Topic: [ANN][NOTE]DNotes - Celebrating DNotes 3rd Birthday - Forum Now Open - page 22. (Read 814568 times)

I agree that it is a great idea. Good employers should be more concern about helping their employees especially in cases where it cost them very little but means a lot to their employees.

Volume in the U.S.? or Europe (Eurozone)?
Something like:
https://bitcoingiftcards.com.au
https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com

Mark

I run them at 800MHz  I recommend you bump the input voltage to 14 VDC if you can. That will lower the amp draw but keep the power the same while reducing heat at the connection points. Power factor actually stays constant but the Gridseeds seem to like the higher voltage/less current arrangement.

Very smart idea Chase! That could be very helpful.

Wouldn't it be nice if forward thinking employers had an emergency CRISP for their employees as well as the Employee benefit/retirement ones. That way the employee could eventually get ahead of the pay day loan shark and never have to use those services again.

It is hard to believe that funds can't be instantly verified today, let alone require an additional fee to release funds early. We live in an instantaneous world, where almost everything can be handled in the blink of an eye. Digital currency is bringing us closer to that reality.

The banks are making a move on the very lucrative cheque cashing market utilized mainly by the unbanked poor.


Banks look to enter the lucrative business of check-cashing

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/banks-look-enter-lucrative-business-173003819.html

Really good read on this report here, makes a lot of sense. We are seeing a lot more realistic thinking towards blockchain applications and I am glad to see it, there needs to be a shift in the industry from overly hyped potential to real world application. Highlights from Coindesk's article Banca IMI Researcher: Blockchain Won't Work if Banks Don't Change

The head of interest rate and credit models at Banca IMI, an investment banking and capital markets subsidiary of Intesa Sanpaolo, has penned a new paper on blockchain technology.

Dedicated to spotlighting "real business cases" for the technology, Massimo Morini’s report argues that the lesson that should be learned from cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin is that traditional financial business model needs to be reformed, not just improved.

Morini writes:

"One crucial misunderstanding here is the idea that blockchain technology can be exported to financial markets as they are to make them more efficient. This is meaningless; blockchain technology was created to change some trust-based business processes to make them less reliant on trust; without structural changes in this direction the best of blockchain technology is lost and just the inefficiencies are left."

"Legal and regulatory status could come earlier than expected if regulators see advantages in an architecture which is more transparent and creates less risk than most of the current solutions."

thanks for the pic bro ,,,  what frecuency you use for not burn/hot connections?  700 mzh?

I hear you loud and clear, RJF. I can admit that I did get annoyed a few times after being misled by some clever headlines on blockchain projects; only to find that they were quite “dump” – smart contracts, IMO.

The undoubted killer app is the digital currency part of the technology. But itself, it has only limited speculative value and insanely volatile. To become truly valuable, digital currencies, like DNotes, must meet the full functions of money. There will be killer apps for smart contract and other blockchain related applications. However, we have not seen them yet.

I generally agree with what you are saying, in the case of "smart" stuff, people are reading into what smart actually means in this sense. Essentially an event can trigger a programmed action "(of a device) programmed so as to be capable of some independent action", but not intelligent in any way, just reactive. You're right though, it is a lot of buzz for what it really is.

Cynical mode ON:

I absolutely hate how "buzz" words become instantly accepted into the lexicon. Using "smart" in everything connected to computers and technology is not only inaccurate, it's very annoying. NONE of this stuff is "smart". It's really quite dumb since it can only do what it was programmed to do and at this point in AI development, that's not really much.

Smart implies thought, reasoning and to some extent, emotion, none of which silicon chips will ever be able to grasp. Mimic maybe but not on a functional level found in the human brain. This is all part of the constant "dumbing down" of society in general. Everything, everywhere is geared to separate you from your wealth. Have you ever seen someone watching a really stupid TV show and a picture of a little IQ meter pops in your head as the needle edges ever toward zero? The lower that meter goes, the more crap and useless junk they can sell you and, that's the bottom line, selling you.

