Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 30. (Read 387457 times)

the initial adoption of a coin with no command economy is necessarily speculative.  moreover all reserve demand is forever speculative.  while i contemn the use of coins as a means of fraud, which is enabled by factors extremely conducive to speculation, such as preplanned supply restrictions and/or demand expansions, it would be folly to paint all speculation with the same brush.  a declining emission creates incentives to speculate which are tunable such that it can satisy the parameters required to accomplish a useful bootstrap dispersion.  

with some time and effort the body of extant evidence from coin issuance should be quite adequate to form a quantitative and structural theory, such that an ideal emission curve may be conditionally derived - although the likelihood of such a theory being robust suffers from the sparsity of the data and the high dimension of the space.  in my view, empirical evidence so far suggests that monero has best approximated the ideal parameters for rapid adoption, among all coins in history.  that empirical evidence should suffice to refute a criticism founded on some teetering stack of theoretical hypotheses.

Thanks! This thread has numerous nuggets of wisdom for cryptocurrency developers.

My latest thinking is a coin with the same parameters as Bitcoin. Verified turn-taking replaces proof-of-work. Block rewards are shared among high-availability full node operators, who must join the Bitcoin foundation, ultimately as voting members, or local equivalent in order to support Bitcoin Core developers.

Put one together quickly:

source

What does VIA hope to improve over Counterparty?

Is Clearinghouse focused on smart contracts mainly? Decentralised exchange? If it's a decentralised exchange, what makes it better than the already existing NXT AE?

Can someone show me a viacoin emission graph?

I actually believe that it would lead to more general trust on that the coin will retain its value, than the opposite of 100% premine and 0% inflation that is touted as "good and ultimate and the value will only ever go up because there will never be any more token X". Problem is the number of such tokens is growing at least linearly, and typically the developers abandon them as soon as the initial pump is over. Not formally abandon, but practically.

If a coin is used by a community, either as a store of value or transactional medium (typically and naturally both in varying proportions), it will have value based on the economic potential of the community. If the outsiders believe in the community, the coin may gain speculative value among outsiders. This has been the case with Bitcoin at times, but I would not rule it out happening with Monero soon, due to the special quality of its community. (It may have happened with some other coins some times also.)

If a coin is developed for outsiders, with the developer intent of receiving value out of it, instead of augmenting value to it, it will experience the initial pump and then die. Very bad coins may even fail the pump. (Not all pumps that look high are successful. A successful pump means that there is at least one sucker who buys into it, and that cannot be judged from the price or even the volume alone).

10 year half life is the main factor that I like XCN.

Linear emission is also good as in the long run, the inflation is low and does not give too much advantage to the early adopters.

Not terrible at all. XCN approximates that for a very long time with its 10-year halving exponential curve. I've said before I like that aspect of it.

The more I think about it, the better I like the idea that emission curve should be linear with a constant block reward.

Yes, you love all forms of Cryptonote, just like I love all presales.   

Are you a native English speaker? Serious question because the meaning of my sentence above where I used the word "presales" is quite clear and you are misinterpreting it.

But if you get enjoyment out of personal attacks on me, have at it.

Here's some raw material for you to work with:

Again, you insist on putting the plural form "presales" in my mouth when the only one I've ever endorsed is VIA's.  Likewise, I never said this was "the VIA thread."   

Thanks for admitting you have have no idea what you're talking about, and can't be bothered to find out.  I can't wait to presume to invent/distort your positions for you, then respond without regard for facts and evidence:

What's that smooth?  You love all Cryptnote coins?!?  How dare you endorse that scam Bytecoin?  How much did Ducknote pay you to spread FUD about VIA?
This isn't the Dashcoin thread.  Stop saying this is the Dashcoin thread!

^^^See how that works?  I must admit, it's a lot of fun!   

No I'm saying that I don't care enough to dig into it, nor do I particularly think it matters because in the end I reject the presale model. Are "good presales" better than "bad presales?" Perhaps, but to me it is a distinction without a difference.


It would be hard to increase the amount of FUD and trolling on the Monero thread.

However, I don't think its the same thing at all. This is not the VIA thread, and I'm not thread bombing there at all. I'm giving my opinions about an altcoin on a thread that is devoted to opinions about altcoins.

So you're asserting your right to refuse to read the relevant materials, yet spout off gratuitous defamatory FUD regardless?   

That's fine.  Let's see how you like it when others do that in your Monero thread...

PS  Entertaining an idea is not the same as agreeing with it.  Good luck with your education, you'll need it!

Why is my opinion of how they conducted the presale so important to you? I already said: I don't have one.

