Bitcoin Forum

Hello world,

We would like to launch a peer2peer currency bounded to a specific community&region (i.e. central europe) and therefore we found it more practical to have our own network, parallel to the main bitcoin thread, independent from the speculations of GPU miners.

Therefore I would like to ask whether it is possible to do such a kind of 'fork' and if yes (which is more or less certainly the case), what should be done so that the new chain of transactions will be seeded ?

Of course we'll change the irc server & initial pnSeed values etc., but the bitcoin code is filled with sophisticated crypto so it seems to me that some other quite obfuscated values have to be changed in order to have a fully independent network. Could somebody indicate what variables have to be changed so that a new currency can be seeded?

Also please understand that by our tentatives to create a parallel currency (let's call it kybcoin for example) we do not want to, in any way, undermine the impact&value of the main bitcoin currency. On the contrary, we believe that an emergence of a new bitcoin-philosophy-based currency will add new spice in the game, since in the ideal case it would be possible to exchange bitcoins for kybcoins & vice versa...

which would be in the end, to the profit of all (we truly believe that bitcoin can lead to a nonzero-sum game economy)

Thank You very much for the time spent by reading (&possible reacting) to this message.

Yours cordially,
D.

P.S. bitcoin is truly genial

Speculation is an healthy activity part of any economy.


However, you wouldn't get far if you bounded your currency to a specific community. Specialization and interconnection of our global economy lead to greater prosperity and world peace.

Yes, it's possible.  You need a different genesis block, and probably a different port number.  I can't see how you can get it to work only as a regional thing, however, unless you intend to tie the currency to an institution of some kind.

Do you think no-one would be tempted to run a GPU miner after a while?

Why would anybody use a region specific currency when you can trade with American, Brazilian, and other people not from central Europe?

Thank You for Your answer.

Yup, we definitely plan to use a different port number.
When it comes to a different genesis block, is uint256 hashGenesisBlock variable the only one which needs to be changed (to no matter what value of same length?) or are there some other variables bounded to it?

Concerning Your remark of 'tying the currency to an institution of some kind', our objective is to tie it  to the functioning of the decentralized network of communities called kyberia which are starting to pop-up here & there and in the year to come we plan to implement bitcoin-based currency during activities like flee markets, music festivals etc...

and since its getting more  and more difficult to mine some bitcoins nowadays, we prefer to start a new fork, bound to real (and already trusted) people exchanging real goods and services

I dont think its wise to do such a thing. Governments are region specific...look how that turned out. 8)

we think that the global market is a huge fallacy if it does not have grassroots in the local interactions of people who trust each other

Why it is a fallacy?

The logic of division of labor, comparative advantage, and specialization is unassailable.

Different Genesis block, different port, but also a different name please !  ;)

Trade between countries prevents war between countries.

I'd like to mention that the idea of a local cryptocurrency doesn't make much sense.

How do you intend to prevent your currency from spreading abroad and thus becoming an international currency ?  Do you plan in controling internet and restrict access inside your geographic area or something ?

This doesn't make much sense.  Sure, you can initiate a cryptocurrency in your country.  But it's not much different from bitcoin, which probably started in USA (or maybe Japan, only Satoshi knows).

*points at the great firewall of china.

And so it begins ...

Wake me up when 10 McD's are given out with each happy meal and OprahBux are accepted for coffee.

You're kidding but this will happen.  Private companies will issue their own cryptocurrencies.

My guess is Google and Apple will be amongst the first ones to do so.

I've long thought that if any private company wanted to issue their own currency, it would be Walmart.

Walmart and brick & mortar corps have to much at stake to legitimize bitcoin et. al.

The chance of multiple block chain-driven virtual commodities will be decided by the strength of the chain that founded it.

See http://yyz.us/bitcoin/patch.bitcoin-datanet-fork for an incomplete example fork.

At a minimum you need

• your own 4-byte message header (or "magic number"; ensures separation of network clients)
• your own genesis block
• your own default port numbers for RPC and P2P network interfaces
• your own IRC seeding method / channel

In many ways, I hope that another block chain or two are started at least to compare different ways to be using cryptocurrencies.  If it is of any value at all, I'm sure that somebody will start to use it in exchanges.  Trading between Bitcoins and other similar currencies ought to be simple and straight forward.

The main issue is the strength of the currency, which to me is going to be based upon the CPU strength of that currency over time.  I find it hard to believe that any "local" currency is going to be any stronger, but one thing that will happen is that perhaps there might be some incentive to introduce that currency locally.


Wal-mart doesn't care how they get their money, as long as it is convertable to something that the Walton family can use ultimately in Arkansas in some form.  Other sorts of retail stores are the same, and certainly don't care if they get paid in dollars, euros, pesos, or any other currency as long as they get paid.  They many not want to do foreign exchange if it is an unusual hassle to deal with, but as long as they have several customers who all want to use that currency and it can make a difference in terms of additional sales, they'll take another currency with no trouble at all.

The problem is mainly the exchange rate, which for a brand new currency is going to be essentially worthless.

Hromisko, I think this is an interesting idea, especially the 'local' aspect of it.

By being local they will more quickly be able to match buyers and sellers for face to face transactions.  Right now bitcoin is useful only on the internet because there are too few of us and we're spread all over the globe.  By focusing locally it could spur the development of bitcoin mobile apps, the use of QR, and the development of offline business accepting a bitcoin-like currency.

