Jd

Agreed but you have to credit PG's earlier work that makes this all credible as an uber-nerd watering hole (i.e. his guide to Lisp, Arc, Hackers and Painters, etc.).

Yep, well that would be interesting in the sense of how you could disrupt the music business by "manufacturing" beats. We've seen some similar progress around machine generated art (e.g. deep dreaming and the like).

Do you think the penalty works better than a positive incentive? i.e. if you got $5 to vote or a 1 in 100 chance of $1000? Also, was the penalty introduced in order to increase turnout? Is there any data on how it affected it, including among which demographics?

Have you ever invested in a band or music production company or considered doing that?

Do you really think that financially incentivizing voting will create good downstream effects? Almost all ideas of civic duty are historically drawn from non-financial incentives and the idea of attaching some financial incentive to them potentially seems to further exacerbate a "pay to play" atmosphere that is one of the reasons people (like myself) don't find it particularly stimulating to participate in the present political climate.

Emin supports some variant of a hard fork regardless.

My own A/B testing revealed that sometimes fitting the thingy into the thingy does not go as seamlessly as desired. Suggest bigger apparatus more prominently displayed. Bright colors should be used to attract the eye. Labels with san serif fonts should be placed on key parts.

I've been building something like this in VR.

Author here. I'm "smug" in the sense that I've made all of the mistakes of the DAO folks and many more beside. One of them was optimistically assuming that many more things could be done in an extralegal context than actually turned out to be feasible.

See for example this "smug" post that I was (correctly) critiqued for 868 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155644

Note the comment here re: "this guy does not understand how the world actually works": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7155872

With the updated forced learning curve on the legal system actually works over the last two years I've learn that a lot o what I previously viewed as cruft in the legal system is actually the complex adjudication of edge cases similar to what we see in well architected and executed software tests.

Missed div by zero can bring your whole system down. Forgetting the right clause in a contract can in a multi-million dollar deal as well.

I co-founded and ran the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup for some time. There was lots of interest right after the whitepaper up through the crowdsale, then a waning of interest in the details, and now resurgence of interest. Like the Bitcoin meetups there does seem to be some correlation between price of the asset and number of attendees but that is unavoidable IMHO.

As far as marketing, Tual was the community lead for a bit and he left to do the DAO which has broken crowdfunding records so I don't think you can say he's been unsuccessful. As to the ultimate success of the developer ecosystem, I'm not sure but I used to track metrics like github stars quite rigorously and Ethereum was doing better than any other crypto project.

What's missing is that this DAO structure has a self-evolving nature and can modify its own decision making structure, something that no "old-fashioned" structure can do.

Someone explained this to me recently with a simple analogy that may be helpful to you as well. Suppose the average user of AOL is 50 years old and non technical. That person has a decent amount of purchasing power and is likely to not significantly change their purchasing habits over the next 20 years. So there's a high chance of vendor lock-in and value capture even if there is actually no technological progress to speak of.

Could be simply that his need to promote his products (i.e. marketing) create a need to self-promote.

I'm the guy who created the Swarm platform, Swarm fund and Harvard conference on cryptoequity. The rough conclusions of $100k+ of legal research was that product tokens are highly likely to be regulated as securities in the US but that cooperatively governed organizations are likely to be regulated as partnerships. Notice all the "likely" aspects as this depends either on a clear ruling from the SEC or case law, neither of which exist.

This uncertainty made me withdraw from hosting crowdsales until some precedent was established (I did however, setup two funds that can take positions in crowdsales).

For what it's worth Swarm was a proto-DAO launched on the Bitcoin blockchain in an attempt to do roughly the same thing on the Ethereum blockchain once Ethereum was ready.

Anyone know if the "Knights" use lambda calculus? If so I don't think they are that similar to Anon. Knights seem more like a hacker elite where as Anon is more like a flash mob.

Do you feel the same way about Blade Runner? I'd put both in the same category. Philosophical digressions and epic musical interludes mixed in with violent cyborg action. Personally I like it but it definitely doesn't have the standard flow of your more normal series.

Actually I'm the founder of Swarm (www.swarmcorp.com) which is built on Counterparty. Very familiar with the platform ;)

(although original post on Quora was written pre-Swarm)

Reposting my review of Ethereum from Quora:

Ethereum has been described by core developers as oil to Bitcoin's gold. it is similar to other metacoins in that it acts as superlayer that empowers the blockchain, that is something like when Javascript was added onto HTML.

