's subcurrency API, including the stablecoins in development on Ethereum. Bitcoin will also be natively supported via BTCRelay, a sidechain linking the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains. (Easy integration with other projects in Ethereum's ecosystem is another significant benefit to building on Ethereum.) Bitcoin integration won't be part of the initial launch, but it is the first big feature we'd like to implement after launch.

The only overlap between the Augur and Ethereum teams is Vitalik; he's one of our advisors. Our technical efforts are separate from those of the Ethereum core team. Augur pre-dates most of the general-use contract programming and JS tools in circulation now. As a result, we have our own custom-built stack on top of Ethereum. This relatively narrow focus has some security and efficiency advantages; for example, two of the tools that have been the most error-prone (the Solidity language and the web3 JSON RPC tool) are entirely absent from Augur's stack.