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Hi! I'm introducing Riecoin.

This is a new coin with proof of work based on prime numbers. Riecoin is forked directly from Bitcoin 0.8.4 EDIT: I'll be including changes from 0.8.5 and is not related to primecoin. I've been working for some time now on a prime number proof-of-work coin. While I knew that the user primecoin was taken on github, its launch took me as a surprise while my work was still not finished. Luckily primecoin's approach is different to riecoin's (I don't use Cunningham chains), and I think riecoin has some good advantages so I kept going with the experiment.
It will have some ltc-like parameters: 2.5mins per block starting with 50 coins per block.

I'm a software developer but not a designer, so I'm starting a logo contest. The coin is named after Bernhard Riemann, whose work on prime numbers was revolutionary. I'll do a fair launch without premine or instamine, so I cannot set a big bounty for this contest, all I can promise is your name and contact info of your desire in the about dialog and/or the splash screen of the QT wallet (I'll choose the winner), and the first block I mine (that's 50 RIC).

Since Riemann is already on the coin's name, I don't feel it's necessary to have his face on the logo. I thought it could contain a lower-case Greek letter zeta with 1 or 2 bars (like $ is an S with a bar) as an homage to the Riemann zeta function, but I'm open to whatever looks good. EDIT: since zetacoin already uses the zeta letter, If you decide to use it I suggest you do it in a subtle way, ie don't make it the main feature of the logo.
Another cool drawing that could be used for inspiration can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zeta_polar.svg you can see it in a more gentle color on the cover of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Prime-Obsession-Bernhard-Greatest-Mathematics/dp/0309085497/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
I like minimalistic designs, but do whatever you like, I'm open to any suggestion.

I need the logo, a .png file for the splash screen (480x320), and the icons in different sizes/resolutions as in bitcoin. If you could provide icons in both .ico and Mac's .icns format it would be awesome. Don't worry if you can't, I can convert the files.
It would be nice to have a different set of images and icons with different colors or something for testnet.
I hope you like the concept, let the contest begin! I'll give it one week, starting now.

Cheers,
Gatra

EDIT: "Official" twitter: @riecoin

hope this is better still similar to the other coin



http://s9.postimg.org/fmrlafey7/reicoin_c.png
http://postimg.org/image/7u0xig8yz/

sorry but no
that is the capital Z, but Riemann zeta function is lower-case zeta. Like the one (sadly) used in zetacoin https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=267545.0

Reserved

Soz thought it was the greek letter Z outlined here from the university

http://www.uscupstate.edu/uploadedImages/Campus_Life/Greek/greek_alphabet.gif

http://www.uscupstate.edu/studentaffairs/organizations/greek/default.aspx?id=34422

I'd try a non-round shape to avoid confusion with zetacoin. Also a vague reminder of how the zeta function may look like.

https://i.imgur.com/4vxBOZw.png

https://i.imgur.com/SWxIrg4.png

Anyone is welcome to improve on this and submit as theirs.

FYI, there's already a coin called Zeta coin that uses Zeta as its logo.

gatra, will the coin's release date be announced in this thread?

Thank you all for your interest and your submissions.
Since Zetacoin already uses the lower-case zeta, I'd rather you avoid using that letter, or use it in a more subtle way, I edited the OP to include this.
Sorry I didn't realize this before... I liked ilostcoins' squared versions though...  let's see where this goes, I'm surprised by how fast the first designs were posted!

sharky444: I plan to release one or two weeks after this contest is finished, and I'll use this forum for announcement (a few days before release, on a new thread and this thread too) and main communication channel. Additionally I might announce release date on other forums too in order to reach more people.

Regards,
gatra

thanks, I was aware of zetacoin but I didn't foresee that logos may be similar

Thanks gatra! Best of luck with Riecoin.

I'm interested to see what your final implementation will be and will be watching this thread.
Any indication as to when this coin will be launched?

