Next Steps for Chronos Crypto Youtube Channel

General
1

Hi everyone,

Now that the Intro to Peercoin video has been launched, we have a couple options on where to go from here. I am open to producing more videos for the community, and I think we have some great synergistic possibilities between the Chronos Crypto channel and the Peercoin brand.

One thing I learned from the Intro to Peercoin video is that quality production takes a lot more effort than I anticipated. There’s a significant difference between producing live content on the fly, as I do on ChessWhiz TV, and producing a professional-grade presentation with carefully researched content and a slide deck.

Anyway, I just wanted to open the discussion on what might be the community’s biggest priorities in terms of producing Peercoin videos with the marketing fund. Here are some options, where each one of these bullet points could be its own video.

Getting Started with Peercoin:

[ul][li]A Tour of Peerunity[/li]
[li]Working with Peercoin Cold Wallets[/li]
[li]How to Buy Peercoin[/li]
[li]Minting For the Rest of Us[/li][/ul]

Educational content:

[ul][li]The Power of Centralized Checkpoints[/li]
[li]Was Peercoin Pre-mined?[/li]
[li]The Rich Get Richer: 1% growth does not unfairly favor large stakeholders[/li]
[li]What We Know about Sunny King[/li]
[li]The Science of Peercoin Inflation[/li][/ul]

Peercoin Security:

[ul][li]The likelihood and mechanics of a 51% attack[/li]
[li]An in-depth look at the nothing-at-stake attack, minting on multiple chains[/li]
[li]How to launch a bribery attack[/li]
[li]An analysis of the long-distance history-revision attack (would require a lot of research)[/li]
[li]Debunking the time-drift attack[/li][/ul]

News and Updates:

[ul][li]Peercoin Newsletter #9[/li]
[li]NuBits Launch (the NuBits team would have to be involved in this)[/li][/ul]

These are just a few ideas, but clearly, we need to prioritize. Which of these topics do you feel are the most important? Is there another topic that you think should be covered?

Thanks for your input!

2

You doing this is alike this dream coming true. Peercoin need a “human face” put on it and your face isn’t a bad one :-*.

I think the most cost efficient would be videos about: what Peercoin is, the long term vision, how one gets started and then, very importantly, continuous small updates on what is happening in the Peercoin space (small because its cheap and news don’t have to be long to fill a void).

Contrary to what one might suspect, I think that myth debunking videos are less important. I think it requires much more work to persuade people who are dead set on refuting PoS as a valid consensus mechanism, then to get other people on board.

To properly, once and for all, debunk some myths it will require either empirical findings (i.e. the survival of the network for many years) or regorious academical research involving a cross-disciplinary studies using game theory, economics (probably not Keynesian or other mainstream ones, which narrows it down even further), computer science, statistics and so on.

Also, when reaching out to new minds, talking about how “broken” PoS might or might not be, is probably off putting.

Focusing on what happens next, like cool projects peer4commit, NuBits etc. that lifts the spirit for everyone, new and old.

Just my 5 peercents.

3

This is great stuff, and I vote yes! :slight_smile:
I think that the main reasons that keep people from investing in peercoin are these:

[ul][li]How can a pos network be attacked or destabilized, and how does peercoin deal with that?[/li]
[li]Why is checkpointing needed, and how is this phased out?[/li]
[li]How can transaction fees be a good thing?[/li]
[li]Why is permanent inflation acceptable? How does this relate to the inflation model of btc and ltc?[/li][/ul]

You have already cleared up most of these issues in the excellent peercoin intro video, but short one-issue videos will (probably) be found easier.

4

As far as i know it’s far more simple, they just don’t know peercoin or PoS so they don’t do research on PoS etc…
Thats the first point that should be changed.

5

I think the main reason why peercoin does not get the attention it deserves is that gavin and other highly respected people say that peercoin is not safe.

Here is one example from gavin: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1oi7su/criticisms_of_proofofstake/

I think Andrew Miller put it best: "The trouble with Proof-of-stake is that there is nothing at stake."

Consider the basic function of proof-of-work and the blockchain: together, they let the network come to a consensus when there are two (or more) different, competing chains.

Miners must decide to dedicate their hashing power to just one chain-- they cannot “bet on” more than one. So their best strategy is to work on the chain that they think most other miners are working on, and that quickly drives the system to a consensus on a single, best chain.

The trouble with proof-of-stake is there is no natural incentive stopping a miner from assigning their stake to multiple, competing chains. If you try to create such a system, you “go meta” – you started by trying to solve the transaction double-spend problem (which proof-of-work and the blockchain handle nicely), and end up trying to solve a proof-of-stake double-spend problem.

From this point of view we might produce a video about the nothing at stake problem and review

  • minting on different chains,
  • history revision attack.

But I doubt that a video is the best medium to counter these critical topics. If we do this video, we have to prepare it carefully.

