Bitcoin Forum

This thread is for open discussion of the Community Cryptocurrency Foundation's coin.

Ideas and proposals that are improvements or localized changes can be more easily implemented and tested, versus complete overhauls. Please keep this in mind when suggesting & discussing changes.

Everyone is welcome, this coin would be decided upon by community consensus.

Also, this is not just about proposing your ideas, but also discussing others. Feel free to +1 those you like, point out flaws that you can see, or stuff you don't want.

Links
Foundation topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166416.0)

Personally, I want to focus on more lightweight - allow everyone to download the blockchain. Less dust and unspendable outputs.

Such as:
Reduce the divisibility to 0.0001 units instead of 0.00000001. This reduces the size of transactions by a small amount, as it is stored as an integer in each transaction, but also makes creating dust and unspendable outputs impossible

Trimming prevBlockHash and merkleRootHash to the first 192 bits. This should still provide adequate security, while reducing the size of block headers.

Full ECC public key-recovery, and Ed25519.

Should we keep the base58 encoding system? Addresses are hardly said out loud. I think we should still remove characters which look the same or similar (eg I and l), but perhaps symbols like !, #, &, *, <, >, . , . can be added.

How fast should blocks be, while balancing storage space with less variance?

What about the mining subsidy / coinbase running out after 3 years? The distribution rates could be 30 coins for first year, 20 coins for 2nd, 10 coins for 3rd, and that's the end.

Would be interesting to see the network hashrate, difficulty and security in a post-coinbase environment.

And of course.. what hashing algorithm? I like SHA256, for greater compatibility. There's a point to be made regarding favouring CPUs but that can bring botnets.

Changing the encryption algorithm gives people incentive to start using C3 because it would be "ASIC-proof" for a short while

I want to put up a counter-argument though of why ASICs are no big deal.

Eventually ASICs will hit economies of scale and demand will level out. These machines will eventually be cheap enough for casual miners to own; it's only short-run scarcity we are witnessing right now.

I think a better model is tying network security to something other than constant hashing power. PPC is a good model of a coin that is starting to do this. We could make something secure against having a hostile party buy up a bunch of power for a 51% attack.

1. I'd like that too, but we need to balance long term blockchain size too.
2 & 3: Could we do proof of stake based on transaction fees instead of inflating the monetary base? What proof of work focused on IO?
4. Why? Like what Vuxil said, the current situation with ASICs is like early GPUs or FPGAs. Soon most who want to mine will buy an ASIC.

1. This is what I'm trying to address through protocol changes, block header size reduction, etc. Keep in mind that block headers take up a set amount of space, so faster blocks wouldn't be too good.

What about scrypt with different parameters, or triple step SHA256 that would break existing ASICs but still be simple to implement miners for?

I don't think coinbase running out in 3 years is a good idea.

So, PoS sounds like a good idea.  I'm not sure about PPC difficulty and block reward calculations though.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any way to "use" the computational power for something without introducing centralization to the process. Interesting idea through, I'll try to think of something.

My idea for the CPU friendly coin has to do with using the tuning parameters in scrypt alone or in conjunction with the normal hash targeting to increase/decrease the "difficulty"

For example: The network hash rate is too high and blocks are being generated too fast. To increase difficultly the daemons would increase the N parameter in the scrypt tuning.

The effect of that kind of change would hit a GPU much harder then a CPU. The CPU is much better at memory functions, buffers and moving large chunks of memory, whereas the GPU is much better at the small mathematical steps needed for SHA-256 hash.

Remember that scrypt and its peers were designed to thwart brute force attacks by requiring large memory buffers and alot of memory handling. What happens with today's scrypt coins is the tuning is fixed, so as GPU gets more powerful, it can overcome the memory barriers with computational speed.

I believe by making the tuning parameters variable and incorporating it into the difficulty logarithm, a coin can be produced that is truly GPU resistant.

I have only experimented with it a small amount. So I do not know all of the issues that will need to be overcome.

If anybody is serious about it, I can start the project back up open source-with a team.

This may be more of a project then the C3 is looking for however, But I thought I would throw it out there.

I was talking about this,but thanks for that input as well.

