EOS - The next Dan Larimer Thing
Unless
you have been living under a rock, or perhaps you are new here, you may know that the main architect of Steem quit in a quite spectacular way working for Steemit, saying that he felt that working on a project with the type of licence that Steem used to have was a mistake.
Note that this has changed now. In theory, there is nothhing stopping anyone forking Steem and starting a new Steem blockchain. Just like that.
Well, this is what Dan is now up to, and he's about where Steem was around february or so last year:
http://www.coindesk.com/eos-unpacking-the-big-promises-behind-a-possible-blockchain-contender/
Of course Tone Vays has weighed in with his expert skepticism about it - he says that both Bitshares and Steem were really just ways for a small clique to get rich... and it is my view that the outcome of Larimer's design, not the central parts but more peripheral parts indeed did this - the old rewards curve before HF19 did make the power of the small group of early big investors excessively powerful on the platform.
This idea about the rewards is 100% Larimer, and I think Steem had to be rid of him before it was going to get fixed.
Because this subject is very interesting to me, I am going to read the EOS whitepaper, in order to understand his parallelisation protocol. I am working on my own design, as my readers would know, although I've put it on the backburner, and I think that Eric Freeman's masters thesis https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2413908 - which uses reliable message passing systems (with multiple nodes processing gossip and voting on whether every validator participating for processing a transaction), must arrive at a very strong consensus, very quickly, mainly by ensuring the same transaction is not being forked across the network). Basically taking the high tempo of block production similar to steem, except throwing out the 'block' concept and distributing the database both from logs, periodic recaps of the recent past transactions, as well as the backend databases directly synchronising with each other, instead of downloading and replaying a blockchain into the database.
So what do I think about this?
Well, Larimer's two previous projects turned out pretty good, although they have not been without problems. But personally, I think that smart contracts are a dead end, in terms of their robustness and resilience. It simply is not smart to be running so much potentially malicious software in a distributed way like this, without really good testing. In my opinion, smart contract blockchains will never get out from underneath the DAO hack issue, because the design specifically permits anyone to distribute code that other machines will run. This is extremely naive, in my view, because there still is not really useful artificial intelligence code for analysing code for what is called 'Correctness' in computer science, and letting just anyone put code which potentially could be a trojan for a mass robbery, and run it willy nilly... it's stupid, really, I don't think it will work. It's too enthusiastic in a field where precision and accuracy is vital.
Do you really want to trust your money to a system where anyone can just write code that might potentially find a hole in the execution environment that allows it to perform any number of malicious acts upon the accounts of other users?
It was bad enough when it started to beecome clear that there seemed to be 'unintentional' agendas behind parts of the Steem consensus, to have this kind of mischief going on with my quite hard earned tokens - but at least with Steem, because a number of folks with integrity were running witnesses, and had a lot of clout so much so they could temporarily suspend the distorted rewards scheme, that eventually forced this bad code to be removed and replaced with good code that represented what the majority of users wanted.
Much better are, in my opinion, the type of 'hard coded' smart contracts like the Steem network consensus. These are much better tested, and do not seek towards an excessively fast development of new variants. I am waiting, but I don't think I will have to wait that long, to read about malware on the Ethereum blockchain, and while Larimer's concept of minimum balances and zero fee transactions is definitely an advancement, exposing your server to running random other people's software, in my view, it's like a windows machine, with no firewall, and more than a year out of date, just waiting for some hacker to hijack it and turn it to nefarious purposes.
This is something that can't happen with the witness-activated-hard-fork protocol that Steem uses when the code changes. It is possible that someone may attempt to inject malicious code into an open source codebase, but if it is found, and it is likely to be, especially when the project is young and exciting, the worst that might happen is a hardfork has to be rolled back.
Smart contract systems, like ethereum, on the other hand, are automatically accepting new, untested, untrusted code, and there is no guarantee that they have nailed all the hidden bugs that could turn into exploits.
Lastly, in general, businesses generally develop forms that embody protocols for executing some kind of multi-party activity, that is to say, there is no reason why there can't be smart contracts, I am just saying that we don't need infinite possibilities in them, all the time, but rather, that you can build proforma contracts, with code that you initially sandbox more strongly, or at least, allow a second phase to the Witness Activated Hard Forks, where they can optionally reverse their consent within some specified cooling down period during which it is expected that glitches can be spotted and these faults halted and reversed in order to fix the code.
