Bitcoin Forum

Short version

I'm currently a graduate student who is planning to move into hacking on cryptocurrencies full time.  I've been an active member of the community for approximately 3 years now and have conceptualised cryptocurrency ideas through the input of the community on a working project called MC2 (http://mc2.xwebnetwork.com/storage/mc2_0.05.pdf).  I have the backing of Conformal Systems (https://www.conformal.com/), owners of Coinvoice (https://coinvoice.com/) and creators of btcd (https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/btcd), who will provide quality control for code written in the implementation of these ideas.

(1) What models work for the community to fund cryptocurrency development and make it worthwhile for you to contribute? One model explored so far is the idea of stake tickets redeemed for coins in the developed cryptocurrency. Are there any others that work better?
(2) What do you want to see from a project like this? What kind of engagement do you want to see? What kind of structures should we build to accommodate what's lacking in the community?

I will be at the Texas Bitcoin Conference if anyone would like to meet up with me there and discuss things with me, and I'm trying to be more active in my IRC channel (#mc2) and -wizards on freenode.  As I live in the greater Toronto area, I will also be making an effort to attend the local meets at Bitcoin Decentral on a regular basis if this becomes my full time work.  I haven't had the opportunity to delve into cryptocurrencies nearly as much as I'd like to, and I'm hoping with the support of the community, I can make this into a career.

Long Version

Most of you here know of me, have seen me post over the past couple of years, have heard of my specifications for MC2 (http://mc2.xwebnetwork.com/storage/mc2_0.05.pdf), or have used GUIMiner-scrypt (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150331.0).

I'm hoping that the end of this month will mark the beginning of a transitioning period in my life: the move away from graduate school and into professional cryptocurrency development.

After much review of my situation over the past month, I have decided that I would prefer to drop out of my graduate program and code for the community if possible.

Likewise, I don't want this money to come from a company -- I want it to come from the community.  There has been a large amount of interest lined up in the early donation of BTC to me and my developers to create MC2, with the promise of stake tickets (eventual coins) in return.  This is somewhat similar to the Ethereum fundraiser (https://www.ethereum.org/whitepaper/ethereum.html), but I don't know if it's considered the ideal situation for you guys, or what you consider to be a fair and balanced initial distribution in exchange for the input required to pay the developers.  Most certainly I did not want something like 5% or 10% of the total quantity of coins being in a central foundation's hands by 5 or 10 years time.  I intended to cap individual contributions to $5 k USD, to allow group buys on the forum for smaller quantities through some of these eligible individuals, and to cap contributions by developers themselves to $10 k USD.

I want you guys' feedback on what you think is far and reasonable, for instance, the premine perhaps being 3% of the total amount of coin issued after 10 years, whether or not the code should be initially released FOSS to prevent forking, and so on.  If it's not released FOSS, we will allow periodic audits by security firms and trusted members of the community prior to and after release, until the period it becomes FOSS.

Basically, though, the people who offered to help me in the beginning and who've stood beside me and supported me and my ideas will be the first ones allowed to donate.  And, I think that's fair.

There are many ways this money could be stored.  I think the best idea is to put it in P2SH multisig addresses (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0016.mediawiki), where the sender transmits it to this address and in order for it to be spent the sender, myself, and whoever other trusted members of the community we choose will all have to sign for the money before it will be sent anywhere.  To mitigate volatility, we can also transfer a small amount of BTC to a P2SH address to use as a deposit, that goes towards the full amount required in fiat later.  In this way, we can use the blockchain as the escrow for the community funds, so that even if you send us the money, we can never spend it to fund ourselves without your consent later.  In this way, we can also schedule the transmission of funds on an as needed basis.

If/when I start working on full time development, I would give major contributers a phone number with which to contact me, and ready access to communicate with me over IRC as well to keep the development process as transparent as possible.  Distribution of funds would be on an as needed basis: if one of my developers needs to get paid for the month, we would contact the sig holder of the multisig address, and move a small amount of money at a time in exchange for a small amount of tickets at a time, and people would know exactly where their money was going.

