Topic: [ANN][NOTE]DNotes - Celebrating DNotes 3rd Birthday - Forum Now Open - page 43. (Read 814539 times)

Excellent recap. "Consensus Escapes Satoshi Roundtable" is an important read you should not miss. This is a serious pitfall of Bitcoin that could lead to very costly consequences. It is very concerning. Any major setback will affect the entire industry.

Consensus Escapes Satoshi Roundtable
http://dcebrief.com/bitcoin-weekly-recap-3-11-2016/

More than seventy members of the Bitcoin community participated in the Satoshi Roundtable event in Florida last weekend, including miners, Bitcoin core developers, and representatives from Bitcoin firms. As might be expected, much of the conference focused on the issue of blockchain scaling. Anyone who showed up at the event expecting the participants to develop any sort of consensus, however, would have left sorely disappointed.

Two of the participants, Gavin Andresen and Brian Armstrong, walked away from the conference with markedly different perspectives. In separate blog postings this week, each man offered his own unique take on the conference, while also providing a glimpse into preferred paths forward.
Both men’s accounts of the proceedings seem to reflect a similar sense of frustration that there are still so many people resisting any serious effort at resolving the block size issue. Their blog accounts, however, do reveal that even they have some obvious differences when it comes to identifying why these divisions remain so hard to overcome.

Armstrong identified the Bitcoin core team’s inability to accept a good solution as a major roadblock to progress, noting that they are resisting a helpful solution now due to their concerns that unhelpful decisions might be made at some unknown point in the future. Not content to simply identify perceived problems, Armstrong also offered his own thoughts on a possible solution that includes an immediate block size increase to 2 MB, an increased effort to communicate the benefits to Chinese miners, and a commitment to building a new protocol team.

Andresen’s post expressed pessimism about the whole process, and focused on the mining community’s reluctance to wield veto power, confusion about the current process, and the apparent unwillingness of some in the development community to support any on-chain solution at this point. In the end, Andresen concluded that these are all signs that the Bitcoin network is in an extremely unhealthy state – and likely to remain so until wiser and cooler heads prevail.

Bitcoin Weekly Recap 3-11-2016

BitQuick Now Using BitGo Instant
BitAccess Announces Bitcoin Purchase Option across Canada
Coinbase Announces Debit Card Bitcoin Purchase Feature
BitPay Report Shows Rising Bitcoin Business to Business Payments
Consensus Escapes Satoshi Roundtable

http://dcebrief.com/bitcoin-weekly-recap-3-11-2016/

There seems to be an increasing interest in altcoins. It is beginning to remind me of 2014. DNotes is quite well positioned now and we are back to an uptrend. Slow and steady is what I would love to see. So far so good.

OK i understand now, thanks. Sure price up is just speculation, or coders investing some money in something they want to work in. Nice to know is on DNotes path,

Thanks, Chase. So the exchange fees is already reflected up-front. That is not to get people started.

It would be pretty costly to continuously pay that kind of a fee if you became a regular purchaser of Bitcoin. This is a good stepping stone for the first few purchases, so people can see it really isn't that difficult to buy. Once they are confident, they will likely move on to buy where the fees are lower.

The price for one bitcoin was $565.85 Canadian and at today's exchange rate that is around $414.00 U.S.

I really enjoyed this one, it raises a very important issue that most cryptocurrencies seem to disregard. DNotes on the other hand performs well in each of those categories.

For convenience and wide availability it is very impressive. It may not be the most cost effective regular savings program. I am curious as to what is the final exchange rate of 1 BTC in UD $ they used for  the conversion.  

That is excellent! I certainly wish they had that around here.

That was pretty easy!

These are the instructions posted in the article:

Buying a Flexepin bitcoin voucher is like purchasing a gift card. It is bought from a store cashier. Once the purchase is made, a voucher is provided in the form of a receipt. In 60 seconds, the receipt can then be redeemed for the cash equivalent of bitcoin.

In just 3 steps, anyone can quickly buy bitcoin:

1. Find a store by visiting Bitaccess.

2. Pay the store cashier for a Flexepin voucher. If the cashier is unable to find Flexepin, tell them it is on the prepaid machine and is just like a paysafecard.

3. Redeem the voucher at https://bitcoin.bitaccess.co/ to add bitcoin to a digital wallet of your choice.

Flexepin allows you to buy up to $250 worth of bitcoin per day. They come in $10, $30, $50, $100 or $250 vouchers.

The cashier had never heard of Flexepin, so I did have to mention it is like a paysafecard.

