Charles Hoskinson Steemit AMA
I've decided to do a Steemit AMA. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment section and I'll answer at least the top 20 after one week. Feel free to ask anything.
I've decided to do a Steemit AMA. Feel free to ask any questions in the comment section and I'll answer at least the top 20 after one week. Feel free to ask anything.
Charles, I'd just like to thank you for your good work on various projects in the crypto space these last few years. I was too prickly when you posted in the BitShares forum. And I failed to recognize how unselfish the bulk of your work has been. For that, I apologize.
Since then, I have watched some of your videos and gained a better understanding of your work and the choices that you have made. I do not think that Ethereum, BitShares, or even Steemit would be where they are today without the foundational groundwork you have done.
It's great to see you posting on Steemit and I hope you do so regularly. I will always welcome your experience and perspective. -Tom @donkeypong
Tom. thanks for the kind words and I have to admit that my personal PR has been pretty terrible throughout the last 24 months and I'll try to make it better. I didn't realize how great of a community has formed around a lot of the projects I've been fortunate to be a part of and in the future I'm going to make an effort to reach out more.
If there is one truth all individuals in cryptoland can agree on---it is that the cryptoverse is one wherein we all say and do things from time to time that we would do differently "if we only had known".
:)
True that fuzz. I think that applies to both of us throughout our interactions.
Any public life has that pitfall. It isn't unique to the cryptoverse.
Do you keep the cap off your sharpie for long periods of time? :) Welcome to Steemit.
I would also ask if you think you will be able to recover development funds from the ETH foundation for ETC or not? Do you know for a fact the ETH foundation is currently holding ETC? What is it you like about Steemit, and what do you think should be improved?
First, I wrote the message with a regular pen instead of a sharpie. In the future, I'll use a sharpie and probably a cool color like purple.
Second, I will not advocate taking ETC from the foundation and reallocating it somewhere else. They are the rightful owners of those funds and can do whatever they want with them. It frankly isn't my concern.
Third, I have no clue if the foundation has liquidated their ETC or held it. I assume they currently have some, but I have no idea.
Finally, Steemit is an interesting concept. I'm not sure I'm sold on the economics- in particular the incentive to buy Steem. But I do like any attempt to change the reddit model, fund content creation, deal with spam more productively and prevent censorship of voices.
Thank you for all the honest answers.
Why did you add a #bitshares tag even though you left the bisharestalk community months ago? Planning a comeback?
I am a founder of Bitshares and I'm willing to answer Bitshares questions.
What are your thoughts on the Peerplay event. I am buying some Bitshares.
I haven't been following it much. I've heard there is still some interest in the community and Bitshares seems to continue to be traded and has tangible value. In 2017, I'll likely do a Bitshares project and it would probably involve a sharedrop from protoshares, but too early to tell.
This is the details of the sharedrop http://coinour.com/index.php/the-bitshares-token-snapshot-for-peerplays-beginning-at-september-1/
What are your thoughts on DPOS? Do you believe it is gaining traction in the circles in which you speak?
I understand Lisk is a project you are working with. Is there any cool news on that front?
We have a PoS algorithm coming out within the next day or two that we will extend to a DPoS scheme that is provably secure. DPoS still suffers from lack of incentives modeling for both participation of the voters and the delegates themselves. The next generation will need to more formally address these concerns.
With respect to its quality as an algorithm, the idea has been around for awhile under the term dynamic quorum paxos. The novelty has been using a PoS scheme to select the quorum. Lisk does use DPoS and would be the first candidate for potential improvements moving forward.
I am very interested to read the details. When and where can I?
You've stated previously that you would hire 3 full-time developers to work on Ethereum Classic. Has that happened yet?
The development roadmap needs to be resolved first in order to determine the business and technical requirements of the development team. This said, we have already internally started the hiring process and will post some ads on the ethereum classic reddit alongside other sources. Expect the first hire by early September.
Do you plan to fight the Ethereum Foundation to recover the ETC equivalent of the development fund? As highlighted by Barry Silbert, the Foundation had no business taking a side in the debate since they have been funded and are still financing their operations using the crowdsale proceeds that where meant to support the development of a chain deemed "immutable" and "censorship resistant" in the crowdsale prospectus. I think the Foundation's decision to support the hardfork/bailout and reject the original chain they have been paid to develop is extremely questionable, and possibly ground for legal action given the fact it can be trivially proven that there was no actual problem with Ethereum itself. Given the circumstances, I think they are not in a position to refuse, at the very minimum, to release the split ETC funds that correspond 1:1 on the ETC chain to the remaining crowdsale funds. These funds could be used to fund developments by a new foundation on ETC.
And how do you see a "Committee" that token holders vote into and out of power based (like what bitshares has) differ from the Ethereum Foundation who cannot be fired by holders of the token?
The system works. The ETH Foundation made a decision to fork and some subset of the community effectively fired them. I mentioned this possibility back in January of 2014 in a debate with Dan Larimer and David Johnston. It has come to pass.
I think ETC has an opportunity to come up with a more effective governance structure and one that produces far less drama.