Reserved

hopefully in 2-3 weeks, client is working in linux/windows, but I have a lot of work and there's so much to do!
p2pool, block explorer, gpu miner, mac client, setup a faucet, etc, etc... I'll probably release even if I don't have all of these...

That's a lot of work for 2-3 weeks :) , good luck.

2 more versions:

https://i.imgur.com/ZJhBWga.png

https://i.imgur.com/gNnJPeF.png

Again, everyone can feel free to modify and improve what I post here.  :)

I like this one.

"Official" twitter: @riecoin

let's bump this so people see it and work on logos during the weekend...

I'll write some keywords and concepts related to the coin so they can serve as inspiration for designers: coin, Riemann, Riemann zeta function, prime, constellations, alt, freedom, open source, money, math, solid, strong, new

is it scrypt?

not scrypt, not SHA, not primecoin's Cunningham chains

It has a new PoW based on prime numbers. More details will be provided on the announcement of the launch, after the logo contest.

interesting, thanks

It's nice to see this new coin.
bump

I like the submissions so far. Thank you! keep it coming!

Some more ideas for inspiration: it should look professional, serious but not necessarily solemn, mineable, buyable, acceptable as payment, desirable, and inspire trust, and look cool.

ok.... maybe that's too much, looking cool is enough for me...  :)

</shameless bump>

The contest is over and we have a winner!
We had a very promising start but no more submissions after the first days... anyway I'm pleased with the results.

And the logo comes from.... Mjbmonetarymetals!
Congratulations, and thank you all for your time. An honorable mention goes to ilostcoins, I liked your squared designs and I'll be paying you too.

Please stay tuned for news about the release.

Regards,
Gatra

2.5 min blocks is too long in this day and age ... maybe a year ago that was OK
Try 60 seconds.

1min block speed would bloat the blockchain and create more orphans, stales. We have 2.5min which was tested for years in LTC. I don't know of any 1min coin that has years of testing.
I think it's not true that 1min is fast enough for waiting in a line when you buy a coffee: with blocks targeted each minute, you have a 1 in 150 chance chance of having to wait more than 5 minutes for a block, this would still be unacceptable for some coffee stores.
Also, with 2.5min, each block requires more work (is more difficult), meaning we will have larger prime numbers sooner.

any update?  :-X

is this still going to be released?

Awesome!
Sounds like a decent way too launch the coin.
Keeping my eye on this.
Now lets get this baby launched.

Any, even approximate ETA?

I had a lot of work and lots of things to do, sorry... I promise it will be this month!
(I've been mining the testnet for some days and it's working, so it's not vaporware)

some updates:

http://riecoin.org/ (http://riecoin.org/) and http://www.riecoin.com/ (http://www.riecoin.com/) are up but still under construction

mail info@riecoin.org is also working

to avoid delaying it further, I may have to release before the p2pool is finished, but at least I want to have the external, optimized cpu miner ready

right now I'm fighting with the configuration of bind and dnsseed...


thanks for your interest and patience!

Reserved

Riecoin sounds really interesting. Will stand by.

Are you alone to do all this?

Because it require a lot of skill to create a coin with a custom algorythm + a p2pool, block explorer, gpu miner, mac client, a faucet.

Can you share a bit of your CV, on what have you worked in the past ?

Yes, currently I'm alone and that's partly why it's taking so long. All those tools are already done (and open sourced) for BTC, so adapting them is not that difficult: the protocol is very similar, only the PoW part has changed.

This is my first cryptocurrency. I'm a computer scientist but I work as a software engineer, I've been working on embedded systems development (C, C++ and some ASMs) for 13 years.

Hi again,

How the project is going?

You're probably busy building the tech, but a coin is nothing without users. This thread need to be upped more frequently to gain awareness.  I think small frequent update, explaining your avancement, your struggle, etc..  could be interesting for people.

hi!

Of course, once everything is ready I will focus on the users.

Updates:

- I'm satisifed with the optimized version of the new cpuminer. It's a fork of pooler's cpu-miner (minerd), and it will be released with sources and windows binaries at launch time.

