URGENT NOTICE TO ALL CROWN HOLDERS
It is our duty as representatives of VIVA to keep you informed of important decisions to be made. It is your responsibility, as a Crown Holder to be a participant in those decisions.
Early Wednesday morning William Banks had realized an issue with a fundamental part of the VIVAconomy. Following, is the discussion, with irrelevant conversations and photos removed for easier following.
September 20, 2017 - William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 4:53 AM
/pirate off (for now)
Ok everyone an important decision on the path forward for VIVA has been made and I want to explain it to you, to allow you to take action before we fully implement it.
We are at the point where we have encountered an issue in our core consensus model and the change we will be implementing is a change to the way our consensus works. But to understand the flaw and the solution you need to understand some technical things about VIVA that have been held very close to the chest.
We are nothing like any crypto you have ever seen. We use many of the same cryptographic techniques as the others, we try to enhance or expand on it when we can, but on the whole we don't do a lot of innovating. Most of what you see when you deal with VIVA and our unique way of doing things comes from rulesets we call "business logic".
Our business logic is powerful and flexible. We don't really talk about smart contracts, but everything in VIVA world is actually a smart contract.
William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 5:00 AM
When you have a mint, you have the opportunity to pay your contracts yourself with cash on hand, or have the network pay your contract for you from money de novo (created from thin air).
This for the most part works well when you have a very small number of mints competing for a very large pie. But what happens when the de novo pie is too small?
Let's examine this for just a moment by looking at a real world example.
First thing to understand is that every contract specifies 3 things
Offer, acceptance and consideration.
The consideration is another word for money. In consideration of 100 VIVA I agree to run your altcoin miner for 5 days.
The consideration section has both a source and an amount attached to it, but the source of that money is where we encounter consensus issues with just the 3 mints we have. (TQ, viva.cash & Galaxy Vault), and this problem will only get worse as time goes on because each mint is saying something different about the de novo fund, or specifically the space available in the de novo fund.
The source of the problem comes from a failure to come to consensus on total coin supply which is the sum of 2 figures. First is the sum of all balances and reserves held by a mint. This is called "claimed funds".
The second figure is the amount of coin required to push the price back to within it's range.
To execute a contract you must make a claim against the "unclaimed" fund first before you tap the mint's reserves which are effectively, the liquid viva balances and VIP balances of the Crown Holders pledged to the mint.
So this works great when there is plenty of space, if we can mint 100 VIVA to pay the worker node without pushing the price out of range, then by all means we should do that.
The problem occurs when we are out of range.
If unclaimed funds are negative, then the mint executing the contract can pay with VIVA on hand, or can bring the money into existence by tapping VIP.
The problem is that burning the VIP into VIVA still adds massive downward pressure on the price when VIP trades at a significant discount to VIVA. This was partly addressed by closing the VIVA / VIP market.
But what doesn't show in models, and can't really be seen until you're on the receiving end of it, is a sort of dillema.
TRs sink in 90 day intervals. There is a strong incentive when we have a pricing dip to just sink the TRs into VIP and build up really high VIP reserves and just exit retirement mode without any actual economic activity going on.
This puts the entire burden of maintaining the peg onto those who are conducting business around VIVA. But it makes the peg much harder to maintain because the excess VIP can also be tapped thereby bypassing the market entirely.
This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but it skews the view of how much is actually available in the unclaimed pile.
Ok so now we have 2 mints with differing opinions on what should be in the unclaimed pile. This produces a stalemate because they cannot come to consensus.
There are 2 options for fixing this.
The first would be to simply ask a third mint to chime in.
The third mint can cast the tie breaking vote.
That's what we have been doing and it works great.
Except for times it doesn't.
You see it's easy to say that if Alice sees one thing and Bob sees another, they can just go to Charlie and ask which one is correct.
But the reality is, often Charlie sees things differently.
And you're back to stalemate, but this time it's 3 way.
A better solution here would be stake weighted voting. He with the most stake (Crowns) wins.
But then how do you deal with someone in control of a majority of Crowns.
You encourage centralization and you're relying on the fallacy that the a person will always act in the best interests of their investment.
There are thousands of iterations of this idea, but at the end of the day they all fall away because if you let one person have more say based only on how much money they have invested, then you leave open the possibility of a rouge actor who only wants to see the world burn, deciding your coin is worth the time, money and effort involved to disrupt it, even if it means he is only shorting the coin to oblivion.
So what is it, One Crown one vote, or one Crown Holder One Vote?
I struggled with this for a few weeks before I realized the solution was sitting in front of me the whole time.
What if it's not A or B or even a mix of A&B? What if there is a third option that isn't being considered here?
At it's heart a TR is just the right to sign someones name to a contract. It's a one time use though and then it's gone. But the holder of the TR is ultimately liable for the consideration aspect of that contract.(edited)
So you create a contract, you burn a signature, binding the person and ultimately the network into guaranteeing payment.
Since these are one time use only, how about we settled consensus this way.
He or she with the most signatures, i.e. the one who burns the most TRs is the winner.
To make this work though, we will need a lot more TRs and right now TRs aren't really fungible because they sink after 90 days unless they are on the market.