I was hoping that Larimer had the sense to realise that a content monetisation system was where the future of this was, just like Steem's initial concept, but instead he's going 'me too' on ethereum, because he thinks he's smarter than Vitalik Buterin.
I think they are both silly.
PS
I have just been reading through the EOS whitepaper, and there is nothing new to see regards to the consensus protocol compared to Steem and Bitshares. There was a little hint that maybe they would change the block reward to be proportional to votes, but not a direct statement to that effect at least in the beginning parts of the document. After reading a little so far, I can see that there is not any substantial new ideas in EOS, it's just, mostly, from an architecture perspective, cut and paste from Steem.
However, I am just started reading it, and I will read the whole thing. I am not convinced that the ability to run arbitrary code on witnesses is a necessary thing, the consensus code in the core is far better tested than smart contracts that anyone can code, and new applications are simply additions to the data types and queries in the database, nothing more. My personal direction in this area is instead to break the chain down as much as possible into interconnected components that stand largely by themselves.
Account registry, consensus protocol, cluster membership protocol, and a back-end database that can be replicated, even with version changes, unlike for example the graphene database underpinning Steem, which must regenerate the database from the chain, when it would be much quicker to synchronise if the shared memory structure did not change with versions, and a bittorrent-like distribution mechanism could allow an out of date version to be very quickly updated, without the overhead of downloading a block log.
I also want to throw out the idea of blocks, and I believe this will be possible, by using gossip and epidemic protocols for distributing the data. The issue I want to resolve is that there is 'hidden' parts in the system that I think should be exposed, like the shared memory data format, for example, and I believe I can eliminate as much latency as is possible, below 1.5 seconds even, by using a protocol that requires clients posting transactions to send the identical tx to every validator in the network, or some defined consensus subset based on geography, and confirming a transaction requires 3 messaging cycles, followed by propagation to non-privileged nodes that provide database query services.
and lastly, I want to have the backend database accelerated by GPU's. The cost of providing database query services is not accounted for in Steem, and probably not EOS either, and as an experienced operator of steemd I can assure you, the cost in terms of time, resources, of providing a Steem RPC node - without any way to directly monetise this, it's always going to be a chokepoint for scaling the network.
But I'll reserve my full commentary on it to after I finish reading the whole text.
finished!
Yes, I finished reading through the whole whitepaper. It basically is like taking Steem, removing the blog, and adding ethereum style smart contracts, running on virtual machines. I don't think that Dan has really covered the cost of delivering the service of running those scripts in his concept, and I think, personally, that he's leaving the space he is good in, to try and one-up Vitalik Buterin and his scheme. I think it probably will work pretty well, but I don't think that implementing smart contract script execution is really that high up down in the hierarchy of what is important in distributed systems used by people to benefit their situation.
We'll see how it goes, and I wish him well, but I personally think this kind of intensive generalisation is really going to be as secure or stable, or resource efficient, than highly focused, binary code that is (ostensibly) running on all nodes involved in replicating the state of the database. I believe that Dan made a big error in leaving Steemit, but at the same time, I was there, I saw what was going on (not in steemit, i mean here, in the community) when it happened, and I shortly afterwards had a hissy fit over a number of unresolved issues that were not just my own opinion.
Well, I'm back now... and my witness is back up and running, in a fairly meagre capacity, but enough to do the job, so, if you don't know how to do it, and want to support my work, visit my updated #witness-category post https://steemit.com/witness-category/@l0k1/how-to-vote-for-l0k1-s-witness and if you have any issues, feel free to email me at [email protected] or message l0k1 on the steemit chat.
Always a good read! Post like this get me thinking about Crypto, heads up @l0k1
Thank you for your thoughts on the matter.
The main thing I didn't like about Tone Vays' analysis of Steem was he didn't actually understand the system. He didn't know as much as someone with a reputation of 50 on here.
About the systems making a small group rich. Yeah I could say that is true but I don't have a problem with some of the early people being rich from the system. One thing I will say about Dan is that the two main projects he has worked on actually work and are usable platforms. We can't say that about a lot of these other projects out there.