Even though my quoted starting wage was $60-80 k USD, I'm not comfortable starting at the high end for the community's sake, because I don't know how this will turn out.  I will commit to these things:
1.) I will request a starting wage of $60 k USD via donations to begin work on this project in March for a 1 year duration.  As I want some stake in MC2 as well, I'll only ask for $50 k USD and myself assume $10 k USD of stake tickets (as if I had donated $10 k USD myself).
2.) I will be the lowest paid programmer on my team.
3.) If for some reason the project falls through, any code generated non-publicly will be released to the community and remaining funds will be returned to their original owners.

I want to make the stipulation that the community will be hiring me through donation, and that there is no promise of future value for any prospective premine system, and no promise that working code will be delivered at the end of this.  It's a donation to help fund innovation in the community and to help generate more cryptocurrency developers with the experience required to maintain the financial systems of the future.

To leave my graduate studies would be a gigantic leap for me, and leaves me with no real guarantee of financial stability beyond the next year (at least, from my current vantage point).

So, how do you all, as a community, feel about me working for some of you for the quantities of funds?  How do you feel about small premines distributed over a series of years being used to fund a new coin?  What else do you want to see in launches of funding for new coins?  What do and don't you agree with?

I'm not a marketing person or really even a businessperson, so I'm not going to sell this to you as anything but what it is -- a system of donations that goes to funding some research and implementation in the cryptocurrency community.  It's my dream to work modestly for the benefit of the community, and to learn progressively more about cryptography and novel decentralized payment systems.

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Contact me via BitMessage: BM-NBKELZ4Ri3paEF71Yr2xxp3wFB7uioZ9
or by IRC: irc.conformal.com:6697 (https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/IRC_server) (SSL required) in #mc2 or freenode #mc2

Original MC2 thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169204

You have my support Taco.

You've been an outstanding active member of the community with many active contributions. The whitepaper that you presented is also solid and this endeavor is not a pump and dump scheme at all. You really want to develop the best coin possible.

For that, I am in.

You have had and will continue to have my support.

Sent you a few messages via pm and bitmessage. Still behind this project and hoping to contribute as soon as I can.

You definitely have my support on this! I feel that if you're not satisfied with your graduate studies then do what will bring satisfaction; especially since you have a route that you can pursue right now. One of the biggest shames in life is to pull back and be afraid to chase a dream.

You've done a bunch of awesome things for the community (just regarding alt cryptos: your posts on making a scrypt mining rig and then following that with a scrypt GUI-Miner)! And your whitepaper for MC2 is really solid and you did great discussing the questions in that thread about the concept and the whitepaper. I'm sure there will be tons of support for you on this.

I commend you and completely support this. If you ever need marketing help (which I doubt) I'd be happy to lend my services. Question, if you are able to create it sooner than a year will you release it?

What's the distribution chart and ETA for the project?

I'm a huge fan, I will continue to support MC2

Here's the whitepaper in question:

http://mc2.xwebnetwork.com/storage/mc2_0.05.pdf

Thanks for all the nice words, everyone.  I really appreciate them. :)


Sure,
This is what I had going out in the newsletter:

To compare, here are the amount of total coins from PoW and PoS combined every year for 10 years:

This image shows the estimated percentage of coins generated through the sales of early stake tickets:
https://i.imgur.com/ygef60C.png

Donations would be first come, first serve, and coins get more expensive as we move past out initial minimum funding.

We're capped at $0.5 m USD.

Individual contributions are capped at $5k USD.

Developer contributions are capped at $10k USD and are removed from what they would be paid (including for myself).

These coins are redeemed between years 0-3 in an approximately linear distribution (so that no one donating can immediately dump a mass amount of coins into the market).

It will be launched as soon as the PoS and "finite mini blockchain" systems are complete and 100% functional.  Decentralized reserve system will be an addon that will be launched afterwards in a version update.

