Bitcoin Forum

Why? Bitcoin isn't fair; unknown early adopters (not you) mined with little competition for the first half of it's existence. They can crash the currency value if they want or cash out for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Deflation: A 10,000 BTC pizza is now a 10,000 BTC Mercedes. Other alternate coins have had launch problems: selfish premining, monopolizing landrush on low difficulty launch, easy denial attacks.

How do we launch a new currency that otherwise is identical to Bitcoin? Delayed mining!:
-The first N blocks have no reward,
-The genesis difficulty is high (~100,000 vs Bitcoin's current 3.3M),
-Insertion of full coinbase block reward into generated block only becomes valid if the previous difficulty period was > 1 million
-"pre-launch" blocks may either have only this 0 generate value, or optionally a maximum testing value of 0.01 if deemed necessary.

Design:
Except for these fair bootstrap rules and putting it on a different P2P network with different addresses, it IS Bitcoin, and stays a minimal patch against the current Bitcoin client. This gives a long period for setup and adoption, as at least the hashrate of 2-3 large pools is required before anybody starts earning coins (plus you get around 2 weeks warning of the block that begins coin launch) The currency must be protected with hashrate before any coin generation, discouraging attack or exploitation by a single entity.

Outcome:
-A long period for adoption, the hashrate must first scale near the size of Namecoin's current merge mining to be "launched".
-Installed base of client software, users with addresses, and miners possible before any coins exist.
-Merged mining this Faircoin is a no-cost bonus to pools and miners, now your pool pays Faircoins too.
-Currency starts rare, and continues to be rare. Miner earnings likely to be similar to Bitcoin earning rate (depending on pool merged mining adoption) due to high difficulty threshold.

Use: Will it be worth anything? Namecoin is worth 1/100 of Bitcoin, and it has little current use and a sub-par command-line-only client. This starts hard to mine and also is almost "forced" on everyone by the necessity to merge mine, so it is widely distributed from the first reward block.

Tell me (besides it being another alt-currency) why this is bad. The only flaw is that it might not "launch" due to pools never putting enough merge mining hashrate towards it.

How can I use Faircoin without coins?

You would be able to download the client, synchronize with the blockchain, generate addresses, put your "Faircoin" (example name only) address into your pool setup, add other's addresses to your address book, etc. Coins can only start being mined after the hashrate is high though, making them hard to get from the very first "earning" block.

It may take weeks or months for enough pools to adopt it and start hashing enough to "turn on" the coin generation. That's the point - lots of time for everyone who is interested to get involved, adopt and implement software, no unfair "rush". The miners of the first pool to find a 50 Faircoin block then have them all, until the next block 10 minutes later. A typical one-rig miner might get 0.5 faircoins a day, so they start rare, encouraging immediate value and even speculation.

600 MHash/s rig at perhaps 1,100,000 first-coins block difficulty = .549 coins/day

So early adapters that helped make the coin successful were rewarded. Sounds fair to me.


So your incentive to start mining is that you get the same reward as someone who comes along later, after the coin is successful?

Your design isn't fair. It's anti early adapter.

The idea has been around.

What you'd have to do is make mining a sigmoid function. That way the block reward would follow a probability distribution curve.
So the bock reward would be low, although not zero at the beginning, high during the median period and again low at the end. One way to do that with discrete values is to calculate a long row of the pascal triangle and make consecutive block reward follow that row.

It's an interesting concept, and trying it out shouldn't be that hard. The thing is however it solves neither the lost coins problem nor the need for pooled mining.

You still get a two-year mining head start on the person that discovers digital currencies in 2015. This also doesn't take away anybody's Bitcoins, which is likely to always be the dominant Satoshi-based coin. However, this gives you a coin that doesn't have that mystery element of "who has the 4 million difficulty<1,000 bitcoins?"

Just had an idea: If the pascal triangle is used anyway it could be used to derive a sort of "soft difficulty" where it is possible to mine at several difficulties at once and the reward for the blocks would be proportional to how near the row is to the top of the pyramid. Also the block reward would adjust more quickly for low difficulty mining and slower for high difficulty mining.
So that would solve the instant transaction problem as well as pooled mining. The only shortcoming it cannot solve on it's own is the lost coins problem.

Another (not-at-all-recommended) wild idea completely different from anything I've seen put out there yet - an inflationary coin, where the number of satoshis mined in a block = block difficulty, with no limit to number of coins that will exist. This lets the currency base grow with the adoption rate (measured by mining), however a divergent series as naively implemented as this could quickly "inflation" the value to zero over time.

Probably a good median is a permanent 50 BTC reward (to counter "lost coin" and also address the "fees must replace reward" problem), but that doesn't address this fair launch of a new coin, which is my primary focus here.

I don't think that would matter if the coin would be inflationary anyway the block reward could remain fixed for all practical purposes. At some point there would be an equilibrium where the number of lost coins is as high as the newly generated coins. Geistgeld used such a model iirc.

If a non-inflationary model is desired there could also be a "storage fee" which would have to be tuned for a Nash-equilibrium with the transaction fees. This way lost coins would eventually be mined back into the pool. This would also limit the hoarding problem and would prevent a deflationary spiral even with a fixed supply. I also think a cryptocurrency could have two representations at the same time: "Coins" where there is a fixed supply and "Cash" where there is an inflationary supply. The limits are only rounding errors.. The only thing which would need to be hard coded, everything else could be voted on by the poof of work mechanism.

