Topic: FAIRLAY - SPORTS BETTING for experts - highest liquidity, provably best odds - page 60. (Read 135445 times)

Currently our entire team is working on a new release of our website with a better design and improved usability. We decided to stop this for a moment to work on something, that we think, the community desperately needs right now: Futarchy markets.
Futarchy markets go back to the famous Robin Hanson (http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html) and could become a very crucial tool for governance in the future. It is proven, that these markets aggregate informations with a much higher efficiency than experts or polls. Furthermore they allow market participants to comply with a decision they were originally rejecting. That would increase the chances of achieving consensus - something we could really use right now.
Users, miners or companies could support a certain protocol change, they originally dismissed, by short selling on the corresponding futarchy market and buying on the Bitcoin spot market at the same time to guarantee a sure profit.
Alternatively, market participants who have deeper insight, which protocol change is indeed the best for the long term success of Bitcoin, have the option to increase the likelihood of that change and make profits in the process.
First markets can be found here:
https://fairlay.com/category/news/bitcoin-futarchy/all/
If you like to have another market, you can create any Future market yourself without permission and instantly on our website.
We are sorry, that the UI is not the best right now. We focused on the functionality. It will be better with our new release.

Yes, there is a technical reason. Thank you for your suggestions anyway.

If you want to bet on old markets, yes. We have not decided what we will do with new markets, created after the HF.  We hope we won't have to do this decision.

How can people apply to become an affilate?

So after the hardfork we need to make 2 deposits in order to place bets? If we deposit just BTC-C, we can't do anything until we have an equal amount of BTC-U?

We have been asked how we will handle a possible hard fork with Bitcoin Unlimited.  All our customers will receive BTC-Us according to their balance. All our existing markets will be settled in BTC-U and BTC-Core and also require BTC-Core and BTC-U to place orders on it.  

We are going to announce CFD  (Contract for Difference)  markets soon, probably tomorrow.  These are markets that settle to a decimal result.  

We finished this far ahead of schedule as there might be a high demand for it.  
There are still certain information missing and some minor bugs need to be fixed.  We didn't put too much effort into the User Interface. We will make a nicer one in our new release of Fairlay that is going live in April.

Anyway, you can already take a first glimpse here:  

https://fairlay.com/category/news/bitcoin-futarchy/all/

Feedback is of course welcomed.

Please do not misunderstand us. We are not saying the Blockstream is bad. The argument was, that we have to apply a much much higher standard to the Core Devs than to anyone else in the community.  If there is only the slightest indication of a conflict of interest between the work at Blockstream and Core, than these people affected have to leave one of the projects.


r/btc is low quality - no one should take seriously or believe anything that is written there. Same is true for r/bitcoin.  

You are back to conspiracy theories again. Can you explain me how Blockstream exactly affects bitcoin in a bad way? Did you ever look at the projects they are working on (which are fully open-source)?

I am only glad that at least 1 company is interested in funding development of cool bitcoin improvements. Blockstream actually works (and has worked) on many interesting/innovative projects: Relative Lock Time, Segregated Witness, Lightning Network, Confidential Transactions, Sidechains, Schnorr Signatures, Mimblewimble, Extra Opcodes, etc. If any company is investigating new bitcoin innovations, it would be Blockstream.



Stop believing the /r/btc FUD blindly please.

Something else.   We are not going to participate in a witch-hunt against certain persons, businesses or miners who support BU, even though a contentious HF would probably be bad for us.

We should not and cannot expect anything else from them than acting in their very own self interest (without breaking any laws of course). Condemning them for that  is one of the most depraved things one can do.   

This is not true for Bitcoin Core. We should and can expect nothing else from them but to act solely in the interest of all Bitcoin holders.  That's why it can be seen as problematic, that certain Core Developers have 70m of venture capital in their back, pushing them for a return of their investment.

That explains our differences.  Your intentions are good and if you think, that it can still activate, you should continue to fight for it.

Anyway, you should keep monitoring the Prediction Markets about SegWit. 

I don't think we just need to wait, we should actively show support for Segwit too. If everyone (I don't mean reddit trolls, but real businesses and users) is clearly for Segwit, I do think it will activate. And IMO it is getting more clear every day that the community wants Segwit.

In the meanwhile, I personally do consider to sell some of my coins if miners keep going to the wrong direction. (Not for alts, I don't use any alts.) Potentially we will see lower prices - unfortunately. But maybe that is needed to wake the miners up to activate Segwit.



UASF without threshold is just like a contentious HF. I don't think many Core supporters/developers are really considering it.