See above.  Conformal thinks with 2-3 more skilled devs that we can launch in 6 or so months after testing and security audits, with the reserve system launching in about 12 months and receiving the same treatment.

I'll put up a form tomorrow if anyone wants to submit name suggestions. MC2 has worked well for a project name, but if we're thinking about a larger general audience (and the future outside of Bitcointalk), we'd need something that works there. Once we have that ironed out, we can set up all the community avenues and get this thing going for March! You can also PM names to me if you'd like in the meantime.

That's a lot of coins generated per annum. Do you think it's really best to do it this way? Market Cap would be huge in order to get significant traction.

Well, it can be adjusted by an order of magnitude in base 10 if you guys want it to be, e.g. 18,700,697 coins in the first year.  This doesn't affect market capitalization against USD or BTC though, just the price per coin.

If you want to make the coin attractive to investors the most important factor isn't the total number of coins. The total number of coins can be infinite or have a low cap depending on the psychological impact you want to have. Peercoin for example has an infinite total number but inflation is limited at the rate of Moore's law. The ASICs being used will eventually give Peercoin among the lowest inflation rates there is and so it's actually a better investment than Litecoin.

The area where there is no room for negotiation is the inflation rate. The inflation rate should be kept nice and low and taper off after the first year so that while you don't have to put a cap on the total amount of coins (or if you have a cap it does not have to be something you reach in the next 100 years).

For example if the cap is 50 million but the inflation rate is 500,000 coins a year it's going to take over 100 years to reach 50 million. I think the only reason coins have to inflate is to attract new people to the idea. Bitcoin had to inflate at a high rate early on because no one knew what Bitcoins were and they had to be given away to get people to use them.

Now if you have a high inflation rate all it causes is pump and dumps. It's not like altcoins need marketing anymore because everyone knows about cryptocurrency now.

40,960,000 coins issued through stake tickets is a lot. My opinion is let the demand determine the supply. But it can reach a return on investment if the inflation rate from mining is kept low. These are just my opinions and everyone is free to have their own.

Cunicula was originally in favour of stemming the initial issuance to a period of 10 years.  In the paper, it's described as 27 years to 1%, after which the inflation of the supply because to increase exponentially (but slowly), similar to fiat but slower.  This will make mining continually attractive, because it does not rely on fees.  Mainly it's designed to to supplement Bitcoin as a goto point inbetween that of equity and actual fiat (in response to criticisms like these (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=351712.0)), and indeed, with the decentralized reserve system, intends to have an in place public oracle system to hold fiat within the chain itself.

Time-to-1% inflation (TT1%?) can be tweaked to whatever, so if you guys want a faster distribution, this can be done.  Initial issuance must also be tweaked if you want it to stay at a 3%/10y target.  It is a delicate issue though; adjusting decreases in inflation so that they occur very rapidly can lead to accusations of a ponzi scheme e.g. protoshares.

Nice to see that there's an active discussion going on. How do others that have posted in this thread feel about the current inflation and issuance?

I still would like to translate the whitepaper into Dutch. Tacotime mentioned I should ask ingsoc_ for the file, so I figured I'd ask here now that I think about it. Has the paper been finalized yet?

Yes, you can ask him for it now.  There are a few changes that need to be made to the PoS file for it to work that I've realized since then, and the PoW method is not finalized, but it should still be able to stand on its own.  The final version will come out with the coin on release.

I've not heard of you before but I read the whitepaper and your ideas look great.  I'd be interested in contributing.

I prefer the crowd funding rubric with a factor of 10 less than what it already is. Given the total amount of coins after year 1, 2...etc, I feel that 40 million would be too much.

I'm happy with 0.108 cents each. What about the others?

I'm happy with a factor of 10 less or the way it is now. Ultimately the tech should represent the value of the cryptocurrency, but before that can happen, we can only look at what we already know about other cryptocurrencies. On a very primitive level, it looks like people like a lot of supply because it's easy to throw around for plenty of reasons, whereas less supply equates higher value (as we can only assume a market would determine through supply/demand). This is a tough balance.