This is what happens when marketing and ad men rule the industry. The unexpected consequence is that they are setting themselves up for failure without even realizing it. Once we start thinking some piece of software or electronic device is "smart" we expect it to act that way. Of course, at some point, it WILL let us down and in a way that really hurts since we thought it was "smart". How could a "smart" thing do this to us?  

Dump, move on, find new smart thing, disappoint, dump....  And so the cycle goes.

    

http://dcebrief.com/why-bitcoin-remains-so-relevant/

I suspect that the Chinese exchanges have a lot to do with the ferocious volatilities. Some of the price movements have been insane. But unfortunately, there must be a lot of people interested in that kind of "excitement" even though it is easy to get hurt.

Sorry for the delay, busy time of year for me. Here's the pic showing where to solder the wires for the Gridseed Blades.



Don't let the connections get too hot and connect the negative (black, ground) wire to BOTH ground posts on the plug as shown.

Ethereum low prices are done by fractional reserve of chinese exchanges, its simply left users trading with tickets and sell 80% of all ethereum user coins to take bitcoins.

The best that ethereum has done for his value its stay away from chinesse exchanges,,,,

Bitshares is the best example about how a group of exchanges can damage and manipulate price of shares i

until all of this shit xploit as investor i say thanks because can buy at low prices, and like holder say "censured"

Part Two:

Beware the impossible smart contract


Hiding confidential data
As I’ve written about previously, the biggest challenge in deploying blockchains is the radical transparency which they provide. For example, if ten banks set up a blockchain together, and two conduct a bilateral transaction, this will be immediately visible to the other eight. While there are various strategies for mitigating this problem, none beat the simplicity and efficiency of a centralized database, in which a trusted administrator has full control over who can see what.

Some people think that smart contracts can solve this problem. They start with the fact that each smart contract contains its own miniature database, over which it has full control. All read and write operations on this database are mediated by the contract’s code, making it impossible for one contract to read another’s data directly. (This tight coupling between data and code is called encapsulation, and is the foundation of the popular object-oriented programming paradigm.)

So if one smart contract can’t access another’s data, have we solved the problem of blockchain confidentiality? Does it make sense to talk of hiding information in a smart contract? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Because even if one smart contract can’t read another’s data, that data is still stored on every single node in the chain. For each blockchain participant, it’s in the memory or disk of a system which that participant completely controls. And there’s nothing to stop them reading the information from their own system, if and when they choose to do so.

Hiding data in a smart contract is about as secure as hiding it in the HTML code of a web page. Sure, regular web users won’t see it, because it’s not displayed in their browser window. But all it takes is for a web browser to add a ‘View Source’ function (as they all have), and the hidden information becomes universally visible. Similarly, for data hidden in smart contracts, all it takes is for someone to modify their blockchain software to display the contract’s full state, and all semblance of secrecy is lost. A half-decent programmer could do that in an hour or so.

What smart contracts are for
With so many things that smart contracts cannot do, one might ask what they’re actually for. But in order to answer this question, we need to go back to the fundamentals of blockchains themselves. To recap, a blockchain enables a database to be directly and safely shared by entities who do not trust each other, without requiring a central administrator. Blockchains enable data disintermediation, and this can lead to significant savings in complexity and cost.

Any database is modified via “transactions”, which contain a set of changes to that database which must succeed or fail as a whole. For example, in a financial ledger, a payment from Alice to Bob is represented by a transaction that (a) checks if Alice has sufficient funds, (b) deducts a quantity from Alice’s account, and (c) adds the same quantity to Bob’s.

In a regular centralized database, these transactions are created by a single trusted authority. By contrast, in a blockchain-driven shared database, transactions can be created by any of that blockchain’s users. And since these users do not fully trust each other, the database has to contain rules which restrict the transactions performed. For example, in a peer-to-peer financial ledger, each transaction must preserve the total quantity of funds, otherwise participants could freely give themselves as much money as they liked.

One can imagine various ways of expressing these rules, but for now there are two dominant paradigms, inspired by Bitcoin and Ethereum respectively. The Bitcoin method, which we might call “transaction constraints”, evaluates each transaction in terms of: (a) the database entries deleted by that transaction, and (b) the entries created. In a financial ledger, the rule states that the total quantity of funds in the deleted entries has to match the total in those created. (We consider the modification of an existing entry to be equivalent to deleting that entry and creating a new one in its place.)