I think you still have failed to describe why the early adopters of Bitcoin making it rich is a bad thing. They made money, got motivated to make more money, got the word out, built services, etc....

The idea of waiting until a certain point before giving miners coins just creates and incentive for people to NOT mine the coin until it reaches some theoretical point. Because of course- our power is limited so why give it over to a coin were we get nothing back for it? And why wouldn't just EVERYONE wait to mine hoping someone else will spend all the time/energy and then you can jump in and reap the rewards?

No point in making something anti-early adopter unless you plan on doing and the early adopter work yourself.

Oh this idea has been proposed in the past. It is not a good one though because tying coin reward directly with difficulty means that as computing hardware gets better, people make more coins. It is a very big disincentive to use the currency when inflation is a factor of computing power. That is why with the Encoin and Decrits proposals I've made, mining is separate from network security and is based around a per-user approach rather than the lottery approach of bitcoin.


This is also addressed with Decrits. Early mining is rewarded in several multiples of the regular award, reducing over time until it reaches the regular award. Early adopters are still well rewarded, but they will not be able to purchase a mercedes from a couple dollars of electricity.


I think he stated it somewhat clearly:


This is a significant detriment to business and trade.

Ok. Send me a PM when the first (N -10) blocks have been mined  ;D

Ideology. This is not debatable.
At least not in a rational way.


You realize that difficulty would compensate so that there still would be a early adopter benefit? At least with my model.. It just wouldn't be as steep.

The advent of merged-mining gives a zero-cost (except for the work of setting it up) ability to support and harden a second crypto-currency with mining. Any successful future coin must, in my opinion, be adopted through merged mining support. Your PPS pool may be merge-mining and not even be telling you.

As an example of merged-mining success, over 1/3 of all Bitcoin hashing is also currently mining Namecoins. However, this is not notable to most miners, due to Namecoin's difficulty of use (due to a sub-par client (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=121142)), it's predictable failure in it's primary purpose (an alternate DNS system), and it's low perceived value per-hash relative to Bitcoin (adding less than 1% to a miner's income after exchange).

Namecoin faltered primarily due to it's introduction before the advent of merge-mining. One had to choose to only mine one blockchain at a time. When Namecoin became more profitable than Bitcoin, everyone jumped on it, mining a two-week difficulty period in just a few days and multiplying the difficulty by four. After the new difficulty was set, making it unprofitable again, miners quit, paralyzing the transfer of money. The currency has been burdened by this since, and the value stays low due to the abundance of no-use-but-to-sell coin.

The introduction of a new coin that has a reward turn-on threshold like I describe above may have a similar "jump on and mine the shit out of it" contingent like the above posters, however setting the "turn-on" threshold required to over 1/4 of Bitcoin's present hashrate means that it cannot make a massive jump - every remaining pool turning on merge mining at once would be the max increase possible, and in reality even a doubling of hashrate at reward start is possibly more than can be expected. The perception of a profitable 2016 block rush may actually encourage and cement the wide and permanent adoption of such a new currency. The new currency won't be left behind to languish like Namecoin was, as there is no advantage to discontinue merge-mining of such a new blockchain once it is implemented, unless it completely falls into disuse. The only obstacle is getting it initially added "for free" and hashed by optimistic pools, which was my only concern expressed in the first post (however the pools that add it first are going to be ready for it's rewards first and attract the miners).

A reward ramp-up period may actually be counter productive. One of the caveats would be low perceived initial income, causing lackluster enthusiasm that may be insurmountable, but another consideration would be the difficulty pools may have in calculating and distributing payments with an inconsistent or unpredictable reward (plus the further departure from mainline code).

That doesn't seem fair.

The problem with merged mining is it restricts innovation and the experiential nature of cryptocurrencies. That is ok for something like namecoin where the economic aspect isn't that important and you are mainly concerned with security. And with the advent of Keccack there is even less reason to do it.

The main shortcomings bitcoin has cannot be solved with merged mining since from the technical aspect nothing can be changed except the contents of a block.

With Bitcoin, if I find it four years later, I get punished with half the reward and a difficulty 3.3 million times higher too...unfair x 6M?

What kind of approach to currency distribution might you suggest to make a coin fair for even late adopters?

I think the best one can aim for is as wide as possible adoption at introduction. Anyone mining now on a new alt-coin that demands network acceptance is likely to get some "newcoin" in their purse through merge mining. The mining of coins seems to find equilibrium where generation power costs approach the cost of just buying the coins, and if we have that at introduction along with relative scarcity, then the value should track money supply and not lead to the anti-late-adopter hyper-deflation that distracts from use as a currency.



