Voting NO on anchor and Oracle master grants

[Mitchell Berry]

144 blocks a day, 30 days a month, 0.44 per anchor. That's still rough 144*30*0.44=$1,900 a month

That's 40 months worth of a marketing budget spent in one grant round that brought in exactly zero customers and absolutely no corporate interest whatsover 6 months later.

If only we as a community could afford such things.

 

[Schalk Bower]

That's 40 months worth of a marketing budget spent in one grant round that brought in exactly zero customers and absolutely no corporate interest whatsover 6 months later.

If only we as a community could afford such things.

Yup definitely, hence my post here: https://factomize.com/forums/threads/voting-no-on-anchor-and-oracle-master-grants.3423/#post-25144

Once we have open source anchor code (which we as an ANO committed to doing without any grant funding). I think it still makes sense to recoup the transaction fees to do the anchoring through a grant.

But I don't feel a grant should need to pay anything more than the transaction fees.

 

[Keith Pincombe]

We don't need to anchor into bitcoin either, ethereum, BCH, and Litecoin are valid alternatives IMO

 

[Nate Miller]

I think we definitely want to decentralize the oracle and anchor. I actually had no idea it wasn't decentralized (shame shame). In most protocols that require an oracle, each node operator runs an oracle. What's the feasibility of this for Factom? In terms of the anchor, I believe we should anchor into Bitcoin as it is currently the most robust POW protocol. Is there anyway we could have the anchoring rotate between ANOs in some way?

 

[Niels Klomp]

You could alternate between feds I guess. I want to have audits then

 

[Quintilian]

Some quick math based on https://billfodl.com/pages/bitcoinfees $0.44 per transaction.

144 blocks a day, 30 days a month, 0.44 per anchor. That's still roughly 144*30*0.44=$1,900 a month for anchoring into Bitcoin

We don't necessarily need multiple anchors to bitcoin. We could have anchors going into blockchains dependent on their fees at the time. It could even be dynamic; having an oracle (similar to Pegnet?) fetch prices of anchoring and automatically have it to switch between the most cost-effective chains dependent on current prices.

In fact it was envisioned originally that all authority servers would do anchoring; so we could have ANOs picking it up as a pledge, running dockerized anchoring software where they set parameters themselves for which blockchains they enter into at what price points etc.

 

[Alex]

The anchors are not time sensitive either so i think we could go lower than the market rate in the knowledge that there is a high probability an anchor will get posted eventually.

 

[Niels Klomp]

Security wise they are.

Obviously not for instance a second resolution or something. But these anchors are there for a reason and thus you do not want the interval to become too large

 

[Alex]

Up to a point, but we’re not at particularly high risk of someone rewriting the chain here. A window of several hours without an anchor would almost certainly be sufficient.

 

[Niels Klomp]

Huh? Let's remove it altogether then. The shorter the window the lower the chance

 

[Schalk Bower]

The anchors are not time sensitive either so i think we could go lower than the market rate in the knowledge that there is a high probability an anchor will get posted eventually.

I believe they are time sensitive, other than the obvious security benefits they bring, it brings that extra layer of finality and trust. Once an entry is anchored into Bitcoin it gives that extra layer of confidence.

I don't think it would be wise to drop Bitcoin as an anchor. From a marketing point of view, something like:

The Factom protocol anchors into Bitcoin, inheriting their security as well.

Sounds much better than saying XYZ coin.

 

[Schalk Bower]

Just as an update, we plan to get the auditor/backup anchorer completed in roughly 3 months.