And, no, consulting their own materials would not be a sufficient investigation for me to have an opinion.

And no I'm not going to STFU about problems I have with them just because you like VIA and I'm not necessarily complementary of it. Deal.

And here's you by the way, agreeing with the idea that Coindesk hypes pump-and-dump coins they have pieces of: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8167219

It is definitely suspicious that Coindesk never reports on Monero (even after the somewhat unprecedented cyberattack against it last week) despite frequently reporting on objectively smaller coins (including VIA).


My constructive criticism would be relaunch without the presale and without the fast mining the first week, or someone should fork the code and do the same.

You don't need "intimate first-hand knowledge of how the presale was conducted" to simply research and form a valid opinion of the matter.  Just consult the primary sources: http://blog.viacoin.org/2014/07/07/viacoin-distribution-model.html and the VIA thread.  And spare us your overwrought solipsism.   

Of course rather than consult primary sources, you'd rather throw out red herrings completely unrelated to VIA's presale.

As if Coindesk had a damn thing to do with VIA, besides reporting on the presale in a very public way that destroyed your now-forgotten claim that 'only insiders knew about the presale.'

Do you have any evidence that VIA bribed Coindesk?  No?  Then STFU until you do.

As if Peter Todd had a damn thing to do with the presale, besides later becoming the beneficiary of it enabling him to complete his work on treechains.

When you find evidence VIA hired Peter Todd simply for a press release pump, and not treechains, please let us know.  Until then, STFU with your baseless defamation.

You're a clever child and I know you can produce constructive criticism of VIA, but all we've seen so far is fact-free FUD.  I challenge you to do better.   

I have no first-hand knowledge of how the presale was conducted, so I can't praise or condemn that aspect of it. Your comments on that matter carry more weight than mine would if I were to make any, since you seem to be intimately familiar with it.

I'm not a fan of how they handled the Peter Todd relationship, where they put out a hyped press release claiming he had "joined the project" as their "Chief Scientist," while at the very same time he was posting on Reddit saying that they were simply a consulting client, being charged the same rate as all of his other consulting clients (including Monero BTW), paying him to do something he already wanted to do (tree chains), and that he wasn't even familiar with what they were doing. That particular episode stunk of sleazy and possibly misleading promotional tactics to me, and in fact I suspect they hired him specifically in order to do the press release, though of course I can't prove that.

Other than that and what I dug up about the odd (but small) one-week fast-mine I know nothing about VIA, but it did leave me with a bad impression of them.

BTW, the fact that their stuff runs on coindesk is another negative to me, since it seems likely coindesk only covers what they are paid to cover (or perhaps is a huge enough story they would be forced to cover it, but that certainly doesn't including anything VIA-related).

The market is often irrational (see DARK/CLOAK/XC/BLACK) but to disregard it entirely is a mistake.

No launch or emission curve will ever please everybody, and you know that far better than most.   

Like you, I hate every other ICO/presale type thingy and have never endorsed any besides VIA.   However, having studied the matter in great detail I am satisfied VIA's presale is the singular exception to a practice will a well-deserved bad reputation.   So why not listen to the reasoning behind my purported exception with an open mind, instead of knee-jerk objections?

VIA set a new standard for fair, honest, and transparent launches involving a presale.  They should be criticized for think you think need improvement, but it's only fair to praise them for what they got right.

This argument is nonsense. The worst pump-and-dump coins have all traded at high prices at one time or another. You can't argue that because something trades a high price it is great, especially on a thread where people are discussing what is or isn't a good investment.

Note: I'm not saying it isn't a good investment, I'm just saying that fact that it trades at such-and-such a price doesn't mean it is one.


Yes, it did, and I corrected that above before your post. For the first 10000 blocks (roughly 2-3 days) there was no reward. For the next 30K blocks it had higher than normal rewards. That bizarre structure (as opposed to simply ramping up to the normal reward over some reasonable period) is nothing more than fastmine/instamine/whatever you want to call it, although a relatively small one in the overall scheme of things.

smooth, this is where you just made stuff up:


If you had bothered to understand/include the context, your mistake would be crystal clear.  I was talking about ONE particular presale, not all (plural) presales ever!

Everyone knew well in advace the VIA presale was underway.  It made all the papers.  Yes, even Coindesk.  They raised millions, to loud acclaim.  Sorry you were under a rock or something.

The market has decided your FUD about the character of the presale participants is nonsense.  That's why VIA now trades at 5 times the Block One price.    

PS VIA used the 'slow-start' method you requested.  Maybe you should bother to learn the facts before attacking?