I like your Idea, and it seems rather easy to implement.



My idea is that as the network power increases over certain "bench marks" , the SHA256 increased on how many times it's multiplied by a predetermined number.
Right now Bit coin has a combined computing power of 200 TH/s.
Let's say if C3 reaches 400 TH/S, then SHA25 is doubled. This happens every time the networking power is doubled. These events would be  hard coded in the source.

Maybe we could introduce Prime numbers as security as well. Therefor folks  will have to compute a higher prime number as the network power increases.

 Prime numbers are very important in the Cryptography  world.
So If we can't lend actual computing power to universities to cure cancer,why not  give out the prime numbers to organizations to improve data security for the world?
Surely we would love want to give a huge finger to the central planners, or the mass murderers of history?


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Holomor_Art_Denysenko_1.jpg/448px-Holomor_Art_Denysenko_1.jpg (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Holomor_Art_Denysenko_1.jpg/448px-Holomor_Art_Denysenko_1.jpg)

Doesn't it become harder over time to find another prime number? Thus, the 'difficulty' would always increase, unless you allow people to generate the same prime number which wouldn't work.

I think the idea to tweak parameters / mining as the difficulty increases is a novel idea, however my personal opinion is that it's overengineering it. Why not find a set of parameters for scrypt that makes GPUs useless for the next 10 years or so, and by then there wouldn't be a coinbase.

We can't do as the network difficulty doubles, more iterations of SHA256, because then you'd just get ASIC or FPGAs that repeats SHA256 x many times depending on the network difficulty.

I created a poll here to see which direction we should be going (should it be CPU only, or CPU+GPU, or CPU+GPU+ASIC) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=166718.0)
Please vote!

I'd like to see a coin that is different enough from the current crypto currencies that it requires it's own technical paper, or whitepaper. However, it should share enough of the basic concepts from Bitcoin's whitepaper that it could be considered a cryptocurrency still.

A few problems that are often cited with Bitcoin:
1. Confirmation Time (i.e. ~10min/block)
2. Growing centralization of mining pools
3. Deflation
4. Blockchain size

Potential Problem(s)
a. Transaction Fees

The Concept

A coin that wants to be spent. While Bitcoin was meant to augment traditional financial systems by removing the need for a third party mediator, this coin would augment Bitcoin by making purchases in real life much easier and more efficient. Currently Bitcoin confirmations take longer than is practical for many purchases such as restaurants, coffee, gas, etc. A coin with an optimized transaction time could better serve the purpose of a digital currency used in everyday transactions. Just how fast would be dependent on testing and could even change over time. Perhaps the confirmation time halves when the block reward does, such that it starts at 1 minute, then halves to 30 seconds, then 15, thus adapting to advancement in communications networks.

A faster confirmation would lead to a higher number of blocks, which could alleviate the centralization problem in mining pools. Users mine in pools to see more steady payouts. With a larger number of blocks in a given time, more/smaller mining pools might be possible.

On Deflation and Transaction Fees

It is yet to be seen whether deflation will be advantageous or not to Bitcoin in the long run. However, there are many that see deflation as a turn off to Bitcoin, especially some that are experienced and accustomed to the traditional financial world. Built in inflation after the initial distribution of coins could be advantageous in two ways.

1. It could eliminate transaction fees.
2. As fans of inflation often state it provides incentive for holders of the currency to spend it.

With the current implementation of crypto currencies there is a real possibility that in the somewhat distant future large mining consortiums could conspire to incorporate large fees into Bitcoin in an effort to retain mining's profitability. However, a coin with a built in inflation of say %1 annually, would allow for constant and consistent reward to miners, without users feeling they need to pay high fees to ensure their transaction is processed in a timely manner.

On Initial Distribution

Most cryptocurrencies follow a similar pattern with the block reward halving every four years. I'd suggest we accelerate this in an effort to mature the coin at a much faster rate. This would make even more sense if we were to include inflation as a way to account for miner's fees. The reward halving could occur at something on par with Moore's law, or even as short as every year.

