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How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain? You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology

How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain? You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is misdirected", how so?

hobofan 8y ago
> How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain? The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can point out wrong information (by providing oposing information). That is done with the help of a token in our system, which is issued to people who help establish consensus about what's true and what isn't. The token is the main reason we need a blockchain, and the gametheoretic aspects behind it dictate that there needs to be a token or similar in our system for it to work. > You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is misdirected", how so? The "shit in - shit out" problem exists also with traditional systems and is not solely a blockchain-problem. That's what I meant to say with that. I think that's about as much as I can share right now without angering my colleagues. The whitepaper which is coming out in a few weeks goes more into depth about the specifics of each part of the systems and provides some game-theoretic and economic foundations for the system.
- gus_massa 8y ago
  > The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can point out wrong information (by providing oposing information). How do you combat "spam", were some users send thousands of fake registrations of well known art works? How do you combat sockpuppet that send wrong opposing information to steal the art work of the original creator? How do you combat sockpuppets that send wrong information to support fake claims? If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct?
  - hobofan 8y ago
    > If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct? In the end I would say that all of your other questions can be reduced to this one, by adding weight to claims, which makes the quantity of claims and indentities irellevant. We are not focused on the art market, but open to any kind of information. But for the example of the art ownership verification: - Person A (true owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of 10 tokens - Person B (non-owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of 10 tokens - An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional weight to the claim of Person A. If the consensus in the end decides (based on the weights) that Person A is the true owner, actor X will be rewarded. There are some specifics about how we construct the reward function that I can't talk about yet, but the core of it is that all participants in the network are incentivized to only submit true information, and also incentivized to combat any wrong information they see by providing conflicting true information. If you are interested in the topic and would like to discuss more deeply feel free to reach out to me via the email on the website (I'm Max).
    - blowski 8y ago
      I can see and am grateful for your effort to answer the questions as helpfully as you can. But to me, when you say "the owner of the Mona Lisa is whoever has the most tokens in our system", it sounds like complete nonsense. The Louvre owns the Mona Lisa, and if your system disagrees with that, your system is broken.
      - hobofan 8y ago
        I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games). When I first heard it I also had the same reaction. Sadly I don't think that I can offer any more information right now, but we are all very eager to publicize it and put it out into the open for critic ASAP.
        Sangermaine 8y ago
        >I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games). It does indeed seem exactly that way. You said upthread: >An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional weight to the claim of Person A. But how do you verify that X is someone "knows about the ownership"? What if X was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the consensus would be swayed? How do prevent bad actors from gaming the system in this way? If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to a bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their side.
        hobofan 8y ago
        > What if X was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the consensus would be swayed? If B were to pay X a bribe of amount N, so X enforces the statement with amount N, B could also directly enforce the statement with amount N, which would lead to exactly the same result. If X would receive less than N, to add a weight of N, they would be gifting some money to B, and vice versa. So between rational untrusted parties, a simple bribe would not make sense. There are some rationality assumptions relating to 51% attacks similar to PoS oriented systems that have to be met, but there are some mechanisms in place that should reduce the practical requirement regarding rationality among participating parties significantly. > If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to a bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their side. Good question, but I'm afraid that's one of the questions I can't answer right now without leaking too much information.
  - evv 8y ago
    Yeah, these seem like impossible hurdles without a centralized identity system to fall back on. The good news is that we have several: FB, Twitter, etc. These centralized networks already pour tons of resources into identity verification- IE, the 'verified' tag on Twitter. The combined reputation from many of these services could act as a badge of trustworthiness on the blockchain. You just need a system like Keybase to cryptographically associate accounts to a public key. I have been shocked to see so few crypto solutions integrate with Keybase as a trustworthy identity network. I wonder why people aren't doing this?

