Augur (software): Difference between revisions
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== Criticism == |
== Criticism == |
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Augur has faced criticism from bitcoin advocates for deciding to build its decentralized application on the relatively younger Ethereum network. Augur has explained that Ethereum currently offers a better development platform for immediate deployment, that making use of bitcoin as the foundation for its codebase would not have offered clear security benefits and that, in any case, it intends to integrate into the bitcoin network through sidechains as soon that technology becomes available.<ref>{{Cite web|url = http://www.augur.net/blog/why-ethereum|title = Why Ethereum|date = February 13, 2015|accessdate = |website = Augur.net|publisher = |last = Krug|first = Joey}}</ref> Notably, since Ethereum went live in late July, it has amassed more than |
Augur has faced criticism from bitcoin advocates for deciding to build its decentralized application on the relatively younger Ethereum network. Augur has explained that Ethereum currently offers a better development platform for immediate deployment, that making use of bitcoin as the foundation for its codebase would not have offered clear security benefits and that, in any case, it intends to integrate into the bitcoin network through sidechains as soon that technology becomes available.<ref>{{Cite web|url = http://www.augur.net/blog/why-ethereum|title = Why Ethereum|date = February 13, 2015|accessdate = |website = Augur.net|publisher = |last = Krug|first = Joey}}</ref> Notably, since Ethereum went live in late July, it has amassed more than 200 GH/s in processing power (gaining more processing power in its first two weeks than bitcoin's in its first two years)<ref>{{Cite web|title = Ethereum Network Status |url = https://stats.ethdev.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title = (Bitcoin) Hash Rate |url = https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate}}</ref>, become the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency network after Bitcoin, Ripple and Litecoin, and over the weekend of August 14-15 registered the highest 24-hour trading volume of any cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.<ref>{{Cite web|title = Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations |url = coinmarketcap.com}}</ref> |
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==References== |
==References== |
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Revision as of 18:47, 16 August 2015
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Type of site | Non-profit foundation |
|---|---|
| Founded | San Francisco, California (November 2014) |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Industry | Prediction markets |
| URL | http://www.augur.net |
Augur is an open-source decentralized prediction market built using Blockchain technology. A demo of an alpha version of the platform was released June 15, 2015.[1] A crowdsale to support future development, the selection of refeeres and distribution of referee voting power begins on August 17, 2015.[2] It is projected for beta release by the end of Fall 2015 and live release by Winter 2015/16.[3]
The project seeks to leverage the "Wisdom of Crowds" (also known as "collective intelligence") — and the open, global, decentralized ledger functionality that blockchain technology provides — to generate better forecasts about any future event involving any major topic of widespread interest. The group's mission is to create an "Early Warning System for Everything."[4]
Augur is one of the first applications being built on Ethereum, a decentralized computing platform featuring digital contracts and a turing-complete programming language. The underlying network unit utilized by Augur is known as Reputation, which will be the unit used by the platform's referees to report event outcomes (whether predictions happened or not), whilst Bitcoin and Ether will be used for speculating on predictions. Augur can be used as a distributed oracle system, allowing other smart contracts to propose questions to it and allowing them to discover information about the real world without trusting a third party. In May 2015, Augur released a two-minute animated video titled "How Augur Works" narrated by Country Music star Shooter Jennings, the video provides a detailed explanation of Augur utilizing simplified language to increase understanding of the technology.[5] Following this, Augur made it to the finals in CNBC and Singularity University's Exponential Finance XCS Challenge in the Breakthrough Technology category, making it the only Blockchain technology to make it as a finalist.[6][7]
The platform has amassed growing media attention, including from The Wall Street Journal,[8] International Business Times,[9] Tech Crunch [10] and CoinDesk.[11]
"The consensus of large groups presents a near infallible way of predicting unknown events, and with this in mind Augur uses a decentralised network combined with an immutable blockchain to record predictions and outcomes," wrote Ian Allison of International Business Times. "In a strange and compelling sense the technology and its scale creates a tool for accurately predicting the future... It's a vibrant example of the sort of wiggy decentralised applications (DAPPs) that can be expected (predicted) to follow in lockstep with the type of technology underlying the bitcoin network." [9]
Background
Augur is a project that began with the purpose to build a scalable open source tool that will utilize the wisdom of crowds to improve decision making capabilities in a wide variety of fields. The project's uniqueness lies in its utilization of Ethereum, a decentralized platform similar to Bitcoin that will provide numerous improvements over other centralized prediction markets available in the past.