Would love to see what the arguments are for and against a factor of 10, because obviously there are also psychological factors to consider as opposed to strictly economic rationale.



Even at 0.18/coin, it's reasonable considering at that point tacotime and the devs would have produced quite a bit of tech to show they're good for it. 0.10/coin feels reasonable for the amount of risk early adopters carry because there is nothing to show for it yet, aside from (1) reputation of the developer and (2) the ideas themselves. If (1) and (2) check out and people feel what's being asked for to pay the developer to do the work is reasonable, then that balances against the risk they're asked to undertake (of course, that's not for everyone). So I think the model reflects that really well.

I can send you the 0.5 version, aside from the changes tacotime wants to make. At this point we don't have any money to pay for translations, so I should get that out in the open. I'll take care of setting up the forums, doing all the community stuff, and all the things that would otherwise take time away from development so tacotime and whoever else comes along for dev can focus solely on that.

I should also mention that I won't take any funds for myself to set this stuff up and maintain it. It's purely voluntary because I think we need to make the funds last as long as possible to produce the best tech/$. That sits well with me. This is also why tacotime will start at the bottom of the field in terms of salary.

Welcome aboard! You should PM me your Bitmessage address if you like and I can help you test to see if it works. That way have direct access to any future communication that tacotime sends out about the project.

It's variable (return is constantly decreasing as with PoW reward), and coins need to be distributed to stake pools to get interest.  Your interest will also be dependent on what the stake difficulty is.  So, it's impossible to say, it's sort like asking what your return would be on mining if you bought a 3 TH/s miner 6 months from now.  But it will be something, and predictable based on the time of your submission to the stake pool.

Public oracle system sort of like that described originally for MasterCoin in Goldshares/Goldcoins, but with much enhanced stabilization.  The downside is that transfers will probably be slow to hedge risk, so if you want to trade fiat with equity on a daily basis you need some kind of exchange.  But, obviously, at some level, to get real fiat you need a bank.  The point here is to have a system that includes fiat built in, so that you can actually just be paid with the in chain fiat and send it to your landlord to pay rent over the chain.

The project is looking very interesting indeed.

Jumping from graduate school to such an unknown and uncertain endeavor, dangerous and exciting no doubt. I wish you all the luck in the world.

While I do understand the risk associated with forking, I do believe quite strongly that source availability is paramount. While I have no doubt in the good faith of the developers and any security auditing company involved, it would add a layer of uncertainty that could lead to unpleasant situations.
The code does not necessarily have to be FOSS, meaning that the licence with which you decide to release the code could perhaps be clear on its stance regarding derivative work, but the full source code associated with the entire system should be available to the whole community.

I admire your commitment,best wishes

pm sent

This brings up a really interesting point. There is no doubt that this project will be FOSS. The only question is when. Without contributors who fund the developer to build and innovate, there can be no project. However, by not making it FOSS the project would do the larger world a great disservice.

So on the one hand we have the desire and need to make it FOSS, and on the other hand we have an ethical obligation to the contributors to protect what they essentially built - in order to ensure their contributions weren't in vein. Even though the larger world benefits from the created knowledge, we can't have a situation where those who contributed become martyrs. That would kill the model in the long term. This is a question Ethereum is also thinking about.

I think there are two ways that can run in parallel that we can use to deal with this question:

(1) Make everything FOSS so everyone can benefit from the knowledge but keep one component out that is not straightforward and critical to the functioning of the cryptocurrency system (something PoS related)
(2) Wait for the community to grow sufficiently large so that the network matures to a point where there is no incentive to migrate overnight to an identical clone with nothing novel (this may be more of an unsubstantiated fear than a real possibility, however)

That's my take. Forgive me if my logic is flawed. I'd love to hear what you think because this is something that remains untested for the most part.

Well, I think you bring up valid points to both arguments. Clearly the large investment (money and effort) spent in building a solution need to be protected.