As far as EOS goes. I don't know what is going to happen with it but I would put my bets on the idea that it will be a usable system and more advanced than Etherium. I never bought into the Etherium craze.
I am going to try to invest in EOS.
indeed, I am pretty confident that Larimer has the required capabilities to resolve the many issues with ethereum. It will probably be better, a lot better. The design features he put into Bitshares and Steem are also in EOS, and I think that Steem really deserves to have the Beta tag removed now. It's fully operational, the only thing that is required now is for it to be changed to enable this partial consensus and distributing the distinct datatypes in the system into separate, but linked databases (yes, this is a bit like ethereum's design).
I'm not going to invest in EOS, because I am building Dawn. Maybe. My priority is on making money, so I may end up looking into this also. Larimer does not like ICOs, and I think that this current fad is going to end in tears, specifically, many many people being kidnapped and accused of trying to skirt past securities laws.
Note that to some degree, Larimer's ideas were a key source of how the idea of using tokens as a funding source became the big deal it is now. You can read this in one of his blogs, which I commented on a couple of months ago, about how to raise the funds for development without any kind of legally dangerous incursions into the Financial Securities space. The whole crypto community has gone mad on these ideas now.
I just think that smart contracts are not the way forward, because of CS software engineering principles. Really, you could even say it's like carpentry: measure twice, cut once. Smart contracts running on virtual machines is like cutting and then measuring.
I really love how you plainly expain things. It's like a breath of relief. I was really thinking I was loosing it, I mean I studied some college level math, I was always the skeptic, liked to find things out by myself... But for a while I was thinking when am I going to catch up with the newest crypto ideas. Well I'm catching up now! Thank you.
It's what I'm good at, which is why Steem has been such a boon in my life!
Good to hear! People who truly understand something can explain it well. Eventhough I think a lot of people don't understand shit and just go with the hype, it might be we all have different wave lengths!
There is only one wavelength of truth :) But there can be many paths to it.
Dude! I don't believe that! A spectrum maybe but not a single wavelength, too little entropy for something interesting. OK maybe π...
no, there definitely is one only, the carrier wave, if you like... A plurality of opposing 'truths' is badly mislabeled. In any situation, there is an objective measure, though usually we can't be 100% sure, though we can be confident enough when we can use the information to cause change as the information specifies, after many tests and experiments.
also, truth has nothing to do with entropy, or negentropy (growth), it's just a model with which to invent machines and methods of achieving a desired end goal. The universe doesn't care what you believe, it just trots along doing things in its own way, and it will never change its ways (allahu akbar... prais god), no matter how much you try to convince yourself. If you want to be successful, you must obey its laws. Sadly, nobody has fully elucidated enough of these laws in the mushy areas of biology and sociology. I think the austrian economists are pretty much on the nail about economics but nobody in washington is talking about that these days.
I don't want to live in a foggy world where anything that is important is not visible to me. You know, the book 'Alice in Wonderland' was actually written as a philosophical jab at the then young field of quantum physics which seemed to suggest that the universe did not obey fixed laws. Well, Quantum Physics is mostly right, but some parts of the theory are simply glosses because it is impractical to test (eg, seeing atoms with light - they are too small, even electrons are too small.
Thank you for your detailed response. The securities laws are certainly a worry for people running these ICOs. I have often worried that eventually Steemit will have issues because people are getting these payouts but Steemit doesn't submit information to the Internal Revenue Service. It is sort of a gray area because it isn't in US dollars and they probably wouldn't need to have a money transmitters license as well because the Internal market is only exchanging STEEM and Steem Dollars.
In the United States if you get paid over $500 from an affiliate program then a copy of that information gets sent to the IRS. With this there is nothing sent but they may or may not have issues with that side of it because they aren't dealing with the ultimate sale to US Dollars.
The legalities of this stuff is something I don't like to even think about to be honest.
I think, if the financial dictators of the USA, especially the racketeers in the IRS, would see Steem way down the line as ripe targets for propaganda coups about the benefits of government centralised regulation. They just passed a law demanding all US citizens declare their cryptos to customs when they pass the border.
