Bitcoin Forum

iXcoin - The Internet eXchange Coin (IXC)

developed in April 2011, after a long hibernation in development, has now been upgraded to the latest Bitcoin 0.8.6 code base.

In addition to the latest upgrades, the development team is now working in four promising areas:

(1) Micro-transactions - Permit micro transactions without the overhead.

(2) Armory wallet - The most advance secure wallet

(3) Colored Coins - Exchange financial instruments (i.e. Bonds, Stocks etc) using IXC

(4) Ripple Integration - Move IXC across exchanges with zero confirmation times.

These innovations will make iXcoin, the most advanced alternate crypto currency.

iXcoin was the first alternate crypto currency.   It will now become the most advanced alternate cryptocurrency.

Lol. Nice try though.

Well, iXcoin almost doubled in price yesterday.

If it weren't for the Bitcoin China problems,  this would have hit $1.

Did Ixcoin really come before Devcoin and Namecoin?

(aka was it really the first altcoin (other than testnet and tonal bitcoin) ?)

-MarkM-

Namecoin squeaked by Ixcoin a few weeks earlier as the first altcoin.  But being the number 2 altcoin ain't bad either.

April 19, 2011 - Namecoin block 1
http://explorer.dot-bit.org/b/000000000036cba77f97fb033dd770830614e2e4f21b61abb0a893472d0bbbb5

May 7, 2011 - Ixcoin block 1
http://block.al.tcoin.info/block/000000000724b7650db4c9582fdb25cc302a85150976e371c1c4571a82ca846f

July 22, 2011 - Devcoin block 1
http://block.al.tcoin.info/block/000000002f751a5066b708d65240c63128183fb67e009027f52cac8a6eb4f81a

It depends whether you consider Namecoin as an alt-coin.

More precisely Ixcoin was the first Bitcoin clone.

I was off by one block on the genesis blocks.  I didn't realize the block chain starts at block 0 not 1.  Below are the updated genesis block dates.  Ixcoin appears to have taken 8 days between the genesis block and block 1.  So it was actually only 12 days behind Namecoin, but the order stays the same.

April 17, 2011 - Namecoin genesis block
http://explorer.dot-bit.org/b/000000000062b72c5e2ceb45fbc8587e807c155b0da735e6483dfba2f0a9c770

April 29, 2011 - Ixcoin genesis block
http://block.al.tcoin.info/block/0000000001534ef8893b025b9c1da67250285e35c9f76cae36a4904fdf72c591

July 22, 2011 - Devcoin genesis block
http://block.al.tcoin.info/block/0000000062558fec003bcbf29e915cddfc34fa257dc87573f28e4520d1c7c11e

to much coins you wanna dump?

You are correct that iXcoin is 12 days older than Namecoin.

By the way, I wasn't trying to bash iXcoin or anything.  I actually like it.  I was just providing some data since the question came up about which came first.

No harm in the truth.  The founder of iXcoin claims it to be the first alt-coin.  Which appears not to be entirely correct.

If however one claims that namecoin is sufficiently different from bitcoin to not be a clone, then iXcoin would be the first real clone of bitcoin.

At this time though,  iXcoin is different from bitcoin in that it is a merged mined coin which bitcoin is not.

Regardless, iXcoin has a lot of promise and we'll be working on new developments to exposed that potental.

Glad to hear it.

We're going to make Mastercoin and Protoshares/Bitshares look like a bad joke.

Let's be real here,  why re-invent the wheel when all the tried and tested technology already exists.

The only problem with Bitcoin in implementing these innovations is that it is now too expensive too build innovation on top of.

You think anyone would "print" their shares on top of a bitcoin that costs over $600 a share?!

If you want to buy in to innovation, IXC is already trading in the open market.   None of these bogus restricted buy ins from Mastercoin with ludicrous claims that there approach actually works.     These folks are in the experimental stage and folks have bet a fortune that what they're doing works.

Do you think it's impossible to print their shares on top of mBTC, that costs 0.6 USD?

Say we have a company with a typical 20 million shares out standing.

So if we go with you bitcoin solution using mBTC, it will cost 12 million USD to use bitcoin to distribute the shares.

What about an iXcoin solution using mIXC, it will cost 2,200 USD to get the IXC to distribute the shares using a crypto currency.

With bitcoin and iXcoin you can go down to 1 millionth of a coin ( the rest will be considered spam).

