I'm glad that I saw this post and that you are active. I'm new to the Cryptocurrency thing and came here because I got into the rabbit hole of decentralized PMs. Just read the case against Augur blog and the fact he didn't even mention Gnosis discredited a lot of what he said. I would like to know one thing, the reasoning behind Ethereum over Bitcoin. There seems to be a lot of criticism about this which is the biggest reason I haven't fully supported what you are doing.
Our reasoning for using Ethereum is explained in detail in
this blog post. Basically, Ethereum has three benefits: 1) Ethereum's smart contract system allowed us to focus on our business logic, 2) being on Ethereum allows us to easily integrate with other Ethereum apps, and 3) Ethereum's subcurrency API will allow Augur to be currency-agnostic.
I think it's important to distinguish Ethereum-as-a-development-platform (and blockchain) from Ether the crypto-token.
Ethereum is a tremendously useful development platform;
ether is just a token which will be one of many crypto-tokens (including Bitcoin) that can be used on Augur. Augur is intended to be currency-agnostic. In fact, after we launch,
one of the first major features we're planning to add is the ability to use bitcoins directly on Augur, via
BTCRelay sidechain.
The other question was what level of involvement Robin Hanson and Ron Bernstein have had in the project? I recently watched the video of Ron talking with someone from your team. His support is one of the other reasons I've been more interested in what you are doing versus Hivemind and Gnosis.
We've talked to Robin Hanson a few times, and his advice was quite good, but overall he has not been too involved in the project.
Ron Bernstein has been very actively involved. Joey and I have been meeting with Ron almost every week for the past 6 or 7 months, and Ron is intimately familiar with Augur at this point. He's also on our Slack and regularly contributes to the discussion. Over the months, we've incorporated a variety of Ron's suggestions into Augur. His most visible contribution is the wholesale removal of the market scoring rule system and its replacement with a regular order book. (MSRs have some nice theoretical properties but empirically don't work so well, so we ended up replacing the MSR with a regular order book, which works much better.) Ron and Joey presented together last month at the
NYC Ethereum Meetup -- if you click through that link, there's video of the event posted on Youtube!