Several alt-coins have died from their old unmaintained completely forked client becoming obsolete, maintained only by one profit-seeker. Many ideas (constantly adapting difficulty, faster blocks, transaction message passing, different hashing, new rewards, etc) may find consensus as the ideal for a re-imagined Bitcoin v2.0, but would only succeed if they continue with the level of development that Bitcoin's client currently has, and would still require a launch technique that would be resilient against abuse from the 24THash/s of existing miners. Being able to patch the Electrum client or your web wallet software with just a few rules for "neucoin" instead of requiring a completely new (old-code) client may be more successful, unless several key Bitcoin developers or others with their skill level pledge support to the philosophy (and maintenance) of a complete alt-fork running alongside Bitcoin.

Well, I have as an argument the relative success of litecoin which is a significant step away from the merged mining aspect.

I concur with the assessment that forking the bitcoin software is a wrong way to apporach alternate cryptocurrencies in general. I am not that interested in another bitcoin fork, if anything it should start from scratch. This is the only way real innovation can take place.

I think this is an interesting idea, and though I won't attempt to predict the viability of it, I would like to see it happen.

Alternatives to Bitcoin are not a bad thing.  Bad alternatives are a bad thing, but I'd call this one a neutral alternative.  It has good intentions, it is just a matter of experimenting with the idea and see if it actually works in practice/

The most important aspect for success would be getting enough pool operators onboard.

I think this is an excellent idea. But it only delays the early adopter issue. A coin that would allow an equal distribution for adopters in the first x years, or maybe until a first 100.000 users are established would IMO have grate chance for being successful. But the how to enable this, is a problem.

There are many coins that have been around a long time, so that anyone who wanted some has had plenty of time to mine some.

Many of them are even merged-mine-able, so anyone wanting some has had plenty of time to get them almost free.

There are even some that various pools have given out too, just in case the ones pool users have been encouraged to also mine haven't been getting distributed among enough people yet.

Some have even been mined almost exclusively with CPUs, somehow managing not to attract GPU miners; they have thus been able to continue chugging along slowly but steadily, with various website visitors CPU-mining them and stuff like that.

Are you aware that bitcoin can only be the parent chain of a merge, it cannot be a child chain? Thus that coins like Terracoin, beingsimple clones of bitcoin, cannot be merged mined alongside bitcoin?

Let us remember too that mining is not the only method of distributing coins. Merged mined coins are almost free, so giving them away to players of online games is a very affordable way of distributing them; a more-interactive version of a faucet in a way.

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I don't think it makes much sense to complain about early adopters having a big advantage when that advantage is being forced upon them against their will by the hordes of miners who refuse to pick them up almost free.

Really what is going on is vast numbers of people are trying very hard to be late adopters, and I don't think that really gives them good grounds for complaining about early adopters. Many are basically against adoption entirely, early or late.

With bitcoin we only have a century or so before the early adopter phase is over and everyone has to settle for transaction fees. With GRouPcoin centuries from now people will still be getting a full 50 coins per block and the coins mined in the first few decades will possibly have spread out due to miners who have more than one beneficiary in their wills.

Most altcoins are so incredibly dirt-cheap right now that quite likely who holds huge numbers of them could change massively within the next order of magniture increase in price and they will still be dirt cheap then too. People seem so determined to always "miss the boat" that quite likely another order of magnitude increase will be needed to actually get even the 'non-conscientious objector" deliberately-late people to consider adopting them. People seem to want to wait until at least a hundredfolk increase in price has happened before considering getting involved, and also seem so fond of complaining that it is as if the whole point of that waiting is so they have something to complain about.

It should be recognised though that what they are really complaining about is their own idiotic stubborn-ness, their own determination to wait until the the train leaves the station before running after it screaming how unfair it is that it left without them.

A great variety of opporunities have been provided, many of them as optional extras even, not requiring diverting mining power away from "the mainstream" in order to mine them. Some of them are never going to stop minting coins, but maybe that just encourages people to wait even longer, to be even more late.

If you set up a coin that people mine for the first two to five years without minting, why even bother mining it at all until two to five years from now? If you don't mine it at all for a few years the deliberately-late masses will still wait until a few years after it does "launch" just so they can kick themselves (while crying/screaming at others) for missing the boat yet again.

Fill up your merged mining as much as is currently feasible first before going on about the unfairness of being denied fellow miners, being left a tiny, maybe even "fringe" community while people wait a few years building up more and more "oh you are so unfair not to have forced me against my will kicking and screaming to mine your coin" ammunition by sitting back still day after day after day, week after week after week failing to set up p2pool and merged-mine...

-MarkM-

@markm

Bitcoin already is fringe, Litecoin almost far-out fringe and everything else more in the realm totally-whack-another-universe fringe. You won't find the attitude, call it "Bitcoinism", that is the believe that Bitcoin will somehow take over a major part of the worlds economy anywhere outside Bitcointalk.

The sooner people realize that the better since the way to economical independence doesn't goes over cannibalism by self-perpetuating "early adoption" but over resilience and the acquiring  of resources which make a self-sustaining society possible. Bitcoin used to have that potential but has attracted the wrong participants who only want to get wealthy at the expense of others instead of working together on a purpose.

Now you sound like the Martians, Brits, Canucks, the Galactic United Nations and so on...

They argued from the start that money issued by people who have no intention of "honouring" it probably would not work well in the long run.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html seems to be indicating their suggestions might have merit...

-MarkM-

Those silly, dishonorable martians!!

deepceleron
It is not gpu- resistant, so miners with ASICs will earn much more money than owners of GPU.

