I've been waiting for a LONG time for an analysis of BTSync. While reading the analysis, I can only imagine what this spells for similar closed-source (yet purportedly "secure") file storage sites such as SpiderOak and MEGA. Thoughts?
Hmm...this seems like a very interesting venture. I remember websites like this (there was one where you could bet on practically any event, but the name escapes me). I read the paper and found many of the concepts very interesting. The question is, capitalism (as we know it) is built upon trust; it is the essential value needed in capitalism, so how will a "trustless" prediction market work? I'm very interested to see how this works out.
Perhaps you remember InTrade? Or there's also a few UK websites like that. The problem is they're centralized, so they can go out of business or a person who judges / shows the outcomes of events could lie to get a payout.
As for capitalism, I would argue that greed is one of the most common elements. We rely on people being greedy and, generally, willing to do the least work for the most possible results - aka laziness. It's trustless in the sense that bitcoin is trustless, we're building a platform that unlike the traditional financial system, doesn't require you to trust others.
The way the trustless aspect is used is that people are incentivized to vote on the outcomes of events with the consensus, because if you don't, you will lose reputation in the system. This is explained in further detail in the game-theoretical explanation of this project, available here: https://github.com/psztorc/Truthcoin/blob/master/docs/Truthc...