So we stop the 90 day sink function and just allow folks to redeem TRs for VIP directly whenever they want to.
Then we introduce a new rule that says whenever there is a consensus issue the page (a daily intermediary stage between blocks), with the most signatures, i.e. TRs wins the day.
When there is agreement this is no problem, the mint that created it burns a TR, and other mints sign off on it by also burning a TR.
When you can't get another mint to sign your page, then you just keep piling on TRs until you are the winner.
This prevents bad actors because it gets very, very expensive very quickly and you only get your way once for that expense.
In the meantime, mints benefit most by having "you scratch mine, I scratch yours" style agreements with other mints.
On days your mint needs a page, your friends sign off and in return you sign off on theirs.
This also helps to spread the negative minting load around.
In times when negative minting is required, the Crown Holders signing off on the negative minting event share the load from the event evenly.
More than one mint can share this burden.
Keep in mind, the negative minting is intended to reduce the supply of coin, and that reduction works by removing coins from the balances of the TR issuers and deleting them, converting them to VIP and spreading them across the entire VIP pool thereby making VIP an even more attractive investment.(edited)
If the TR issuer does not have sufficient VIVA, then their VIP balance is tapped instead.
But now we spread this out across all affiliated mints.
malvino-September 20, 2107 at 5:50 AM
Makes sense…
William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 5:50 AM
So...
Each mint publishes a new page daily.
The only numbers they need to have agreement on are total supply, claimed funds, and unclaimed funds. Unclaimed can be negative, and it just represents how much coin needs to be added or subtracted from the total supply in order to push the price back to peg.
In addition to those numbers, the page contains a list of all contracts that pay that day.
This actually simplifies the code dramatically and we can build a healthy market in TRs by turning off expiration and just replacing it with a "redeem" function, that does the same thing sinking used to.
If we were to sink today each VTR would be worth about 700 VIP.
I'll add a function to TQ to allow you to do this, and price feed showing what the redemption is worth.
William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 6:00 AM
We are going to need to update the whitepaper to reflect this, but at least the code is much, much simpler.
alexrickard86-September 20, 2107 at 6:02 AM
From what I understand of what you've written, it does make more sense to do it this way.
kenny-crane-September 20, 2107 at 6:02 AM
It's usually good when the code is made simpler.
We need a VIVAconomy simulator! You mentioned a model; do we already have one?
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:10 PM
Two reasons. First of VIP is transferable, and secondly we have a subjective PoW system similar to [Steemit's]. The big difference between us and [Steemit] on subjective PoW is that your VIP balance determines the number of times you can "upvote" instead of the amount given per upvote.
The amount given per upvote is a fixed quantity and if it were live right now it would be about $0.01 per vote. You get 1 vote per 10,000 VIP
Joe-September 20, 2017 at 8:11 PM
VIP is transferable is what was in mind in it being gifted. I think the point was that it can't be traded on the exchange, so external arrangements have to be made.
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:11 PM
Those numbers are something Crown Holders will be able to adjust.
Joe-September 20, 2017 at 8:11 PM
But you're talking about the future platform, correct?
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:12 PM
Yes, but the discussion was in regards to the design of the system.
You don't need to be a Crown Holder to gain VIP.
Joe-September 20, 2017 at 8:12 PM
It's something we don't discuss much and is still pretty nebulous.
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:12 PM
Just have someone with some VIP toss you some votes.
Joe-September 20, 2017 at 8:13 PM
Right, you can get it directly from others or you can buy TRs. But the votes is clearly not on our radar. Thanks.
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:13 PM
Yeah we've been heavily focused on getting the part where the rubber meets the road going that we haven't talked about it at all since ICO. But it's there.
Joe-September 20, 2017 at 8:14 PM
Good reminder. It's kinda out there for us. Lots of work to do first.
William Banks-September 20, 2017 at 8:18 PM
Now, going back to the pegging mechanism for VIVA. When we say there's a peg on VIVA what that means is that the network will take action against the supply to try and steer the price back to it's peg. Furthermore, no VIVA Holdings controlled mint sell it's VIVA below peg.
So when the market feels thin and there isn't much pricing support, people can and should speculate on the price and they should make the assumption that the price will trend towards the peg.
In otherwords when it comes to VIVA, You should buy it low and sell it high.
What makes us different is that if you have a 90 day to 1 year out look and you are really speculating on currency. You are pretty much guaranteed to earn 20% on your funds, just by placing your orders and waiting.
It's not instant gratification, but it also proves we aren't manipulating the markets with fake volume.
If you need something that tracks 1:1 another asset, you should buy the other asset.
NetEnergy-September 20, 2107 at 8:25 PM
Big picture. If peg is currently ~~~$10 and the Merry central bankers actually drain QE according to today's posted schedule, and remove 1.2 trillion over 4 years. Fiat markets are gonna be wild places for the foreseeable future
realdominique-September 20, 2107 at 9:14 PM
@ William Banks anymore insight on the TR proposal?
William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 9:26 PM
I'm watching the thread
Joe-September 20, 2107 at 9:27 PM
Is this the thread, or is there discussion on Basecamp?
