Open Transactions Servers for Peercoin/Peershares

General
1

There has been discussion here before on Open Transactions. It is basically a federated server transaction platform that offers more security than centralized providers and more scalability and speed than the blockchain.

I was wondering whether it would be worth looking into setting up dedicated servers than can process Peercoin/Peershares transactions.

Here is a quote from OT developer Chris Odom (FellowTraveler), with the most relevant part in bold:

Let's say we are going to trade some alt-coin, like PPCoin or Primecoin, inside OT. That means we would have to issue units inside OT, based on actual alt-coin units on a blockchain somewhere.

That means we have to do one of two things:

  1. Have a trusted issuer who is trusted to hold the coins and to issue the units inside OT. (The OT server itself cannot lie on the receipts, but the issuer still must be trusted to hold those coins.)

  2. Eliminate the need for a trusted issuer by storing the coins in a Multisig Voting Pool: Bitcoinism: Voting Pools: How to Stop the Plague of Bitcoin Heists, Thefts, Hacks, Scams, and Losses
    In this case, OT will support this soon, but it will only work with alt-coins who support multi-sig. And even for those, it will only be available if specific OT servers actually choose to create voting pools for those alt-coins. If you can’t find a pool of OT servers with a Primecoin pool, then you can’t use Primecoin in OT (except through a trusted issuer.)

Either of the above two options will allow you to use any blockchain-based currency inside OT, Bitcoin or any alt-coin.

With the Open Transactions Multisig Voting Pools to be apparently released within months, it may be worthwhile to start planning this now in order to give us first mover advantage. I firmly believe that something similar to this will be have widespread use in the future, and getting a headstart may allow Peercoin to have a higher usage within the system for exchange with other currencies etc. It will also allow Peershares to be traded almost immediately without relying on third-party exchanges to add each implementation.

If a project was set up on peer4commit for community OT servers or something, I would be happy to donate quite a bit, and I imagine others would be too.

2

Open Transactions will be great for efficient trading in a decentralized manner. The future is bright :slight_smile:

3

That’s a really good idea. It would be really nice if we could get a head start.

I still totally believe in OT and that it’s a very nice friend of Peercoin. I also suspect that something down the line of OT could be very nice to use on mesh nets (whereas heavy blockchains will be super bad). But that’s another topic.

4

This is how to install it https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-Debian_Ubuntu.txt

5

I sent Sunny some resources about OT so he could learn more, but he has a question…

"Hey Sunny, you didn't seem to know that much about Open Transaction, so I wanted to give you some resources to look at in case you get asked about it again. I've actually met the guy in charge of the project before, Chris Odom, except it was before crypto-currencies existed. I met him for different reasons, though he most likely wouldn't remember me.

The reason why people in our community seem to be excited about this is because once Peercoin’s value rises and the fee is much higher, OT would allow us to keep using Peercoin as a transactional currency without having to worry about the higher fees. Here is something somebody posted on Reddit…

“It’s designed to specialize as secure transactional medium with its multisig federated server model while Peercoin is designed to specialize as a secure backbone currency. Attach both of these components together and we will have the best of both worlds! Also, Peercoin isn’t dependent on transaction fees like other PoW coins do. Therefore, Peercoin won’t care if OT takes all the transaction revenue.”

Anyway, as for the resources, here is the first video introduction that I got to OT…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teNzIFu5L70

Here is an informational page, plus a bunch of interviews are linked to the right…

http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=About

And here is the thread about it on our forum in case you wanted to know what our members thought…

http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2184.0"

"Yeah open transactions certainly could complement peercoin in its role of cheaper transaction processing. I probably should take a better look at it. Although for various reasons I somehow got the (possibly wrong) feeling that it never got very popular. I do remember markm on bitcointalk touting some game currencies long time ago.

Do you know the current state of their network? Roughly how much volume going on there compared to various bitcoin/altcoin exchanges?"

