I think this is a pretty bad idea for investors and Mr. Ponzi. don't get caught by an angry investor. you haven't even activated whois protection, so I would take it down ASAP.

if this would have been done using an anonymous DNS registrar or torservice, then I would be more impressed. I think Mr. Ponzi is running a pretty high risk in terms of "investors" and police.

would be interesting to know how this is being treated legally. clearly its not honest, as payout is said to be "guaranteed". you could have done this as a charity if this would have really been an experiment. for example by picking a balance at random when the money goes to X.

nice post. you should read Marx some time if you haven't. it has actually surprisingly little to do with wealth-distribution or constructing a ideology. rather it is a very broad analysis of human production, capital and work. he has probably as much to do with soviet communism as Adam Smith has with capitalism. both never proposed a political system, but where used for justifications of them.

I see what your getting at. you're referring to a kind of party rule, where there  are intransparent of processes of group decisions. at least we have now several experiments going on, so it is interesting to see how this evolves.

now that the big eth fundraiser was called off, I'm more sympathetic. its probably thanks to communal efforts that it was called off. I think there should be some guidelines for such power-plays.

r0ach thanks for your posts. you're one of the few who realize that these problems are not merely technical.

I don't understand how eth even pretends to solve the hashing power problem. Anyway.

Surely mining does not suffer from lack of competition. Its rather how pools shift power from consumer to producer. much economic research is spent on studying monopols, oligopols, polypols (1, few, many). oligopols often exist in resource markets like oil and electricity, because of scaling effects. its not that surprising we see the same in bitcoin. a miners tax is probably not a bad idea to redirect excess profits.

..which is this article
http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/02/01/on-transaction-fees-market-based-solutions/

ok, I stand corrected. then the readme doc is just badly written (an order without a price is called market-order). I'll look at it more closely then. with a block based exchange there are plenty of attacks one can do. timing attacks, flooding attacks, ... it certainly can't scale to any meaningful volume, because orderbooks are central datastructures. a possible way to solve this is much more involved.

I've looked at this XCP thing. it doesn't have prices in the orders... why would I buy something at an unknown price? that's what an exchange does. its a price-machine so to speak. I mean this design is like a car that doesn't drive. its completely absurd.

at least they are not taking money for the dev upfront, so that's good.


yes. people designing an exchange should know what they are talking about. none of this stuff works, for quite obvious reasons. limit order book is a central datastructure like the blockchain. if you think about it bitcoin is de-central and central at the same time. blockchain is the ultimate central datastructure.

I haven't studied NXT at all, only looked the source code for 5 seconds. all current projects MSC, NXT, eth, have not considered much what an exchange is, in terms of price discovery and settlement.

very good idea, but altcoins are internet based. there is no known mechanism for local segmentation, as the internet is global, and bitcoin builds on that. best best is probably some kind of proof-of-stake.

if anyone wants to work on local distributed coinage let me know.

What we need is a structured marketplace, where people who buy and sell cryptocurrencies meet, based on same principles. that's what I'm working on. as long as some market principles are met, demand and supply can establish a fair price of any currency. price is then the estimate of future value.


We don't have a process for tracking fundraisers. There is no way to know what happened with past funds. It would be much better to build a plattform which can be re-used and to actually build out the intermediation process. the alt-coin market is pretty fragile at the moment.

satoshi designed the stack engine for a very good reason. it doesn't look like this will ever be done in bitcoin itself. the risk is too high for that kind of experimentation to occur now. overall the system/network has probably much more inertia than initially thought. from which I infer that there will be several serious candidates in the long term.

That was a bit mean from me. I appreciated the work more, before someone put in the idea of corporate control. that is not opensource/anarchism. anyway, if everyone plays fair, its a free market.

cryptocurrencies have as much to do with economics as it has to do with cryptography/computer security/etc. One problem is one can't pick up sound economic thinking from a textbook, as modern economics is mostly nonsensical drivel. And it does not help to understand how in the future human societies will be organized based on principles of cryptocurrencies.

this thread is a good example. it discusses various technical questions, but does not touch at all on the questions of contracts, and why we even would want smart contracts/DAC's and what they are good for. say for example all contracts with the government, which can be changed more or less arbitrarily by those in power, starting with control of money supply. so the question is how this new arising form of social organization fits in with the existing civilization, which is build on nation states + a rather strangely constructed institution named United Nations + other institutions like Worldbank, IMF, SWIFT, G8, etc.

are there more messages like this? that would be an indication of "spam". I assume that any such evil hacker would provide prove to back up his claim.

