Topic: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement - page 166. (Read 381579 times)

It should start only when it is ready.

will keep watch this coin, when will this coin start?

We do have a new solution for the byzantine generals problem. We do not have a solution for cross blockchain transactions.

Cross Blockchain Transactions:

We do not have a solution for cross blockchain transactions. What we are planning is personal blockchain for each user, a scripting language and counter signed receipts for transactions.

What Skycoin is providing, is the libraries for creating personal blockchains and ability to synchronize personal blockchains and providing some infrastructure. We have no idea what people will use this for in the future. This is for developers and people who want to experiment with blockchain technology and is not a component in any planned consumer facing application. \

You could embed a game like huntercoin in your own blockchain or Piratebay could dump their torrent files into their own blockchain. I am sure people will do something creative with it.

There is no "Skycoin" or way to force a transaction in the off blockchain transaction. It requires voluntary compliance on the part of the counter party. Zero trust cross blockchain transactions are currently an unsolved problem. Even if the problem can be solved, it is not clear that people would use it.

Until someone solves the problem, what we were planning to do is
- each person has a personal blockchain and signs each block with their private key
- in a contract between A and B, person A signs the hash of the contract and then B counter signs
- the contract signatures and counter signatures are published publicly in A and B's personal blockchain
- A contract that says "A will pay B 500 coins within one month to address X" cannot be enforced, but if A does not fulfill the contract, the default can be verified publicly if B publishes the contract
- contracts can involve a trusted 3rd party escrow that personally guarantees execution of the contract.

If you have an options contract for "right to sell 5 Bitcoin at 20,000 Dogecoin" between A and B. There are two issues
- transferring the contract
- executing the contract

Assume A issued the contract and will fulfill the contract on execution. B wants to transfer the contract to C. B and C sign a transfer agreement and countersigns the agreement. They hand the agreement to C and C signs and then A,B,C publishes the signed transaction (delete contract between A and B, create identical contract between A and C) into their personal chains.

A simple transaction between a user and an exchange is "You owe me 500 Dogecoin". You deposit 500 Dogecoin into the exchange and receive a signed contract saying "You have 500 Dogecoin" and the contract has provision for withdrawing them to a public address.  Now you can transfer the ownership of the 500 Dogecoin withdrawal contract to another person and the exchange signs the transfer and the receiving person can now authorize the withdrawal of the 500 Dogecoin to a blockchain address.

The exchange is obligated, but not required to sign the transfer agreement and is obligated but not forced to send the Dogecoin at execution. However, if the exchange tries to send you a different amount of dogecoin, claims the contract does not exist or wont honor the contract; you can publish the contract and it proves in automated way that the exchange is a fraud.
- If the exchange says the contract is not valid or wont honor it, the exchange has to produce a valid receipt showing you authorized a transfer or withdrawal (which the exchange cannot produce without your private key)
- The exchange cannot make money appear or disappear
- You can transfer your obligation and ownership of assets held by the exchange to a third party

We dont try to eliminate fraud and make it zero trust, we just make it so you can detect and prove fraud to third parties in an automated manner. This allows you to give some data to a third party that proves the other party is not trust worthly and can be verified independently.

A contract may entail a trusted 3rd party. So if A defaults, the escrow agent will execute the contract on behalf of A, but the escrow agent may require holding collateral from A, to take on the risk of default.

It sounds complicated. Its easier to look at example contract scripts and then it makes sense. Scripts take in inputs, have conditions and output new scripts on execution. A script input should be a public condition. A script output may be an action, that can be verified publicly such as "Pay 5000 Dogecoin to address X".

The personal blockchains are public broadcast channels and are used to get inputs which refer to particular transactions and may trigger execution of the scripts. People publish hashes of the blocks from the chains they subscribe to as receipts of the data, in their personal blockchains. This prevents selectively denying receipt of information which would trigger script execution and establishes a distributed time stamping system through the linked cross signed chains.

A script for "I am holding 5000 Dogecoin for person with public key A" reads "If I receive a valid signature for the hash of this transaction, signed by the private key of A as input 1, output (SendObligation Dogecoin 5000 AddressInput)". The script has two inputs a signature to verify that the withdrawal is authorized by the person who the Dogecoin are owed and an address to do the withdrawal to.

The exchange will then send the coins and the person on the other end may publish a signed receipt confirming fulfillment of the obligation. If the obligation is not fulfilled by the exchange, you can publish the contract and it can be publicly verified by anyone that the obligation was not fulfilled.

So its not really "cross blockchain transactions". Each script only exists and executes in a single blockchain. Its more like cross signing receipts and publishing them in your chain. When script conditions can be triggered by events in another chain, then it begins looking like a cross blockchain transaction. However, payment obligations and contracts involving coins are voluntary and not enforced by the protocol. Its not zero trust.