I never know this, just checked this groupcoin, seems it is not working at the moment. It's biggest problem is that a mechanism to pay the core developer with half mined coin endlessly, and use a strange whitelist to achieve this

Actually from pure economy point of view, 50BTC/Block forever provide better chance for late commers at the early years of coin genertion, but after 10 years it still becomes insignificant for the total coin supply. While BTC is more aggresive in reducing the coin supply, makes it highly speculative

You could just 'inflate away' the gains of early adopters.

To do this just make the block reward a function of difficulty.

(e.g. block reward = difficulty / exp (time in years * -0.3).

The expectation here is that difficulty halves about every two years due to Moore's Law. With this system you get the same USD from mining regardless of when you begin hoarding coins.

It doesn't matter when you adopt. Money printing prevents the price from rising.

A problem is that the price will fall after a decline in usage. To solve this you can charge a mandatory 0.1% txn fee on all sent inputs and destroy the txn fees.
Thus if you print too much, then you solve that by printing almost nothing and mopping up excess currency.

With both of these rules, price should be very stable over time. There is no longer any motivation to use the currency as an investment.

[Note: I am not advocating this coin. There is no motive for initial adoption. Fair or not, it would never get off the ground.]

It might be a good idea to do the following, however:

(e.g. block reward = difficulty^0.5 / exp (time in years * -0.3).

This would spread out the early adoption process over a longer time span. The early adopters still get bigger rewards, but the contrast is not as dramatic. More rewards are shared with later adopters.
This avoids the psychological problem: early adopters rich, would-be adopters poor -> would-be adopters have sour grapes -> would-be adopters reject bitcoin due to 'unfairness'

The coins of course have persistent inflation, but that is implicit in the idea of not rewarding early adopters heavily.
 

You could completely omit difficulty based on hashrate and simply make it follow moores law. Transaction times would be faster if more people mine as well as inflation.
Inflating away the currency in a hardcoded way wouldn't improve a thing however (I sense some slight concern trolling here... bad cunicula bad! ;) ) especially if it should be in a exponential way.
One thing to keep in mind is that bitcoin is often said to follow the mining gold over the time periods which isn't strictly true since the overall gold production was less during early periods, has a peak sometime around now and is projected to decline from there on.  The big difference here is that improvement in technology results in a overall higher production rate.




Yeah, yeah I know.... that was meant serious though. :-\

Would-be adopters could have opened their ears a little more when early adopters "preached" the bitcoin to them. Now they can have some bits at a fair price, or go elsewhere and start Inflatacoin.

paraipan please leave, you are clearly trying to distract people from seeing the solutions already there.

We are not trying to copy exponential inflation but find a more fair (or call it natural) initial distribution of currency. The one gold really follows that is.

I said nothing about the timing of coin generation. I see no reason to modify it. Difficulty is increased or decreased so that one block arrives every 10 minutes on average.
I only discussed the block reward.

But I did ;)
What it meant is that it would have a similar effect, block times could either be variable thus transaction times would be less reliable or it could be based on the soft difficulty model I mentioned earlier.

That last part isn't more dangerous then all the small people freaking out and dumping their coins. You can't really prevent people from selling unless the exchanges agree to close to halt trading (done in the real world). You're talking about creating a coin that is somewhat insulated from the realities of supply and demand. I venture that the largest holders of coins in any of these currencies are not early miners: they are early hoarders. People who buy up the coin immediately and then dump. There is no protocol change that can avoid this.

Oh okay. Didn't read the thread carefully at all. Sorry.

You know, an easier solution might just be to reduce the coins in the reward. One should not underestimate the power of people's psychological reaction to big numbers. The idea that some PPC holders have hundreds of thousands if not millions of coins is quite silly and psychologically people will over estimate the value or underestimate the value based on how many zeros there are and where the decimal point it. Terracoin seems interesting because early adopters will have a tough time accumulating millions of coins. The difficulty adjusts fast to compensate for huge miners that might jump on board, and the pay out is 20TRC per block, which is less then bitcoin.

Someone dumping 1000 coins makes a far less dramatic impression psychologically on the members of the market then dumping 100000000 coins does.

1. Bitcoin is fair.  Somebody had to make that pizza risk it on bitcoin.  Over 1,000,000 of BTC are traded monthly on MTGOX.  Most of the early adopters have sold their bitcoin.  People have bought them.  People have advertised them, billboards have been put up, commercials paid for.  It has been on t.v. shows.   There once was a coin you propose fairbrix. 

2. The fairest way to make a coin is to pre-mine them all.   That way the economy grows on its own.  The supply is limited with no inflation and things can really grow as people adopt the medium of exchange.  Mining is no different than Ben Bernanke printing money to give to his banking buddies.   The system should survive on transaction fees.

That's just silly.
Did you play Diablo3? There, items are traded for millions of gold and people are accustomed to it. In wow the situation is entire different with much smaller numbers. But the end result is the same.
We simply substitute the zeros in our heads and arrive at the same behaviour.

