General Summary
It’s been about a month since the last GOAT statement (1) so it’s time for another one and we have some exciting things to share and some challenges to mention.
I have not gotten back to all the emails Voat has received so if you haven’t heard back from me please note you are on the list.
.NET Core Port (Cross Platform Voat)
We’ve been pushing very hard on porting Voat to .NET Core, as this will give us the most opportunity to cut costs and get more hands and help from the development community.
Today we have major news:
Voat has been successfully ported to .NET Core! (2)
Today’s commit took care of the last few failing unit tests. What originally was estimated at three months of work was accomplished in less than a month.
What a great day for this milestone to take place as today is my 3 year anniversary since I registered and then shortly afterwards started “working” for Voat. (3)
Anyways, it’s official, the upcoming version of Voat can be run on an entirely open source solution.
Unit Test Runs Using Various Configurations
Voat Core Port - Sql Server on Memory Cache
Voat Core Port - Sql Server on Redis Cache
Voat Core Port - PostgreSql on Memory Cache
Voat Core Port - PostgreSql on Redis Cache
The next step is to get Voat running a preview build so we can start having users test what works and what needs fixed. This should happen this week sometime. Please pay attention to v/voatdev for updates on this.
Finances
Revenue: 2017-05-22 – 2017-06-19
Store Revenue: $2,628.00 USD
Expenses: 5/1/2017 – 5/31/2017
Hosting: $7,005.23 USD
Monthly Misc: $200.00 USD
Yearly Misc: $105.00 USD
Please note that I did not scale down Voat’s hardware as I previously stated because at the time of that announcement reddit’s r/The_Donald was rumbling with discontentment and I couldn’t justify doing it during a potential growth opportunity (4). After this awkward advance and retreat, I still held off because Voat’s primary webserver CPU during peak times is maxed out.
While all my attention has been put into the .NET Core port, I will be spending this week figuring out where to cut costs in the short run.
Processor Shut Down (Why BitCoin Matters)
Voat’s primary credit card processor has decided, for reasons unknown, to discontinue their relationship with Voat. While they did claim that it was due to “risk”, I can only speculate as to the reasons. This means I will have to spend time looking for another processor which brings up all my memories of what PayPal did to Voat. On July 14th 2017 they will stop processing our store orders.
And thus, I am going to make a proclamation that each of you as Goats need to be educated on digital currency such as BitCoin. Decentralized currency such as BitCoin shifts the power structure from large conglomerates to you as an individual. It will increasingly become more and more important as our society moves to an entirely cashless model.
Bitcoin and related technologies provide a financial freedom that we should all embrace and exercise as much as Freedom of Speech.
All merchandising is put back on hold until we regroup from this setback.
Footnotes
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I will get on a regular schedule after this month by posting a GOAT statement on the 1st (or closest business day after) starting next month. First GOAT Statement if you missed it.
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This means all the unit tests are passing which is a close indicator that the majority of the code is correctly running and reliable. There are still functional issues and bugs, mostly with the UI, that need to be tested and fixed.
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Thank you everyone for the well-wishing on this day. I posted a comment about this earlier here: https://voat.co/v/OneTruePutt/1943481/9567603
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I want to apologize for asking you Goats to be nice to the new kids. While I don’t agree with scaring the hell out of new people to Voat, I also see why it’s important to not compromise on the values we hold. So, for those that I upset, I do apologize.
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
view the rest of the comments →
go1dfish ago
/v/Bitcoin is willing to help anyone who needs an introduction to the wonderful world of cryptocurrency in whatever form.
Bitcoin is kind of expensive to send for typical donations amounts at the moment @puttitout you may want to setup ethereum/litecoin addresses as well to help mitigate this.
Edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JceL50sL1fA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEQ2nPSL5-0
Other related subs:
hels ago
I would prefer to mail puttitout $10 each month or $120 each year. Or maybe a bank transfer. I suppose I am just old school but I imagine it is easier for me to lose a few percent purchasing Swiss currency and mailing it to him or bank transfer to him rather than any crypto.
go1dfish ago
The only parts of crypto that have to be hard right now are the gateways to fiat because government demands it.
Once you have it, it's really quite simple and there are very easy use wallets now.