William Banks-September 20, 2107 at 9:28 PM
Umm this is embarssing but I lost my basecamp password and have yet to reset it.
Joe-September 20, 2107 at 9:28 PM
lol, so this is it...
kiokizz-September 20, 2107 at 9:28 PM
I like the fixed 90 day production cycle for TR. Under the rollover model, If you sold a TR and it reset your 90 days counter, the TR would still exists, another would be produced? You could just go and buy another at similar price to you sold and accumulate them anyway? Would this provide any benefit? i may have misunderstood how this would help with the consensus and parties with more crowns?
Also, the ability to sink TR when a user wants to seems to be ideal.
cryptomancer-September 20, 2107 at 10:04 PM
Wow so much discussion to get caught up on! After thinking on it overnight, I'm convinced that a fixed 90 day production cycle for TRs is essential, otherwise as @ Joe has said people will be incentivized to sink their TRs immediately after receiving them.
So I think let people freely sink / redeem TRs whenever, then at the end of each 90 day "window" everyone's TR balance gets normalized.
Let's imagine I'm a crownholder with 5 Crowns:
It is the end of a 90 day window.
Case 1: I have 7 TRs. 2 sink automatically so I'm left with 5 to match my number of Crowns.
Case 2: I have 5 TRs. Same as my number of Crowns so nothing happens.
Case 3: I have 3 TRs. I get 2 new ones issued to me so I have 5 again, matching my number of Crowns.
realdominique-September 20, 2107 at 10:08 PM
From what I gather from what William said and all the discussion so far. I would vote for being able to sink/sell TR's whenever and also some type of accumulation would be fine with me. I think Sherry suggested 1 vote for every 5 or 10 or something like that.
Joe-September 20, 2107 at 10:10 PM
Very clear and simple, @ cryptomancer
Craigers-September 20, 2107 at 10:52 PM
I would need much more detailed understanding of the minting process and it's consumption of TRs before I could make an educated position on the topic. I understand the sinking to VIP just fine, tell us more about minting direct to VIVA.
September 21, 2017
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 5:06 AM
[...] Craigers had a good question about minting directly to VIVA.
I want you all to understand this process, because the way we have described it in the past has not been clear and I blame myself. It is really hard to boil these technical things down into ideas and sometimes it runs the other way, it becomes hard or impossible to take the ideas and turn them into tech because computers hate logical conflicts.
So here goes.
Imagine that a mint is like a bank
Each day the bank MUST produce a report.
This report details the amount of money held (as an aggregate), i.e. funds under management.
Funds under management are not really an asset, they are actually a liability. But what matters is the due date on those liabilities.
VIVA and by extension vX, represent "on demand" liabilities. The bank MUST have enough funds on hand to cover those liabilities at all times.
Now all of this at it's core is really just VIVA. You have 1 BTC? You actually have 1 BTC worth of VIVA at the strike between bid and ask, and taking into account the market depth of liquidating it. But that VIVA does not exist until you "claim" the vBTC.
Once you do this, the mint MUST give you your VIVA, and if it isn't on hand it MUST be able to mint enough VIVA into existence to fulfill that contract.
If they cannot fulfill, then the network will fulfill and put the mint owner into debt with the network.
In otherwords all vX are callable instruments and all calls are covered and insured.
When a vX is created, this process goes in reverse.
A quantity of VIVA equivalent to the strike price is destroyed. That is the price for creating the contract. The VIVA destroyed comes from the mint that issues it. But that cannot be newly minted VIVA. In otherwords if I'm destroying 400 VIVA to produce a 1 vBTC, I must have that on hand. It cannot be from a VIP drawdown in this case.
The mint can then trade that 1vBTC for anything they want, including a real BTC. The network will honor the agreement even if the mint goes out of business.
So a mint can mint ANYTHING it wants. What we're really coming to consensus on is how many VIVA are destroyed in the process.
....
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:00 AM
[...]
Mints create vX for spending, and in the process they burn VIVA to do it. This is handled via the execution of smart contracts. Each day the mint has to produce a summary report and stapled to this report is a list of all contracts outstanding.
Each time a report is generated it is signed for lack of a better word, by burning a TR.
Part of the report contains claimed funds, this is the summary balance of the entire system, i.e. what mints currently control what amounts of VIVA.
The other part is "unclaimed funds". This is the amount amount of supply that should be added or removed in order to help bring the price back to it's peg or target if you prefer.
Under the current system, this "unclaimed funds" category is used to fund new claims (a contract that is being authorized) and the unclaimed funds are then said to exist.
The problem arises when there isn't enough in unclaimed funds or funds under mint control to cover claims. An example would be when we actually need to remove money from the system in order to get the price back to it's peg.
In this case there is contention for these unclaimed funds, or the mint simply refuses to mint because they do not want to bare the cost of bringing the price back to peg.
So the primary proposed change here is to allow mints either singly or collectively (both would be allowed), to burn more than a single TR. Basically all mints that agree with the overall supply number and the contents of the new claims, could sign off on the originating mint's page. This would allow for cross stapling and co-signing and ultimately mints would be sharing the load of pushing the market back towards it's peg.