I would say that it is similar to open transactions, but using the personal blockchains as a ledger. Its much simpler, much less code and designed for the convenience of developers who want to build something on the technology.

The contents of the personal blockchain blocks are just bytes. You can use any scripting language or extension to the scripting language you want. A single person may have contracts in three different scripting languages on the same chain. As long as the counterparty accepts the scripting language and it can be parsed, its a decision between the peers.  For simplicity and determinism, we might have a base language with a simple VM and communication primitives and let people implement their contract scripting languages on top of that.

Link?

It also seems that any questions relating to these features aren't being answered. Also I suspect the coder is a young teen from Hackforums (he's a bronnie and coupled with his writing style fits the demographic of an intelligent 12-14 year old scrypt kiddie from this forum)

You can add to the list of notably important claims the fact that they found another solution to the byzantine generals problem without the need of (PoW) mining. That's also pretty impressive and unique (AFAIK).

It seem like most of these proposed features (enforceable contracts, distributed trust-less exchanges, reputation systems etc) all come from the core feature of cross chain transactions. Cross chain transactions allow adding other currencies/goods to the economy that can be securely exchanged. This is a very powerful feature which solves tons of problems including the scalability ones (you can shard the currency if the distributed consensus becomes too expensive, or even add ultra low transaction cost centralized sub-currencies that can be converted back to any other currency)

I've looked into cross chain transactions before: the idea is not at all new. I've just never seen anyone claiming they had a way to do it (If I missed one, please direct me to it. ZeroCoin seemed kinda close, but didn't solve the general problem as far as I could tell). I tried to design some solutions myself, but I was unsuccessful (No surprise since I'm not an expert). If Skycoin really does solve the cross chain transaction problem, then I think we really have something here. I hope this is the case.

However I have a couple of doubts: Skycoin appears to claim supporting cross chain transactions involving existing currencies that have their own block chains already that are not effected by skycoin's. This means that actions on the skycoin side (such as a transaction failing to get included due to being involved in a double spend) can not effect the other block chain. If one version of a skycoind/bitcoin trade transaction gets accepted on the bitcoin side, but a double spend is issued on the skycoin side, I don't see how both sides would be guaranteed to reach the same consensus. Even more confusing to deal with: suppose bitcoin forked, what happens then? A block chain forking is a perfectly valid and acceptable thing (if there is a legitimate disagreement about some transaction's validity, then its forked. Usually one side is mostly abandoned (but still existent), but thats not guaranteed)

Secondly: I don't see how these problems could be solved, even within skycoin one block chains. Solving it there seems more likely to be possible, but I still don't see how it can be done. I won't say it can't be done (cryptography does pretty amazing things), but the explanation for how that works is the main thing I'm looking for.

To be clear though, even if Skycoin fails to deliver a cross chain transaction solution, it still looks like it has a lot of potential, but I'd start to be more suspicious if such a significant claim ended up being false.

Interested in. I think it's a hard work to receive your goal, will keep watching

This sounds a very innovative project and really look forward to it.

Any date as to when the IPO will be launched?

Totally agree! Great work! Developers and their product undoubted awaits success!

+1

How can I help for skycoin development?

Thanks for the update! Everything you say makes me feel you guys are switched on for the long haul, Well Done!

Development Update:

Development is exhausting. We pushed too hard to get to launch and underestimated the time and effort required. Getting things working has been easy, but 90% of the effort is in achieving quality and has been impossible to budget for.

We are distributing development further. The project is being split into bite sized pieces, documented with specifications and additional developers are being hired to work on the individual components. Developers from the community who help with the development effort will receive generous allotments of coins.

New infrastructure is being developed to facilitate collaboration between the project teams. We are expanding project capacity to work on multiple components concurrently.  Additional full time developers are being hired, we are writing source code tutorial for using Skycoin libraries and creating a wiki for documenting project milestones and components.

Community Organization:

The community and number of developers has now grow to the size where adhoc communication between the individual developers is breaking down. We are starting a wiki, a project board like Trello and maybe a message board to coordinate development and marketing.

White Papers:

We are writing academic and technical whitepapers. The academic whitepaper lays out the theoretical and mathematical foundation of Skycoin's distributed consensus system and its inspirations. The academic paper is focused on the mathematical formalisms, assumptions which allow us to prove security guarantees.

The technical papers outlines implementation details, milestones and software architecture. The technical paper is focused on security as a process and defense in depth.

Marketing:

The Skycoin project incorporates a variety of concerns and objectives and its important that we create documentation and brainstorm about how to communicate to the media and public. The community needs to help create simplified, high impact messages for communication to potential new users.

