Bit Cat

#Bitcoin and #Kaspa stuff.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

Bitcoin is social consensus around the idea of following a default rule (heaviest chain) to keep agreement around something (a global ledger of value) for which there would normally be very little agreement.

It's just a default rule, that can be overridden at any time when there is social consensus around something else. If there was social consensus for deleting bitcoin, it would be gone in a split second and it would be hard to prove it ever existed.

In the early days, in presence of a catastrophic bug and with the full agreement of the very few participants, the rule was neglected, and patched. It's a human tool after all, therefore human agreement is always king, when it exists.

However, despite being just a default rule, it can become an incredibly sticky one, because of the well known difficulty of humans to take any kind of coherent and durable collective decisions, especially at a global scale. Newspapers contain very little traces of social consensus. And when alternatives are shaky and not immediate, the default rule easily becomes the only rule.

So while it may sound like a contradiction, I think bitcoin exists thanks to a form of social consensus, but is also nourished by a total lack of it.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@TheRealPlanC @MrMPodcast @Giovann35084111 Wow people still debating about a regression line that has zero scientific relevance. Impressive.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@ebfull That's cool, but why not building that on a foundation that also settles instantly and produces no orphan blocks? (Kaspa anyone?)

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@Bohenguy You can't prevent such things to end up onchain, however if anyone decides to run a public frontend, they can decide to filter what they show.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

Although "prediction markets" is the standard way people refer to such systems, it has a gambling connotation that I believe is very reductive.

Contracts that pay when a specific event comes true can be extremely beneficial for all sorts of risk management activities. You want to open a bar but you're scared of a lockdown? You can buy a token that compensates you if that happens. You make wine and you're scared the summer is going to be too hot? You can protect yourself against that. Basically, you can turn off the risks you're not willing to take and only keep the ones that you're happy to handle.

Traditionally such things have always required an intermediary, who decides what events are available, how much they cost and how they are resolved. But at the heart of it, it's just a bunch of people coming together and coordinating around a common need.

I'm not completely sure what form this will take, but I don't really see this as an app or a product. It's fundamentally a protocol, a set of open rules that people can use to find themselves and agree on whatever terms they consider useful. Backed by a solid ordering backbone and a design offering some specific guarantees (with limitations that must also be understood).

[Manyfest @manyfest_]

TLDR- A fully open, decentralized and permissionless prediction market application on Kaspa.

In the last few months I have been working with @maxibitcat mapping and coding his proposal for a permissionless prediction market into an Argent app.
He proposed a voting resolution mechanism that utilizes a lottery to incentivize the losing side of a binary market to vote honestly (see more in his original post).
It felt like a great use case for KCC20 tokens. A prediction is held as a tradable, fungible KCC20 token representing the prediction asset, with extended logic to support voting.

A few things worth sharing:

1. Argent is a fantastic tool that enables coding this complex covenant system with ease. This idea could also be written as a single EVM program, but when mapping it to the state machine it actually is, it feels natural and obvious to implement it as a UTXO covenant application (image attached).

2. It’s exciting to draft an application that is completely decentralized and open. Everyone would be able to create and participate in any market they wish, while also running their own application code
There will be no owner and no beneficiary. The system is completely open, would only benefit the network miners, and would encourage honest participation.

3. The system’s openness and current implementation tie the security of a market to its size. Small-cap markets could be manipulated more easily. Inevitably, people would lose money in this social experiment.

4. I aim to release a mainnet version around the end of this year.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@michaelsuttonil @averagecatdog @manyfest_ Oh that max thing does make it much stronger!

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

Oh cool, that mitigates the concern quite a bit, but still even a limited set of options can greatly amplify your winning probability.

The reason I liked the reveal-based randomness is that if there are multiple players trying to manipulate the lottery, they can't try all their options at once, cause they're never sure to be the last playing, and the race should tend to neutralize everyone's power.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

It is an interesting direction indeed, although at 10 bps I guess even a small "grace" period can still give the miner quite a bit of grinding opportunities (and if it gets to 100 bps in the future even more!). It would be ideal if one could identify a single block as source of randomness, giving zero leeway, but I suppose that's not currently possible.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@averagecatdog @manyfest_ Yes vote commitments aggregate into a nonce that decides the lottery.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

Not saying an app won't exist, it's just not the core of what this is.

Hosting a central unfiltered frontend is potentially legally borderline depending on where you live, though I'm not an expert. Having local frontends that anyone can run, and decide if and what they expose publicly, might be a better way.

Building an app is not too hard nowadays, once all the specs are settled and public. So an ecosystem will arise naturally if there's enough interest around this.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@asaefstroem @manyfest_ @kakaroaeli The main idea was to have token holders vote, in this way: https://t.co/pWuTv1Uw8t

But like UMA, there should be an optimistic resolution that should make voting unnecessarily in most cases.

[Manyfest @manyfest_]

TLDR- A fully open, decentralized and permissionless prediction market application on Kaspa.

In the last few months I have been working with @maxibitcat mapping and coding his proposal for a permissionless prediction market into an Argent app.
He proposed a voting resolution mechanism that utilizes a lottery to incentivize the losing side of a binary market to vote honestly (see more in his original post).
It felt like a great use case for KCC20 tokens. A prediction is held as a tradable, fungible KCC20 token representing the prediction asset, with extended logic to support voting.

A few things worth sharing:

1. Argent is a fantastic tool that enables coding this complex covenant system with ease. This idea could also be written as a single EVM program, but when mapping it to the state machine it actually is, it feels natural and obvious to implement it as a UTXO covenant application (image attached).

2. It’s exciting to draft an application that is completely decentralized and open. Everyone would be able to create and participate in any market they wish, while also running their own application code
There will be no owner and no beneficiary. The system is completely open, would only benefit the network miners, and would encourage honest participation.

3. The system’s openness and current implementation tie the security of a market to its size. Small-cap markets could be manipulated more easily. Inevitably, people would lose money in this social experiment.

4. I aim to release a mainnet version around the end of this year.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@Gegam245074 "brute forcing" makes it seem like the AI searches through all possible answers before replying. Which is obviously not the case.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@pozsgaybalazs Journals will probably survive, if they accept to evolve. Even if everyone uses AI, the smartest people will always find the most interesting stuff.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@PI010101 Don't publish sharp results either then, someone with more computing power will make it a trivial corollary of a more interesting result.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@Jinnanog5 Or maybe simply accept the paper if it's interesting enough (raising the bar of what's interesting).

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@JuBo92110 Il suffirait de permettre la déduction du loyer du net imposable (comme c'est déjà le cas pour les entreprises).

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

@ValerioCapraro So what? Millions of people post stuff without proof on this app every day. A guy produced a computer assisted argument and posted it. Ignore it if you want, or study it if you're interested. There's no reason it should be a problem.

[Bit Cat @maxibitcat]

Possibly hash rate/security budget will increase, but not necessarily with a similar magnitude as the new stablecoin (+derivatives) market.

Also I have a bit of trouble considering this "backed by hash rate". I mean miners mine block anyways, now they'll also be able to attach a price number to their blocks. They'll compare the rewards of posting a correct vs incorrect price, where the honest rewards are fairly small and irregular, if I understand it correctly.

Of course there's also a reputation risk in misreporting for large miners, which looks imo as the biggest deterrent.

Anyways I don't want to bash the project, it's a cool experiment, I'd just be cautious in promising that it's able to power a huge defi market.