- Everything works on linux, but the windows -qt wallet is very unstable. Maybe because I'm compiling with mingw natively, which is not supported by bitcoin. I've given up on that and I'll try to cross-compile for win32 from linux.

- I've been writing text for the web site explaining the new proof of work. I'll follow Sunny King's example and release that data 2 days before launch in order to avoid copycats.

- Now that I'm done with the cpuminer, I'm back to the struggle of setting up dnsseed and bind

There are a lot of things involved in doing this right. Most developers don't do it, but I want to do it right. Today I generated new alert keys. Many coins out there don't care about this and just launch with other coin's alert keys and without dnsseeds...

Thanks for the update.

You definitely are not like all those clone maker. I'm really looking forward to the release.

Do you already know the total supply of coin? (or no supply limit like SunnyKing's coins)
Do the Difficulty retarget will be classic or custom?

And I have a last question : In comparison to Primecoin, how do you judge the scientific value of your PoW? I guess it's hard to judge but some people are saying Cunningham chain are almost pointless.
At least, you can't be worth than Bitcoin, for sure!

general parameters are like LTC: supply is 4x BTC, targeted at 2.5mins between blocks, reward starts at 50RIC.
Diff adjusts every 1008 blocks, but taking into the equation the last 2016 blocks (similar to BTC, but intervals are shorter and overlap). However I'm not 100% sure about this, I might change it to retarget more often.

Scientific value is hard to judge a priori, we will be gethering evidence for or against the Riemann hypothesis (which has a prize of 1M USD if you can prove or disprove it!). The PoW might generate groundbreaking results, or may be as pointless as hashing, most likely something in between: we'll create a repository of numbers that some mathematicians may consult for reference. It's very unlikely that we win the million dollars because the hypothesis is considered to be true and we are not explicitly evaluating the zeta function, but we are looking for numbers that will (or won't, that's the point) follow the distribution derived from Riemann's equations.
But if someone makes FPGAs/ASICs for finding prime numbers I'm sure that would be a big help for mathematicians in general. Even if it only helps for generating interest in math, I already consider it a win: we are proving that not only it's possible to make a distributed computing network more powerful than the largest supercomputers, but we would also prove that we can use it for something other than hashes. That surely must be of some "scientific value".

Very intrigued, will be watching closely  :)

Interesting and nice that this coin is at least trying to do something useful.

I am looking forward for the launch.

its searching prime numbers. It can't be scrypt.

@gatra please wait with release. When you are all ready, then make an announcement two weeks ahead (even better three weeks). Two weeks is minimum I think to avoid any kind of premine (not by you, but by coin stalkers), or some other kind of stupid race between people, which usually occurs when a  new coin is released.

Ideally you should release the software and sources some time ahead of launch, so that everyone will have time to download it and read.

Then people will have time to configure the software so that all are up & waiting(idle) & connected to the p2p network. When a specified number of seconds since 1970 passes (cool if you pick some prime number for that) then the p2p network will receive the first block from you and will start mining.

I think that a week of waiting idle is a minimum. So that everyone will have time to properly join and configure the software.

Also during the first days (until block 2016 is generated) you should have dynamic difficulty adjustment based on all blocks generated since genesis block. This way we will not have blocks flying every 10 seconds, and lots of orphans. Then after block 2016 it should be safe to go back to the original difficulty adjustment algorithm.

This way everything will be prepared and no surprises.

Do you like this approach?