I agreed with most of what you said, until you got here. At this point you completely went off the rails for me. Mining differs from what the Bernanke does in several ways. Benji types some buttons and trillions appear, yet I'm a miner typing right now and where are my BTC? I have to invest in infrastructure and electricity to produce BTC. Also there are restrictions placed upon mining(difficulty, reward halving, power costs, hard coin limit, etc...) that the fed does not have.

...and the system will eventually be forced to survive on transaction fees when it's vibrant enough. It's really a brilliant setup.

You can eventually force a coin to survive on transaction fees today.  This is another reason you should not be so upset at early adopters, 1/2 the coins are still out there.  I would not call it brilliant, it is really a flaw.  However, it did get a lot of interest in the coin.  Someday the coin is going to have to survive on transaction fees.  Basically you guessing whether it can.

You seem to be confusing GRouPcoin with DeVCoin.

DeVCoin gives 90% of the coins to people who work on free open source projects. GRouPcoin was initially used to prototype various things on the way to developing DeVCoin but once the method to be used in DeVCoin was decided GRouPcoin went back to being just a slightly modified BiTCoin, its modifications being a more-adaptive (and timetravel bug fixed) difficulty adjustment and a constant 50 coins per block mining of coins.

(DeVCoin mints 50,000 coins per block and also never lowers the number minted per block.)

You seem to be talking about DeVCoin when you say it does not work. Did you put its receiver_*.csv files where it can find them? They are provided because one of the early websites, used for the early receiver files, no longer exists thus clients can no longer get a majority consensus of websites as to which versions of those early files are the correct ones.

-MarkM-

There are several chains that have to survive on transaction fees.

So few people mined them that they were too vulnerable, thus only GRouPcoin stuck it out as a blockchain so the rest could watch how it survives as an aid in making their decision as to when to go back to blockchain form. Yet GRouPcoin does not survive only on transaction fees, so those that moved away temporarily from blockchain format are waiting not only for merged mining to be robust, as demonstrated to them by GRouPcoin's actual experience as a merged mined coin, but also for their expected transaction fees to be sufficient to attract merged mining.

Since GRouPcoin are not being valued very highly, the fact that GRouPcoin mints coins need not subtract from GRouPcoin's usefulness as a "weathervane" for deciding when/if it is "safe enough" for all the transaction-fees-only coins to move back to blockchain format, since the amount of value miners obtain by merged-mining GRouPcoins is hopefully, at its current low valuation, no higher than the amount of value the transaction fees alone of a more reasonably valued coin would be. (See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for relative values.)

-MarkM-

I might be out on a limb here but I suspect it seems silly to you BECAUSE you play Diablo3. I'm in the majority here when I say I don't play Diablo3, or even videogames for that matter. Most people don't actually substitute the zeros in their heads and the redenomination of currencies when there get to be too many zeros happens by central banks all the time. Infact Iran is up for one very soon: http://www.alsumaria.tv/news/56866/iraq-to-cut-off-dinar-zeros-by-january-2013/en

The central question for all cryptocurrencies long term success is if we are building a money system people can use or a money system that only 'Diablo3' players can use. If America still can't get on the metric system, you're not going to get people to wrap their heads around .00150243601BTC.

That said, even for your fellow Diablo3 players who are doing the substitution probably are just rounding to the nearest quarter million more often then not. The technical increase in precision is lost in practice if people just don't want to bother with the numbers and round up for convenience.

If you need a real-world example, just look at real estate prices. People don't advertise to sell homes for 1235469 USD, do they? They sell them for 1.3 million.

All that precision might be necessary for calculating taxes and bank loans, etc... (or the financial 'diablo3' players) but if buyers and sellers didn't need to do that, a seller and buyer would settle for 1.3 million in cash and leave it at that.

It's our arrogance as numerically orientated, technologically literate, an logically reasoned people to assume everyone is as 'efficient' as we are. And that arrogance could be the difference between failure and success.

I'd like to propose the "Really fair coin (with social justice)". At midnight GMT, all the coins are added together and evenly divided between all users. This solves the early adopter and hoarding problems and since everyone has access to cash, the rfcoin economy should be booming.

CommieCoin?

That's about 1.5 Millis or 1502 Mikes.



When I was younger, one GBP was worth about 1000 Italian Lira. They have since tweaked that but I don't think it was a big issue (other than being a bit embarrassing for the Italians)

I think "Mike" might catch on, BTW. :-)

FYI I did quit playing 2 months ago, partly because of economic issues. (It's prone to inflation due to Botfarms selling ingame gold for money)

So you have a point there crazy_rabbit.
However the issue wouldn't be solved by choosing any arbitrary scale and hard-code it into the software. Of course it's more convenient to deal in a certain range of magnitude more familiar to us.
But that wouldn't solve any economic problems like inflation, deflation and stagnation. Only the right model coupled with the right social aspect can do that.



Richy_T, I encourage you to leave this thread.

There's quite a good thread on it somewhere. (Can't find it right now). I think it used "Millie" for the thousandths rather than Milli

I would tell you what I would encourage you to do but I don't want a ban.

Nah, you'd be safe.
My point: If you feel threatened by us discussing innovating the cryptocurrency concept you shouldn't make it so obvious.