PS, the latest development in my eyes is George Kikvadze of Bitfury visiting Jihan Wu yesterday. I hope he could give some proper arguments to Wu on how to improve the situation.

How much longer are you going to wait? Until November or until Bitcoin lost another 10% of market share to alts? The sad truth is, that miners are not going to come.   And "certain people" neither.

What is your actual proposal to move ahead?  UASF?





We never claimed that Core is "bad". We just said that certain developers of Core are unpopular and did severe mistakes and it's the most common thing in the world that they need to take responsibility and leave. When someone fails, he gets replaced - that's how it works.

1.7 MB was estimated based on the transactions in 2015. Since more wallets/businesses switched to multi-sig addresses, the current estimate is 2.1 MB: https://twitter.com/sysmannet/status/800766999039184896

I agree this increase will not last us till forever, but this will give a bit lower fees while long-term solutions can be made without forking/splitting the blockchain like a contentious HF would do.

Segwit is such a no-brainer that I hope miners will ignore the lobbying from certain people soon and open their eyes. The community (real businesses and users) clearly want it and it is the safest way to do a small increase now. Just waiting for the miners.





The reason why I am replying to you here, is because I think the "anti-Core sentiment" from you is not very helping and as said prior, very misplaced. Bitcoin Core is not anything near as bad as you seem to believe. We should unite as a community again and activate Segwit and work on long-term scaling solutions.

Wasn't it 1.7 MB?  That's probably not enough to keep fees low for too long.  

Well, you can find out in advance if it has 90% support (through voting or futarchy markets). If not, you won't do it.

Segwit as soft fork will give us an effective blocksize of 2MB. Everyone in Bitcoin Core wants that 2MB blocksize increase. What are you talking about?

Doing a 2MB HF instead seems completely pointless. I would not support a pointless hard fork. No way that will gain 90% support.

Note: if Segwit SF couldn't include an effective blocksize increase too, I would fully agree with you. But it does!

We can agree that r/btc always was low quality and r/bitcoin recently managed to get even worse.

There are many reasons why a Hard Fork (opt in) is better - we don't want to repeat all of the arguments here.

From our experience 90% of all Bitcoin holders would easily support a HF to 2MB (as long as the majority is behind it). It would be much cleaner than what happened with Ethereum.  First of all, there is always an inherent pressure to reach consensus and have one Bitcoin. Furthermore the price of the old 1MB  Bitcoin would drop a lot and noone in their right mind would even consider mining it because of the slow difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin.  

To back this up, exchanges could offer  future trading for the two Hard Forks in advance.  There can also be voting  as done here: vote.bitcoin.com - but maybe rather on an unbiased site.

The arguments against a fork to 2MB are always very very far-fetched. It is ludicrous to take these problems more serious than the very existential problems of ever rising tx fees (Bitcoin dropped to a historic low in the crypto market as it is unusable right now for lots of appications).  

We would be more likely to reach consensus if

-  Core could regain trust by kicking out certain small blockers, who made horrible mistakes and damaged their reputation
-  2MB would be openly embraced by Core to meet the demands of the community
-  SegWit as a HF would be embraced by Core as a HF  gives power back to the actualy Bitcoin holders - as it should be


You still argue as if SegWit as SF through miner activation is still an option. It is not. It won't get activated. Core with their current policy failed. We wish it were different.

Source?

TBH I think you are believing /r/btc a bit too much /r/btc does not represent the community. While a majority of /r/btc users are just people who want TXs to be a little bit cheaper and therefor bigger blocks (which is fair!) The vocal actors on that subreddit are very obviously malicious. They constantly spread propaganda full of lies just to push the threat that is "emergent consensus". Any critical rebate, even with proper arguments and technical proof, is downvoted to oblivion. /r/bitcoin is not really good, but /r/btc is just terrible. (Overall I never liked reddit.)

But IMO go outside reddit and look a bit to businesses, known bitcoin users, full nodes, etc. The majority (still) easily support Bitcoin Core as it is obviously the most competent team.

I can agree. But the problem is that people expect Bitcoin Core to act as 1 clear entity with a clear message. But Bitcoin Core is an open-source project with a lot of different indivuduals. For example, LukeJr tends to have a bit of an extreme opinion (and obviously vocal /r/btc love to quote him.) But he does not represent Bitcoin Core, he is just 1 of the developers.

Many would love to see Core officially pledging to a blocksize HF in the future. But the thing is, only individual developers/contributors can really do that. And IMO most of them have said to support a blocksize HF increase somewhere in the future. The idea is basically to activate Segwit, collect data (like are full nodes affected by the increasing blocksize that Segwit brings?) and have a definite dynamic blocksize HF based on that. Core isn't best in PR, but their path still seems most scientific/best to me.