Securing large amounts can be more difficult, but most people wouldn't even attempt to store such large amounts of wealth in any other form on their own.
Cryptocurrency has the potential to be way more secure and easy to use than any other form of banking system currently known, but significant effort into making things easy to use hasn't happened until more recently.
hels ago
I entirely support your words. I have nothing to go against them but it sucked when my 1.08 bitcoins disappeared when instawallet went down.
Remember silkroad? Had 0.2 bitcoins in there too.
Those numbers are here and there but why trust crypto? I don't think you know that a government can completely censor or shut down the internet. I am curious why you think crypto is more secure and easy than any other form of banking system. Let's pretend that USA Walmart could not accept US currency in the United States. Tell me, what do you think would happen. So let's pretend that all any server that can be accessed in the world stopped processing bitcoin transactions.......
We know that internet is censored in a major country like China. We know that censorship is coming towards us, why crypto?
go1dfish ago
I went looking through old wallets the other day and saw a transaction of 10 BTC to MtGox, not sure what ever happened to that.
Almost everyone in early on the crypto space lost some, but almost everyone who stuck with it gained more than they lost as well.
Because pretty much every banking system right now involves trust or shared secrets.
Clearest example:
You know your pin code, and you have to give the bank your pin code to authenticate yourself. This is not the case with cryptocurrency. Newer chipped/contactless payments also have similar features in this regard though as well as Apple Pay.
Beyond that, money in a bank always requires trusting that bank (or the US government in the case of FDIC insured deposits)
You can hold bitcoin without trusting anyone, and it is possible to transfer bitcoin to a completely unknown location, and even password protect/encrypt the private key. So you can get all the benefits of physical security with none of the downsides of internet access for coin you want to store long term, and this is what exchanges do with cold storage.
Not sure what you mean by this, these servers are distributed they could be censored like china does but that censorship could be routed around through encryption like people currently route through the chinese firewall.
In a doomsday mass EMP event or something yes bitcoin becomes rather useless until communications are restored and there isn't a good way around that. Precious metals still have a place for that sort of doomsday scenario.
hels ago
Thank you for the response. It is why I love VOAT people can ask questions and get well thought-out explanations. I had fun on the dogecoin bandwagon when it hit it's peak but we all know what has happened now. So I have one other question for you, do you think bitcoin will be around as long as the internet is alive?
I agree completely that precious metals will always regain their value. After an EMP your gold is worth close to shit but as we regain power and revive into a normal society again it will continually increase in value. I really want to believe in something anonymous but I would put pretty good money on anyone who has over 100 bitcoins and lives in America, the Government knows who they are.
go1dfish ago
This is an interesting question, I say it's very likely that it will be barring some catastrophic vulnerability that causes the whole thing to fail. Quantum computing is the most likely vector of this sort of doomsday IMO.
The bitcoin blockchain would at a minimum still be interesting as a museum piece for being the first if nothing else.
hels ago
I used bing and this is the first thing that came up when I searched 'Quantum Computing" (I had no clue what it is and am still confused) Quantum computing studies theoretical computation systems that make direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits, each of which is always in one of two definite states, quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can be in superpositions of states. A quantum Turing machine is a theoretical model of such a computer, and is also known as the universal quantum computer. The field of quantum computing was initiated by the work of Paul Benioff and Yuri Manin in 1980, Richard Feynman in 1982, and David Deutsch in 1985. A quantum computer with spins as quantum bits was also formulated for use as a quantum space–time in 1968.
The funny thing is, I don't believe bitcoin would ever be in a museum. 1984 is mentioned time and time again. Why would the government allow museums to remember something so free?
I hate the pessimistic side of me. My instawallet bitcoin + .08 was lost, dogecoin never prospered, so why trust again? Sure, I should have held the bitcoin+ in something offline. I know that now. I was naive then and now non-trusting. I want to be proved wrong, I want crypto currency to beat the government and globalism. I just have a difficult time believing it will.
Again, I thank you for your thoughts as that is all I ask.
go1dfish ago
I can understand this being a general pessimist myself.
It doesn't seem like there is any better approach, government is violence.
Cryptography is one thing that is resistant to violence, that seems very strong to me.
Dollars will absolutely go down in value, it's just a matter of by how much.