From perhaps the more ideological standpoint, FOSS and its goals match rather well with the concept of cryptocurrency and it's admirable (and perhaps a little expected) that in the long run the source ought to be fully public and OS.

I was wondering how practical an intermediate solution is. Beyond the ideological benefits of openness.
I think source availability is key to providing a modicum of trust in the technology.
A solution, I thought, could be to initially release the software under a limiting license, which allows scrutiny but disallows derivative works, clones, etc. This obviously raises the question of enforce-ability, and that is a question I don't really have an answer to.

Releasing the code in partial form, with key components missing is an interesting take on the problem. It could doubtlessly be interesting, in terms of knowledge sharing, however it would still not help provide any comfort over the security and transparency of the software released in binary form.

Judging by the Alt-Coin frenzy and ongoing existence, I would tend to think the risks posed by clone currencies to be somewhat small, but this does assume this project innovates enough and delivers enough to claim a top spot, rather than just being an alt-coin among many others. It certainly looks like it has the chance.

Hey Tacotime as always you have my support. One thing I think is lacking is transparency in the pre-launch process, and then when coins are launched having a solid, robust tooling and infrastructure in place. Maxcoin is a perfect example of where they had the former but the latter was pretty horrid. Not sure if this is purposeful (it seems like it might be), but we really need to fix these launches. I'm almost thinking of having a phased launch:

1) pre-launch announcement
2) launch stage0 - people can start mining up to X % over 2 weeks then coins stop being distributed for Z%, this rewards but also tests the system initially
3) launch stage1 - restart people can mine another Y% over 1 year then coins stop shortly to fix bugs in the system
4) launch stage2 - long-term launch, mining continues for 5 years ... etc.

This might build some fairness in the system.

I think the ideal situation is that we release FOSS after 3 or so months, and in the meantime have several trusted, independent members of the community audit the code.  I would also like at least one security firm to do an audit, and hopefully something like that would put the community at rest until the code goes FOSS.  Conformal Systems will have access to everything I write as well, and I'm sure that if there were something malicious they would raise an issue with it.

The truly paranoid can also run it inside a VM.

Miners I want to open source and get out for the testnet as early as possible, to let people play with optimizations.

It's hard to tell exactly how to mitigate problems with large hashrates at introduction -- you'd like have to titrate the difficulty by some means, perhaps by a centralized mechanism akin the the alert keys of the network, but you still run into the problem that people won't start hopping on until the difficulty is low enough for it to be very profitable for them.  I think a 4.5-9.0 day titration period may be ideal where you set the difficulty sky high and then keep halving it every hour until you start seeing a lot of blocks enter the network, then release the network to the miners.

I offered to help fund this project but Taco Time is far too important to reply to PM's. Good luck guys.

Me too,ah well, all the best ;D

Sorry, the PM/e-mail/Bitmessage volume is kind of high right now and there are a number of people I need to reply to.  I have replied to you.

Send it to me and I promise I'll get it to him and a response for you, if I can't assist you with it directly. Problem is he's running around like crazy tying up all the loose ends before he moves into this full-time. That will all change in the future. In the meantime, if you don't get a response from him, send it to me, and I'll get it sorted. I want to commit to try and look into everyone's concerns. An insane task, but let's see.

also replied

Alright, I sent you a PM regarding this.

MC2 is name of coin?

If not, I hope it's something that can become mainstream and the general public can understand well.

+1 price/coins are the only thing that will be affected. Personally I'd rather own 1 million coins that are worth $1/coin, instead of owning 10btc that are worth $1 million or $100k/btc. I'd rather make payments in whole units so, please dont reduce the order of magnitude by 10x.

Just as a preamble, I've been a long time lurker, even though this is my first post. I started mining last April and followed your guides and I've been following MC2 since around that time. I always look at your posts within threads with a high level of respect, because I know you know what you're talking about. I have been looking forward to this project coming to fruition for a long time.