I think you/we should we should start to produce videos about
-inflation model
-Working with Peercoin Cold Wallets
-Purpose of Checkpoints

By the way, it was fun to watch our tape, Chronos. Great job!
First, I wanted to tip you, but then I realised that it would be better to tip the market fund! Hope you get the money from there :wink:

6

Hi, Chronos

Your proposal to do a series of Youtube videos is fantastic. In my view, the most urgent topics are the first four:

• A Tour of Peerunity
• Working with Peercoin Cold Wallets
• How to Buy Peercoin
• Minting For the Rest of Us

How to buy Peercoin

I would amend this topic to “How to buy and sell Peercoin”

Minting For the Rest of Us

Why “the rest of us”? Consider changing to “Minting For All of Us”

A discussion on minting needs to be correctly framed, whether in the video, website or elsewhere. The temptation is to say that the benefit of minting to the individual is the 1% reward. This throws the topic off course. The benefit to the individual, first and foremost, is that minting secures the system. Only once has this been explained is it safe to say that individuals also benefit from a 1% annual incentive. This gets matters the right way round; do not allow the 1% tail to wag the network security dog.

Something I noticed in your 38-minute video is that you are open about issues facing peercoin; this is, of course, the right approach. In this spirit, I think you will have to acknowledge the present conflict between the need to mint and the need to keep coins safe by not having too many online. You can refer to cold-locked minting as a future solution, but what advice to give until then? Perhaps you can say that people should keep “most” coins in cold storage, but that any coins kept in the client “should” be minting, rather than lying idle. Unless anyone has a better idea?

Working with cold wallets

This is such a good topic. I think it will benefit from having two parts, especially if you intend to demonstrate a paper wallet “live”. So;

Part One - creating a paper wallet
Part Two - using a paper wallet

I am not sure “cold wallets” is the correct jargon; it should be paper wallets and cold storage.

“Your responsibilities”
I have an idea of a video that you might want to consider, provisionally called “Your responsibilities”. This would cover minting & wallet security. These topics are covered already by the videos that you suggest, but your videos are more geared to practicalities: “what it is” and “how to do it“.

I envisage “Your responsibilities” as more of a fireside chat, explaining that, if people want the benefits of decentralisation, they have to accept the responsibilities that go with it.

Thus, you must tell the viewer: you are responsible for the security of the network; you are responsible for the security of your wallet; you are responsible for a backup of private keys in the event of a hard drive failure, house fire, accident or death. There will be no deposit insurance, no bail-outs, no reimbursement by the bank in the event of theft – but that this is a good thing, because it is a culture of self-reliance. And that the steps to ensuring safety and security are easy.

Hopefully, such a video can help foster the right mental attitude, and save Peercoiners from unnecessary and preventable losses, such as those experienced by bitcoiners at Mt Gox and elsewhere.

“Myths”
I agree with Pillow’s comment: “Contrary to what one might suspect, I think that myth debunking videos are less important”. Debunking myths, particularly old ones, takes us back to those myths by drawing people’s attention to them. If you have too many videos rebutting myths, it can create the impression that Peercoin is under constant criticism, hence the need to post “defensive” videos. This can be counter-productive.

Watergate
Regarding the water, try using a slimmer glass, as the one you are using obscures you somewhat. Also, drink from the same hand - the glass usually appears from your left, but on one occasion it appeared from your right.

7

paper wallet: private and public key stored (together or separate, complete or divided in chunks) on paper (or aluminium, etc).

cold storage: wallet.dat stored on offline USB-stick (or other electronic medium)

Right?

EDIT: my preferred paper wallet is the inside of a can of beer. then I engrave my private key in there. then I fire up an ubuntu live-CD, and import the private key as it is written on the beer can (same thing with public key). if everything computes, I use the public key (when first generated I stored it on USB) to send coins. That way I can be 99.9999999% that no character is wrong or that ink will fade in time (spill coffee etc).

8

Bump

9

Just like to express my support for further videos in the series.

My list would be:

  • A tour of Peerunity (might need to wait till v0.2 release)
  • Working with cold storage (@pillow, engraved beercans will be popular to steal for tech savvy thieves)
  • The rich get rich myth debunking (had those questions about peercoin minting during meetups)
  • The science of Peercoin inflation
  • The Peercoin developers, what do we know about SK and other Peercoin developers (current and past).
    This can be documentary like.
  • Checkpoints and other unique safety measures/ safeguards in the Peercoin protocol

Looking forward to your proposals

10

I think the main reason why peercoin does not get the attention it deserves is that gavin and other highly respected people say that peercoin is not safe.

Here is one example from gavin: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1oi7su/criticisms_of_proofofstake/

I think Andrew Miller put it best: "The trouble with Proof-of-stake is that there is nothing at stake."

Consider the basic function of proof-of-work and the blockchain: together, they let the network come to a consensus when there are two (or more) different, competing chains.

Miners must decide to dedicate their hashing power to just one chain-- they cannot “bet on” more than one. So their best strategy is to work on the chain that they think most other miners are working on, and that quickly drives the system to a consensus on a single, best chain.