The second paradigm, which comes from Ethereum, is smart contracts. This states that all modifications to a contract’s data must be performed by its code. (In the context of traditional databases, we can think of this as an enforced stored procedure.) To modify a contract’s data, blockchain users send requests to its code, which determines whether and how to fulfill those requests. As in this example, the smart contract for a financial ledger performs the same three tasks as the administrator of a centralized database: checking for sufficient funds, deducting from one account, and adding to another.

Both of these paradigms are effective, and each has its advantages and disadvantages, as I’ve discussed in depth previously. To summarize, Bitcoin-style transaction constraints provide superior concurrency and performance, while Ethereum-style smart contracts offer greater flexibility. So to return to the question of what smart contracts are for:

Smart contracts are for blockchain use cases which can’t be implemented with transaction constraints.

Given this criterion for using smart contracts, I’m yet to see a strong use case for permissioned blockchains which qualifies. All the compelling blockchain applications I know can be implemented with Bitcoin-style transactions, which can handle permissioning and general data storage, as well as asset creation, transfer, escrow, exchange and destruction. Nonetheless, new use cases are still appearing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some do require the power of smart contracts. Or, at the very least, an extension of the Bitcoin paradigm.

Whatever the answer turns out to be, the key to remember is that smart contracts are simply one method for restricting the transactions performed in a database. This is undoubtedly a useful thing, and is essential to making that database safe for sharing. But smart contracts cannot do anything else, and they certainly cannot escape the boundaries of the database in which they reside.

Source:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-impossible-smart-contract-gideon-greenspan?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST

We have been hearing a lot about blockchain and smart contracts these days. Despite the fact that there is huge potential, it is greatly misunderstood by many who are blindly throwing a lot of money and resources at it. Gideon Greenspan is someone I greatly respect on this subject. Here is a lengthy but excellent article. I am posting it in two parts starting with my response - an easy to read intro:  

Response to: Beware the impossible smart contract:
by Gideon Greenspan

Quote From Dyna:

This is another outstanding article. Well, there isn’t anything Gideon wrote about blockchain that I didn’t like. He is amazingly skilled in telling it as it is in plain easy to understand language.

We are witnessing the early stage of a historic technology revolution that came to us in a package of three definable components; bitcoin the currency, global payment network system, and the underpinning blockchain technology.

This fundamentally changed every aspects of money, including its creation and the movement of money. It created a new payment system that would allow any two parties to send payments directly to one another without the need for banks or financial services. This innovation opened up the future potential for people to be their own bank, and neither hand over the security of their money to any third party, or pay fees for the privilege.

To gain a better understand of smart contract, it helps to understand the total package. The most innovative concept of the blockchain technology is the consensus-based system that is completely deterministic. The network will only confirm, record the transaction, and pay the block reward after 51% consent is reached. And, for all practical purposes, it is not reversible once confirmed.

It is essentially a decentralized ledger that follows very strict rules of confirmed or failed. The movement of funds is reflected as database entries showing deleted and newly created transactions. But the total amounts remained the same; just in different accounts or wallets. Hence, the “smart bond” smart contract may not be such a smart idea. Unlike the world we are used to, we cannot create money out of thin air or use IOUs to guarantee payments. If you know how, I certainly love to know. One fundamental difference here is that you cannot commit to the blockchain as a payment or a guarantee of what you don’t have. You can not spend more than what you have in your wallet.

A good use case of smart contract is for transfer of wealth. Let us assume that I want to give 120,000 DNotes to my grand daughter but I want it to be released at an increment of 1,000 each over a period of 120 months when she turned 21. In another case, I want to donate 600,000 DNotes to a charity but have a concern that may it be dumped in the market negatively affecting the price. In either case, I must have those amounts of DNotes to begin with. Those amounts already resides in the blockchain and verifiable by address. Once I activate the transaction (contract) the amount is committed to the blockchain to be transferred to a different address. They are no longer mine and not reversible.