I personally believe that after activating Segwit, we will continue the blocksize increase HF discussion and the best solution will come forward. There is no real point in trying to do it before Segwit... if we cannot even get consensus behind an obvious improvement on bitcoin (fixing malleability, opening the options for second layers and having an initial bump) as a SF, how will we ever get consensus behind a HF? I don't think the "emergent consensus" where effectively miners have full power over blocksize and users risk being on the wrong fork constantly, is even a real option. But there has been some BIPs (from Jeff and even from Luke if we change the start parameters), that could be adjusted and potentially still get consensus.

Why would you prefer Segwit as HF while you don't want 2 different bitcoins? Softfork is obviously less risky. Additionally Segwit as SF can be activated within just some weeks, HF will take many extra months of planning. Segwit just need some miners to activate it now. Businesses and users seem ready.


I understand and glad to hear it again

1) Theymos (r/bitcoin) is, of course, a different entity. It's fruitless to specualte about the connection  Theymos / Blockstream. Let's just agree, that Theymos is doing unspeakable things and deserves the contempt of the majority of the Bitcoin community and needs to go  and the censorship on r/bitcoin needs to stop.  

2) Of course, though the influence of Blockstream employees cannot be denied.  We support all Core developers who are willing to compromise, have no possible conflict of interest and are respected by the community.  

3) We are supporting SegWit.  We prefer it as Hard Fork  + 2MB blocks, but even as SF it would probably be better than the status quo.  The problem is, that it makes no difference if we support or not.  All predictions indicate that we won't get it because certain Core developers do not have the trust of the community anymore.  

4/5/6) We also support  Sidechains, LN and most of the Core developers.  Our argument is, that Core did a lot of mistakes and the public perception has suffered. Certain people just have to go and their policy has to change so we can continue.

7) We never said, we support BU.  Two different Bitcoins is the last thing we want.

I just want to say that I fully disagree with this:



1) Theymos has nothing to do with Bitcoin Core. Equally Bitcoin Core has nothing to do with /r/bitcoin subreddit. Only very few of the Bitcoin Core developers are active on reddit. IMO you should separate those two things.

2) Bitcoin Core has more than 100+ contributors. Only very few Blockstream employees (like 4 or 5?) are working on Bitcoin Core too. Blockstream != Bitcoin Core.

3) If you want bigger blocks (me too!), you could start by showing your support for Segwit - which will give effectively 2x the blocksize (2MB indeed) in a very safe and properly tested way.

4) I fully agree with your statement about $100 fees. But it is important to realize that almost all Bitcoin Core developers do not want $100 fees either! Just because some extremists say this, doesn't mean that everyone in Bitcoin Core wants this.

5) Segwit is just a start. It give an initial minimal bump to make the fees a bit lower. Additionally and more importantly, it will help decentralized trustless second layers for real scaling like the Lightning Network (LN.) While I am skeptical about those second layers, it is interesting and could potentially be awesome. It is important to realize that it is decentralized protocol with different teams working on it: lightningd, lnd, Thunder, eclair, Amiko-pay. I am personally planning to test LN a bit with regtest and testnet to see IF and HOW gambling sites could potentially use LN in the future

6) After Segwit, I have no doubt more scaling improvements will follow. I am personally a big supporter of Bitcoin Core, but I definitely want to see a safely planned dynamic blocksize HF in the future too(!) 1MB Is definitely not enough in the future and a properly planned non-contentious HF should be possible IMO.

7) BU will cause a blockchain split and will be very bad IMO. I don't think miners should have the full power to change the blocksize limit to any limit they want. Effectively "emergent consensus" would give that power to 5 mining pool operators, while the costs of a blocksize increase is mostly upon the full node owners. IMO with the risks of "emergent consensus", gambling sites will have to change their required confirmations too. Most sites require now 1 confirmation (yourself included), but even a very small miner can fork off and trick you to get 1 confirmation if your BU node's EB setting is "wrong". Orphans are possible now, but 1 till 12 confirmation will be much less safe with the "emergent consensus" model. Not even talking about their incompetence, lack of testing / peer reviewing, etc. I understand you don't explicitly support BU, but just sharing my opinion.



Overall I think you are experiencing the bad things of the rising fee (which I understand), but your anger towards "Blockstream/Core/Theymos" (which are 3 different persons/groups) seems to be misplaced TBH. I personally fully agree with RHavar's statement today.