That said, I just wanted to caution you, tacotime, about what your coin is turning into. Consider what this will look like to people who have never heard of MC2 and know nothing about it, and the first things your competition will grab onto to put your coin down.

1. Premine?
2. Backed by corporation?
3. Closed source?

We have already seen examples of all of these and they don't turn out well. I would like to suggest you fully develop your coin and relevant services/pools/miners/etc before launch, so that you can have a successful OPEN SOURCE launch without fear of competition. So that all your shit is lined up and ready to go. It would be a real shame to put all this time and work in, to quit your studies, just to have your coin fall flat on its face before the community even gives it a fair chance.

Surely other people are thinking this?

What are your thoughts?

We're working on a new name for release, MC2 is just a working title.

Well, it's going to be hard to code the entire thing by myself with thorough testing.  I'm not sure what would make people feel secure about pushing money our way for work on this.  Some people tell me that I should try and get as much BTC as possible as early as possible, other people tell me I should take no BTC, and most people seem happy with progressive funding that extends only to fit our needs.  Scaling funding to the minimum needed amount to keep the premine as small as possible seems ideal, too.

It's going to be hard to get this all from donations now, with all the other fundraisers present for coins like SkyCoin and Ethereum, which promise users at least something in return for their donations.

Conformal is strongly dedicated to FOSS that assists users in achieving more security, such as btcd and xombrero.  It's a small company.

Well, I had wanted this to prevent forks, and only for three or so months post release of new featuresets.  nxt is still closed source and is doing okay.

I would really love to be able to do this, but I'm pretty sure I need at least a couple more well versed coders to get this out in a reasonable timeframe.  On the low end, programmers cost $60-90k USD depending on level of experience and proficiency.  Again, it's hard to compete with other chains that are paying their coders huge amounts per month, e.g. Ethereum.

I mean, I could try to work for free for the community for the next year and hack this out myself as best as I can... but I'm not sure that's fair to myself, and I'm not sure it's fair to the community in terms of time and security.  I don't know how other people feel.

No, MC2 is the original working title of the project that introduced some ideas in a white paper to the community. You can have a look at the original thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169204.0) if you want to see where it comes from. It was just a name used as a container for the ideas because of the original memory-hard focus of the cryptocurrency.

Bear in mind this was in a time long ago, long before Mastercoin, BitShares, and Nxt. Heck, it was even before Litecoin got cool. Pretty sure there's a MemoryCoin 2.0 now too. We finally arrived at a name that we think works well. We'll do a [PRE-ANN] soon for some information on this (pending on getting all the hosting sorted and getting stuff online).

Received and responded. Sorry about taking so long. I feel like we're two guys in a garage and everyone is queuing up to get some lemonade. We gotta make sure it's good lemonade. :P

Could we vote for the new name?

Fair point, and a clear dichotomy of opinion. Would people prefer it if we put up a poll and keep it going for a long time while we work on things so we can gather as many unique votes as possible on this?

We scratched our heads on a name for a really long time. I can't believe how hard it is nowadays to get a top-level domain. We managed to get one, but we can certainly put up a suggestion form so people can submit names.

We also need names for units. I'm not sure how essential it'll be, but it's kind of fun to name things. E.g., Ethereum has wei (10^3), szabo (10^12), finney (10^18), etc. Similar to Bitcoin's mBTC/uBTC/satoshi debate.

I'll put up a form now so we can see what kind of suggestions come out of it, and we can share the submitted names with the community.

Thank you for stepping out of the darkness, lurker. I'm in the light too, and I get to type lots now. :D



I'm not speaking for tacotime here, but I'd like to chime in on the 3 points you raise (sorry about a lengthy post - I'll split it over posts):

(1) Premine. It's impossible to do this without demand and supply. The only reason this is possible is because there's enough demand for tacotime to work on this cryptocurrencies full-time. If nobody wanted any of the coins backed by the software he and the team writes, they wouldn't be able to do it because they wouldn't get any money to buy food with. I actually think premine isn't really correct. There are different types of premine.