It's actually on the bitcoin wiki:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

Think of DIablo3, WoW, EVE Online etc botfarms as CPU mining.

http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=CPU_mining

Afterall with even litecoin moving to GPUs, miners still need things to keep their CPUs busy, right?

The page linked is a start at exploring such CPU mining. (You need unpredictable-path "random" stuff like scripted non player characters in multiplayer online games have to deal with in order to stay in realms where CPUs outperform GPUs...)

-MarkM-

That's true, and maybe Satoshi thought about that. Hence, we don't have BTC millionaires (yet) and I find it interesting that the price tends to hover around either 2.5, 5 or ten dollars. The other price ranges feel more volatile. Perhaps it's just psychology. :-)

At the same time though, we do have 8 decimal places of precision so all the technical things have been accounted for as well.

BTW: I like your tag line. Scam or Legit? You don't quite know before hand. :-)

OK, we're good then.

I'm not feeling threatened. My original post was more satirical. A lot of the original poster's concerns seemed to be based on some perceived need for fairness and the solutions he was suggesting either seemed to further unbalance things, damage the chances of adoption of the currency or both. The motivation seemed to be to want to get a share of the loot once all the work had been done. One might look to the story of the little red hen.

Everything about Bitcoin appears to have been done for a reason and those reasons seem to have been calculated by someone who was both a genius and had some serious experience in the field. It's not perfect for sure but it seems to me that every part of the spec is at least "in the ball park". So there really needs to be a very good reason to change any of those decisions. One does alter an aircraft and take away the front window and yoke because it's not "fair" to the passengers.

With that said, I'm up for getting into the nitty-gritty of things so let's jump on in.

Richy_T: People often try to hide their fear behind sarcasm. Since you think Bitcoin is perfect there is no point with you being here, is it? We are discussing an alternative to perfection, that's a waste of time.


Yes it is clear Satoshi choose the number of coins to be a certain value with a specific purpose, the problem is that the current paradigm present in this forum (Bitcoinism) tends to promote driving the value up to the point where common day goods would be traded in fractional values. (The whole perpetual early adoption thing)
The problem with Bitcoin is that the ever reducing block reward encourages this ideology and that's the reason why I think it should be changed.

thanks!

Would that be more like PC mining (player character). The strength of the CPU would not really be an issue.

Minecraft might be more of a fit though. I think a mod has even been suggested that would allow mining for actual BTC in the game.

The major strength of CPUs is forked decision-trees. If it is not known even which planet one might end up on, or even, without some analysis of price lists from various planets, which planets offer the best rates of return for a given set of skills and state of peace, war, alliance or whatever between planets and the nations on those planets, it is hard to hard-code a fixed set of actions that will work constantly.

I suppose though I am really meaning PC mining as in Personal Computer mining, since the ability to keep historic prices on disk to compute trends and so on is also something GPUs and ASICs are not optimum at.

Daytrading automatically would be an example of the kind of mining I am thinking of.

Basically it is a matter of teaching your computer to make money automatically 24/7.

Once upon a time posting messages worked well, gradually the rules posting had to follow got harder and harder, like instead of only post to no more than 5 newsgroups the same post, it started getting into whether the post involved products or services for sale.

Once upon a time generating web-pages worked. You could generate gigabytes of pages of Yahoo search results on a topic and Yahoo would rate it number one because apparently it thought its own results were the most relevant possible content about the topic.

Once upon a time simply having autosurf programs running 24/7 in browsers worked. Heck that one still works somewhat for some people it just takes a heck of a lot of pageviews to earn, so that the electricity and network-bandwidth cost becomes more than the thing makes unless the pages it is showing to other "surfers" suck the rare actually live human viewers of the occassional page (e.g. people setting up still thus actually seeing some pages other people are showing) into extremely efficient marketing-funnels.

And so on. Mining World of Warcraft gold is really just yet another "how to rake in money automatically" plug-in. :)

See Total Automation Project, which was known as Money for Dummies until the "xxxxx for dummies" corp complained about it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040803020712/http://isp.knotwork.com/dummies/

See also Makemoney Knotwork: Toward a GNU "make money":

http://web.archive.org/web/20070429184251/http://www.makemoney.knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

It's not perfect, as I said. Perfection may not even be close to being required. Heck, we get by with pieces of paper with a dead guy's face on the front well enough. I just think you need to look closely at what you're hoping to do before you go massively adjusting the protocol. No rewards for early mining will likely mean it's DOA. Allowing long-term inflation would be much more damaging than people realize (I suspect). Trying to make things "fair" will typically remove many of the incentives for generating and using such a currency in the first place.

Heck, I'm almost at the point that I've almost mined my first complete bitcoin. I'm no big player and it's mostly just a curiosity for me. I think the focus on mining is misplaced. In a short enough time, it will "Go away". Will some people who got in early make out like bandits? Of course. That is the nature of being in the right place at the right time.

Is there room for other crypto currencies? Possibly but they will have their own niche and their own problems to solve. In the arena that bitcoin fills, it is likely to be the 800lb gorilla in the room. Even technically better solutions (and I don't believe the OP's is) would have a hard time competing against it. There may be some interesting options in alternative currencies. Heck, one which did gradually redistribute itself might be interesting to some.