How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain? You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is misdirected", how so?

hobofan 8y ago

> How is the information verified in your system? Why does it need a blockchain? The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can point out wrong information (by providing oposing information). That is done with the help of a token in our system, which is issued to people who help establish consensus about what's true and what isn't. The token is the main reason we need a blockchain, and the gametheoretic aspects behind it dictate that there needs to be a token or similar in our system for it to work. > You mentioned that the "criticism in the blog post at blockchain as a technology is misdirected", how so? The "shit in - shit out" problem exists also with traditional systems and is not solely a blockchain-problem. That's what I meant to say with that. I think that's about as much as I can share right now without angering my colleagues. The whitepaper which is coming out in a few weeks goes more into depth about the specifics of each part of the systems and provides some game-theoretic and economic foundations for the system.

gus_massa 8y ago
> The information is verified by creating an open system where anyone can point out wrong information (by providing oposing information). How do you combat "spam", were some users send thousands of fake registrations of well known art works? How do you combat sockpuppet that send wrong opposing information to steal the art work of the original creator? How do you combat sockpuppets that send wrong information to support fake claims? If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct?
- hobofan 8y ago
  > If some piece of art has two claims, who decides which one is the correct? In the end I would say that all of your other questions can be reduced to this one, by adding weight to claims, which makes the quantity of claims and indentities irellevant. We are not focused on the art market, but open to any kind of information. But for the example of the art ownership verification: - Person A (true owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of 10 tokens - Person B (non-owner) claims that they own the Mona Lisa with a weight of 10 tokens - An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional weight to the claim of Person A. If the consensus in the end decides (based on the weights) that Person A is the true owner, actor X will be rewarded. There are some specifics about how we construct the reward function that I can't talk about yet, but the core of it is that all participants in the network are incentivized to only submit true information, and also incentivized to combat any wrong information they see by providing conflicting true information. If you are interested in the topic and would like to discuss more deeply feel free to reach out to me via the email on the website (I'm Max).
  - blowski 8y ago
    I can see and am grateful for your effort to answer the questions as helpfully as you can. But to me, when you say "the owner of the Mona Lisa is whoever has the most tokens in our system", it sounds like complete nonsense. The Louvre owns the Mona Lisa, and if your system disagrees with that, your system is broken.
    - hobofan 8y ago
      I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games). When I first heard it I also had the same reaction. Sadly I don't think that I can offer any more information right now, but we are all very eager to publicize it and put it out into the open for critic ASAP.
      - Sangermaine 8y ago
        >I can definitely see where you are coming from since that mechanism of "most token wins", sounds very unintuitive and inherintly cheatable (and in a lot of places has rightfully bad connotations like "pay to win" in video games). It does indeed seem exactly that way. You said upthread: >An additional actor X who knows about the ownership can add additional weight to the claim of Person A. But how do you verify that X is someone "knows about the ownership"? What if X was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the consensus would be swayed? How do prevent bad actors from gaming the system in this way? If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to a bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their side.
        hobofan 8y ago
        > What if X was someone A or B paid or incentivized to vouch for them so the consensus would be swayed? If B were to pay X a bribe of amount N, so X enforces the statement with amount N, B could also directly enforce the statement with amount N, which would lead to exactly the same result. If X would receive less than N, to add a weight of N, they would be gifting some money to B, and vice versa. So between rational untrusted parties, a simple bribe would not make sense. There are some rationality assumptions relating to 51% attacks similar to PoS oriented systems that have to be met, but there are some mechanisms in place that should reduce the practical requirement regarding rationality among participating parties significantly. > If the asset in dispute is valuable enough it would certainly be worth it to a bad actor to pay a little to cheat and have the consensus fall on their side. Good question, but I'm afraid that's one of the questions I can't answer right now without leaking too much information.
- evv 8y ago
  Yeah, these seem like impossible hurdles without a centralized identity system to fall back on. The good news is that we have several: FB, Twitter, etc. These centralized networks already pour tons of resources into identity verification- IE, the 'verified' tag on Twitter. The combined reputation from many of these services could act as a badge of trustworthiness on the blockchain. You just need a system like Keybase to cryptographically associate accounts to a public key. I have been shocked to see so few crypto solutions integrate with Keybase as a trustworthy identity network. I wonder why people aren't doing this?