The trouble with proof-of-stake is there is no natural incentive stopping a miner from assigning their stake to multiple, competing chains. If you try to create such a system, you “go meta” – you started by trying to solve the transaction double-spend problem (which proof-of-work and the blockchain handle nicely), and end up trying to solve a proof-of-stake double-spend problem.

From this point of view we might produce a video about the nothing at stake problem and review

  • minting on different chains,
  • history revision attack.

But I doubt that a video is the best medium to counter these critical topics. If we do this video, we have to prepare it carefully.[/quote]

Hi Chronos! Your introduction video is excellent. :slight_smile:

I agree that any video about attacks on peercoin needs to be very well thought-out. I would also say that it should involve some contribution from the developers (Sunny, Sigmike, Jordan), to be more persuading - many people simply put more trust into authorities than into anybody else. Ideally, the video should be an interview with one of the devs. If this is not possible, it should refer to some text/paper from the devs.
Jordan’s counter arguments against the “Nothing at stake” argument can be read here:

This explanation from Jordan is however quite technically and too lengthy for a video, and does not take into account that other nodes than the attacker could mint on forked chains by using manipulated client software that the attacker publishes.

I have been thinking about the “Nothing at stake argument” for quite some time myself.
I think that a simplified model, which can easily be understood in a video, should distinguish between different types of actors, namely attackers, honest actors, and so called “rational” actors. Like this:
[size=8pt]
Attackers (Bad actors): Do mint only on one or several forked, shorter chains
Honest actors: Do mint only on the longest chain
So called “rational” actors: Do mint on all chains

First, an attacker or a group of attackers needs to propagate a double-spend transaction to the network and deliberately mint a forked block that includes the transaction that was rejected by the main network. Let’s assume they have published manipulated client software prior to the fork to get more actors to mint on their fork.
If all actors were “rational” and used the manipulated software to mint on both chains, then both chains would grow at the same speed, and consensus in the network were no longer possible. But the cost for being honest and not participating in this is only 1% per year at most, while the cost for participating can be up to 100% if the attack is successful and ruins the coin’s market value. It can thus easily be seen that there will always be a large number of honest actors, since there is a strong incentive to be honest. And as long as there are more coins held by minting honest actors than there are held by the attacker, the longest chain will grow the fastest, and the network will have consensus and be safe. [/size]

11

Chronos, another idea for a video:

A few months ago, several of us were discussing the dangers of the “brain wallet” on wallet.peercointalk.org (indeed, all brain wallets). The internet has endless stories of people who put in phrases (on other brain wallets), which are then hacked by super-algorithms and funds stolen

So, you could do a video explaining how supposedly random phrases and passwords are, in fact, easily compromised. And then, demonstrate with cards and dice how to create a truly random and secure private key. You might be able to have fun by slipping in a card trick, etc.

12

Thank you, everyone, for the feedback. You have shared a lot of great ideas. I’ll be sure to take note of the thoughts in this thread, as the channel develops.

I just rolled out a new informational video for a Ripple giveaway that came out on their blog today. In a couple days, I’ll post a video for the ongoing “10 PPC Raspberry Pi Node Giveaway” that we have running here. These smaller informational videos will go a long way toward keeping subscribers interested for when we roll out larger Peercoin-related content.

Thank you for your support!

EDIT: Raspberry Pi video is now live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdtdS1uibJA

13

Shared the Pi video on social media…

http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/2cbqn2/chronos_crypto_channel_receive_10_ppc_for_setting/

Facebook and Twitter are linked in the comments. Please like, share, retweet and favorite.

14

I saw that you have not set a custom URL yet, you should do that so it’s easier to find you channel and nobody can steal your name.

15

Thank you!

I didn’t know about this. I’ve now set up the channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/ChronosCrypto. Thank you!

16

Chronos Crypto has rolled out a new video, highlighting Coinographic’s 5 BTC coin design contest. Check it out!

This channel will be the host of the new videos being prepared for the redesigned Peercoin.net website, so we’ll be seeing quite a bit of activity in the upcoming month.

Thank you for your support!

17

Hi Chronos,

The light in your room makes you look very pale in this video.
That’s really a pity, because your videos are excellent apart from that.
I suspect you have got LEDs or Energy-saving-lamps in your room.

Maybe consider replacing them for halogen lamps, or traditional tungsten bulbs?
At least for the time of video-recording.

In your Peercoin-Intro video, it seems to be daylight -even better.

18

The lighting in the 38-minute video is perfect, stick with that

19

Thank you for the feedback. It seems that, although camera and audio are better than ever, lighting is worse than ever. I’ll make a change.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

20

[quote=“Chronos, post:16, topic:2679”]Chronos Crypto has rolled out a new video, highlighting Coinographic’s 5 BTC coin design contest. Check it out!

This channel will be the host of the new videos being prepared for the redesigned Peercoin.net website, so we’ll be seeing quite a bit of activity in the upcoming month.

Thank you for your support![/quote]

Yes the colors in this video is not as great as in your other video. Its kind of greyish and whitish and well… the backdrop is great on the other hand. Is that a giant little tree? Bonzai perhaps? Looks like a big miniature pine tree.