In my opinion, if you are still in the USA, you are a masochist. Much of the rest of the world, even the second world, is more free than the USA. I mean, the IRS even claims to be able to tax you when you are resident in another country! No other government is as audacious as this, and not only that, this is of course going to lead to a lot more conflict between them and pretty much all the rest of the world except UK, USA and the western europe. Especially Russia and China.
No, there is no, current, tax liability risk related to the way Steem works. Even the minimum balance/account price thing is outside of their jurisdiction. The only thing that will happen to us from them about Steem is going to be no different to Bitcoin, Dash, Ethereum, and what have you. The ICOs, on the other hand, that could get sticky.
There are advantages and disadvantages here but I don't have a lot to compare it to since I haven't ever lived in another country.
I like our national parks. That is one advantage to being here.
Here in Eastern europe, we have vast forests that are less fucked up by governments than over there. If you are comfortable with the situation there, and don't see the need to migrate, that's your prerogative. I migrated out of Australia because the government was such an inordinate obstacle to my prosperity growing. I landed on the street, for a while, but the benefits of greater freedom are now starting to bear fruit, as I sit here reading from a 4k display attached to a computer with a 8 core 16 thread processor, 32Gb and an NVMe SSD...
Most people manage ok under whatever government, because most people are not as badly messed up by the life-toxic businesses that are empowered by governments, and are more susceptible to propaganda and more likely therefore to become complacent and satisfied. I am neither of these, so I have to be a lot more agile.
I'm glad that everything turned around for you. You are one of the more interesting figures here on Steemit. Some of the stuff you have written before is on another level. I'm pretty technical even though I may not seem like it from my blog posts but it was hard for me to even keep on the same page.
I'm actually learning a lot by being on Steemit. Even little stuff that isn't technical. I found out the other day that there are elephants in Sri Lanka. I knew they lived in India but didn't realize they were on that island. :-)
Yeah, the information sharing is probably the heart of what makes steem valuable. Two days ago @huntiii put me onto Jack Kruse, and that led me also down a few other rabbitholes, and this would never have happened if I hadn't piped up in a comment to parrot the line most people stick to about electrosensitivity - scepticism. The contrary evidence @huntiii put me onto was so compelling it's going to change my life, I am dead certain about it.
Should i buy eos tokens i have my doubts.
Sorry but I stopped reading here
Anyone who thinks Tone spews anything but bs should know better.
sorry, maybe you didn't pick up the sarcasm...
Ah, lol, I just woke up. :D
You are missing the true point of all this: FREEDOM. How can you tell what is a good contract and what is not? How can you decide who has to have money and who not? You are missing the base of this: escape the control of a benign-malign entity that knows what is good and what is wrong, and only let us choose between its standars.
Freedom is a tool, not a goal. There is plenty of evidence that in the past human settlements have structured themselves by rule of law (the ancient jews are an example) instead of through violence and authority. A polycentric system of law - yes, these smart contract systems aim towards implementing part of the infrastructure, but the governance has to be by people, not code, like Steem's . That is to say, the people follow the code. No matter how fancy computers get, there will always be some things that only we can judge.
Smart contracts are just things like the Steem Power, and its power down function. Steem power is a smart contract, and it's 1000x more useful than anything they've built so far on Ethereum.
This was the best post i read today. Will be following you. Also looking ahead to a full commentary soon.
I have updated the post to include that commentary at the end. I have not dug deep into the thing, but my assessment can be found now at the end of the original post. I think that it could be successful, and quite beneficial, as his design is definitely superior to Vitalik's older design, and all the legacy problems it has (and they are talking about eliminating mining, btw... months after it's long gone here...) I think that Dan didn't realise how important the social media aspect was in his Steem architecture design, and he's playing me too at the peak of the wave, which I don't think is going to work out.
Thank you for the update. I do see smart contracts taking over every autonomous routine transaction in the world I personally truly believe in the idea of smart contracts. But your point on security is all correct and I think questions the reality when it comes to the implementation of the wonderful idea of smart contract that I believe in.
Steem is real. Anyone who doubts it simply needs to check alexa. Also i think, it will be interesting to see the rivalry with Dan and Vitalik develop.