Have you looked at my proposal at all? It's a little different than OP's in a way that it still rewards early adoption due to difficulty, but not as in the form of a block reward until 50% of the currency has been minted.
I am not that interested in being even in the same district as bitcoin, which strikes me more as a velociraptor than a gorilla. It might evolve into a bird some day but when the comet comes in its current form has to go.


I am not even interested in creating another cryptocurrency per se, but an engine to drive a self-sustaining civilization.

I took a quick look. I'll take a better look before commenting on it though.

I do not recall even seeing any links to any proposals, I would have gone and taken a look I expect had I noticed one but I don't even notice any links in any of your posts to this thread so have no idea where your proposal's documentation might be found.

Engines to drive civilisations are of course always of interest to the Freeciv (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Freeciv) ("'Cause civilisation should be free!") scale aspects of the Galactic Milieu (http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu) and thus also ultimately to all the smaller scales too once assimilated into the Milieu.

-MarkM-

I made a proposal on the topic of the thread, not a complete concept which if I had wouldn't even bother with this forum.

We all have our motivation, I respect yours, but if you link to some of your stuff please provide context to relate it to the discussion.
Srsly, I'm lost how are your online games related the economic aspect of cryptocurrencies?

YOu seriously don't see any connection between vrtual currencies and virtual worlds?

World of Warcraft god, EVE Online currency, Lindens, Litecoins, Bitcoins, BotCoins, etc etc are all virtual currencies and many of them situate much of their economies within virtual worlds.

All that is without even getting into the legal aspects, wherein games seem to be a lot safe places in which to situate stock exchanges than plonking then right inside the jurisdiction of the Earth authorities like GLBSE did.

Stock exchange and currency exchanges working with virtual world currencies are primage targets for any kind of integration with bitcoins and any other cryptocoins.

Another economic aspect is that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on money-transmitter licenses stock broker licenses and so on might not make sense for any coin of which you are not doing millions of dollars of volume, so cranking up the volume in virtual worlds makes a lot of sense for getting security issues solved and software fully tested before even considering using the software for real world exchanges and stock exchanges and such.

Plus if it is useless even for games it is totally useless. Whereas if is is useful as a game currency it might, like other game currencies before it, become valuable in the real world too.

There is also the matter of backing. Game currencies have an entire world, or many worlds, of products ready to buy with them right off the bat, whereas currencies no games will accept likely also few or no sellers of anything else will accept either so they just end up as pump and dump schemes, trying to scam people into selling fiat for them.

-MarkM-

I'd say online games are a good use for cryptocurrencies yes. But so are drugs, socks and webhosting. (I'd leave out socks because they are closest to the thing I'd like to deal with)

Where my interest lies is have a system which is very well suited for these things:
land, food and shelter
production-, communication- and transportation-infrastructure
weapons, energy and computers

I don't care about the rest.

All those things are what we try to simulate.

Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".

You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".

Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".

Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".

It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.

-MarkM-

You make an interesting proposal, but it would require for the currency be an inherent part of the simulation.
A separate block chain if you will, a bit like bitcoins testnet but requiring simulated infrastructure to run.

The issue I see with this is how the rate of generation of the currency would be controlled. With Bitcoin it's in the protocol. How would you prevent gaming the system or the game's owner from generating large amounts of currency whenever they wanted in your scenario?

Maybe make the "maturity" rate on coins based on difficulty. When the diff is low it takes a lot longer for the coins to mature and when the diff is higher it takes a shorter time.

Then late adopters get rewarded by being able to use their coins earlier than early adopters.

Nice idea, makes even sense from a security aspect!

It would be interesting and useful to get some actual quotes / commitments from miners on how much exactly they would charge to merged mine how many chains (or a chain that will be their X-many'th chain, if they charge less per additional chain).

That way a realistic budget can be worked out and actually "backed" coins such as USDcoin and so on could be deployed, knowing how much the backers to whom the initial and total number of coins ever to be issued were issued need to budget for paying miners to secure their chain.

About game companies messing with the number of their coins, minting more on demand, have you not read anything about bitcoin? They have as much ability to do that as Gavin has to do it with bitcoin, maybe slightly easier is less users out there already using it.

What keeps Gavin from doubling the number of bitcoins minted, for example?

-MarkM-

Agree with this 100%.

But what the hell you are talking about here?

This thread is so petty!

Why ever put value in the system at all then?

Exactly. The whole success of currency is that it's a representation of value. The labor theory of value just doesn't work. The point of mining isn't to put the value of the labor into the coin.

+1

You guys really need to get over that stupid "this is a new currency" idea.
No sane merchant out here, in the real world, wants another currency to deal with. What they want, is fast and secure and a lot cheaper way to transfer "value" from point A to B. They do not need additional risks like volatility, complicated "coin"-to-fiat conversions and so on.
You go and tell someone: "this new cool internet currency" and they usually walk away. Go an tell merchant, you have a fast, secure and X times cheaper way to transfer funds... you have their attention. Mention new currency, and the door will hit you in the ass on your way out.