Other Thoughts

Using a different hashing algorithm, one that has no special hardware or software, may help in maintaining a more even initial distribution between early adopters. Part of the success of the coin is getting it into as many different hands as possible early on. Specialized hardware may prevent this and make the currency harder to distribute. Furthermore, once individuals hold a significant amount of a coin they suddenly have incentive to help develop it or services for it. Having more individuals with incentive to help the currency is important.

This is more of a psychological benefit than a technical one, but coin denominations should not be measured from a whole coin into fractions. Rather, the smallest unit should be seen as a whole coin and the larger units should be expressed in scientific notation based off of that such that:

1 coin = 1 x 10^0
1 decacoin = 1 x 10^1
1 hectocoin = 1 x 10^2
1 gigacoin = 1 X 10^9

and so on.

That's it for initial thoughts, let me know what you think. I may have some more to add in a bit as well.

Thanks for the nice writeup! Here's my thoughts:

The biggest problem with very fast blocks is that the block headers will need to be stored. If a client wants to rely on the full blockchain, then they'll need to download the blockchain which will become unfeasible on mobile phones and soon slow internet speeds. There's thin clients, but that still downloads headers (and that'll be unfeasible if we have a block every 15s).

Faster blocks also makes having connections to the most peers more important, it actually benefits mining pools to some extent. In addition, faster blocks does not make it faster for transactions to be more secure, it just reduces the variance of it. To get 6 confirmation "bitcoin-level" security you'd need 24 confirmations for litecoin for example. So we shouldn't overdo the block times.

Deflation is a tricky issue - why would people want to acquire an inflating coin, especially when the largest coin is deflationary? I think we will lose a large part of potential users.

I agree that we should change the block reward change schedule to make it release faster. However, perhaps it shouldn't have but instead is reduced by 25% every X months in block time? Would be less of a sudden jump.

The coin denominations - it is already that way really. In the code / transactions, 1 bitcoin is expressed as 1e+8 units. You can call satoshis the "bitcoin", and a millibit is just [blah] satoshis.. Either way this isn't about the core part of bitcoin but how the UI presents it.

If we want faster blocks, we really need to reduce the size of blocks and transactions in them. Like I mentioned before, my suggestions are:

1. Less unit divisibility (smaller ints stored in each transaction)
2. Reduced prevBlockHash and merkleRootHash for each block header

Maybe also a smaller address stored (160 bits instead of 200) - checksum would take a large hit to still provide enough address space.

Here are my brainstorming ideas I've had over the past few days. I had the old foundation thread open since this morning, posted in it, and THEN I saw this thread. I just went and deleted my other post and decided to bring it here.

Re: Automated checkpoints would make it centralized. We definitely will have checkpoints with each update through.

Also, what are your thoughts on "quicker blocks versus less storage for blockchain"? I don't think we need to continue the "litecoin is silver to gold" - I like a monetary base of around 20 million or even less.

With the quicker blocks vs storage, maybe make it so that each new wallet would have the option to go back maybe 2 checkpoints instead of to the beginning of the blockchain,with the possibility of deleting data earlier than 2 checkpoints ago when new checkpoints are reached. In addition to that, have a second option to include ALL blockchain history. With the first option, the client would take up significantly less space over time, but users could still keep a complete history if they wanted to by choosing the second option.

I agree that 20 mil is probably a better base. Making it the copper or platinum equivalent would make it easier for some to understand, but it's not necessary at all.

Idea: Initial coin release is done through the equivalent of set difficulty mining - generate processing intensive hashes, if the first X bits are all zeroes AND that coin isn't already made then you just created a coin.

Example:

de345cf32de1ab9: no coin
96f7410e7925cc5: no coin
000000ac9531cee: coin
0000001ab98f9dac: coin
[...]
000000ac9531cee: no coin (already made)

Can just use TX hash for that. If TX hash starts with X 0 bits, AND it has no inputs, AND it has only one 1 coin output, AND first x bits of the TX hash is unique, then it passes the successful create coin check.

Those "create coin" TXes would be broadcasted and would be confirmed after being included in the blockchain. The blockchain is purely generated by Proof of Stake. Proof of Stake mining just earns transaction fees (which are required to send transactions, so the create coin TXes would have to include a fee that the PoS finds acceptable)

Initially the network would be seeded via a genesis block that gives the seed PoS node 0.5% of the total monetary supply.