Augur's conceptual roots can be traced back to Aristotle's Politics, Frederich von Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society, Robin Hanson's concept of "Idea Futures", Paul Sztorc's "Truthcoin" whitepaper,[12] Vitalik Buterin's "Schellingcoin" concept [13] and the work of Stanford University computer scientist Joseph Bonneau.
One of the goals of Augur is to create a wide variety of inputs that utilize efficient statistical gathering models, therefore increasing accuracy of the prediction. In a 2012 FiveThirtyEight blog by Nate Silver, he discusses the efficiency of prediction markets and points out that the consensus of forecasts is often better than even the best-performing members of the group involved. Silver, known to be one of the few statisticians to outperform prediction markets, confirms that a consensus of data gathered by about a dozen models similar to his own FiveThirtyEight.com blog would be useful as the consensus of forecasts often performs better than even the best singular performer in the group used.[14] Silver has also stated that a prediction market given sufficient volume could be more accurate than Bayesian statistics.[15] Although great at forecasting things with ample data such as baseball and elections, Bayesian statistics can't predict more uncertain topics as well as prediction markets.
Augur became the only Blockchain technology that made it to the finals of the Exponential Finance XCS Challenge. The innovation in Augur's design resulted in the project being listed in the "Breakthrough Technology" category rather than Finance when it was accepted by the event. Judges from Forbes, Barclays, Deloitte, Wells Fargo and Credit Suisse voted Augur to the finals.[16] Coinbase selected Augur as one of it's five most exciting bitcoin projects in their "Bitcoin Trends In The First Half Of 2015" report, sharing the title included 21, Blockstream, Abra and Streamium.[17]
Development
The development of Augur began in October 2014 with the Alpha Prototype being available after some time in the development phase.[18] In April 2015, the very first contract was created utilizing Ethereum.[19]
In June 2015, the Augur Alpha was released to the general public.[20] The release is similar to the version used to demonstrate Augur at the Exponential Finance conference. Following the Alpha was a blog "What Is Reputation" that provides a video, infographic and FAQ that explain the importance and use of the Reputation Token within the Augur software. In the FAQ section of this post it is revealed that the Reputation Tokens will be distributed via a crowdsale that will occur about two weeks after the Ethereum Frontier launch.[21]
On July 22, 2015 Ethereum posted a blog "Frontier is coming" explicitly stating "There will be no countdown – Ethereum is not something that’s centrally ‘launched’, but instead emerges from consensus." regarding the launch.[22]
In early August 2015, Augur announced that 11 million Reputation Tokens will be distributed via a 45 day crowdsale that will begin on August 17th, 2015.[2][23] In a subsequent blog post, an explanation was provided by Augur's Tony Sakich detailing why a crowdsale distribution was necessary for the platform's decentralized oracle system to operate correctly.[24]
Academic and business affiliations
Much of the interest in Augur has been in academic circles in fields including Statistics, Mathematics, Cryptography, Economics, and Computer Science; the project includes Intrade founder Ron Bernstein and author of OvercomingBias.com and George Mason University Economics Professor Robin Hanson among its advisers.[25]
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Augur "could produce some incredibly useful data" and that it was "super exciting. We talk about it a lot internally."[26] Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and bitcoin entrepreneurs Erik Voorhees and Bo Shen have also expressed support for the platform.[27]
Marc Andreessen has expressed general interest in supporting a decentralized prediction market.[28]
Erik Voorhees, Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Bo Shen were listed as notable supporters that pre-purchased Reputation Tokens in August 2015.[24]
Criticism
Augur has faced criticism from bitcoin advocates for deciding to build its decentralized application on the relatively younger Ethereum network. Augur has explained that Ethereum currently offers a better development platform for immediate deployment, that making use of bitcoin as the foundation for its codebase would not have offered clear security benefits and that, in any case, it intends to integrate into the bitcoin network through sidechains as soon that technology becomes available.[29] Notably, since Ethereum went live in late July, it has amassed more than 200 GH/s in processing power (gaining more processing power in its first two weeks than bitcoin's in its first two years)[30][31], become the fourth most valuable cryptocurrency network after Bitcoin, Ripple and Litecoin, and over the weekend of August 14-15 registered the highest 24-hour trading volume of any cryptocurrency after Bitcoin.[32]
References
- ^ "The Augur Alpha is Now Available To Download!". Augur.net. June 16, 2015.
