A bit too fast for a technology which is still work-in-progress to be honest. But hey... I am not complaining.

Eh? Isn't this capless at a minimum of 1 hour?

Not too hard to get in - There was an initial DDOS but that's about it.


PS: Eh sorry didn't saw your above post bro.
PPS: I've sent three transactions. The one I did not edit (with regards to gas, but I did increase transaction fees) got through.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 12 2017, 10:24 PM

Managed to get through? Fingers crossed for you.


When I first added the contract to my wallet, it showed up as 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 BNT tokens. LOL. Should have captured a screenshot for you guys. Fixed it by re-adding the contract (the real amount is a lot lesser).

Official site below:
https://bancor.network/fundraiser

Use only the address from their site. Scammer aplenty.

Cryptocurrencies – Is it a Ponzi scheme?

I had been spending the last couple of days breaking down Ponzi schemes by attributes, translating it to a mathematical model, in hopes of finding provable similarities with cryptocurrencies. After all, it looks like cryptocurrencies are fueled on the necessity of new purchases for price increases, hence the association of it in likeness with Ponzi schemes.

First of all, definition just for entirety’s sake: an “investment” generating returns for (older) investors using the revenue intake from new investors. Apart from fresh intake of funds from new investors, the “investment” may or may not have a business activity for revenue stream. Usually comes with an abnormally high promised return paid in a controlled manner over an agreed time period.

From this, we could make a very simple model of a Ponzi scheme as such, optimistically assuming there is a business activity providing a revenue stream to maintain the scheme for as long as possible:

Intake of new funds = Fr
Payout of funds = Fp
Time starting from 0 (t >= 0), so at any point of time we’d expect both intake and payout
Business revenue = Fb
Total liquidity = CL, where CL = Fr + Fb

From here we could already very quickly deduce if t(Fb) > t(Fp), then the business is making a profit hence sustainable and legitimate. If payouts from CL results in a negative t(CL - Fp) < 0, where Fb < Fp then this fully is a Ponzi scheme relying on new fund intake to survive.

From this model, if we could fit in the attributes of cryptocurrencies exchange-of-hands we could determine at what stage it would be a Ponzi scheme. However:

1. Intake of new funds. When new funds of a Ponzi scheme is being taken in, this adds to a pool of liquidity such that CL = Fr + Fb. On the other hand buy orders does not add to any pool and instead provides a difference which indicates the increase (or decrease) between previous price and new price.
2. Payout of funds. When a payout of a Ponzi scheme is initiated, this deducts on liquidity CL with Fp. Again, the same problem arises, sell orders does not add to any pool and this is derived as a difference instead.
3. Time is consistent between both models.
4. No liquidity of the same sense for cryptocurrencies – It’s a market supply-demand curve.

From here we can clearly make the differentiation that – As the attribute CL does not exist in a cryptocurrency market, it is not possible for it to fail the same way as a Ponzi scheme in which t(CL – Fp) < 0. There could be a huge negative difference between the previous and new price, but never to a point where the price is below 0. On the other hand price increases are fueled by speculative worth where the “greater fool theory” applies, so we could look objectively from this perspective to see if this could result in a crash/bubble, and what happens to the “last greatest fool”.

In summary, instead of showing attributes akin to a Ponzi scheme, cryptocurrencies show attributes closer to the stock market/penny stocks, driven by fundamentals (equivalent to investigating the industry, NAV, P/B of a company) and crowd speculations. I may expand more about bubbles and the greater fool theory in relation to the cryptocurrency market on a later date, but not now.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 14 2017, 01:23 AM

Glad that you guys enjoyed it. Sure, go ahead.

This assumes that people are actually interested in staying in the crypto market realm during that time (which is a valid assumption btw). There are very few direct entry and exit avenues for Ethereum at this point of time, many which requires one to go through Bitcoin to exchange for altcoins or Ether.

This will be an interesting show.

I think he meant the price listing for 1btc at 12300, where 0.6 is available.

Singapore is really open to researching cryptocurrencies, tokenisation of assets, and blockchain - I've seen some journals from NUS students which are just pure brilliant, and these are papers from 2-3 years back.