So let's go to to that level with shares.   1 millionth of a bitcoin is, 0.00065.  1 millionth of a iXcoin is, 1.1e-7. 
20 million shares (no fractional shares) costs $13,000 for bitcion.  20 million shares of iXcoin costs $2.2. 

Now we are talking about the price of bitcoin today,  if bitcoin continues to go up, it would be uneconomical to use bitcoin for smart properties.

And GRouPcoin? (We ran GRouPcoin during development of devcoin so its genesis block obviously must have an earlier datestamp than devcoin's.)

I suppose we can pretend UKB, CDN, UNS, NKL, MBC, GRF, GMC and UNS never existed...

( See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html )

Along with weeds, BEER and other coins that used the multicoin codebase...

-MarkM-

It's an old coin, but how does it make it valuable ?

About "Colored coins"... There are already projects to implement this as a layer on top of Bitcoin's blockchain.

Well, if you can resurrect these coins and get them traded in exchanges, then perhaps there's a chance.

See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

( The Digitalis Open Transactions Server thread is https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0 )

-MarkM-

It is more valuable because most of the coins have already been mined and have already traded on the street.   Therefore the price is much more stable than a coin that was just create a few weeks ago or 6 months ago.  All these newer coins are still at an inflationary stage where miners can mine coins at next to nothing and sell at a profit on exchanges.   By contrast, iXcoin, it is very difficult to accumulate a sizeable stash of IXC.  

Yes, the problem with colored coins on top of bitcoin's blockchain is that bitcoin considers anything less than 5,400 satoshi as spam.  So to create bonds or shares on Bitcoin by consuming bitcoin is now prohibitively expensive and will continue to become more expensive over time.   However by contrast, doing so with iXcoin is economical.

So what again am I looking at here?

Actually, you reminded me to look at Open Transactions.  Thanks

Watching this thread.

Vircurex has made good both times that they were hacked in the past, so they seem to have been reasonably safe so far.

They also give you "interest" (a portion of their fee-earnings) on certain coins (such as bitcoin).

So you can presumably place buy offers offering to use bitcoin to buy things, and earn interest on those bitcoins even while they lurk at some lowball price.

This makes it an excellent place to support the bottom end of the price range of a coin whose price you want to try to keep from crashing, as you can put offers at every satoshi of price all the way up from one satoshi, and still earn (assuming they really do pay "interest", especially on coins you are devoting toward providing liquidity and stability in this way) even though you hope no one will ever end up actually selling to you for only one satoshi.

(You hope that because you want to support the market cap of the coins you are supporting; obviously if people do dump so many coins that they do take you up on your entire huge pile of lowball offers you stand to pick up a lot of coins dirt cheap so hey it is good either way... Either you get bargain basement prices or the market cap is upheld, either way you win. :))

Furthermore you can get a discount on trading fees at Vircurex by signing up using a referral link, so here is a referral link:

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-

iXcoin is traded on exchanges like Vircurex and Cryptsy.

Nice strategy, indeed.   Holding BTC while earning interest at the same time supporting the value of an alt-coin.  Very nice indeed.

Also so just realized that you can buy almost anything under the sun with BTC using Gyft. 

IMHO, an alt-coin does not need be even honored by merchants.  It only needs to be exchangeable with BTC and provide  functionality that BTC cannot provide.

Having merchants accept an altcoin may not be an absolute requirement, but it's still a good goal to include in a strategic plan.  Merchants increase transactions, which is going to be more and more important to insure miners stay interested once iXcoin has mined all its coins.  Merchants are also like free advertising because they expand people's knowledge and acceptance of the altcoin.  So  I think we need to work on merchant acceptance at some point if they don't start using iXcoin on their own.  But I like your priorities at this time of getting the client updated, website and forum up, etc.  First things first.

Payment processor acceptance is probably much more important than merchant acceptance because probably more merchants sinply let their payment processor worry about what foreign and crypto currencies to accept than run their own payment processing.

For example if paypal accepted bitcoins, presto all kinds of merchants that never even heard of it would, unknown to themselves, accept it, without even needing to know it even exists because the payment processor gives the merchant the type of currency the merchant wants regardless of what obscure currency the customer chooses to pay in, provided it is one that the payment processor accepts.

-MarkM-

Yes, in my mind I was lumping payment processors in with merchants, but you make a good distinction.  Payment processors are probably much easier to target because they make money on the transaction itself and should welcome additional coins as long as they are stable.