I bought a $10 Flexepin voucher (at a gas station) and with the fee the total was $11.49 Canadian. The fee may seem expensive to those already in the industry, but for newcomers, ease of use comes first. One thing I forgot to ask is if the fee is a flat percentage of the voucher value, or if you get a better deal if you buy a larger amount. I can't find the answer online, so I'll check the next time I'm there.

- To purchase bitcoin with this voucher, you enter a mobile phone # and they send a log-in password.

- Your name and address are required as per regulations.

- Once logged in, you enter the 16 digit PIN number that is on the voucher as well as your Bitcoin address.

The whole process (after going out and purchasing the voucher) was faster than waiting for the Bitcoin confirmations at Poloniex.

Published almost a week ago, What Happened At The Satoshi Roundtable by Brian Armstrong and Satoshi Roundtable Thoughts by Gavin Andresen. Pretty interesting reads outlining 2 very different opinions on the issue. Brian believes we need and have an interim solution though it may not be a perfect solution but it will help keep us moving forward, Gavin hopes an off-chain solution will be created if no action is taken.

What I Learned at the Satoshi Roundtable by Stephen Pair, is also worth a mention, with a more in depth explanation why we may not want to raise the limit. He does mention voting mechanisms as well.

Good to see you, infovortice. I am well aware that blockchain and Azure are two industry buzz words at this time. There are significant advantages to team up with Microsoft at the appropriate time. In our case, it may not be until 2017. We have a very clear vision where DNotes needs to be three years from now.

We spent the first two years building a trusted brand with a solid infrastructure of our own ecosystem. We are now focusing on a revenue model to will help fund major development projects beyond what we have already been working on.

DNotes is a trailblazer with a very long term strategic plan. We are committed to be a technology leader with a trusted digital currency for everyone worldwide to participate. We are also committed to a strategic path that will give DNotes the best chances of meeting the full functions of money one day, with an ultimate goal to be far superior to money. Additionally, DNotes is positioned to supplement, though not replace fiat or national currencies globally. Thus, we see things very differently; with a very different timetable when compared to our industry peers.
 

Good to see you infovortice! Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform. Microsoft is trying to promote usage of this platform by 'partnering' with service providers, in this case blockchain data providers. The advantages for a blockchain provider include providing services for one looking to utilize blockchain for data purposes, opening themselves up to potentially a new user base on a nice and easy platform. This isn't something that is on the top of our priority list, but on our radar for future utilization of blockchain services.

I can't explain the exact correlation to the price, other than potential higher utilization of that providers services, and excitement of a new technology venue.

Hi family, its a few days ago a pumping devotion arround proyects that join to microsoft azure stuff, really not understand too much or know azure, just looking that syndrome, each proyect that join azure is hardly pumped. Just rumors that stay there its like be legalizated or something.

just wanna know if DNotes has in his roadmap Microsoft azure listing ?

Why really a coin take profit by join there ?

http://dcebrief.com/speed-security-or-stability-which-is-the-most-important-to-us/

On the surface the claims in the following article sound impressive. Indeed, there will be great demand for high speed blockchain transactions with many good uses.

However, it is important to take notice this is about centralized private blockchain with “trusted” intermediaries; as opposed to trustless decentralized consensus network confirmed by proof-of-work without the need of any central authority.  

“Juno provides a platform for private network applications and removes the need for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake functions typical in current blockchains.”

***************************
JPMorgan Introduces “Juno” Blockchain Prototype with Lower Latency, Higher Throughput
March 7, 2016

http://blockchain-finance.com/2016/03/07/jpmorgan-introduces-juno-blockchain-prototype-with-low-latencies-high-transaction-volume/

JPMorgan on Friday revealed its own blockchain technology prototype at the technical steering committee meeting of the open source Hyperledger Project, according to a CoinDesk scoop.
JPMorgan executive director David Voell introduced the “Juno Digital Cryptoledger” and one of the developers of the prototype, financial technology engineer Will Martino.

In his introduction, Voell placed emphasis on Juno’s lower latency and higher transaction throughput.
“It is very well suited for high volume use cases. A lot of the existing technology we’ve seen with blockchain is not so good at higher volume transactions. Some of the use cases we are looking at are in the area of 200, 300, 400, 500 transactions per second.”

Martino gave a presentation on Juno as an alternative to existing smart contract blockchain technologies like Ethereum, noting that project started in September 2015 after testing other blockchain technologies.

