Hi,
If there are any SDC holders who have not been following the news, the ShadowProject is morphing into Particl - full details:

https://blog.shadowproject.io/2017/0...-new-platform/

If you have some SDC stashed on Umbra or any exchange, please either sell it within the next 4 weeks or exchange it to PARTs (a new currency that will be on the long-awaited decentralised market based on Umbra). Any leftover SDC that have not been exchanged to PART will be shared with the community.

There is also a bonus with of extra PARTS if you exchange within the next 3 days (+ pay in some bitcoins)

More details:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Particl/com...cess_start_to/

Project website:
https://particl.io/

I think the announcement on Friday was a bit of a shock for a lot of users/investors and created more questions than answers. After my initial disappointment, I tried to look at a bigger picture and got to like the new direction of the project as it will potentially grow into something mainstream, which shadowproject, IMHO, had little chance of accomplishing.

All of these projects are, to me, still waiting for what truly would be a breakthrough: individually self-verifiable unique tokens that can be quickly and easily generated.

To me, the very thing that gives people the perception that these tokens are "valuable" and even "rare" is also their Achilles Heel: they are slow and hard and unpredictable to generate. Therefore, you can literally "run out" of them. There is therefore no assurance of liquidity, which is a critical feature in any practical monetary/exchange system.

What we need is something that can be generated at-will which also has these fundamental cryptographic characteristics. We would not use them "as coins," but they would form a far more secure basis for conventional financial transactions and for other related purposes. Right now, all we have are digest-algorithms and conventional forms of encryption.

Absolutely. I agree about the liquidity paradox but I think it already is about more than particular coins. They all (better or worse) contribute to the spread and eventual adoption of a blockchain model where the whole decentralised system can serve not only financial purposes but other areas as well (eg. Legal agreements, etc.) Tje whole idea that there is no government that can shut something down makes it appealing but again it may be seen as its weak point. It is still unchartered territory in many respects and that is why it is so interesting. I also like the Golem project with its distributed computing model.

Well, I, for one, am not persuaded that there is not a "back door" of some kind in these systems. And in any case, a great many assumptions are being made by the participants in what is basically an over-glorified barter arrangement using a most-unusual token. The strength or supposed rarity of the token does not make the overall arrangement either secure or secret. The token is merely a fixture in a total business arrangement filled with people.

People. "Aye, there's the rub ..."

Furthermore: governments can find a way to shut down anything. You might think that you're doing something incredibly secret, but the power company can see that your power bill is six times higher than your neighbors'. (They know this by querying your modern electric meter. In fact, they're profiling your electricity usage throughout the day.) In fact, "you stand out like a sore thumb."

A court has also already decided that these tokens aren't money. Some officers tried to coax a suspected criminal into a "sting," but the criminal did not take the bait of "stolen credit card numbers." He used only "bitcoin." A judge ruled that the officers had no case since the suspect had not committed a crime. Unlike a credit-card number, which can be directly used to obtain cash, a bitcoin is an instrument of barter with no cash value at all. The suspect had outfoxed them, and he walked away from their intended trap.

But if we somehow could come up with tokens that possess these very unique and useful characteristics, and generate them by the millions without an unreasonable computation load, then we certainly would have a practical invention that could be used in any situation where two parties must "one-time authenticate" one another uniquely and in a completely de-centralized way, without reference to any central authority. That would be huge. But, we're not there yet.

True. As I said earlier, it is still unchartered territory. It is far from ready for widespread adoption. Each (or some) cryptocurrency brings something unique to the table. This will continue untill we will reach the characteristics that you described (or not). It might be the case that it is not going to be used as currency.
I don't think the attractiveness of it lies in coins (currencies). The adoption by some huge financial institutions was the result of the blockchain database model. In terms of governments ability to shut it down, my understanding of it is that once you have synced with the blockchain of some data, you have an the exact copy of it in its entirety. If the gov in the usa wants to shut it down, they would easily do it on their territory. If they wanted to shut the whole thing down, they would have to shut it down in each country a user has synced the blockchain in. This would prove if not impossible then certainly extremely difficult. Similarly, if someone wanted to tamper with the data, the particular node would not be let back in the blockchain without the confirmation from other, random nodes. This makes it much more difficult to hack than any current banking systems. Nothing can be reversed makes it transparent and easily auditable.

I am curious how it will all develop. Currencies are just a hobby. Due to its volatility, I would not put all my lifes savings on that. You can earn as easily as you can lose everything.

"Never mind governments trying to shut you down." The distributed, de-centralized way in which these systems work have interesting and exciting possibilities in other applications.

I'm not entirely sure how one would know whether someone had tampered with the data – or with any other aspect of the system. "Computation infeasibility / difficulty" is really not a sufficient defense, and "the data" is only one rather-small aspect of what is still basically a very-human system. People are in fact making many of the decisions here – and people can be deceived.

Computers can be deceived, also.

People who trust too much in computers and in barter systems can really be deceived.

The lack of liquidity is what makes these systems impractical as currency. Conventional financial systems have the ability to be as liquid as each day's transactions will call for ... and people spend billions of dollars each and every day. The conventional system does not rely on dollar-bills nor any other physical token: it depends on the supposed integrity of a system whose linchpin technical designs are half a century old. (And yet, it does the job. Coffee gets made and sold. Therefore, drivers, who were able to fill-up their gas tank if they needed to, are not sitting in traffic jams, sound asleep.

If one day we can exploit a derivative of some of these ideas, say, to improve our representation of currency within conventional systems and thereby to simplify the entirely timing-based characteristics of those systems, as I said, that would be huge. We live in interesting times.

This should explain it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32781244

Find a way to make that block-chain file much smaller, and you might be on to something.

However, as it is, billions of financial transactions occur around the world every single day. We cannot reasonably store them in any sort of "sequential ledger." There is no time to "compete to be the next one," because the flood of data is coming in too fast and it will never stop or even pause. There is also a potential flaw in relying on the asynchronous nature of the present Internet, "to keep them honest." Well, what if they are dishonest? What happens if they are precisely synchronized, instead? Could this system of "mutual trust" be gamed by someone who is intentionally untrustworthy? A fraudster? A thief? A con man?

Also: what if a transaction legitimately needs to be changed? You paid the wrong amount for a cup of coffee ... or, literally, someone tpyo'd something. Y'know, human error. Seems pretty intolerant of that sort of thing.

I sense in this story the emerging presence of a new company, fielding a very promising-looking technology that no one really understands and which is not yet fully developed, headed for "an IPO" in the very best dot-bomb tradition. (And I daresay that they won't be selling shares of their stock for Bitcoin ... ...)

I don't know the answers to your questions or claim that block chain is the solution to all our problems. I can see a potential in the work that is being done on it.

Your reservations are valid and necessitate more work on it. It's like in the 60's questioning first computers: Make this big box of metal considerably smaller and you might be onto something. The computer does the calculations too slowly, much slower than our mathematicians. Why would a company want to start producing those computer boxes - nobody would want them....etc.

This is how a progress is made.

I agree! These are very exciting ideas with some revolutionary possibilities. Today's conventional financial systems are very "leaky." They lose many millions of dollars a day to various forms of crime, communications failures, and other technical malfunctions. They are extremely dependent on timing. There are many improvements that could be made when these new ideas reach maturity.

And I think that these people are very astute to pursue them separately from "coin." I don't believe that these technologies will usher in "a new form of currency." But they could well revolutionize the electronic exchange systems that we are now rather stuck with.