Also going through EOS whitepaper, I do not see if there is any improvement made to DPOS. Other then having a smart contract protocol, ARK i thing does better DPOS. Would also like to hear your thoughts with ARK and their consensus model.
yeah, dan is extremely competitive towards vitalik. I think he intimidates Vitalik, also... You can find a video of him asking difficult questions of him somewhere in a recent post here on steem.
Can you drop the link to this ARK project? I am expecting that fairly soon I will hear about other designers talking about using gossip and epidemic protocols more extensively for replicating the database faithfully.
I think the condition drives him. And I thin Dan at time is pissed with the world for not recognizing his talent and celebrating his genius, though i rate both men very highly. Will try looking up for the video you mentioned.
The Ark Project - https://ark.io. I think this is one the best DPOS chain projects under dev. Would like your opinion on them. I do think the IPFS protocol is the way forward for file system and storage.
Also I think i read some where that using torrent network could be a good solution to distributing files. I think something like what Creative Chain is attametping (creativechain.net).
Ps.: Also tried looking up Dawn. Not much is there to be honest but i found the original bitcoin talk PRE ANN and @faddat here. Would like to read whitepaper.
you should be able to find the clip in one of the threads you can dig up in the 'replies' section of my blog @l0k1
I never heard of ark.io before... it sounds like they are borrowing heavily from what @faddat was working on (ipfs based content distribution). I'll read it now before I post this reply...
If you want to read what I was going to make Dawn turn into, click the link on my profile https://gitlab.com/dawn-network/nexus it's a bit all over the place (I have published various drafts also on gitbook). Proof of Service, I call it, though it's not a security protocol it is a consensus protocol for monetising delivered content for creators and hosts and of course curation (consumers of the media).
ok, it was a bit hard to find it on the page (this should be in the menu at the top imo) but https://ark.io/whitepaper I am now reading this...
Actually, I only had to scan the contents page of it to get the general gist. A key difference in my design is that it uses merkle trees with a cluster of different databases that are constrained within the scope of the data type. So there is an account registry, a cluster membership advertising protocol (i was going to build it on zerotier, btw), after I read Eric Freeman's masters thesis (you can google that phrase to find it) on forming a consensus - in this system there would never be a fork because of the nearly instant confirmation by ALL validator nodes at the same time, I was also going to use interval tree clocks for determining the canonical sequence of transactions quickly, and I have plans to use a graph database system that runs on GPUs to accelerate the provision of database service (ie, running a validator or replicator) and it goes beyond just monetising simple text, or even media files, to enable even more, different distributed databases to implement applications that the provision of service can be directly monetised by using algorithms that prove delivery but also modulate the reward by using deterministic social network distance to reduce payouts to people who have close financial connections with each other.
The concept is not fully crystallised yet, though it's mostly complete, and yes, the token ledger is not a core component, neither is the monetisation system, these are basically applications. I also worked on some ideas about an alternative to standard double entry ledger format and instead use a coin model, where it is necessary to trade a big token for smaller ones of the same value, and using a similar network distance algorithm, issuing a small amount of new tokens to nodes that provide change (like how banks charge for those rolls of coins above the value of the coins). This was a design aimed at reducing the necessity for a total history of the ledger to have high confidence of it being a valid spend, and further, and I forgot this, I'll make a new paragraph...
The replication protocol, I forgot to mention that - there is no blockchain but instead a simple transaction log, that the network builds a consensus about ordering using interval tree clocks, and as well as being able to stream this log to replicate it, the shared memory system would use a bittorrent like breaking the database into small pieces with hashes identifying the content, to allow rapid update of the shared memory.
I'm not so enthusiastic about all this now as I was when I was intensively working with @faddat, and to be honest, I would be more than happy for someone to steal it and run with it, although it would be good manners to give me credit or maybe a validator slot or something.
by the way, all this stuff about short clearance times, in theory, with my 'fully connected graph' validation chatter protocol used by validators, the clearance time could be under 1s for internationally distributed validator nodes, and when operated on a LAN or smaller geographical area, potentially as low as 100ms, which would also, coincidentally, make it possible to have a distributed database that tracks a virtual world environment's changes (like world of warcraft sort of thing).