But there are cases where a merchant is particularly large or a gaming site has a lot of activity where it may pay to target them specifically.

I was mainly pointing out we should not ignore people who actually buy and sell real stuff.  Without them we are expecting investers, traders and miners to create enough transaction volume to keep iXcoin's economy healthy. 

I can see some cryptos, like iXcoin, specializing as long term stores of value if they have low or zero inflation rates.  However, miners still need to stay happy by getting enough transaction income.  Without them we loose block chain security.

Targeting merchants is the payment processor's job.

If it is possible to convince the gaming site or whatever to accept one coin in addition to whatever other coins or fiats or airmiles or whatever variety of things it already accepts, shouldn't it be even easier for a payment processor to convince it to simply accept the payment processor and thereby no longer have to deal with all the spam from different coin enthusiasts urging their coin be accepted, or having to implement yet another currency themselves when some nation changes its currency or when some new nation is born that launches its own currency and so on?

Isnt it just easier on the merchant, however large, to let all the potentially billions of currencies in the universe all be handled for them by a payment processor?

Even if, like e-bay, they buy a payment processor for the purpose?

(Assuming it was ebay that bought paypal and not vice-versa?)

-MarkM-

This is why the planned Ripple integration is so nice. If a coin has liquidity within Ripple, it can be effortlessly spent at any merchant that accepts either Ripple payments *or* bitcoin.

For example, if you are buying on Gyft, you select the option to pay with bitcoin. Then you enter the BTC payment amount and the supplied bitcoin address as the recipient from within your Ripple client. Ripple then calculates a conversion path and tells you how much IXC it will cost. If you elect to spend that IXC, a few seconds later the Gyft checkout dialog will register receipt of the requested bitcoin, and you have your Gyft card. The process is just as easy at any merchant who accepts bitcoin.

Under the covers, Ripple trades your IXC for BTC.bitstamp, which is then redeemed at Bitstamp's Ripple->Bitcoin bridge. Bitstamp then sends that amount of BTC to the address entered in to the Ripple client. The user doesn't have to worry with any of that, however, they just enter the final payment details and select the currency to pay with.

---

James Lee (jl777) is serving as a market maker within Ripple for several crypto and fiat currencies. He has recently started offering market making services (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383658.msg4127541#msg4127541) for additional altcoins. Since the iXcoin dev team is planning to integrate with Ripple, having a good market maker supporting IXC will be a plus. Send James a message.     

Unfortunately, as far as I know, the "gateway" source code provided by the Ripple team is not recommended for real use, and I have not yet heard of any better gateway code having been released yet.

Otherwise I would have had gateways up and running for several coins as soon as the ripple server source was released.

-MarkM-

EDIT: "snow" gateway code is released but I do not know if that is really ready for real-world use with other people's money yet either. Maybe it is?

I don't know whether Ripple Labs actually supplied gateway code or if each gateway rolled their own using the API. If a gateway has low volume, everything can be done manually from the client until their usage pushes them to automate it.

Regardless, Justcoin (http://www.justcoin.com) has released their gateway code as open source:

https://github.com/justcoin/snow

As written, it has interfaces for XRP, BTC, LTC and fiat banking. It is a good place to start if you want to integrate additional altcoins. They are just starting a documentation project to make that easier.

In terms of strategic focus,  we have to focus on the international market or more specifically the remittance market.  So yes, this requires some payment processing function however it needs to have some exchange function such that foreign markets are able to exchange their IXC to their local currency.

So the OT (open transaction) functionality of supporting different kinds of bids/asks/limit etc orders may be a good starting point for providing a software bundle that different countries can use.   

So we're still trying to work out how to integrate colored coins, ixc, OT and perhaps ripple for an integrated bundle.

Roughly we are saying,  the system allows users issuance of new currencies using ixc colored coin functionality.  Now unlike mastercoin,  the amount of new currency is proportional to the ixc consumed.   This effectively creates demand for ixc at the same time reduce supply.   OT acts as a gateway such that these currencies are usable in a manner more similar to debit cards or gift cards.   

There is of course the open question as to whether more advanced transactions should be embedded in the IXC protocol or just be implemented as an OT layer using IXC as the underlying currency.  We know that the latter does work.   There is no evidence at the present that the former approach has any value.

I will have to agree with you that market maker functionality is necessary for iXcoin.