Does anyone know the answer to his question? I thought OT was still in testing, but I admit I haven’t been keeping track of it. As for Sunny’s thought that it doesn’t seem too popular, I think that’s most likely because it’s not a coin that you can profit from.

6

PrimeCoin now has it’s own page on http://coinwik.org a wikipedia listing all the alt coins to help you quickly find facts and links about your favorite coin.

http://coinwik.org/PrimeCoin

If you know of other facts and links that can be added to the page, please feel free to update the page.

7

[quote=“Sentinelrv, post:5, topic:2427”]I sent Sunny some resources about OT so he could learn more, but he has a question…

"Hey Sunny, you didn't seem to know that much about Open Transaction, so I wanted to give you some resources to look at in case you get asked about it again. I've actually met the guy in charge of the project before, Chris Odom, except it was before crypto-currencies existed. I met him for different reasons, though he most likely wouldn't remember me.

The reason why people in our community seem to be excited about this is because once Peercoin’s value rises and the fee is much higher, OT would allow us to keep using Peercoin as a transactional currency without having to worry about the higher fees. Here is something somebody posted on Reddit…

“It’s designed to specialize as secure transactional medium with its multisig federated server model while Peercoin is designed to specialize as a secure backbone currency. Attach both of these components together and we will have the best of both worlds! Also, Peercoin isn’t dependent on transaction fees like other PoW coins do. Therefore, Peercoin won’t care if OT takes all the transaction revenue.”

Anyway, as for the resources, here is the first video introduction that I got to OT…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teNzIFu5L70

Here is an informational page, plus a bunch of interviews are linked to the right…

http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=About

And here is the thread about it on our forum in case you wanted to know what our members thought…

http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2184.0"

"Yeah open transactions certainly could complement peercoin in its role of cheaper transaction processing. I probably should take a better look at it. Although for various reasons I somehow got the (possibly wrong) feeling that it never got very popular. I do remember markm on bitcointalk touting some game currencies long time ago.

Do you know the current state of their network? Roughly how much volume going on there compared to various bitcoin/altcoin exchanges?"

Does anyone know the answer to his question? I thought OT was still in testing, but I admit I haven’t been keeping track of it. As for Sunny’s thought that it doesn’t seem too popular, I think that’s most likely because it’s not a coin that you can profit from.[/quote]

Yes its nothing at all like a coin. In OpenTranscation (OT) there is nothing like a blockchain. You don’t even have to keep the receipts (although its encouraged). Thus makes me think that OT will be perfect for cell-phone use (they guys over OT told me that cell-phone manufacturers have already been in contact with them) and I suspect it (or at least something very similar) will be the preferred tech to use in mesh networks - which will be the future for network freedom. Mesh networks can actually be run by Raspberry PI, wireless, with libs like this Babel — a loop-avoiding distance-vector routing protocol . I suspect some of these nodes will then create secured tunnels through internet to other side of the world and connect us all. The Bitcoin blockchain might be to fat to fit, but OT would work very well in this environment.

The idea of putting everything on the blockchain is, in my opinion, silly. The blockchain is a distributed store of value (tied up in asset/token). Why not use other techs for other parts of the plumbing in the new financial network.

I can definitely see how people will be using OT without even realizing that they do so. OT is not something that you can really “own”, you can “only” create servers and charge a fee.

EDIT: OT can have coin like stuff created in it, but I think that is a bad idea, because these coins will depend on the set of servers handling the contracts. I’d rather have my store of value, spread out across many more computers (also one of the reasons why 3-5 super Bitcoin mining pools is a bad idea… it works until it doesn’t and not much is required to mess with the system. (Only a handful of people with guns :surrender:) ). :rant:

8

Does anyone know the answer to Sunny’s question about volume above?