I also started to work on methods of sharding these databases and allowing a fast provisional clearance with a subsequent update digest so potentially, posts could be in the database and propagating to replicas very fast, and only in the case of an attempt to double spend (post data tied to the same object that perform different operations) then about 10-60 seconds later the fractal distribution of the distributed validator sets has all the same, globally, and locally, 99% of the time, within a second (It takes 4 message cycles, broadcast, crosscheck, certify, distribute/confirm)
It looks a lot like ark has been reading the chatter from me and from @faddat about dawn:
humbug, stupid document copy/paste function. Dawn was going to be built on tendermint originally... and use IPFS for the distribution protocol. @faddat had absolutely no concept of how the content monetisation was going to work, that is 100% my ideas.
Btw voted for you as a witness. My first vote)) Do you come to know who votes for you?
https://steemdb.com/@l0k1/witness
Exactly, you'd have to have a very restricted language for a secure smart contracts or at least start with one and build up slowly.
As for Dan being smarter then Vitalik well... maybe some of the time.. ;)
yep, I rate both guys as about on par genius level...
As regards to the execution platform, in fact Bitcoin has one of these in it, it was how they added multisig and a few other things. But the scripting language is not turing complete. The reason why a turing complete scripting language is a bad idea, is that you can't write AI without a turing complete language, and do we really want an AI running around on the blockchain? Hm?
Oh that's interesting. I did some programming but I skipped a lot of the more interesting CS stuff since I was on a math major...
I think I would not want to AI to be in the blockchain but outside for analysis... machine learning is quite amazing at what it can do!
I think that as GPUs accelerating databases and AI algorithms continues to develop, that there will be a place for this kind of thing, but I don't think it will be directly tied to our financial ledgers, like you say, 'outside the chain'. It's just a continuing evolution of the trading robot, and trading robots have been a boon to finance, by increasing liquidity without inflation.
I did receive marketing letters from Harry Dent & Co. There was an interesting project: a program which sifted through social media feeds looking for stock market predictions and it would check who would be right and rank them according to prediction accuracy. Such a bot could be pretty neat here on SteemIt as well.
If you look at the #fake-news which is mostly mainstream media, in my informed opinion, track record is a very interesting thing and I wouldn't mind making a business out of it.
I've heard of that program, pretty cool concept. Voting on steem is actually a type of prediction market - how much profit you can make on curation depends on you correctly determining beforehand that a post is going to get upvoted hard (and that's also why it was so important to get rid of the log curve or whatever exact formula it was that compounded the vote power of whales...
A system like you describe would be very interesting for predicting all kinds of things. Humans are more precient than most people realise, that's precisely what it means to be an entrepreneur - to use prescience to recognise an opportunity for profit based on patchy evidence. Prescience is basically a matter of a person having taken in enough data that their subconscious brain does the sherlock on the puzzle and sketches out a possible description of what is not yet visible (the future). I visualise it like a tree graph that grows endlessly new branches into the future, and we can guess at what branches are possible, and picking the correct one, this is the essence of what evolution works towards - changing before the conditions are untenable without the change.
Did Dan offer some sort of public statement about his departure?
I couldn't find anything.
there was a few posts... https://steemit.com/@dantheman it's a ways down.
He made a very big and bad gaffe by self-upvoting with his huge SP to promote his post, that was kinda the last straw for many of us.
It's funny. A friend I recently recruited, @holoz0r was saying I could upvote myself substantially now, as 100% upvotes will net about $5.
I suggested that at some point, someone will write a tool that ranks steemers based on their history of self voting.
I think a lot of people will regret their previous opportunism.
indeed, it could be added to the reputation score...
Great ideas both of you @mattclarke and l0k1. It's really frustrating to see some users upvoting each and every one of their own more or less useless comments to get a few bucks each time.
I agree and this can be analyzed and mended in the future. Ah I just love software, it's ideas in silicon!
I don't think it's a problem. Larimer even discussed the issue of self-voting quite extensively, and basically, it's just about optimising the distribution of new tokens. It wouldn't matter whether people self vote or not, in my view, because on average, based on the relative levels of posting activity and voting, pretty much, though unevenly, distributes a roughly stable amount of new tokens in a given time period.
It's best to think of self-voting as simply claiming interest payments. You can't make more than a certain amount this way. Writing the content that gets a lot of votes will always be more profitable.
I agree that writing posts will be more profitable, but not necessarily writing comments. For people like me, who comment a lot without writing our own posts (well up until recently at least), it's worse.