The other changes we've discussed such as removing the 90 day expiry are there to allow a market to build for TRs that is competitive. But since the expiry would be gone the TRs no longer autosink so we need a way to let someone convert TRs to VIP, thus adding a "claim on demand" feature to TRs.
The tricky part here and the part being debated most hotly is the net effect of this. I am sitting on the fence as to whether TR accumulation is good or bad.
A bad actor could technically accumulate enough TRs to push supply to 0, but all that really means is no new money could enter the system and all mint liquidity would burn. The supply can't ever really drop below the sum total balances of all existing claims, i.e. the total of all funds on hand that are not the mint's own funds.
realdominique-September 21, 2107 at 6:19 AM
So if this were to happen what are the possible negatives? I know a lot was speculated as a negative but I don't think we have a clear understanding if it actually would be or not or just our perception? Besides the co signing to create consensus and auto sink what are the pros?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:20 AM
A bad actor could technically push up a supply number to crash the price of VIVA by flooding the market with new VIVA except you can't just mint VIVA for resale and you can only mint VIVA against vX that have already funded that are in process of being burnt back into VIVA. So at most they would have a lot of contracts they would be funding, but they would never make it past settlement because the disagreeing nodes would quickly overhwhelm them and they would be on the hook for a metric crapton of VIVA
realdominique-September 21, 2107 at 6:20 AM
Ok there's a negative. How would that bad actor benefit
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:21 AM
See the thing is our system is designed to make acting badly a costly business decision.
Once a week all debts are settled and we create a new block. This block is the shortest path to settlement. So yeah a bad actor might mint a crapton of VIVA, into a bunch of fake contracts, but no mint is forced to accept his newly minted VIVA for settlement. They can de-peer that mint.
This means that mint has to settle with other mints that still trust it and if they cannot settle then their crowns are indebt.
By roughly the amount they tried to force into existence.
realdominique-September 21, 2107 at 6:25 AM
So if I'm understanding this correctly nothing stops this bad actor from doing this today or with the current model. Because some one with tons of money can buy a bunch of TR's and although that contributed to the economy they can still mint a crap ton and push the supply to 0
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:26 AM
Now it's not worth it for the occasional dude that just happened to bump supply by 10% to fill a bunch of legit claims. But for someone with mal intent, you just de-peer them and that tells them you won't accept VIVA directly from them, they have to send through a third party or chain of third parties you both trust.
@ realdominique Actually today it would just create a node that isn't compliant with the network. Nothing really matters until settlement day.
That's when we truck large loads of VIVA between mints and settle all outstanding inter-mint obligations.
But if you de-peer them, you aren't accepting their promise to pay anymore. They have to find someone else to pay on their behalf.
Instead of A->B settlement it becomes A->C->B
Assuming they can find a C that will take them still. Otherwise they are just blocked until they resolve the issue.
But we're talking about something brain dead like trying to double the supply while we're 50% below peg.
Alright guys it's 4:30 AM here and I need to call it a night.
Just wanted to make it clear, mints can mint anything they damn well please except VIVA itself. The way they do that is by finding space in the supply to fund a contract (utilizing de novo money), or by utilizing their own VIVA to fund said contracts.
Just to make it clear, they can only mint vX by burning existing VIVA. But they can and should redeem vX by using the de novo or unclaimed funds.
realdominique-September 21, 2107 at 6:35 AM
Based on what you said there should be no real issue with the accumulation of TR's then? If that is the case I vote for the proposed change.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:35 AM
Either way a TR is burned each time a report is generated.
I'm not seeing an issue @ realdominique , unless someone accumulated massive, massive amounts of TRs and managed to sustain the bad actor thing for 90 days without getting totally de-peered. But if that happens then we have a community scale problem.(edited)
Remember we still do quarter close in order to trim the blockchain and produce a network wide summary settlement.
Joe-September 21, 2107 at 6:49 AM
[...] The 90 day rolling TR replacement still causes a problem though, because it promotes all CH to dump their TRs as quickly as possible, so that the 90 days resets. I still like the scenareo @ cryptomancer laid out above. It's clean and simple and seems to solve the problem in a way that is easy to understand. And, whether accumulating TRs or not is an issue, it simply avoids the problem.
Dennis Lewis-September 21, 2107 at 7:47 AM
Hello @ William Banks - get a good rest. Hopefully, when you wake up you can answer this question. If I read correctly, a mint is required to burn 1 TR every day. That means, just to open a mint the business must have a VERY substantial number of TRs in its possession. What if it is a SMALL mint that perhaps only wants to mint weekly, for example? Why wouldn't that be acceptable? Many of us Crown Holders have plans to operate a mint, but the capital required to accumulate say 60 TRs (two months supply) would be very significant. Could you clarify this?
boxcarblue-September 21, 2107 at 8:12 AM
I'm also a little confused about how running a mint would work. I've been falling these conversations for the past couple of months trying to figure out how to best prepare for the full on launch of the VIVAconomy. As a single crown holder, if I decide to run a mint, how much Viva should I hold? How many TRs do I need to possess? Do others feel like they have a grasp on this?
