Quote from: BrianDeery on October 10, 2016, 05:21:13 AM

Quote from: astmandu on October 09, 2016, 02:30:11 PM

The commit frequency has slowed quite a bit. Anyone have an opinion as to whether this means anything regarding testnet/M2, or nothing at all?

https://github.com/FactomProject/factomd/commits/testgenesis

Why do you think that? https://github.com/FactomProject/factomd/commits/m2-sunday

Quote from: Jjtjjt on October 10, 2016, 01:46:42 AM

Right now there are 8 million factoids give or take. Will that number increase or decrease over time? There is supposed to be 10% emission but at the same factoids are burned when converted to entry credits. Or will it all be a wash in the end, i.e in 10 years after all the emission and burning there will be the same number in existence?

Maybe more than what you were looking for:
https://medium.com/@BrianDeery/i-love-negative-feedback-632f8ee780ff

Quote from: Jjtjjt on October 09, 2016, 01:32:17 AM

From the way I understand it, factom inserts a hash stating that a record exists but the actual record is kept off the blockchain? I might have this wrong. I read the whitepaper. Are the actual documents, i.e. videos, files, etc kept on Factom servers? Thanks.

While storing things on the factom blockchain is expensive, and not really even guaranteed, it works much better as a publishing platform pointing you where to find the bulk data, and if you find it, is it correct (by whatever definition of "correct" your application might use). Bitcoin with pruning used widely in the future has similar properties.

As the Turkey censorship detailed above, storage is not the real problem. The real problem is the indexing, collation, publishing and advertising of the data, coupled with making sure you have the right data. Storing of the data is not the hard part. Once you know what data you are looking for (and in some cases how to find it), it does not matter who produces the data, if you can check its hash and verify the signature.
Here is Julian Assange talking about this technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=290&v=MaB3Zw5_p9c

This resonated pretty strongly with me. George Orwell predicted a pretty bleak future. The antagonist in the book 1984 has a saying:

Code:

Who controls the past controls the future:
Who controls the present controls the past

Securing records in a public witness (a blockchain) with >$1,000,000 of electricity per day being burned to advance the ledger, means that bureaucrats with admin rights cannot change history undetectably. Even when the local databases are wiped, individual citizens can produce copies of the digital documents that match the hashes signed earlier by the bureaucrat's predecessors.

There is also a pet theory of mine which flips the rationale for Bitcoin's existence.

https://medium.com/@BrianDeery/hashpower-is-the-ends-bitcoin-is-the-means-4de61c559bc0

Thank you Brian, once again, for answering all of my questions!