Plus, really what I dislike the most about it is not even how much money people make from it in relation to how much others make, but rather how it looks. The psychological aspect of seeing particular users hand themselves 5 bucks for commenting "OK" back to someone etc.
I dunno, you should keep watching your curation rewards, they should still be ticking up even though you are only mainly a commentator. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all rule about when it is etiquette to self vote, but if you aren't writing posts, you are missing out on a share of the steem that more stupid people are happily taking.
It may be that HF20 includes a ban on self voting. I can see this shaping up to be a HF worthy issue. Essentially, the self voters will force those like you to self vote, or watch them get the steem instead. This is an unacceptable situation and I think it will need to be remedied.
However, the increased decay rate of voting may ameliorate this, as the self voters spend their voting power down to the 20s and lower, and your received votes will probably be relatively worth more. So the steemit devs did consider this and it was included in HF19, and may be sufficient a remedy. The honeymoon will be brief for self voters, I think.
So it could go two ways, I won't say with certainty which way it is going to go.
While I think some of your wording comes off a bit harsh at times, there deffinately is valid criticism in this piece. Resteeming to get some increased publicity.
I'm just telling it how I see it. In my opinion, to be naive about the human desire for self enrichment is foolish. There should be a little aggression in a debate, or there isn't a debate at all. I may be wrong but I also preface what I'm saying with the fact that it is opinion, and my hypothesis, inferring what has not been revealed by what can be seen.
Yes, I think that it's a very worthwhile subject area. We, the Steemians, are now in competition with him. I think he's wrong, in some critical areas, but I am sure that Larimer is going to build a far better smart contract blockchain than ethereum. I just think that the virtual machine/distributed application model is very dangerous in terms of opening up holes for hacks like the DAO hack. I think, in this area, Larimer is going in the wrong direction.
Agreed, on pretty much everything. Only reason I hesitate to resteem etc is when I see words such as "foolish" or "stupid" used directly to describe a person, I'm always expecting the follow up to be at least equally "descriptive" so to speak and it often tends to go in a very unproductive direction.
True enough, but I'm speaking from the position of someone who has had a lot to do with software development in general, since I was quite young, and to disregard the principles and best practises of Computer Science in software really is foolish. Because you would have to be a fool to do something that is sufficiently well known to be folly. A fool engages in folly, this is the definition. Folly is unnecessary, ignorant nonsense.
Sure. But someone might do something foolish, without forever being a fool as well though. That's all I'm saying. It may come of as more rude than you probably ever intend to be.
Fair point, but I would expect a much higher standard of knowledge of CS from these people. Unfortunately, folly is an epidemic in the software development world. From agile development, to turing complete blockchain scripting languages, to extremely overweight, slow, and bug prone scripting languages like Javascript, the industry is full of folly. All of it flies in the face of some 60 years of development in computer science. So my statement stands, and I don't care if it upsets people, because if I am wrong, then so is all the people who did that incredible work that built the internet.
A secure and resilient system cannot be built by fools, these current generation of developers are like the stupid heirs of a good monarch, who run the kingdom into the ground.
Fair enough =)
@lok1 Awesome! Thank You! This is what I was looking for! I just wrote a post questioning the fervor over EOS but Im so new I had no background. This post kind of reminds me of a wise elder passing on oral history tradition.
There are many questions, but one I will ask regarding,
"This is something that can't happen with the witness-activated-hard-fork protocol that Steem uses ..."
Could it happen if the witnesses were all deceived into seeing the "malicious" code as favorable? Or if they all decided to install selfserving unfair code? You mentioned,' the correctness '. I would say correctness depends on who you ask...
a link to the post i just put up - looking at this thing from a newb perspective..
https://steemit.com/eos/@live2love/eos-ico-wtf
No, 'Correctness' in computer science is not an arbitrary thing. There is many metrics you can measure in code, that are either correct, or incorrect. Incorrect is such things as logic errors and un-accounted for boundary conditions, unhandled exceptions and the like.
Yes, it is possible that the witnesses could be tricked by Steemit. In fact, HF17, that was exactly what happened. They then fixed it in HF18, and then finally bowed to the pressure for altering the reward curve for HF19. I personally think that Steem should not be labelled beta anymore, especially if the market cap continues to expand, and it is expanding at an exponential rate, over the last 5 months. It seems like it was only yesterday steem was at 10 cents.