Of course they won't be able to strictly limit the use of their currency to a designated geographic area, but practically speaking no one in Brazil will have a use for their currency if 90% of the accepting businesses are operating offline somewhere in central Europe.

Please keep us up to date with this project, I will be interested in seeing how it turns out.


We'll see how that works out with Chimerica.  Maybe, maybe not.

Ain't brucewagner working on getting local merchant to accept bitcoin?

I expect several bitcoin clones to arise eventually.  Both with the bitcoin codebase or with a totally new codebase and protocol.  Proof-of-work timestamp server is now "out there" on the Internet.  Derivatives are inevitable.

And probably 98% of these clones will either fail, or be worth nothing, compared to mainline bitcoin chain.

Good luck with that.

With a centralised currency  it is already difficult enough to exclude people who try to use it outside the intended community or region.

I am curious. How do you plan to enforce these restrictions in a p2p currency? Moreover, in a p2p cryptocurrency where a user can identify himself with nothing more than a set of cryptographic keys? 

How do you plan to prevent a GPU miner (or any other kind of "speculator") from joining your network?

And who is "we"? Are you part some kind of local currency initiative? In which case, the Bitcoin software is probably not the tool you are looking for. I would suggest looking into the Ripple monetary system.   

Sigh.

Please don't become fixated on mining. Mining is not the point of Bitcoin. Trading is.

Sometimes I feel as if the bicycle has just been invented and everybody has become obsessed with servicing their shiny new bicycle (which is required to keep the bicycle working, granted), but people have now become so obsessed with servicing that hardly anyone actually bothers to ride it.

I agree that we shouldn't be focusing on generating, however it is important to note that bitcoin is very much under-generated atm. Generating bitcoins is way to profitable atm.

People are valuing bitcoin at about 10x the price that is supported by the current generation rate.

I am very curious about this also.

I have been saying that there will be competing bitcoin networks and I think its healthy. But the way you want to do it I dont think its a viable solution.

If you can find a profitable way of generating, go for it!

What I'm concerned about more is that a lot of newbies turn up here expecting that they should generate X amount of coins, and then become disappointed/disillusioned when their attemps yield meagre results. Or they feel that it's "unfair" that they mine so little compared to expert and early generators, because they feel entitled to X amount of coins, like our friend hromisko. And then they give up on Bitcoin for the wrong reasons.

Where did you get this 10x figure from by the way? The cost of generating is likely to vary hugely depending on individual circumstances, because it is likely to involve sunk costs that are not related to generating. Also, there are the non-monetary costs: Time invested in learning about short lived mining software, fan noise, etc.

Unless your specific community and region has its own, isolated internet, I suspect that you'll find this task impractical, if not impossible. You could probably try to keep your currency secret, but you've already blown your cover.

What's to stop the speculations of GPU miners from affecting your currency?

Do you intend to incorporate significant modifications to the source code? If not, how will you impose your community's philosophies, to the extent that Bitcoin does not already?

Please elaborate.

So you want to be on the ground floor?    How long will you mine for yourself before going public?  

As others said, the day you go public will be the day people start GPU mining.  This is in fact a desirable, because the strength of your currency is basically the number of people that mine.  

Forking does make sense for the selfish reasons of the forker, but it is hard to market your new money, and nobody will use it.  You could as well start using bitcoins 'locally', what entity could stop you from doing that?

One advantage I can see with a "local" currency, at least initially, is that you could get the initial pool of coins distributed locally among the participants as a way to buy into the system.  If anything, I would suggest doing just that where the "mining" is not tied so much to the coin generation aspect but mainly the transaction processing (with fees).   Set the initial few blocks as a huge number of coins while you are getting the network up and running and then have a huge drop-off in the generation rate, distributing the coins locally in something like the Bitcoin faucet to jump-start the "local economy".  Putting 20 million coins in the genesis block and then 0.0001 coins generated for every block after would do the trick.

While you have the stack of coins, it is essentially monopoly money until you start to hand it out, so don't be stingy.  1000 coins per new user would be enough to get it started.  The point of doing it this way is to keep the coins local instead of being spread around the world by miners who aren't in the local economy.  If you meet people face to face or find some way to trust them, it would avoid a problem of trying to allocate coins this way with Bitcoin as they likely wouldn't come to you multiple times to keep collecting those thousand coins to "work the system".

If you do that, it would "keep the currency local", yet it could be exchanged for the main Bitcoins or traded with the government currency too.  None the less, it would be mostly an electronic version of something like Berkshares (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshares).  Don't peg it to any other currency, but simply let it develop organically.  If that is done, I think it could succeed for the purposes stated here.

Let bump this thread

No doubt it is 100 percent possible to launch an independent bitcoin network. Because if there are so many network for almost everything why it would not be possible for bitcoin and it will also increase the value and benefits of bitcoin. The people will easily open and search for bitcoin. The independent network should contain all the economic characteristics of bitcoin, so it will be more helpful to the communities.

Yes, it's possible.  You need a different genesis block, and probably a different port number However, you wouldn't get far if you bounded your currency to a specific community. Specialization and interconnection of our global economy lead to greater prosperity and world peace.