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 8:13 AM
Whitepaper page 13 is a good starting point
Joe-September 21, 2107 at 8:19 AM
Your mint should be associated with a business venture, as I understand it.
boxcarblue-September 21, 2107 at 8:33 AM
I understand that. I'm just not sure what the ideal amount of Viva holding would be to cover the risk of running a small mint. If I associate with a small business that doesn't require a lot of funds, for example, less than what a TR what sink at, can I use my TR to print less funds than would be received through sinking a TR? Maybe that wouldn't make much sense from an investment point of view, but I'm just trying to understand how all this works. TRs don't have a specific value per se, and I believe that a mint can produce as much currency as it chooses up until a certain percent of its Viva holdings. Is that correct? If so, would not possessing a lot of Viva mean that I, were I running a mint, could not produce much currency?
I'll double check that page @ NetEnergy Thanks.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 3:53 PM
@ Dennis Lewis I'm responding to the question you asked about mints and what is needed to be successful.
Like all business ventures your success is going to be directly tied to your business aptitude and how well you play with others. The daily report each mint must generate, should on the whole be the same for all mints, you can choose to simply accept what you're told by other mints and in that case you don't need to do anything. But if you have a contract stapled to the report it would be a courtesy to burn a TR on it yourself in order to add weight. Prior to this change, a mint needed to burn 1 TR per settlement and that is weekly. This new change will require a mint with only 1 crown to have access to 90 TRs each quarter if they want to actually make a new claim each day. But most mints should be doing a single claim about once a week or there abouts and using additional TRs to support the claims of others through some sort of backscratch arrangement.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 4:00 PM
So for everyone let's try and think of this in a different light so you can see the way this logic plays out from a business perspective.
One way to think of Crown Ownership is that it confers a seat at a table. Each Crown Holder has the right to represent the interests of a business at this table.
The daily reports are just like the daily reports you get when you're a C-Level executive and as mints you are all acting like VPs in one global organization.
The daily report contains a line "new funds available" or "unclaimed funds".
Next we have a list of proposals for spending. We each staple our proposals to this report. As long as the total of funds used in the proposals does not exceed the new funds available, there is no problem everything is paid from new funds.(edited)
The problem arises when there are not enough new funds to fund everybody.
In this case, we need a system to decide which proposals get funding from the new money (for free) and which proposals get funding from the budget of the folks that proposed them.
This is why we weight it based on TRs burnt. The TR is a chance to steer the direction of the new money in the system.
When the price is depressed, there is still new money entering the system, but it's negative money. Negative money is when we take VIVA and turn it back into VIP. When this happens the VIP is distributed to the entire liquidity pool in a proportional fashion. We also have the ability to simply delete money if we have to. This is only triggered when the price is between 1% -15% of target. In this case money just gets deleted from the balances of the mints.
This is an important balancing mechanism, because it allows individuals to benefit even when the mints collectively are acting against the interests of the individuals.
Remember we use Capitalism / Fiscal Responsibility to fund Social Responsibility. So when mints set a target and just mint willy nilly, it means the bulk of their money just goes to VIP holders.
So collectively the mints function as a boardroom full of VPs who are all talking and trying to get funding for their projects. TRs are given to each one by virtue of how many chairs they hold.
Every contract accepted by a mint is paid by the mint. Every project accepted by a VP is paid from the budget of the VP. The real question being debated is how much are we increasing or decreasing the overall budget and the budgets of each VP respectively.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 4:24 PM
Will CH & mints have daily access to the aggregate total value of VIVA to help picture funds availability ? Or will it be inferrable from the market deviation from peg value for VIVA ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 4:27 PM
Unclaimed funds is an assumption that a 1% price deviation is remedied by a 1% change to supply.
Example, price is $11, we increase the supply by 10%, with the new 10% being up for debate.(edited)
If the price is $9, we decrease the supply by 10%, pushing 10% of supply from reserves to VIP.
Hey all it's raining here. That usually results in a temporary power outage for me and as a result of no power, no internet either.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 5:29 PM
Hey good news everyone! As of today, MedicAxess in Mexico has legal authority to manage medical records including prescriptions. This means we could launch a pilot project for prescription management and tracking right away and roll it out all over Mexico, just need to hire devs now. I'm letting the folks handling the USA side of this know, but I wanted ya'll to be first in the loop.
kooshikoo-September 21, 2107 at 5:37 PM
Wow, any idea when the mint could be operational?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 5:39 PM
I'm screening devs and I'm going to bring the USA side in tighter now we're ready from a legal perspective here.
I'd like to see a pilot project roll out within 90 days which means the mint would have to be operational in 45 days.
Since VIVA was created to meet the needs of the MedicAxess project and not the otherway around, the mint setup for MedicAxess is basically the default configuration.
By that I mean a mint who's job is tracking and record keeping and selling controlled access agreements to said information.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 5:48 PM
That's.... Big news. Will the mint be tracking on a metadata level or with unique patient identifiers ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 5:51 PM
So umm, am I allowed to talk about the fact that in my email as of this morning, we now have both sweden and singapore with legal authority to operate and the last bits remaining are coming together ahead of schedule?