That's pretty close to what I was planning, this is what I was thinking:
I would release the sources of the coin and the stand-alone miner a few days ahead, a week if you wish, except for the PoW functions which would be replaced by stubs. The final code would be released at launch time. The idea is that everyone would be able to examine the code and confirm that there's nothing strange and it is indeed pretty similar to bitcoin's. Everyone would be able to compile it, see if they have the correct dependencies, etc, but it won't run. This way I don't have to publish the PoW so no one can steal it and launch before riecoin does. At launch time, when the final code is released, everyone could easily check that the only thing that changed is the PoW code, so you'd only have to check the diff of a few lines of code and recompile.
To avoid having a different difficulty adjustment algorithm for the first blocks, my idea is that for the first N blocks (haven't decided the value of N yet) the reward will be 0. So if there are a lot of orphans or instamining at the beginning, it wouldn't matter. I will be mining from the first moment, and encourage everyone to start mining as soon as they can. This should give everyone time to review the code and compile, but you should hurry because it will be hard to predict how long will it take to get to block N.
Maybe it can be done gradually, to avoid everyone jumping on board at block N, let's say at block N/2 reward starts to increase with each block until it reaches the full value at block N, or something like that.

Would this approach be ok?

You already have the advantage to have block every 2.5 minute instead of 1 with primecoin. It should reduce the orphan and instamine.
But yeah, some block without reward at the beginning should let people have the time to jump in.

Do you consider your miner very optimised? The primecoin one was very bad at the beginning, and few poeple have privately benefited from more powerful miner earlier (thanks to Mikhael who share his version)

This is a nice compromise between openness and protection of your work unitl launch, as fair as you can get in my opinion.
The measures against instamining and difficulty adjusting are a must also for a fair launch, but instead of a 0 reward you can put a small one and increase the initial period for low rewards, this way you will attract more people from launch.
Good luck with this new PoW, seems interesting.

Is there a better eta already?

Hi,

yes, this approach is even better than what I proposed. You could increase the reward linearly starting from block N/2, so that at block N it will be a full 50 coin reward, I think that setting N at around one month should give people enough time to get everything up and running. Nobody cares about flying orphans, no premine. A very clean start. The formula would look something like that:

N - block when reward is full
n - current block

if n<N/2:
  reward=0
elif n<N:
  reward = (50*(1+(n-N)*2/N))
else
  reward=normal_reward # first  50, after four years 25, etc..

it is an integer division internally (but outside it appears as having 8 decimal places precision), so there's no danger that different architectures will grant themselves a little different reward. Unless on some architectures integer division 3/2 gives 1 while on other architectures it gives 2. So just to be safe you could ignore the eighth decimal place when determining whether to accept the block in the blockchain. In fact people could modify their code to always put "9" there, and it will get accepted, but I think that instead of treating it as a problem we can later make some statistics to determine how much hashing power belonged to people who took the effort to modify the code in such a way (and "stole" few satoshis/riemanns) :).


Care to tell us what you are struggling with right now?

This make 2 weeks without reward at all.
By the time there is a reward, the launch period interest will have dissapear long time ago.
For a coin to be successfull, it need some interest+competition. By pool for exemple, who try to do the best miner, the best fee to attract people.

The point is to avoid instamine, not to handicap the coin at launch.

+1

the point is to avoid great loss on orphans and lots of people disappointed by losing their generated block.
Maybe two weeks without reward is too long. But slow increasing of reward to 50 coins is definitely a good approach.

Slowly increasing rewards is a good idea but 2 weeks is DEFINITELY far too long of a period, the crypto world moves way too fast for people to mine something with 0 reward for 2 weeks.

you should increasee reward

2 weeks? I was thinking more like 3.5 days... or hours ... or 2016 blocks... explanation follows:

Keep in mind that even while I "target" for 3.5 days, I've seen that at some launches you can have a block every 4 seconds or even less. So while 3.5 days are normally 2016 blocks @ 2.5min/block, the first 2016 blocks since launch could be generated in as little as 2 hours.
When the difficulty is too low there are many "orphan" blocks, all this orphans are blocks that were valid but are not factored into the equation for difficulty adjustments (only accepted block are), this means that each orphan introduces a small error in the difficulty calculation, so it takes some time to adjust at the beginning. And in the first moments after launch, sometimes blocks go to those with better bandwidth and latency instead of processing power.
Since this is a new PoW (and my first launch) it is impossible for me to guess the right starting difficulty, so I think a small period without reward is needed to compensate for that.