There will be many viable smart contract applications but I am seriously concerned that the “me too” phenomena of anything blockchain/smart contract is attracting plenty of “wild goose chase”.

****************************************

Beware the impossible smart contract
Apr 12, 2016

Gideon Greenspan
CEO and Founder, Coin Sciences Ltd

The three most common smart contract misconceptions

As the developers of a popular blockchain platform, we sometimes get asked whether Ethereum-like smart contracts are on the MultiChain roadmap. The answer I always give is: no, or at least not yet.
But in the hype-filled world of blockchains, smart contracts are all the rage, so why ever not? Well, the problem is, while we now know of three strong use cases for permissioned Bitcoin-style blockchains (provenance, inter-company records and lightweight finance), we’re yet to find the equivalent for Ethereum-style smart contracts.

It’s not that people lack ideas of what they want smart contracts to do. Rather, it’s that so many of these ideas are simply impossible. You see, when smart people hear the term “smart contracts”, their imaginations tend to run wild. They conjure up dreams of autonomous intelligent software, going off into the world, taking its data along for the ride.

Unfortunately the reality of smart contracts is far more mundane than all that:
A smart contract is a piece of code which is stored on an blockchain, triggered by blockchain transactions, and which reads and writes data in that blockchain’s database.

That’s it. Really. A smart contract is just a fancy name for code which runs on a blockchain, and interacts with that blockchain’s state. And what is code? It’s Pascal, it’s Python, it’s PHP. It’s Java, it’s Fortran, it’s C++. If we’re talking databases, it’s stored procedures written in an extension of SQL. All of these languages are fundamentally equivalent, solving the same sorts of problems in the same sorts of ways. Of course, each has its strengths and weaknesses – you’d be crazy to build a website in C or compress HD video in Ruby. But in principle at least, you could if you wanted to. You’d just pay a heavy price in terms of convenience, performance, and quite probably your hair.

The problem with smart contracts isn’t just that people’s expectations are overblown. It’s that these expectations are leading many to spend time and money on ideas that cannot possibly be implemented. It seems large companies have sufficient resources to travel a lengthy path – from the moment when senior management encounters a new technology, to when that technology’s advantages and limitations are truly understood. Perhaps our own experience can help shorten this time.

Over the past nine months, we’ve been pitched many smart contract use cases, and have found ourselves responding, time and again, that they simply cannot be done. As a result, we’ve identified the three smart contract misconceptions that are most commonly held. These ideas aren’t wrong because the technology is immature, or the tools are not yet available. Rather, they misunderstand the fundamental properties of code which lives in a database and runs in a decentralized way.
Contacting external services

Often, the first use case proposed is a smart contract which changes its behavior in response to some external event. For example, an agricultural insurance policy which pays out conditionally based on the quantity of rainfall in a given month. The imagined process goes something like this: the smart contract waits until the predetermined time, retrieves the weather report from an external service, and behaves appropriately based on the data received.

This all sounds simple enough, but it’s also impossible. Why? Because a blockchain is a consensus-based system, meaning that it only works if every node reaches an identical state after processing every transaction and block. Everything that takes place on a blockchain must be completely deterministic, with no possible way for differences to creep in. The moment that two honest nodes disagree about the chain’s state, the entire system becomes worthless.

Now recall that smart contracts are executed independently by every node on a chain. Therefore, if a smart contract retrieves some information from an external source, this retrieval is performed repeatedly and separately by each node. But because this source is outside of the blockchain, there is no guarantee that every node will receive the same answer. Perhaps the source will change its response in the time between requests from different nodes, or perhaps it will become temporarily unavailable. Either way, consensus is broken and the entire blockchain dies.

So what’s the workaround? Actually, it’s rather simple. Instead of a smart contract initiating the retrieval of external data, one or more trusted parties (“oracles”) creates a transaction which embeds that data in the chain. Every node will have an identical copy of this data, so it can be safely used in a smart contract computation. In other words, an oracle pushes the data onto the blockchain rather than a smart contract pulling it in.