Joe-September 21, 2107 at 5:51 PM
For GV?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 5:53 PM
Yeah for GV
kooshikoo-September 21, 2107 at 6:03 PM
I just realized something kinda obvious, that if we set up an incubator, that could be a mint, and a crowd-funding platform could also be a mint. I think those two things should have high priority.
malvino-September 21, 2107 at 6:03 PM
A question: If you're in retirement mode what happens with VIP from sinked TR?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:05 PM
@ malvino Under the current system it's a flag that excludes you from any gain to VIP that is not the result of a direct account to account transfer.
You can't gain on retirement while in retirement.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:06 PM
@ kooshikoo I'm definitely on the same page with you on that one. We might need to convince these terrific VIVA people to go with an incubator idea
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:07 PM
Actually we're planning to sell shares in that idea @ kooshikoo & @ NetEnergy
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:08 PM
Just one thing at a time, but an incubator is part of the horizon.
A lot of things just work out easier for us once we own our own bank.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:17 PM
When I was younger like in elementary school my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. I told her "A billionaire!"
One day everyone here will be a Billionaire if they stick with it and tough out the tough times too. But we're going to make a lot of millionaires on the way.
Not that the system will let you accumulate like that, but you'll be able to spend like one.
kooshikoo-September 21, 2107 at 6:19 PM
I refuse to become a billionaire. Nobody should have that kind of wealth.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:20 PM
Well there is a difference between actually accumulating that much wealth and trying to spend it.
[One of the premises of VIVA is:] There is nothing wrong with spending like a billionaire. The problem is one of accumulation.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:22 PM
VIVA is very "anti-accumulation" and very high on the "use it or lose it" side because we believe that money is only worth what you can buy with it.
Money is just a type of energy
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:22 PM
Having available capital to pursue worthy projects is one of the end results of wealth. Money is not evil. The misapplication produces bad results.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:23 PM
When energy accumulates, too much in too small of an area it can cause major damage.
So we have a lot of safeguards.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:24 PM
The first is use it or lose it. Liquid VIVA that sits for over a year in one place and doesn't move is taxed via demurrage in an attempt to shrink the blockchain.
The maximum VIP a single account can have is configurable by the Crown Holders, but presently sits at 100 years of VIP drawdowns and the drawdown amount is fixed at 24 VIVA daily.
Now, that doesn't mean that a joint account can't have more. The cap there goes up by the number of Crown Holders pledging their crown to the account.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:26 PM
If someone is in retirement mode. Will TR still sink to VIVA ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:26 PM
But a single owner account is capped there.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:26 PM
Er ah VIP ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:27 PM
Good question @ NetEnergy and the answer is at the moment no, The exception being crownholder accounts which are just fundamentally very different things. But this can be changed if we're changing fundamentals about the way TRs work anyways.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:28 PM
If CH is in drawdown mode will TR sink to VIP. ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:28 PM
It's ok to think of VIVA and VIP as the same thing. VIP is a promise of future VIVA. VIVA is VIP brought forward.
Yes at the moment a Crown holder by default auto sinks their TR and retirement mode isn't considered because it's irrelevant for Crown Holders.
Crown Holders already have the ability to tap VIP to pay contracts. The network just needs to have space to allow it.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:31 PM
So there are 2 types of accounts in the VIVA system. One is a Crown Holder account and it has a set of rules designed to allow the Crown Holder to make their will felt in the world. The other is a normal account, a "non-crown" or as I call them, an anonymous account.
Anonymous accounts are very similar to BTC or Monero addresses, they have no identity tied to them and as such they are very tightly controlled, but the overall goal is to allow people to have a living wage.
You can if you want, have as many non-crown accounts as you want.
But you still have to deal with a mint and a crownholder because only crownholders can give these things out.
They can be thought of as subaccounts of the mint in which they are created.
They can be transfered once created to any other mint, on demand. But the receiving mint has to accept you.
In this way we can work around geo political stupidty like the US Embargo of Cuba. Cubans can't have an account with a mint based in the USA. But nothing stops them from having their account in Canada, Mexico or anywhere else that isn't part of the unilateral embargo.
So going back to the differences...
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:39 PM
Anyone can "own" a Crown because it's just a software license. But to utilize it to create a "Crown Holder" account, you do need to register an identity in the system. You do this by getting someone else who has a Crown Holder account to sign off on the fact you are who you say you are as an individual. This is of course big and scary in the crypto world, but it is important we all know eachother at that level because there are very few (a max of 42,000), who can have Crown Holder accounts and we are all operating businesses that interact with eachother and rely on eachother. This is how we get around bad actors. The only people allowed to act are people we know and honestly you should not directly peer your mint with a mint controlled by someone you haven't sat down to dinner with yet.
Now one other thing I have never talked about, but should talk about since it is important.
The system described above is what is called "an ol' boys club" it is very exclusive and it leads to centralization of power.
Hence there are two things in the system to combat that.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:42 PM
The first is an idea I shamelessly stole from @ Someguy which is to have a mint where all accounts are anonymous. You just register a key and you're good to go.