9

Copy paste from IRC channel: #opentransactions on irc.freenode.net this morning:

Guest49290 (pillow): If Peercoin wants to be tradable in OT voting pools, they’d need to produce a Peercoin client that implement the Voting Pool Wallet API, (once it’s finalized)
The amount of trading happening in OT is low now, but voting pools don’t exist yet…

…

Guest49290> I believe justusranvier said that the trading happening is low, which tells me that there actually is trading going on. Is there anyway to get some hard data?
(stats)

…

you could use it, and afaik knotwork is using it for a gameserver (with game tokens)
You’d have to ask the server operators. There is no global repository for that kind of data

…

personally I think OT will have an upswing when voting pools is implemented. I mean… low cost, decentralized… it solves a lot of issues.
it would give them a big advantage over the other alts
what’s this?
voting pools solve the problem of exchanges losing/stealing cryptocurrency deposits
nod
tell us when they are realling start working on it, then I’nm going to buy some^^

EDIT 1: voting pools whitepaper: Category:Voting Pools - Open Transactions

EDIT 2: This is the Category:Voting Pool Wallet API - Open Transactions that justusranvier was talking about. This is what we have to do. The cost benefit here must be very good. I can’t believe that copy+pasting the Bitcoin code (someone will for sure do that, likely OT deves themselves for references and market purposes) and patching Peercoin will be that difficult. For sure other up and coming altcoin will do this, just to stand out from the crowd and get some attention.

It would be amazing if we created some servers too (I’m not experienced enough to do that, I would probably create a big door with a welcome sign for hackers).

10

Does this mean we’d have to implement it into Peerunity, maybe v0.3?

11

Does this mean we’d have to implement it into Peerunity, maybe v0.3?[/quote]

I’ve not looked into how Peerunity works, but an un-qualified guess would be that we would have to patch Peercoin and Peershares too. The thing here is that the voting pool wallet api is about enabling OT to interface with ONE blockchain (please correct me if I’m wrong, I might very well be) and Peerunity is all about fusing together many blockchains. Peerunity isn’t exactly a competing technology to OT, but plugin Peercoin and Peershares into OT is probably the way to go.

I’m of course totally wrong here. I’ve no clue what I’m talking about. Just guessing randomly. Sorry.

12

Well, current implementation of Peerunity is just a Peercoin fork with some features. Features can be added relatively easy to Peerunity (and if proven secure and popular to the official Peercoin wallet). When a protocol change is required it will be more difficult as that would require an update for all wallets at the same time, as we saw with update to v0.4.

To me it looks like OT can be implemented without protocol change given the requirement is just connecting to an api, but I can be wrong.

13

I made a request about this on the Peerunity board, even though it may be a while before voting pools are ready.

14

[quote=“Cybnate, post:12, topic:2427”]Well, current implementation of Peerunity is just a Peercoin fork with some features. Features can be added relatively easy to Peerunity (and if proven secure and popular to the official Peercoin wallet). When a protocol change is required it will be more difficult as that would require an update for all wallets at the same time, as we saw with update to v0.4.

To me it looks like OT can be implemented without protocol change given the requirement is just connecting to an api, but I can be wrong.[/quote]
From what I understand V.Pool concept we will probably have to rise the P2SH sig limit.

15

[quote=“kac-, post:14, topic:2427”][quote=“Cybnate, post:12, topic:2427”]Well, current implementation of Peerunity is just a Peercoin fork with some features. Features can be added relatively easy to Peerunity (and if proven secure and popular to the official Peercoin wallet). When a protocol change is required it will be more difficult as that would require an update for all wallets at the same time, as we saw with update to v0.4.

To me it looks like OT can be implemented without protocol change given the requirement is just connecting to an api, but I can be wrong.[/quote]
From what I understand V.Pool concept we will probably have to rise the P2SH sig limit.[/quote]
Hmm, that is about the limit of 3 we have on multisig support? That would be a protocol change. I don’t understand V.Pool concept though.

16

In few words - to withdrawal real PPCs from federated OT servers you need m from n of them to accept your recipe/balance/withdrawal-request and place their signature on transaction input.