All due respect to the development team. The website looks great and I am looking forward to the wallet and core updates. That being said... the white papers while well intentioned are completely overwrought.
The preamble and pseudo-philosophy does not add anything. The lack of clear objectives and lack of technical specifications for what is being proposed is concerning. Moreover, having to sift through all the superfluous text to understand what exactly is being proposed is a detriment. I should be able to look at the title of the white paper or the first sentence and understand what is being proposed, instead I have read them all and feel like almost nothing has been clarified, only confused.
The problems crown has proposed to solve, block size and POS/POW alternative are what might bring value to this project. I understand setting the foundations of the project, but this can be accomplished without the quotes and in plain language that is easily digestible. Too much esoteric nonsense.
Anyways. Hopefully more information about these solutions will be available sooner rather than later.
I appreciate the effort of the Crown Team.
Yes i can agree that unless you already know the intricate details of what we are working on, it can be hard to figure it out from the white papers, that being said, more clarification will come forward in stages, when we are ready to release, but we might try to clarify some of the concepts though.
the current problem is we do not want other more wellfunded groups to steal our ideas, but on the same time we want to enlighten the community, its a double edge sword...
The problem is, we are working on some things not seen before, and that will revolutionize the way digital currencies work...
Critical feedback is essential and appreciated. I don't think anyone would disagree that the tone of the white papers isn't for everyone -- and as Chaositec mentions there is a strategic reason for the lack of detail.
But I think the key error that you are making is that you are thinking too small, and the idea that you can boil the value of the project down to POS/POW actually illustrates that you haven't grasped what the team is trying to do. What the team is trying to do isn't anything esoteric -- it's just a simple understanding that distributed teams actually represent a new business model, and that the development of a crypto project will be driven by the working of the distributed team, so lets set some rules for that first. Then we need profitable business models that can operate on the platform -so lets think about that and maybe even have something like turnkey franchise packages where we have worked out the legal issues around application provisioning for the throne providers before we get to that point. Then you need to think about what cash flows will come after the block rewards -- and saying transaction fees is bullshit, you need to actually be providing a service of value. And this is all before we really get to a line of code.
But I understand that many would encourage the team to ignore these factors -- and they might seem like nonsense -- until a project finds itself locked in to a narrow use or user base and unable to scale -- which we would argue is actually where Bitcoin is now -- too big to pivot but too small and narrow to ever be of general use -- and now captured by china on the mining side and Visa on the end user side. Instead of crossing the chasm, a project falls into it.
In terms of the idea that it is pseudo philosophy -- that means "false" philosophy. I'm not sure what you mean here -- probably quasi-philosophical -- because if it were false then that would imply we are lying about our intentions and goals for it to be false -- but you are patient and seem supportive of the goals and respectful of the team's effort -- so I think what this is really saying is that the papers aren't your style -- which I totally get.
I would also state that the tone and tenor of the papers isn't nonsense -- it's deliberate and can be read in many different ways. The whole structure of the papers starts with a social contract and ends with a personal statement and an invitation to others to make their own statements. This is because unlike projects like Ethereum -- where the machine is functionally given "godlike" status by putting it on the blockchain -- what we believe is central to the project is the people and the community. The project will only succeed if it helps people achieve their goals and those goals are socially constructive. So the idea of not just having a social contract -- but prioritizing the human nodes and their freedom is just about as far from nonsense as I think it gets. I guess when I talk to friends who have lived in regimes and survived real oppression and the lack of rights -- they get and value this. Lots of folks have fought and died over this idea over the years and we don't seem to have it locked in as a guarantee (especially given the extraordinary surveillance state and advertising-surveillance businesses which now exist worldwide).
So all this seems really fucking important if you think you might be designing something more than a POS/POW alternative -- but actually would like to have something that could scale to a general purpose platform.
And there are other elements -- but let's move to the code. Or let's not -- because there are well funded projects who would be able to build whatever we might propose more quickly than we can. So we would be genuinely stupid to talk too much about that.
Since we can't do that -- what we can try to do is lay out in a few short papers some of the highlights of how the team is thinking -- and do it in a fashion which will annoy many but hopefully attract a few folks who get the vision and the potential importance of it, and invite like minded folks to "throw their weight behind the plow" and help us see if we can build Crown into a general purpose platform for communication, commerce and computation. So this is what we did with the white papers.
All the pieces are there not to just do a little distributed storage, or any other single application. All the pieces are there to create a separate and secure technology and transaction stack virtualizing functions from Hadoop servers to VOIP phone networks. Did anyone notice this stupid little coin already has Android and Apple apps...?