Identical to https://anon.steem.network/ in many regards.
This will allow people such as Snowden and Assange to have accounts without risk of compromising their identity and provide a valuable resource for people who are being politically persecuted.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:44 PM
But won't VIVA become a target since it is now assisting "terrorist" and "enemy combatants"
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:44 PM
That mint will have a Crown that is faulty and unable to mint money on it's own. Thus it will rely on voluntary donations. It will also only be accessible via the CAN.
No website in other words.
GV will be unable to peer directly with that for legal reasons. But there is nothing stopping any non-gateway mint from peering with it.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:46 PM
So awards can be sent to"faulty" crown account for such worthy causes as S and N ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:47 PM
Correct, but you do need to have a destination contract.
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 6:50 PM
If Snowden went to a VIVA ATM. Don't most crypto ATM ask for ID ? wouldn't the Visa and MasterCard Network get upset for sponsoring and aiding "enemy" ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 6:50 PM
A contract is a payment instruction and it's referenced by it's registered address. You can register aliases for them so they are easy to remember, but by default they are not aliased. So you have a combination SHA256(2) and SHA256(3) concatenated with a . in the middle. Example 0000000000000000.FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF is the contract address for the faucet belonging to anonymint. But the anon mint cannot register aliases, because it operates default untrusted.
A true VIVA Cash Station asks for 2 pieces of info, a recipient phone and a MTCN or money transfer control number. If you have those, you have the money and it's one reason viva.cash is so delayed.
We have to send the MTCN out of band somehow, because it's now considered trivial to intercept inflight SMS messages.
And of course the phone number is a well known identifier.
So going back to identity...
You have a main account that represents a contract with instructions to pay on demand any request authorized by and a list of subkeys as well as a "master key" that's sole purpose is to reject the subkeys in the even of compromise. You can escrow your master key material and if you lose access to a subkey you can use the masterkey to revoke any future activity by that subkey. Your master key is therefore used only for key change events.
Each key can be used to sign additional contracts on your behalf and each contract has a unique identifier.
The mint that issues a contract has the right, but not the obligation to register either a public (expensive) or private (should be free) alias for any contract, or issue no alias at all.
When you alias a contract, a public alias is top level and looks like @ galaxyvault or @ williambanks
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:00 PM
A private alias is very much like an email. williambanks @ galaxyvault
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 7:00 PM
So the contract kinda works like a call option ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:01 PM
A contract is just instructions on what must happen when certain events occur.
A default account is "pay on demand, any amount signed by key X up to the amount of funds available".
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 7:04 PM
Do both the public and private alias wind up recorded on the blockchain ledger ?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:04 PM
A vX example vUSD would be "check PRICE VIVAUSD, mintordebit X, pay destination"
@ NetEnergy Only public addresses are on the public ledger Private addresses are replaced in flight by the responsible mint.
However all contracts are public, and there are two types of contracts. Transferable and non-transferable.
A transferable contract represents one which can be moved between mints. A new account with a mint is a transferable contract. You can sign a transfer request and the mint that issued your account must comply by sharing your balances with the new mint and then deleting your balance from their books. From there if there is an alias, the alias is deleted and no new payments will be honored by the network and you'll need to get an alias from your new mint.
This also means if a mint starts acting stinky, they are penalized by the network agreeing to force-ably transfer all balances from the misbehaving mint and depeering it. This would happen if for example the feds raided a mint and seized the equipment. The mint is compromised. Therefore the network de-peers with it, but takes over responsibility for the accounts / contracts.
This is why all contracts have expiry, even a master/crownholder account has a lifetime of max 100 years before it MUST be transfered to a new account.
Nontransferable contracts however are not moved between mints. These are 100% opaque and represent private business of the mint that creates them.
An example would be the prescription records for MedicAxess. Only MedicAxess authorized clients can see that info, and you cannot transfer the records out from MedicAxess in any meaningful way.
They are still blockchain backed, but only MedicAxess has the tools to decrypt the data and deal with it. In this regard even worker nodes working directly on it, only deal with encrypted information. It is only the locallly installed MedicAxess information server within the hospital, clinic or pharmacy that can decrypt this information and there is a very strict procedure and limits on how much information can be accessed by any single node.
Example a Pharmacy would see a list of currently prescribed meds, any known drug allergies and a patient name and DOB, but to get that, the client needs to hand them an EMV compatible smart card containing their key and the key is not accessible itself. It is the card that decrypts the data sent to it.
Using the key stored in a secure enclave.
Even something like the Govt of Mexico, where we have plans for a pilot with the municipal insurance of TJ (police, firefighters public servants), can only see data regarding patients they onboard and not for example patients of the same hospitals or Drs who are not granting explicit permission.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:25 PM
There is an ER and mass casualty function that does bypass this, but it is only made available to ER physicians and it only shows data marked explicitly as "ER relevant" by the physician who did the intake. In this case it's structured a bit differently, but I don't want to go into too many details. The point being there are contracts which can and contracts which cannot transfer...