Juno provides a platform for private network applications and removes the need for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake functions typical in current blockchains. Juno accomplishes this by using a variant of the Raft consensus protocol with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), called Tangaroa, and a smart contracts language developed for it, called Hopper.

According to its Github page, Juno can achieve significantly lower latency than traditional Blockchain-based models.

“Running the demo locally, one can expect latencies of ~20ms and throughput in excess of 1000 transactions a second.”

In his presentation to Hyperledger, Martino indicated that an un-optimized version of Juno running four nodes on a MacBook Pro generated throughput of 500 transactions per second and a latency of ~2ms. The development team believes it can achieve 2-3 times performance with basic optimizations.

To put this performance in perspective, the Bitcoin network can handle 7 transactions per second, while Visa’s network handles an average of 2000 transactions per second. Even if it can handle just 500 transactions per second, Juno is much more suitable for most mainstream financial applications than the two most prominent blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Juno however is not a finished product, as Voell noted in the introduction to Hyperledger:
“It is not finished yet. It is still a work in process. We have been having some very good results from our testing.”

JPMorgan is a member of R3’s consortium of 45 member banks, called the R3 Global Collaborative Lab, and recentlytook part in testing distributed ledger technologies developed by Chain, Eris Industries, Ethereum, IBM and Intel.

Chase, the article is factually correct. Private or permissioned blockchain is just a glorified version of database. It is controlled by a central authority or centralized, hence authorized parties can reverse the record and make changes.

As mentioned, “there are two types of private blockchains: consortiums, which include preselected participants from a variety of organizations; and fully private blockchains, which are limited to participants from one organization.”

A proof-of-work decentralized Bitcoin or DNotes blockchain record is not reversible and cannot be changed once confirmed by the 51% of the peer-to-peer decentralized consensus network.

What sold me about Bitcoin in the first place is Satoshi’s ingenious consensus technology to deliver immutable transaction time-stamped records verifiable by anyone anytime anywhere. Without this feature, there is not that much one should get excited about. The so called trusted intermediaries continue to rule.

Very cool. That would be nice if we had this option locally too. Let us know how it goes!

This is impressive! I took a quick look at the locations and this makes it possible to buy bitcoin in some pretty small towns across Canada. There are a few locations that are close so I'm going to give it a try tomorrow.


You can now purchase Bitcoin at 6,000 retail locations in Canada with BitAccess

https://ihb.io/2016-03-09/news/you-can-now-purchase-bitcoin-at-6000-retail-locations-in-canada-with-bitaccess-28037

I came across this article on public and private blockchains and found something within it that made me a bit nervous. Is it true that transactions within a private blockchain can be altered?? The "feature is not permitted in public blockchains" because of the security risk. Are we supposed to believe there is no security risk with organizations that are racing for the private blockchains?


Beyond Bitcoin: The blockchain revolution in financial services

PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE BLOCKCHAINS

To understand the difference between public and private blockchains, consider the difference between the Internet, which is public and available to everyone, and intranets, which are created by specific entities and only available to certain individuals with permission.

Public blockchains are decentralized and accessible to anyone, regardless of their affiliation. Transactions are publicly verified and remain in the public domain. To ensure the integrity of the system and to validate transactions, financial-incentive and consensus mechanisms are built into the system. Crowdsourcing is an advantage of public blockchains, which are outside the control of any private or governmental entity. Because a public blockchain is available to anyone, improvements are made by consensus of the participants. Open access encourages greater participation and makes it more likely for public blockchain networks to be employed in a wider variety of applications. Importantly, public blockchains offer the potential for reducing transaction fees. In the Bitcoin network, for example, the average processing fee for a Bitcoin transaction is .04 cents, compared to more than .35 cents for a typical credit card transaction.

Private blockchains are set up and maintained by a private entity. Security protocols control and limit access to authorized parties. Transactions are verified within the private blockchain and can potentially be altered within that private network, which enables operators to correct errors. This feature is not permitted in public blockchains, in part because it can create security risks. There are two types of private blockchains: consortiums, which include preselected participants from a variety of organizations; and fully private blockchains, which are limited to participants from one organization. Private blockchains can authenticate transactions more quickly— generally within seconds—because they operate on networks that are more centralized and are made of up fewer computers. In contrast, it can take as long as two hours to authenticate a Bitcoin transaction, which happens on a globally distributed, public blockchain involving thousands of unaffiliated computers.

http://www.whitecase.com/publications/insight/beyond-bitcoin-blockchain-revolution-financial-services