The two exchanges, Vircurex and Cryptsy don't currently support Ripple.   However, one can envision a exchange package that has integration with ripple to provide the market making functions.

So are we saying then

(1) Colored coins to allow issuance of various kinds of currencies, bonds, stocks, coupons etc.
(2) OT gateway to provide richer feature such as cheques, recurring payments, escrow etc.
(3) Ripple to provide market maker liquidity for the OT gateways

Is that the overall architecture we envision here?

Blinded token "cash" might be better than coloured coins because people keep seeming to imagine that coloured coins, being distributed / p2p, are somehow "secure" in some sense that Chaumian blinded token "cash" is not.

I think that is dangerous and misleading, and pretending that that does not matter "because buyer beware" or "because RTFM" maybe does to quite "cut it" when grandma gets bilked out of her retirement savings due to somehow failing to have it sufficiently strongly drummed into her that the things have no value other than any value the issuer might honour, regardless of how many distributed p2p people go on and on about how important it is and how wonderful it is that "the issuer is not required in order to trade this asset".

With Open Transactions based "cash" tokens it hopefully is very very clear how totally dependent it is upon the issuer. Especially if the issuer is the server that must be used to deal with the tokens. Even just having some other issuer's tokens be used on a server could be dangerously confusing, because when one thinks of a term for what the server is doing when it gives out cash tokens a word that English speakers seem likely to have come to mind is that the server issues the cash tokens. Which is correct English but that kind of handing out of the cash is utterly different from "issuing" the Open Transactions assets themselves that the cash represents, which in turn only represents some real asset such as grams of gold or shares of a company etc.

So for total clarity it might be better, even if third party running an Open Transactions server/service that some company's shares will be traded on and/or handed out as cash tokens by, to set up a distinct server per such company, making it clear the server is that company's server so it is always totally clear that the assets tokens cash etc all totally depend upon that company not upon the hosting service or software as a service company that sys-admins the server/service.

-MarkM-

Well, my big question really is, which parts of OT can be used that will be synergistic with iXcoin?

So right now, I am thinking, one would create new financial instruments using OT,  this would be defined in Ricardian contract like fashion.   The actual instrument is allocated into IXC.  In short, issuance of currency is not free, one has to provide an allocation of IXC that gets converted to the new currency.   OT scripting functionality would then be used to enforce the agreement of the IXC currency.  

The question though from the IXC p2p peer network is this.  How does the network know of the details of the currency?  How does the enforcement of the contracts work in a distributed fashion?   In other words, there is some registry out there (hopefully not centralized), that the IXC network is aware of and employs to enforce contracts of all its minted currencies.  Can the contract information be embedded in the genesis transaction?  Are contract executions confined to the server that issued the contract or is it transferrable?

Yes, you are entirely correct that there needs to be some linkage back from the issuer and the actual server that would deliver the contract.  Unless what needs to be delivered by the issuer is a commodity.   The function therefore of iXcoin based currency is to make transparent to both buyer and seller the total number of units that are available.   The issue with a OT server only issuance is that one cannot discover the quantity that is actually issued.  There is an element of trust that the issuer has actual created only what he can actually deliver (kind of like a fiat currency).   In an IXC denominated currency, the amounts that have been issued are known in the ledger.

Actually the audit stuff that Open Transactions is intended to have is supposed to take care of tracking how much of an asset has been issued on a server.

That audit stuff has been talked about and assumed to eventually be put in place for a long time but currently it remains vapourware.

Nonetheless it is still the solution that Open Transactions intends so any questions like how will anyone know the balances all add up and the correct number of assets were issued onto that server and so on all come back to "the audit stuff will take care of all that".

It is thus well understood what the audit stuff will do, it just isn't actually up and running doing it yet.

So maybe people who feel an urgent need for those parts of Open Transactions might want to look into whether some donations or bounties might speed up or prioritise that part of Open Transactions' development.

-MarkM-

Other than the Ricardian Contract capability,  what in OT would be useful of iXcoin?

So IXC will be a victim of it's own success.  If IXC were to increase in value anywhere near BTC, then it will lose the advantage you talking about.

Shhh!  Don't point out the bullshit.

Smarter approach: get yourself paid off, and contribute to spewing nonsense on the IxCoin threads about how awesome it would be if all these hypothetical features existed.

Alternatively, point out how because IxCoin is worthless, it must work better.  But try not to reveal the fact that by the same logic, something 1000 times more worthless would presumably work even better.