<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">The prior (and seemingly this) assurance contract proposals pay the<br>
miners who mines a chain supportive of your interests and miners whom<br>
mine against your interests identically.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The same is true today - via inflation I pay for blocks regardless of whether they contain or double spend my transactions or not. So I don't see why it'd be different in future.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">There is already a mechanism built into Bitcoin for paying for<br>
security which doesn't have this problem, and which mitigates the<br>
common action problem of people just sitting around for other people<br>
to pay for security: transaction fees. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>The article states quite clearly that assurance contracts are proposed only if people setting transaction fees themselves doesn't work. There's some reasonably good arguments that it probably won't work, but I don't assign very high weight to game theoretic arguments these days so it wouldn't surprise me if Satoshi's original plan worked out OK too.</div><div><br></div><div>Of course, by the time this matters I plan to be sipping a pina colada on my private retirement beach :) It's a problem the next generation can tackle, as far as I am concerned.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Considering the near-failure in just keeping development funded, I'm not sure where the believe this this model will be workable comes from</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Patience :) </div><div><br></div><div>Right now it's a lot easier to get development money from VC funds and rich benefactors than raising it directly from the community, so unsurprisingly that's what most people do. </div><div><br></div><div>Despite that, the Hourglass design document project now has sufficient pre-pledges that it should be possible to crowdfund it successfully once I get around to actually doing the work. And BitSquare was able to raise nearly half of their target despite an incredibly aggressive deadline and the fact that they hadn't shipped a usable prototype. I think as people get better at crafting their contracts and people get more experience with funding work this way, we'll see it get more common.</div><div><br></div><div>But yes. Paying for things via assurance contracts is a long term and very experimental plan, for sure.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">one time cost. I note that many existing crowdfunding platforms<br>
(including your own) do not do ongoing costs with this kind of binary<br>
contract.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Lighthouse wasn't written to do hashing assurance contracts, so no, it doesn't have such a feature. Perhaps in version 2.</div><div><br></div></div></div></div>