I hear good things about Plankalkül these days. Its a bit old, but it has excellent support for electric vacuum tubes.

More serious answer: if you can't answer that question its a long road ahead. Essentially there are only 8-10 languages which cover 99% of the market. and for ultra high performance there are 4-5 choices: C, C++, Erlang, Skala, golang + maybe Java, C#.

Here is a recent article, quoting Mike. This uptake in the concept can be attributed to the last couple of weeks.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corporations


Interestingly the articles start with this:

anyone using gentoo overlays?

thanks for the info. interesting, I didn't know gmaxwell's storJ proposal. The thread is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53855.0

In some ways these concepts could have only evolved after BTC.   I assume bitshares were the first attempt at constructing these, although storJ refers to something quite different.

I think a lot will be gained by understanding that cooperations are legal constructs. The article above explicitly refers to the problem of multi-jurisdictions. agency granted by law (sometimes even called artificial people), implies rights and responsibilities. Is AAPL a US company? it operates globally so it is a multi-national. but there is no entity granting rights to multi-national cooperations, besides nation to nation agreements.

why are these videos always the same? some ukulele in the background and a guy selling a CC as it was a bag of soap.

there is some buzz about the concept of a distributed autonomous corporation. I wanted to find out who invented the concept, but as these so called whitepapers floating around don't use scientific standards for citation I haven't been able to identify where the term comes from. google scholar doesn't return any reference on a keyword search.

Szabo wrote this paper called "Multinational Small Business " in 1993, which comes very close to the concept: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/multi_small.html . So the best of my knowledge this is the source of the concept, which might have roots in earlier works of art. The idea is bit different, and more well thought of, in that in refers specifically to the multi-jurisdiction problems, and acknowledges that cooperations are legal constructions, not just bits on the internet.

ethereum's 30M$ fundraiser was stopped by negative campaigns (actually there is more negative things I would have to say about this, but I actually hope they do some work). It didn't stop by itself. Next time there can be a more efficient process. People will then link to old discussions / guidelines. If you want to raise money, follow this, otherwise you will be campaigned against. Negative campaigners can have bad incentives, too. In the real world we have all kinds of laws, from securities laws to libel, etc. Imagine somebody using violence to achieve their financial ends, then things get ugly.

many thanks for the thread. important question. is there a list of IPO's / fundraisers somewhere?

I would argue: large IPOs (1M$+) should be not allowed, in the sense that people should speak out against them and told that these are darkpatterns which are not wanted. so there is a continuum of outright banning, restricting and just campaigning against them.

if somebody wants to launch a CorporateCoin or eGold 2.0, do that outside the community. nobody wants it. bitcoin was designed precisely to avoid problems with eGold. a corporation can be attacked in various ways, or use its influence in various ways.

on the other hand problem is how to define "IPO"? somebody asking to be paid - is that an IPO? do you want to restrict all BTC flows and how? then you get into the question of potential admin corruption, i.e. "ban this person asking for money, and i'll pay you x BTC." another example is link to a Kickstarter. actually with BTC assurance contracts we can have a much better version of kickstarter.

my sugggestion: somebody opens up a thread and discusses some guidelines. then anyone can link to those guidelines, the next time somebody asks for a million bucks, he will be shown a flag: this is a darkpattern, established by discussion in this thread.

i.e. you want to raise 30 M$ without putting in a dime in yourself? => that is not a good idea.

some dark patterns:

* money beyond covering reasonable expenses (300k$ p.a. is highend)
* no skin in the game
* a lot of marketing based on non facts
* referencing law of the country. if you're raising in BTC, there is no law covering this, unless you have proof, i.e. legal docs to back up your claims