Good post, btw, upvoted... You know why they put that on EOS? The US govt. In fact it should be a warning to you to leave the USA, if you want to continue to deal in cryptocurrencies, because the regime uncertainty about them is now peaking out hard.
The IRS, and its siamese twin, the Fed, have figured out they can't manipulate crypto markets significantly except for attempting to pump/dump it with sudden, large inflows and outflows, designed to intimidate the crypto investors.
and... an ICO? Dan larimer is officially flip-flopping on this issue now. Back in march last year, he actually said in his blog that this was a bad idea, ICO, or premine, same thing, right?
haha! See, my friend @the-ego-is-you said I was being rude calling these people fools. Nope. To back track on this, on the part of Dan Larimer, shows he is a fool, because he DOES know better.
Wow its a rabbit hole. Coming into Steemit I thought it was social revolution.
It kind of is I suppose but not quite what I thought.
Thanks for clarifying those points. I appreciate the style - clear, instructional.
Yes, I started leaving the us in 1998. Returned for a woman who then divorced me. I have chosen to stay so I could see my son, but have been telling him as soon as he is an adult Im gone. I have heard @dollarvigilante explain how he is able to use BTC in mexico I was like, Huh?
Thank you for the upvote.
I also have become aware of the British Gov launching a digital coin that they call the "New gold standard." RMG. Royal mint gold. The mint is the government its proudly stated on the website. Like you said - exponential change - its an exciting time. Thanks for the great convo!
The racketeers at the fed and irs are slow to move, but they are going to, for sure, start a campaign of harassment on all these ICOs, and for sure it's gonna see ethereum lose a lot of value as people are scared away from it. But, really, it's kinda not entirely a bad thing. Blockchains still have not got adequate governance systems, and no government is worse than one based on force, which is worse than a government based on principle-based law like Equity or pre-monarchic Israel. Steem is actually the only blockchain that has a fully functioning open governance system. Dash has a closed governance system, as does a few other of the PoS coins, and this is also why they are doing better.
The reason why this is important, is that a well governed cryptocoin will be a bit like a well run corporation, and we are its shareholders, and we have a very powerful ability to influence the path of development. Sooner or later the market is going to realise this, and we all will become millionaires...
Sounds like something I can believe in! You obviously have a bright future as these technologies are adopted and you can talk the talk. What do you think about the Iota tangle thing, or the whole "quantum computing is going to wipe out crypto" negativity?
haha. Do people actually think that quantum computing will wipe out crypto? No way. Quantum driven encryption will be used by the systems at that point anyway, like a sword with two blade edges, like any kind of arms race, there is always the positive and negative ways to use a technology.
Besides this, a ledger is just the simplest type of database you can distribute. Steem is one of the first chains to expand beyond a simple ledger, or even marketplace/exchange, and this is a trend you can expect to see growing. Smart contracts are the current fad, but mark my words - monetising media distribution is where things are going. Steem is the first mover there. This is no guarantee of success but it tilts the table in its favour, same as with bitcoin.
yes they do - my friend who has refused to get into crypto with me just sent me a negative nancy text about that yesterday - he was citing a msnbc report or something. He knows better but is just mad that hes not doing anything to change his life and I am lol. Also I think that is what IOTA and QRL coins are pitching - they are immune to the next stage.
Yes I agree I have been looking for coins with function - so far only found Steem - many claim it but dont have it - status
Yes
that's right. there is a an attitude amongst the bitcoin faithful that 'appcoins' are not likely to be broadly successful. But I don't think they have considered the fact that through the inflation tax mechanism as demonstrated on Steem, that you can solve the very serious problem of content monetisation, given some careful engineering of the mechanisms to prevent gaming the system.
I personally don't see Steem as just an App Chain, because it also has a fixed ceiling on the cost of running the network, transactions are POS grade fast, and lastly, monetising media and solving the copyright problem for paying artists and designers, this is not an App Chain. This is a Killer App Chain. Everyone has something to put out there. This is not just money, but culture, and culture is rightly the majority of what humans concern themselves with.