Advantages:

* No mining pools needed! Each PoS block is expected to hold multiple create coin TXes with PoW.
* Rate of new blocks not tied to hashpower vs difficulty.
* Can't be 51% attacked unless you own more than 51% of all coins in existence
* No "mass block time" at the start of the coin's life, difficulty goes from 1 to 4 to 16 to 64 because that's the max jump..
* Energy efficient after all the monetary supply would have being created
* Scales with more hashpowers which can be somewhat linked to new users
* Limit on max amount of coins.

And I like going with less amount of total coins versus bitcoin too. There's the psychological effect of something being worth more than a dollar (like bitcoin has seen), or an exchange rate of 0.01 versus 0.001 even through there's 10x as many coins.

just adding my thoughts from another post in what I want to see done with a new coin / blockchain that i posted on another thread

Now if a coin was launched which was NOT designed to be a currency, but rather allowed you to upload files to the blockchain with a cap on the size of file to stop blockchain bloating and the cap was set that people would only upload .torrent files to it so there was a public network record of all the torrents available across all networks and you could destroy the coins in the process in uploading a torrent to the chain then I would be very interested in pointing my hashing power at this

Make it have limited number of coins, but make it a high number, even higher compared of Litecoin's limit, this way transaction fees wouldn't cost much in theory.
Bitcoin's deflation is a kind of problem to be world accepted, Bitcoin is getting more a store of value and less useful for small transactions.

Yes, a PoS of 2% would be manageable.  And i helps to process tx.

All ideas welcome eh? Let me know what you think of this concept: I have been thinking about this for a while now and it seems I have found the place to bring it up...I have been thinking about about a coin that is created for the non-computer programer/developer because lets face it if the cryprocurrencies are going to work and fix this current shit job of economy then they have to be understandable to the common Joe-plummer if you will. So I will post here that CPU mining is by far the easiest way to mine IMHO, so if you want your coin to be mainstream and appeal to mass the the cpu mining is the way to go. However I was pondering a way to create coins based on Real life events to spark interest on more of a mass scale. Historians, Librarians, teachers.  A way to encourage people to bring factual information to the internet. In this way we could change the face of mass media and create a currency based in Real Life, not that bitcoin is not real by any means! It is just difficult for the non-programer/developer to understand. We could correlate events to algorithms to authenticate events...AuthentiCoin!

I have set your mind on fire TF

Fast really fast

many low value block pay out

scrypt mine

low lotal number

catchy name

no the less divisible is not so good

from day one you wnat built in

nBit (nanobit)
uBit (micro bit)
mBit (millibit)
Bit (whole bit)

this give a clear road map and terms of where you see things going

and people still feel like they have a whole thing when the buy a mBit

Should we make it impossible to mine with CPU's?

I don't like the idea of mining for the sake of mining.
1. It CPU wastes energy as they're immediately outdated with alt coins when they're released..
2.It also make's it harder to mine,for those who want to mine with a single modest GPU,without investing thousands on quickly outdated hardware.

Within a year or so, ASICs will be released.
 After a short while it will be cheaper to invest and mine with a modest ASIC than a modest GPU.

I like these ideas, dust and microtransactions are unnecessary and burdensome I think.

However, I think it's possible to reduce dust and unspendable outputs without reducing divisibility. I think you could still have divisibility to 8 digits (or thereabouts) but then enforce a rule that a transaction can't have outputs smaller than .0001 (or thereabouts).

That is silly, there are electricity costs. Look at LTC's TX fees vs btc.

How can we make it impossible to mine with CPUs?

Merged mining: Could only work if we use SHA256. Also, we can use pure PoS for security with PoW for coin generation (but not block generation).

Bitcoin <-> altcoin: Would not work with centralization.

This rule has no performance or storage benefit, and will case a hard fork in case we want to allow spending less than 0.0001 in the future.

Perhaps 4 digits is too small - maybe 5 or 6?

My thoughts so far from the other thead.

Lamport signatures are an interesting idea to make the coin "quantum-proof". Use it for generating and signing addresses?