I will not advocate for the ETH Foundation to send ETC to whatever governance structure ETC forms. This is their money and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. ETC doesn't need their talent or funds to succeed. It will succeed on its own merits and with a stronger, more principled community tirelessly working towards the original vision.
To be precise, this is our money, and among other things my money. What would you say if Lisk developers made a runner with the development funds, spawned their own fork under some arbitrary reason that had nothing to do with the network itself, and even had the gut to steal the name and collude with everyone they can find to attempt to discredit the still perfectly valid and unchanged original network?
At some point in life, one has to invite pragmatism. If ETC is to survive and not get bogged down in years worth of legal fights, then I feel the best path forward is to treat it as a sharedrop to all active ETH Accounts. Whatever the people do with those accounts is their affair.
I'm not the leader of nor do I desire to be a leader in the ETC community. If you want to advocate a different position, then by all means argue it. But do understand the implications of inferring ownership of ETC. It has consequences beyond the foundation.
It is more accurate to say that ETH is a sharedrop to ETC accounts. It is completely illogical to claim that an unforked chain that has continued in a linear fashion using unchanged code is a sharedrop.
Nevertheless pragmatism or other factors may still support a decision not to fight over the foundation funds.
In light of this perspective I'm curious why you choose to describe ETC as a sharedrop. To me it seems to play into the rhetoric that continues to try to frame ETC as a rogue or illegitimate fork/project. Comments?
I'm not personally advocating going the legal route, but the legal issue is real and the Ethereum Foundation is aware of it. They have effectively wronged a significant fraction of their investors and defaulted on multiple written commitment. I don't think they have anything to win worsening their case by refusing the one opportunity they have to prove their good faith. This can be used to negociate an orderly release of the ETC side funds.
Smooth and Recursive pretty much nailed it.
What's your top 5 crypto's at the moment?
Two that are unreleased, ETC, Dash and Lisk currently interest me the most. I also am following Zcash closely, rootstock and several other projects.
Thanks for doing the AMA! I guess I'm less interested in what the prices of these will be as how they'll be used. I'm loving Dash for all the obvious reasons right now. Still excited to see some MVP's come out from Lisk and Rootstock. What do you envision an MVP on these platforms to look like?
if you had to explain to a child of the future what we are doing now with cryptocurrencies how can you explain it to him? 8]
The same way someone would explain a child of today the internet from 1991. You start with the first principles of the system. Cryptocurrencies represent a fundamental change in how value is accounted, moved, transformed, earned and legally encumbered. The end goal is to promote a system that is censorship resistant, transparent, inclusive, accountable, corruption free and self-evolving. Furthermore, if it's successful, then like the internet that preceded it, the system should become ubiquitous. It's a standard that flows across every part of the social experience of commerce and relationships.
To a child, like children with iPads today, we know the system has succeed if they accept it as they would a book or a toy. It is and one cannot imagine a time when it wasn't even if they lived it.
Full transparency is a huge mistake. If all of our economic lives are transparent, we lose a great deal of privacy, and with it, dignity and choices in life.
As it stands now the state already has too much control over our financial lives. If anything, crypto can help by once again reversing this back to where it belongs -- none of your damn business.
thanks @charleshosk ! 8]
I have a basic question regarding bitcoin. If market cap of bitcoin is only 10 billion, and we are seeing many fin tech and block chain start up projects started. Most of these start up projects are originally funded with bit coin and their valuations are priced in bit coin. Wouldn't you expect the market cap of bit coin to valued much higher based on what can be seen as a tech boom in blockchain companies? My questions is then, what is a fair valuation for bit coin price based on simply the number of start up projects that are in place so far in 2016?
First, I'm not sure if your question is quite accurate. Many of the startups in the blockchain space have been funded from VC capital that came from fiat. Second, they occupy a bet on the technology and its overall profitability, not necessarily the particular implementation that is Bitcoin. For example, Ripple Labs isn't connected to Bitcoin and could survive without it.
In terms of a fair price, I think you need to examine the total population, how engaged they are, the merchant adoption, custom infrastructure such as hardware wallets and atms, the rate of evolution of the underlying protocol and how resilient the system is to negative events. With these factors in minds, Bitcoin looks fairly attractive and I suspect will continue to grow at a nice pace. Whether it obtains a value on scale with gold or other value store commodities is difficult to say, but that's what makes it fun.
Not my AMA, but I'd like to add that valuation depends on whether you consider Bitcoin now or after the release of the lightning network and other important sidechains like Liquid and Rootstock. This is important because Bitcoin now and then are totally different things. Today's Bitcoin has pretty much hit its maximum capacity and can't scale to become a mainstream payment network. All it can do is improve in quality and security, which is its strong selling point right now. Today's Bitcoin is fairly valued at 10B USD IMO. Tomorrow's Bitcoin is a totally different thing: with Lightining it becomes a potential competitor of global realtime payment network like Visa and Amex, with Liquid it becomes a settlement backbone like SWIFT, and with Rootstock it becomes a direct competitor of Ethereum. It also ceases having scalability issues since on-chain traffic becomes almost exclusively dedicated to large transactions, lightning settlements and side-chains traffic. Tomorrow's Bitcoin could easily command a trillion dollars market cap.
Can you share your vision for ETC?