Bitcoin Forum

After the recent Bitfunder news it has become quite clear that central exchanges are not viable.

The whole concept of central security exchanges is counter intuitive to the bitcoin philosophy entirely.

COLORED COINS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmFjmvwPGKU) is the answer. The closest thing to any implementation I have found is BITCOINX (http://www.bitcoinx.org/).

So how can those of us who are not programmers help? I propose we start a bounty campaign. Instead of just asking for donations I think a better way to gather funding for a development team would be through a tshirt sale such as TEESPRING (http://teespring.com/).

All profit can go towards funding a bounty to a dev team.

Is there any interest in this? A shirt should be created that does not only cater to those interested in bitcoin denominated securities but rather bitcoin as a whole in order to garner wider support. Perhaps something related to DPR - or perhaps a very nicely designed general bitcoin shirt?

I am willing to invest $300 towards T-Shirts right now and start directly selling shirts for BTC if there is enough interest. I direly need help with a graphics designer for the design.

I did a quick run through teespring with a sample image and for a high quality shirt - selling 100 shirts @ $25 would profit $1.400.

Thoughts?

You can read more about colored coins from COINDESK (http://www.coindesk.com/colored-coins-paint-sophisticated-future-for-bitcoin/)

If you want to donate now to the BitcoinX team here is there DONATION PAGE (http://www.bitcoinx.org/donate/)

I am willing to donate, how far along is this possibility?

Colored Coins - I know it.

But how do we interface it with actual exchanges ? (Bitfunder and friends...)

There won't be a need for exchanges. As i understand it, that is the point. Trades will be made in clients - i think.

OK, a bit of history: There were several implementation attempts by different people, but (as far as I know) the only one which has decentralized market as a goal is called BitcoinX. It is like the mainstream of colored coins.

People who started it wanted to create an organization of some sort, but it didn't work very well, and basically I was the only permanent team member.

So I worked on it on and off for about a year. (Since September of 2012, when I made the first prototype.)

Until July of 2013 I treated it like a gig, but then I noticed that BitcoinX isn't going anywhere (lead developer of WebcoinX which was supposed to take over development sort of disappeared), but there is a demand for this technology, but nobody is doing it right.

So since July it is, like, my main occupation.

Still, progress have been slower than I expected: I wasn't able to recruit more people, and I had to split my attention between two projects: WebcoinX and NGCCC.

(In retrospect, I should have focused on NGCCC. My hope was that we can quickly make a WebcoinX demo which will help to popularize colored coins, but it looks like colored coins need a robust implementation more than they need popularization. On the other hand, I previously had some bad experience with ArmoryX.)

So the currently status: we are working on it, it is slower than expected, but there is hope that something will be available this month.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, sponsors are willing to provide 200 BTC to fund development, so that's not a problem.

More details about status:

    I've recently written an article about the theory of colored coins (https://github.com/bitcoinx/colored-coin-tools/wiki/colored_coins_intro), it summarizes how it works on the low level, but with a dry language. I also plan to write an article about practical aspects of it, like color definitions/asset definitions, trade, issuance and so on. Meanwhile, all this information is available in bitcoinX group archives (http://groups.google.com/group/bitcoinX/), but you have to dig to find it.

    NGCCC: We have coloredcoinlib and CCoinDemo prototype, but this prototype isn't adequate, and I'm currently designing a new core. You can see preview here (https://github.com/killerstorm/CCoinDemo/blob/master/wallet_model.py). Working version will be available in a couple of days.

    WebcoinX: The plan was to implement a demo first, and to improve it to make it work on mainnet second. Demo is almost complete, but there was no development in last couple of weeks. [url-https://trello.com/b/n4qoNDDI/webcoinx]Here's TODO list[/url]