Strategy:

We are writing marketing materials that clearly explains the capacities and strategic position of Skycoin vs alternatives such as Etherium, Ripple, Maidsafe, Mastercoin, Open Transactions, Color Coins, Protoshares and Bitcoin.

We feel that Skycoin is not as locked in to a particular model and is positioned to adapt and improve on any new technologies that have been suggested by competitors. Skycoin is adapting a standardized, coin agnostic "gateway protocol" which we believe improves upon Ripple and Open Transactions. Skycoin's infrastructure for personal blockchains gives Skycoin the ability to coop and implement crypto-assets, contracts, scripting languages and cross chain transactions if these become popular.  Skycoin's wire protocol and service architecture allows third parties to implement distributed services which expose computing resources for coins (like maidsafe). Skycoin is also the only coin with a coherent strategy for user acquisition and adaption based upon utility instead of marketing.

We also believe that standardization of exchange APIs and "distributed exchange" will completely eliminate the network effects that Bitcoin has previously benefited from. With the distributed exchange service, there will be one API and numerous exchanges implementing the API. Different coins will be instantly, effortlessly and invisibly convertible to each other at the current spot prices. A person holding Dogecoin, Skycoin or Bitcoin will be able to make payments in any currency at the spot price, from a single wallet (the Skycoin wallet).

Once Bitcoin's network effects have been eliminated, coins will compete based upon security, usability, speed and price stability. Traditional proof of work coins will not be as competitive as emerging alternatives which offer higher security, faster transactions and lower operating costs than mined coins. People will earn coins through providing services instead of mining.

Many new coins will likely be associated with geographic regions (Iceland), groups (native American tribes), companies (reddit) or be issued for specific purposes (time shares, gift cards). Mining becomes both a security risk (51% attack) and overhead. Ubiquitous, society wide adaption of crpytocurrencies will require moving beyond Proof of Work for securing the blockchain and will benefit from standardization between coins.  Skycoin's consensus system is both distributed, immune to 51% attacks (perfect security) and very low cost to run.

Bitcoin and proof of work coins allow anyone with enough hashing power to revert transactions. Higher security in Bitcoin means higher mining costs and higher network overhead. Mining also creates new coins to create an incentive for miners (to waste money), which makes existing coins less scarce and less valuable. Coin creation dilutes the equity of existing coin holders.

With recent advances in scripting languages and digital contracts we expect the development of collateralized digital assets which track fiat currencies such as the United States Dollar and Euro. We expect these assets will replace legacy bank transactions for payments to exchanges and may displace the legacy banking system for some types of international payments. Skycoin is being positioned to take advantage of and benefit from these advances, should they occur.

We believe that transactions with counter parties will become increasingly important in the future. In order to issue options or receive a loan, each a node needs an identity and a reputation. Skycoin is developing a standardized identity, messaging and transaction receipt system (the gateway protocol) to support the development of transactions that are not currently feasible within the Bitcoin framework. This will enable, for example distributed systems of credit that bypass banks and credit card companies.

For instance you may say "I am willing to loan up to $5000 to my friend Adam at an 8% interest rate, with minimum monthly payment of 10% of the outstanding balance". This will enable people to earn interest on assets and the resulting debts will be verified by cryptography, enforceable by reputation and potentially by court systems. The Skycoin project has designed and is beginning implementation of the infrastructure these transactions require.

Personal blockchains and the purposed scripting language for the gateway protocol is flexible enough to represent equity, convertible debt instruments, different classes of shares, vesting and voting rights. The purposed protocol has the potential to replace lawyers and paper with a machine executable scripting language for private equity transactions. Cryptoequities can be transferred without intermediaries, can be publicly traded and may enable crowd funding over the internet.  The gateway protocol will expose and record the information required to automatically compute and document the basis of transactions for tax purposes.

The messaging protocol will enable merchants to send receipts for payments, send shipping tracking numbers and low friction reoccurring payments for payroll and renting equipment such as computer servers. Messaging is prerequisite for identity, reputation and more complicated financial transactions.

We believe that standardization of cloud computing will allow polling price information and provisioning servers from multiple providers over a common API. We believe cryptocurrencies offer a lower overhead, lower friction, automated payment options compared to credit cards, which require dealing with each service provider individually.

The Skycoin Project does not prescribe a single correct monolithic software entity. Skycoin exposes a framework of independent components as libraries and permits competition between different implementations. Developers are able to easily extend Skycoin and offer new distributed services.

Additionally, the Skycoin project is funding development of applications to drive user growth, spread awareness of Skycoin and improve the world we live in (the meshnet project, distributed exchange service).

THe suspense is killing me

tons of funny guys

Excuse me?