It empowers an immense number of custom applications on top of the blockchain, for purposes as diverse as contracts, derivatives, custom currencies, and filesharing. As Robert Ver said recently in Miami, if it works it is at least as innovative as Bitcoin itself.

Enthusiasm is high because, unlike Bitcoin, there is immediate use value for ether within the Ethereum network. All of the applications built in ethereum consume amounts of ether along with their computational cycles.

For folks looking at things from a macroeconomic standpoint, this makes Ethereum perhaps the most interesting of the new cryptocurrencies, because among other things. there is immediate use value for ether outside of trading, mining, and the other standard features of the first generation of cryptocurrencies.

Is it Bitcoin 2.0? Time will tell.

http://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Ethereum

As it turns out, Swarm's first legal entity is in the UK.

I agree. It's on our roadmap to build the appropriate tie-ins to the existing legal system to provide benefits that are not only pledged but also enforceable.

Among other things we are actively attempting to hire a lawyer (ideally a brilliant younger one) to help figure out how to integrate these cryptoassets with the existing legal system.

There are lots of reasons for pause and our choice of the term "cryptoequity" was certainly because it does evoke the fuller idea of the potential behind these cryptoassets, something that you don't get with the weaker but more accurate "cryptotoken."

Although we've issued various statements clarifying the issues including a manifesto, cryptoequity whitepaper, and legal action plan, it remains fairly complex and something that is probably not approachable to the ordinary user. I'm hoping that changes with the video explanation that we are launching on July 10th.

As for me, I have my B.A. from Brown and M.A. from Penn and a smattering of various other institutions including Harvard.

Completely agree with what you say, so not sure what argument you think I'm making. I'm only pointing out that our system does have fraud prevention mechanisms that do not exist with standard cryptotoken offerings.

As listed in the above document, cryptoequity is not simply a cryptotoken that ostensibly represents a stock, it encompasses all types of programmable rights that can potentially apply to a project. There are many potential applications of cryptoequity that fall into the realm of securities and equally many that do not.

Fundamentally what we are trying to do is stay on the right side of what is a very fuzzy line between what we can and can't do, while offering something that is incrementally but substantially better than all previous funding platforms. I think this is eminently possible because even a relatively simple feature like the distributed voting we are doing (http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/swarmcoin-holders-vote-c...) provides a rather significant amount of benefits relative to existing offerings.

Of course, people hear "cryptoequity" and they immediately think "stock." The reality is far more complex... and interesting.

Yes, one of our legal counsels actually recommended that we read that article once. And then again. And again until it sank in.

It sank in. ;)

I personally strongly dislike the term "Bitcoin 2.0" although I still use it quite frequently, primarily because I don't know of any other succinct way to describe all of the second generation functionality that is currently being built on top of the blockchain.

Kickstarter's "perks" model was not clear cut in the beginning. It became clear cut over time as the legal space was established. We are probably one step further than Kickstarter in that we offer things like programatic voting, but it's quite infeasible for us to offer "equity" at present and attempting to offer something like this is not even in our roadmap.

That's not quite correct. Our model includes a "Decentralized due diligence" aspect (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=664071.0;topicseen) that we believe greatly reduces fraud potential. Our full plan consists of a variety of fairly novel features, including crowdsourced project screening and fund-locking such raised funds are programmatically unlocked as founders achieve certain milestones.

Swarm founder here. We have a very unusual organizational model that allows people to represent the Swarm without having an "official" status within the organization, which means that we are always at risk of some degree of misrepresentation. After this specific interview I issued a "Legal Action Plan" that specifies the particulars of our near and long-term legal strategy, such that no one makes faux pas like "we’re launching it entirely outside the system."

That said, a lot of these subtleties are lost on non-native English speakers, which at the moment is probably the majority of the Swarm.

The full letter can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b6krYF6rMECtTwmTjbcZWZ0l...

I like how it says "tonight" but there is no day either on the post or on the thread. Looks like people are posting more than 24hrs ago though, which makes me think the day has already past...

I think just the opposite is the case. Individuals are better poised to diversify if they can drop investments across a large number of projects with tickets in the sub $1K range.

Imagine what would happen if you could really micro-invest, $10/day in 10 different projects. You'd even have kids actually learning to invest from age 10 that could beat the "pros" by the time they are in high school.