Yes a quantum proof system would be a vast improvement.

Also make some sort system that charges for something like Satoshi dice to it can't get a free ride.

Easy access to the new coin for all computers, something like equal share, the right to coins for person/pc, more people owning coins, more trades, more pressure for the market to adopt it.
After the experience with the bitcoin, equal share means a true mania to get rich for the little guy and a true mania from Pakistan to Chile, from Indonesia to Spain is necessary for the new coin to rise to the top.

Coins for the masses.

Keep in mind, Wordpress wasn't the first CMS but it's the most popular today.

Just some ideas, maybe I'm wrong.

An article on Bloomberg about the weakness of the bitcoin in comparision with state money


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-04/sorry-libertarians-history-shows-bitcoin-isn-t-the-future.html

I have thought about this but the problem is when you just get "it" given to you, in equal shares....the uptake may not work

the only reason to stimulate uptake is to see a massive appreciation, that get peoples attention, makes them think how to provide services, it get attention then settles into its constant state determined by market penetration....then it becomes a tradable currency

you may need this early adopter effect to bootstrap the CC as a serious Currency contender

Thoughts on this? Now I think this is quite a good model.. You can't 51% this coin no matter how much hashpower you have, and coin generation uses PoW.

My few ideas about concept of better coin:
1) It would be nice to have a real decentralization - not just about 5 big pools (many reasons for that). How about making it somehow double-layer like this:
Miners will be hashing individual transactions. So every transaction would have a hash (that meets the difficulty) and address for reward.
There will be normal blockchain with reward for finder, but it will contain all those hashed transactions with its rewards.

=> The mining reward system (count of rewards) scales with number of transactions. So millions of users are able to solomine... not just the elite and pools.

2) Since part of rewards would come directly from transactions, this rewards can be used to form any kind of economy system.
2a) For example some kind of small constant inflation (that minimises fees) can be added if desired. Each transaction reward can be based on the age of its coin (I mean last used). So 1 year old coin creates 0.01 reward, 2 years old coin creates 0.02 reward etc.
=> Total money supply curve would be exponential, but in perfect control and quite predictable...
=> Miners would likely prefer older and higher transactions...
2b) Or it can be done the opposite way - some kind of millionaire tax - higher transaction with higher fees...
2c) Probably multiple reward equations will be later tested in new forks that will appear the same way as other alternate currencies appears now...

Problems:
3) Size: Yes, I realize, that it would bloat blockchain even more, but solution for bloating the chain will have to be found no matter if block size is 1MB or 3MB...
4) Transactions' solutions: This concept will require a mechanism to distribute individual transactions' solutions and accepting it by all others (more miners will often find the solution for the same transaction like in block solving now).
How about a second really small, simple, speed-optimized blockchain of individual transactions?
=> Lightweight miners would no longer require to download the full chain, just receive transaction and last block of this transaction chain.
Fullweight miners can participate in both transaction mining and mainchain mining... as they see it profitable...

5) No premining - if we want it to succeed, start date will have to be known months in advance. And it has to start with proper difficulty, so there is absolutely no contra-arguments later...

6) Blockchain bloating has to be solved... I got an idea, why not do it distributed like torrents? Each user could hold only some random blocks from chain... and some number of last ones based on desired security.

7) This multy-layer idea can be formed to any technology, even enable to mix them... For example let the masses mine the transactions with GPUs (some asic proof algorithm) and let the pros to mine main-blocks with asics (sha256)...

[edit0] Typos, english++..

No storage benefit? I see eliminating dust outputs as having storage benefits, am I wrong? The number of 0s is arbitrary and depends on the number of coins that exist, but with bitcoin for example you could still allow transactions to have precision down to the satoshi level but require that every output be at least 1 microBit in size. Yes, if bitcoin is ever worth $100k+ then you might need to hard fork and add some more decimal places at the end, but then you could give 1/100th satoshi precision while requiring all outputs be at least 1 satoshi. Either way, this prevents the practice of sending 1 satoshi transactions which has basically nothing to do with commerce, it's just either spam or messaging.

You could also require a fee on any transaction that creates dust outputs.