No matter, how shiny and fair and what not your new coin is, if it has no real life use, it will be dead sooner or later (after few pump and dumps and Trendon-like tricks)
Yes, there are huge wallets stuffed with BTC. Lot's of greedy scumbags have stolen coins from each other and so on. Lot's of scams and what not. But this all will be history, if those coins (BTC, LTC etc) do not become useful in the real life and find larger audience. Most people do not give a flying f** about mining. They do not get a hard-on when GPU fans are screaming in the corner, making them less than a EUR per day.

Real world promotions are the key for any coins success. 20+ nerds having a circle jerk session about BTC is not really a event RW cares about. What about LTC? Yes, LTC is better for a merchants in many ways but if it gets no real life use... it will be dead too. :(
Do not get me wrong, I really like the idea of BTC, LTC, PPC... and so on but it's time take a step back and understand this: Yapping about technology is not going to cut it. Technology is only a tool. Tool for solving a real life problem. If you do not understand the RL problem, you can not develop a tool for it.

Oh I do remember you shitting yourself calling merged mining and any kind of alternate cryptocurrency a "siege". Now this forum is live an well with plenty support from within Bitcoin.
Now who's petty?


At first to understand a problem you have to work on solving it. You can do that either by manual work or by better tools.
One can not work without the other but tools can get arbitrarily complex and useful and work arbitrarily tedious. So everybody will choose the approach which works best, and since almost the entire community here consists of nerds we mainly focus on tools. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we get to work at some point.

Independent of the exact implementation, there is no need for a fair initial distribution. It's unimportant. An early adopter can smash his coins into the market exactly once. Then, that's it, and they can be traded hundreds of thousands of times later.

But rewarding early adopters served an important purpose, namely kickstarting adoption and incentive for the developers (although they might have really hit the mark in their own getting rich method. :P ).

The current distribution is as good as any to start off with. For all I care, Satoshi could've just sold me the coins directly. In the long run, it's all irrelevant. I'm jealous about early adopters' quick riches too. Still, that time is over now, and as a community, we have no real reason to go back. So let's think ahead and focus on the power of international markets we could unlock; there's more than just a one-time use mountain of digital gold to get there.

No the current distribution is not as good as any, it's bad in a sense that is does not go after the distribution of gold mining. That follows/followed a bell curve, which is what I did suggest.
If you apply the current distribution to gold it would be if early miners did grab head-sized nuggets out of the earth with pick axes and later giant mining apparatuses only being able to drag up microscopic specs of gold out of the depths.

Are you serious? How about the fact that he can't alter code running on my computers?

Except gold production in metric tonnes has gone up almost every year and 50% of all gold ever produced was produced since 1967.
Lets not forget, that the damage don to environment grows at absurd rate every yea and less than 10% of the gold gets used by industry for something useful.

Yes pretty much in tune with a bell shaped curve.

So how would a cryptoconcurrency be more environmentally harmful if it's distribution is closely modelled after gold? If anything it would be more environmentally friendly during the initial period since the rising block reward and exactly as environmentally unfriendly as bitcoin during the second period when the block reward declines.

As has been said over and over not just here but all over the place, the initial distribution is pretty much unimportant.

If all the gold on the entire planet had been handed to Adam and Eve in one swell foop it would still work pretty much as it has always worked. The ores we find would be from things like Vesuvius eruptings or something, gold melted band oxidised or whatever, and we'd find larger nuggets such as chests of bars in sunken pirate galleons, there still could well have been gold rushes as people discovered far lands where Cain and Abel each took a big chunk of their parents' hoard and so on, but that is all trivial detail.

-MarkM-

Absurd amount of power required to keep the network safe and running is one of the biggest flaws in BTC - 51% of the network must be the good guys or it's game over. Constant fear of attack and chance to lose everything - not a healthy mindset for something as important as BTC (or any virtual currency) and if users truly realize this, it's game over. YEs, the chance is small but someone like BFL can fire up all the (still imaginary) ASICS and ... bleep.
Sure, banks get robbed all the time but they are insured and this is can not be compared to 51% attack at all. This is more like wiping out all the banks at the same time. Puff... and it's all gone. 
Those 2 major flaws have to be eliminated in the next coin. 4.5 GB of bc download is also borderline retarded. Yes, Electrum client/server has taken a step in right direction but this has to happen in much lower level.

You are using the wrong analogy. It is more like WoW, where people who come in late can buy a full suit of armor, weapons, and get leveled up by someone in China.

Agreed. The Travian-etc chap has obviously not continued such games beyond the point where he conquered the entire world yet would not really have anything to show for it if he couldn't keep the other players from quitting the game.

It is more like running such games. Notice how the game companies run them now: they kill the server just at the moment when the game starts to get interesting, because unfortunately the way the "winner" plays is not conducive to keeping hordes of players playing and a constant influx of new players joining in generation after generation.

They are tiny little oneshot games, and the winners win by the "default the prisoner's dilemma" method on each single "shot". The games teach people that you need to slaughter all other intelligent beings in their mothers' wombs or failing that in their cradles, and scorched earth their entire civilisations if need be.

They end with an entirely unnihabitable world, so uninhabitable they don't even leave it running for people to explore "what happens next".

-MarkM-

Eskimobob, somehow around "must be the good guys or it's game over." you lost me. What are you trying to tell us?

You obviously want to bring up some sort of criticism about what we are planning to do, but what is it?  ???