As someone mentioned, the point is not to handicap the coin at launch, the points are:
- To avoid a few people concentrating an unfair amount of RICs in the first moments (if blocks are intended each 2.5mins but a few people with lots of bandwidth get 30 blocks in that time, I consider it unfair)
- To give some time for those who want to examine the code and compile themselves
- To give some time to join to those who have other obligations and cannot be there at the exact launch time and cannot set a script to do it for themselves ("more fairness, yay!")
- To ease the pain for those frustrated by orphan blocks

So I'll try to have a few hours before full reward.

Not everyone will be pleased, but please share your thoughts!

that's nonsense: C, C++ and the Riecoin protocol define integer division as rounding towards zero (ie truncating)
If someone did it differently, it shouldn't be called Riecoin, and their language shouldn't be called C++
If they insisted in creating such a thing and compilng C++ programs with it, postconditions would be broken, invariants wouldn't hold, programs would fail, lives could be lost, would you think of the children?

mostly my daily job and my kids :)

dnsseed is still not working. I might release with seed nodes instead of dnsseeds if I don't get it to work, but this would mean I'd have to pay more for servers...

It uses GMP which is supposed to be highly optimized for many architectures, and I spent some time optimizing the rest of the code. However I'm sure once it's out for the community to examine there will be optimizations that I missed.
If I find more optimizations, I will share them.

Does it mean that you need some reliable seed nodes - from the community?

Or the problems are more technically related?

Is the final logo set it stone? I had just finally convinced a really talented designer to take a crack at it.  This is her work (http://www.waspdigital.com).

sorry, but yes, the contest ended weeks ago and the logo is in the client, twitter, web site, etc. I can't change it now.

Ok, no worries.  Any news on the release date of the currency?  In another thread you said 2 weeks, a bit over 2 weeks ago...

Any news?

unfortunately I think I have to give up. A coin where the main developer sits silent for long cannot succeed. Just look at namecoin, it was extremely difficult to get in touch with vinced the namecoin creator.

gatra, any good news ?

Please don't give up! I admit it's been a lot longer than I (and everyone) expected, I could have launched sooner but I wanted to dedicate to this the time it deserves.

Good news:
I updated riecoin.org with some data.
I'm testing 4 versions (win/linux, 32/64 bit) of the miner and have to make sure all are capable of finding valid blocks. So far 3 of 4 have found blocks.
Launch will be by the end of Jan or beginning of Feb. I can promise this: the launch date will be announced before the end of January.

Thanks!

Very nice man! So there are things going on it seems! I really want to see serious ideas and especially scientific ones! I am waiting for it!

Looks like today is the last day of January, and I am looking forward to it.

Any news?

aaand... here we go: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=446703.0

let's make some noise!

"I can promise this: the launch date will be announced before the end of January." (Gatra, January 19, 2014)

"Launches at 20:00 UTC on Tuesday, Feb 11th, 2014" (Gatra, February 03, 2014)

Will the announced date and time of launch be of simmilar accuracy as the announcement of the announcement?
(Thank you for your work, keep on, I like your ideas and I know that it is not easy to get everything in the ideal way.)

It's ok, I understand I lost credibility regarding deadlines... but the reason I didn't commit a launch date before is that I wanted to be sure that I could deliver. I take the launch seriously and I believe that a failed launch can pretty much kill a coin before it even begins. I have everything needed so unless something really bad happens then it should launch on time.

One more question, will there be pool available or solo only?

solo only
I'm working on a p2pool, but it won't be ready for launch

Hi!

To the winner of the contest: Mjbmonetarymetals, please send me your RIC address so I can award you the prize!

Sorry the logo didn't make it into the Windows wallet, in the rush for launching the Linux wallet is ok but the Windows version was published with the bitcoin logo. I'll fix that for the next release.

Thanks and regards,

gatra

Payment received with thanks

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