That's a pretty interesting way to distribute coins. How exactly would the proof of stake blocks work in this example, though? How does one generate a proof of stake block? I think ppcoin has showed that it's not exactly the simplest thing in the world to do with adequate security and robustness.

I was thinking about that too. One should develop a coin with all advantages of bitcoin (& other cryptocurrencies) that actually calculates something useful. On my mining pc I run a GPU mining LTCs and the CPU runs Prime95 (mersenne.org). In the Prime project a "solution" is rewarded with Ghz-day scores (however this is just a number).
What if the network of the coin could assign work (could be smaller bits, not necessarily a very time-expensive Prime (LL) test) from the mersenne-project and randomly distributes it to the coin-network. Work could be distributed to more than one miner to verify the results and to prevent cheating.

As it is now for all cryptocurrencies in existence: the calculation (hashing) power is only used for "guessing" a correct hash which basically only produces hot air. I'd really like to see a coin that makes use of that calculation power and includes the prime (or similar) calculations.

 

That's cool for a project like folding@home, but there is really no way to do that without centralization.

I'd like to see mining seamlessy integrated in end users devices (like a desktop screen saver or something like this running on low CPU usage).
Millions of computers already running could be transformed into something like "micro-miners".

Is this not much of PPC?

The way PoS and PoW works is different to PPCoin.

There are only proof of stake blocks. There are no PoW blocks.

PoW coin creation is transactions. A block can include multiple coinbase transactions.

PoW becomes an initial currency seeding mechanism - should be all gone in maybe a year or so.

No inflation.

Ever thought about implementing a tier system for those who have  GPU farms?

I think it's crazy those who can't afford much and want to mine,are walked over by those with gpu farms that contain 20 or more GPUS.
It's even worse when the very few who have ASICs,pretty much bomb the difficulty of new currency up to the level of bit coin over night.

My thoughts are that the more GPU's you have, the more you're taxed. What is taxed is sent to a community faucet.
This taxing is tied to IP address.

I only  have 47 Byte coin after days of mining,where folks in the same period have mined several hundred if not thousands..
The well off then crash the price when the coin goes onto an exchange.

not sure about this....

the arms race does drive innovation and secure the chain

One of the problems with altcoins is that they can't really be used for anything other than exchanging them for other coins. It's going to be tough to get merchants to widely accept a new altcoin, but bitcoin is becoming more and more popular. I don't know if this is technically possible, but what if you could send coins from the C3 wallet to a bitcoin address. The funds would be automatically transferred to bitcoins through an exchange and then sent to the address.

Many of the ideas discussed here are similar to or in alignment with Freicoin's goals.  Even if you eventually do make your own coin you might find that collaborating on some of your technical advancements with Freicoin developers fruitful.  Currently we are focused on improving difficulty adjustment methods with plans to look at compressing the chain for faster downloading and distributed voting in the future.  This is on top of demurrage and smoothly varying (no 'halfing' day) mining reward innovations already present at launch.  While our economic views lay well outside BTC norms (were anti-deflation) were committed to open-source development and sharing good innovations with the community.  Check out our forums http://www.freicoin.org/index.php

I think Freicoin lacks the hook, that BTC et.al has, the prospect of an investment vehicle is the most sure way to hook people into the system en-masse, then after it meets full or near full market penetration it will stabilize and be used as a currency.

I know your not supposed to hoard BTC, but that is a necessary evil. FreiCoin Demurage the loss while holding while actually great attactks the problem from an idealistic point of view

This is certainly true to a great degree that we frown upon holding coins as a speculative investment, feeling this is both unfair and counter to the job that money should perform.  The combination of a large amount of the coin base being given away along with the demurrage make speculation less attractive, but they likely do not remove it entirely.  Were willing to tolerate some degree of early adopter enrichment, as it's clearly a vehicle for rapid adoption and establishing an exchange rate.  It may also be that it's simply unavoidable unless we went to the extreme of selling all coins from a central stock at a fixed Dollar rate and then maintained a pegged exchange rate.  That would be what many other local complementary currencies do (like BerkShares), which makes them essentially coupons for the national currency and eliminates any speculative potential.  Sovereignage is a sticky problem indeed.