Just step back and think a little bit. That is the respect which I would like much more than anything else.
I would also point out that if you get to the end you will understand why I am doing this and where my convictions are. The ultimate respect is the respect of people -- and building processes and code to enable and enrich their lives rather than imprisoning and manipulating them. I don't really think any lesser goal is interesting. We have the pieces to be able to put this together in open source code -- and there may be an interesting legal/regulatory window which the large tech companies -- due to their interest in not being responsible for the software they write and being the largest lobby in Washington DC and other Capitals, have left open for a distributed software project with vision.
So the goal is to be a new platform -- but then it still gets more interesting -- because how do the economics work if you have a platform that does charge an insane vig (like Apple's 30% on the App store)... well the benefits of the platform flow through to the nodes. If we are able to scale and maintain a general use open source platform, the platform itself doesn't need to pay some venture shareholders -- the platform's "return" insofar as it exists comes through the demand for the tokens which would drive up the price of the currency -- but this isn't a return to the "platform" -- the platform gets nothing, but it shared by all. You are creating a digital commons.
And yes to many people this is all nonsense -- and in all likelihood, we never achieve these goals and a post mortem could say it was all nonsense... but my own personal belief is that I would like to live in a world where this platform exists. And it's not about the code -- its about the people who would use the platform and the businesses and the greater freedom and prosperity that they could achieve without being nicked by app stores, or tracked by Uber, stalked by Facebook, etc...
So that's the deal. And in the meantime -- we have the solution for those other details. That shit actually isn't hard -- it's all the rest of it and getting the people to come along and allow themselves to escape from the prisons they have built for themselves through their own limited expectations.
So yeah, I get the idea that you may describe that as overwrought -- but, I would argue more accurate terms might be ambitious or arrogant or unreasonable.
You also have to make the strategic assumption that you will come into contact with regulatory bodies if a project achieves any degree of success - so you plan for that. You plan for success although it is improbable -- because the consequence of not planning for it is guaranteed failure. So one role of the papers is to define what this team and project is about -- with sources and things that can be drilled down on into the primary literature later. There is literally no piece of the papers which isn't in this sense a door onto a whole other set of considerations and supporting arguments. This is actually completely different than any other crypto project I'm aware of -- and part of why the tone of the papers is different.
One might contrast this strategy of a bootstrapped coin with a vision to be a platform guided by a belief structure and operating principles stated in black and white with other venture backed start-ups who have raised tens of millions of dollars without even really understanding what the components of the bitcoin code were, much less any more sophisticated understanding of what motivated them or their investors behind money.
Maybe it's best for these people with the venture backing to win... and we can just keep a narrow focus on elements of the coin ecosystem and small innovations. Maybe DA Holdings and Blythe Masters know how to create a better world based on her experience in bringing credit default swaps to the world... BTW hasn't anyone noticed that the dim-lightbulb network is actually bringing swap settlement styles from derivatives into bitcoin... basically the problem child of the financial sector which was the source of problems in the financial crisis (but no one can talk about it because JPM owns the derivatives market and Jamie doesn't play nice if you oppose him in any way). Feel free to go look up the ISDA margin surveys to see where the multi-trillion dollar margin calls were in the crisis that forced the sale of other assets... but yeah -- great for BTC that these guys are now designing the transaction code for BTC -- couldn't be better. YGFBK...
Maybe that's a better world -- but I don't think any sentient entity could conclude that.
So I guess at this point a way to think of the proposition which Crown offers is the opportunity to try to build a new tech stack which no one owns and where no one is owned by it.
Along the way you have to solve a lot of problems -- but a lot of the problems in one area have actually been solved in adjacent applications, or other parts of the open source community. So the solutions amazingly are tested blocks of code, they just haven't been put together in the combinations which we are planning to put them together. Any problems which we solve will be available to all in our open code base, so regardless of the end success of the overall project -- we are actually very confident that we will be able to move the ball forward in crypto by introducing a few new combinations of things.
We also know that we are only a few people working on this on the side, so we will need community involvement in every element of the plan from here forward. Also part of the reason for the tenor of the papers -- if I were to do some work for a group of folks, I would want to know what they are about -- so for those who plan to pitch in but don't know anyone on the team directly, we thought the frameworks in the papers might be valuable.
Hope that makes more sense.
Once the code update is complete, we move on to: spec, bounty and build... which is where the real fun starts. I think we all agree on that.