When it comes to smart contracts causing events in the outside world, a similar problem appears. For example, many like the idea of a smart contract which calls a bank’s API in order to transfer money. But if every node is independently executing the code in the chain, who is responsible for calling this API? If the answer is just one node, what happens if that particular node malfunctions, deliberately or not? And if the answer is every node, can we trust every node with that API’s password? And do we really want the API called hundreds of times? Even worse, if the smart contract needs to know whether the API call was successful, we’re right back to the problem of depending on external data.

As before, a simple workaround is available. Instead of the smart contract calling an external API, we use a trusted service which monitors the blockchain’s state and performs certain actions in response. For example, a bank could proactively watch a blockchain, and perform money transfers which mirror the on-chain transactions. This presents no risk to the blockchain’s consensus because the chain plays an entirely passive role.

Looking at these two workarounds, we can make some observations. First, they both require a trusted entity to manage the interactions between the blockchain and the outside world. While this is technically possible, it undermines the goal of a decentralized system. Second, the mechanisms used in these workarounds are straightforward examples of reading and writing a database. An oracle which provides external information is simply writing that information into the chain. And a service which mirrors the blockchain’s state in the real world is doing nothing more than reading from that chain. In other words, any interaction between a blockchain and the outside world is restricted to regular database operations. We’ll talk more about this fact later on.

Enforcing on-chain payments
Here’s another proposal that we tend to hear a lot: using a smart contract to automate the payment of coupons for a so-called “smart bond”. The idea is for the smart contract code to automatically initiate the payments at the appropriate times, avoiding manual processes and guaranteeing that the issuer cannot default.

Of course, in order for this to work, the funds used to make the payments must live inside the blockchain as well, otherwise a smart contract could not possibly guarantee their payment. Now recall that a blockchain is just a database, in this case a financial ledger containing the issued bond and some cash. So when we talk about coupon payments, what we’re actually talking about are database operations which take place automatically at an agreed time.

While this automation is technically feasible, it suffers from a financial difficulty. If the funds used for coupon payments are controlled by the bond’s smart contract, then those payments can indeed be guaranteed. But this also means those funds cannot be used by the bond issuer for anything else. And if those funds aren’t under the control of the smart contract, then there is no way in which payment can be guaranteed.

In other words, a smart bond is either pointless for the issuer, or pointless for the investor. And if you think about it, this is a completely obvious outcome. From an investor’s perspective, the whole point of a bond is its attractive rate of return, at the cost of some risk of default. And for the issuer, a bond’s purpose is to raise funds for a productive but somewhat risky activity, such as building a new factory. There is no way for the bond issuer to make use of the funds raised, while simultaneously guaranteeing that the investor will be repaid. It should not come as a surprise that the connection between risk and return is not a problem that blockchains can solve.

Continued: Part Two – next post

Hi Dink. Unfortunately, we do not have written material on DNotes price stability. Personally, I was a lot more confident that it was achievable until mid August last year when it broke the previous lower low. Until that point we were consistently generating higher highs and higher lowers. At that time it was reasonable for us to say that we had reliable long term appreciation which I believe is where DNotes is heading. We are slowly earning back that track record. With a new company and a revenue source (from the book) behind it, I believe we will make it happen. However, we are still subject to the forces of free market; very much dependent on supply and demand.

By virtual of the book we expect DNotes to gain significant awareness and credibility; hence increased demand. Expected to be a best seller as an entrepreneur book, it will open a lot of doors for us to the merchant business world. We believe that many business owners will find it attractive to supplement their under-funded retirement accounts with a small regular savings in CRISP For Retirement. Likewise, some of their employees could be given a bonus in the form savings for the CRISP For Employee Incentive Benefits savings accounts. In due time, these merchants will find it beneficial to start using DNotes as a medium of exchange. We are always systematic and strategic in every move we make. We are quite different than the rest of our industry.

I hope that you find this is helpful. Feel free to ask any other questions you may have.

Hi Dnotes community, I was looking for any material on how Dnotes will maintain price stability.  I think one of the biggest problems with alt coins (maybe even bitcoin) is the great fluctuations in price that affects an individual and his holdings.  Yes, ether is a good example.  I like what you are doing so far, it is a slow up hill climb, especially with the reputation of alt coins in general.