It's still ongoing. Check out their Twitter.

MyEtherWallet basically given a big middle finger to people spamming transactions trying to get into Status.

Not over yet, I think they are on their last ceilings though - contributions are getting smaller.

https://contribute.status.im

IMHO observing the Status ICO for the past 12 hours - this has to be one of the best structured ICOs I've ever seen. Thoughts later.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 21 2017, 01:02 PM

Random Thoughts on Status ICO

With each passing ICO, we are seeing increasingly sophisticated models to manage contributions sent to an address - During the past months we have seen innovative implementations in this space: hidden caps as a prevention mechanism from pre-empting knowledge of total token supply (e.g. Aragon), Pre-ICO sales (e.g. Patientory) allowing larger contributions as to prevent contention with smaller ICO contributors during the actual ICO event, uncapped ICOs (e.g. Bancor) that ensures no one party is capable of having a large stake of all tokens.

The Status ICO which started on 20th June, was in my humble opinion by far the most sophisticated (and if I may say, effective) model towards ensuring a fair distribution of tokens to as many different contributors as possible.

Several mechanisms observed used by Status:
> Pre-ICO sales (bitcoinsuisse, ImToken) allowing huge contributions. These are the huge transactions observed during the first hours of the ICO, with gas prices allowed above the 50gwei limit to ensure that they get in.
> Dynamic ceilings - Where as contributions increase, per transaction contribution allowance reduces (surplus ethers are sent back to originating address). This makes huge contributions over time costlier, discouraging hoarding of tokens.
> Gas price capped on 50gwei - Transactions with gas price above this limit will be cancelled.
> Address ban mechanism (two transactions from the same address are not allowed within 100 blocks, circa ~25 minutes (17secs*100/60))


This model effectively allowed over 18k+ addresses (as of time of posting) to contribute at various capacities (in comparison, Bancor - 10885, Aragon - 2403, Patientory - 1728).
Will be looking forward to seeing more and more innovative ways founders structure their ICO, as for now I remain exceptionally impressed with what Status had came up with for theirs.


Some more observations:
> Many of the transaction errors during the start were a result of transactions with gas price being too high - ultimately cancelled.
> Ethereum's network ended up congested as usual.... Of which many of these early transactions are cancelled due to high gas price.
> Etherchain and Etherscan getting DDoSed before the ICO.
> MEW outright showed a message stating the contribution has ended (when it did not) - Out of frustration of herd FOMO. lol.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 21 2017, 05:03 PM

Sharding, Raiden. Just keep in mind the Ethereum network is still experimental, so any use cases should also be treated as such.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 21 2017, 06:32 PM

I am not sure about Antshares's implementation (let me look for some information), but sharding allows parallel execution. The devil is in the details, as the implementation has to be careful with cross shard communications (e.g. when smart contracts call smart contracts) and concurrency needs (e.g. a transaction relies on output of another transaction).

Vitalik did address this on one of his papers.

So yes, parallel execution is feasible (and realistically should be introduced for scalability) provided the implementation is well thought of.

Think I could watch a recording of their live stream somewhere?

Went through their v1.1 whitepaper last night and I have some reservations.

Thanks!

Just change your DNS. (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4)

I was going to start writing on Medium then found out I had issues getting my equations there. lol

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 23 2017, 08:43 AM

I'm not sure about ASIC mining myself. If they are using the same computation (e.g. SHA256) then wouldn't people still be able to jump between coins...? Also how likely it is for a "normal" users to buy dedicated hardware, vs just using a GPU (could it lead to a very centralised groups of people, e.g. data centers running ASICs to secure the blockchain hence data centres owning most of the hashrates). I would imagine mining pools to not be able to convince all miners to act maliciously, compared to data centers.

Need to thoroughly look through Vorick's thoughts. Maybe later.

This post has been edited by Enigmatic: Jun 23 2017, 11:57 AM

EIP648 is a very pragmatic approach to improving scalability in the short term - Isolation of address transactions to its own parallel "thread". This will avoid network congestions during ICOs.

Not sure when they are gonna be releasing it though. Impression is that Metropolis is already committed.