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 7:29 PM
Mostly the intake and assessment are done by nurses
NetEnergy-September 21, 2107 at 7:31 PM
Triage is done by nurses. I have been in codes where the MD walked in with a cup of coffee and said "ok" and walked out. We did it all. The nurse will need access too.
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:36 PM
@ NetEnergy Yes intake and assessment are done by nurses, but final commit of the record is authorized by an attending physician or medical provider There is within every organization at least one person who bares liability for the correctness of a record. He or she can delegate this, but in our system the key, the right to sign and encrypt is owned by the person ultimately responsible for the record. However there are 3 copies on the blockchain. One is the patient copy it is encrypted using the patient's key on their card. The other is the provider level and this is signed by the individual who inputs the record, but encrypted by the organizations keyring. This key ring should contain a unique key for every point of differentiation. The third only occurs when data is marked as ER Relevant, and this is protected by a different method that allows inter-org sharing under limited circumstances. It does not work how you think though. There isn't like a single "MedicAxess" key that could be compromised and divulge the records of world + dog
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:39 PM
It's probably also incorrect to call this a blockchain in the traditional sense. It's a graph of attributes and their edges (connections)
Which then evolves over time. [...]
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:42 PM
My point is just to take some time here and explain why VIVA works the way it works.
You see MedicAxess was not created to demonstrate the power of VIVA, it's the other way around. VIVA was created to provide the technology needed for MedicAxess, but as we were designing this we realized there was enormous flexibility in "the system we will build to power MedicAxess" and from there VIVA was born.
Everything and I mean everything in the VIVA world exists within the CAN or Content Addressable Network. Our "blockchain" is a graph database with cryptographic integrity and relational isolation.
We share only what we absolutely have to, and unlike other "blockchains", everything within VIVA defaults to encrypted and private.
The only thing that resembled typical blockchain style stuff is the monetary settlement component in which everything ultimately boils down to bulk settlement operations in VIVA Coin and changes of ownership on digital asset identifiers.
In fact one of the original names we considered for VIVA was DAMP (Digital Asset Management Platform), but we figured that name was all wet.(edited)
Craigers-September 21, 2107 at 7:50 PM
Wait, if I'm in retirement mode, what happens to my TRs at the end of the 90 days?
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:51 PM
@ Craigers If you're a Crown Holder, they sink. If you're not a Crown Holder, then they just mint VIP into the VIP pool
Ugh that name VIP pool has all the charm of ATM machine and PIN number.
VIP is VIVA Investor Pool
William Banks-September 21, 2107 at 7:55 PM
Anyways, you can still see the effects of DAMP in the VIVA terminology. Pool, Making it Rain (when you give an AR to someone), channels, streams, rivers etc. Lots of water terminology ultimately sources from that. But then it was realized that DAMP was too much like Steem, Ripple, Waves etc but with none of the positive connotations.(edited)
VIVA was an older name that was originally rejected. Then I came up with DAMP and the others decided VIVA was better after all
[...]
freo-September 21, 2107 at 9:37 PM
@ William Banks if I own 5 crowns but 10 TR's cause I bought some, will all 10 sink or only 5 if i'm in retirement mode?
decibel-September 21, 2107 at 10:11 PM
[...]@ William Banks, FWIW my vote is that even if in retirement you should still participate in TRs sinking and anything else that your VIP would get you if you were not in retirement. Certainly at least TRs, since those aren't really directly related...
September 22, 2017
NetEnergy-September 22, 2017 at 10:08 AM
So. To clarify. If someone has an account today on TQ but they are not a CH and that person buys VTR on the exchange. Will the VTR sink into a VIP balance for them in November ?
William Banks-September 22, 2017 at 2:01 PM
@freo Great question. At the moment, all TRs sink after 90 days. With the upcoming changes, you'll have the right to issue a TR but it won't be automatic. If you don't issue the TR then once every 90 days you'll autoissue and it'll be marked for sinking. So only 5 would sink 1 for each crown.
William Banks-September 22, 2017 at 2:03 PM
@ NetEnergy Yes changes if they happen would not change the current ruleset. We would just issue a new contract type and deprecate the old contract with an effective date of Nov 1.
Moondancer762-Today at 4:11 PM
Instead of the Crownholders voting with TRs, what about doing an average of the amount each mint shows as "unclaimed?"
William Banks-Today at 4:14 PM
@ Moondancer762 That's what we do now, it doesn't work out because the network is the average point of view of all mints and if there is a drastic difference then it doesn't settle.(edited)
Moondancer762-Today at 4:14 PM
Oh, got it. Now I better understand the reason for the change.
Moondancer762-Today at 4:16 PM
I really like cryptomancer's 90-day cycle scenarios, coupled with the 10-TR per vote to help somewhat equalize the difference between those with lots of Crowns and those with only one.
Craigers-Today at 4:27 PM
So on the VTR market... if we have more VTR than crowns at the end of 90 days, I assume this time around they all sink to VIP.... what about next quarter under the new structure?
End of conversation as of September 22, 2017, 4:31 p.m.
data retrieved by @Moondancer762 and confirmed by @merej99
@WilliamBanks is the CTO and chief architect of the VIVA project.
For information about the VIVA project please read our whitepapers
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