- ^ a b "Augur to issue 11 million REP tokens starting 17 August". Retrieved 2015-08-13.
- ^ Peterson, Jack; Krug, Joseph (November 17, 2014). "Augur: a Decentralized, Open-Source Platform for Prediction Markets" (PDF). Augur Whitepaper.
- ^ Despeignes, Peronet (July 13, 2015). "The Pressing Need for Augur".
- ^ Sakich, Tony (May 20, 2015). "How Augur Works Video". Augur.net.
- ^ "Decentralized Prediction Market Augur Reaches XCS Finals in 'Breakthrough' Category". Retrieved 2015-06-17.
- ^ "Blockchain Prediction Market Augur Elected as a 'Breakthrough' Finalist at Exponential Finance 2015 - Bitcoin Magazine". Retrieved 2015-06-17.
- ^ "BitBeat: Ethereum Opens Its 'Frontier' for Business". Retrieved 2015-07-31.
- ^ a b "Augur to issue 11 million REP tokens starting 17 August". Retrieved 2015-08-03.
- ^ "Vapor No More: Ethereum Has Launched". Retrieved 2015-08-01.
- ^ "Augur Bets on Bright Future for Blockchain Prediction Markets". Retrieved 2015-03-01..
- ^ Sztorc, Paul (August 24, 2014). "Truthcoin: Trustless, Decentralized, Censorship-Proof, Incentive-Compatible, Scalable Cryptocurrency Prediction Marketplace" (PDF).
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Buterin, Vitalik (March 28, 2014). "SchellingCoin: A Minimal-Trust Universal Data Feed".
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ Silver, Nate (October 23, 2012). "The Virtues and Vices of Election Prediction Markets". FiveThirtyEight.com.
- ^ The Signal and the Noise
- ^ "Breakthrough Category". Exponential Finance | June 2–3 NYC. Retrieved 2015-06-17.
- ^ "Bitcoin Trends In The First Half Of 2015". The Coinbase Blog. Retrieved 2015-07-22.
- ^ "AugurProject Contributors". https://github.com/AugurProject/augur/graphs/contributors. Retrieved March 17, 2015.
{{cite web}}: External link in|website= - ^ Hertig, Alyssa (2015-04-21). "Augur Creates First Contract with Ethereum". CoinTelegraph.com.
- ^ Krug, Joey (June 16, 2015). "The Augur Alpha is Now Available To Download!". Augur.net.
- ^ Sakich, Tony (June 21, 2015). "What is Reputation?". Augur.net.
- ^ Tual, Stephen (July 22, 2015). "Frontier is coming – what to expect, and how to prepare". ethereum.org.
- ^ "The Augur Crowdsale". The Augur Crowdsale. Retrieved 2015-08-13.
- ^ a b "Why A Crowdsale Is Necessary For Augur To Work & Some Updates". Why A Crowdsale Is Necessary For Augur To Work & Some Updates. Retrieved 2015-08-13.
- ^ Rizzo, Pete (March 1, 2015). "Augur Bets on Bright Future for Blockchain Prediction Markets". Coindesk.com.
- ^ "@brian_armstrong augur". twitter.com. Retrieved 10 August 2015.
- ^ "Tony Swish". Twitter. Retrieved 10 August 2015.
- ^ "Marc Andreessen on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 10 August 2015.
- ^ Krug, Joey (February 13, 2015). "Why Ethereum". Augur.net.
- ^ "Ethereum Network Status".
- ^ "(Bitcoin) Hash Rate".
- ^ [coinmarketcap.com "Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations"].
{{cite web}}: Check|url=value (help)