What the project is doing is saying "Hey community, I want to write some software to represent some digital coins that you can purchase from me so I can continue working on making the software better. I've used digital coins before and have written some software that you can look at to help you make a decision about whether you want to contribute".

Now if the project said to the community that they need to purchase these digital coins but people on the "inside" of the project aren't going to purchase any coins and will get them for free, then that's a different story altogether. That to me is a premine, especially if the insiders try and hide the fact that they got stuff for free!

The facts about the premine:

(1.1) Anyone who develops can buy a maximum of USD $10k worth of coins (this might end up being in BTC/LTC terms, but the idea remains the same). The reasoning behind this is that you need to add incentive so that they have a long term interest and won't just dump the coins (assuming anyone wants to buy it).

(1.2) Anyone else can enter into a queue and buy a maximum of USD $5k worth of coins per person until the hard cap of USD $500k is reached. This is also locked for a period of time so that the same logic applies as above (however, it's yet to be ironed out how long it's locked for - a vote would be interesting to determine this once the community is a little larger).

(1.3) Nobody gets anything for free. The only people who will get any of the BTC/LTC donated will be developers who work on the software (the first confirmed dev being tacotime). I'll set up all the hosting and community stuff and maintain it as long as the project lives (this will also come out of our own pockets and if it gets too big, we'll have to figure something out). I won't take any money for working on this stuff because I feel it takes away from the core of the project and I can live with that.

We're also not making any crazy promises about these digital coins. There is absolutely no guarantee any of the coins will have any value whatsoever. Think of it as tacotime making really cool dreamcatchers in his garage that he wants to sell at a community marketplace. They might end up having awesome magical powers and can do amazing things, or they could just end up being useless objects of string with shiny rocks. Someone might see how cool they are and want to use what they can do and decide to pay you money for them, more than you bought them for, or they can decide to not buy them at all. Cryptocurrencies are a bit like that.

What you'll see from this project is honesty. No shiny and pointless marketing and no big budgets. Certainly no promises we can't back. It's a risk, and the risks will be communicated very clearly to everyone who is thinking about getting involved. But we also want to have some fun and build some cool stuff. Everyone is welcome on that journey.

Conformal Systems is an LLC. They're a small group of guys, most of whom are old school OpenBSD hackers. They're crazy about open source. Aside from btcd (https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/btcd), they maintain lots of OS stuff too, like Spectrwm (https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/spectrwm).

I had no relationship with Conformal Systems prior to getting involved in this project. When I found out tacotime was really busy with grad school and couldn't develop, I went out and looked for developers. It turns out there aren't a lot of people producing quality cryptocurrency code relative to other fields. I found Conformal Systems through a Google search and joined their IRC channel. I spent months in there (I'm still in there) and spoke to all of their guys. We talk a lot about the future of cryptocurrencies and where the field is moving. There are a lot of concerns with a monoculture developing (if it hasn't already), and alternatives are important.

I explained to them that tacotime has some cool ideas that are worth exploring, and the CEO (behindtext on Bitcointalk) invited tacotime and cunicula to meet with him for dinner and talk cryptocurrencies. Everyone got really excited about the field and what can be done and it was decided that Conformal Systems will help us by reviewing code written and making sure it's of high quality. They can do this because they have the experience and had to learn a lot about Bitcoin over the last year as they developed, and continue to develop btcd, which is a full-node implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in Go. They even reached out to MtGox and offered to fix the latest debacle free of charge because it affected everyone.

They also do commercial stuff to pay the bills, and you can check that out too if you like. There's Coinvoice (https://coinvoice.com/) and Cyphertite (https://www.cyphertite.com/), for example. For the record, I'm not getting paid by them and reached out to the guys in my free time. You can jump on their IRC and meet them if you're interested in doing so, to see for yourself if you're concerned about a company helping tacotime out. They use SSL for security, so if you have trouble connecting to their IRC server, send me a PM and I'll help you get on this ship! No space marine will be left behind in this space opera.

This comes back to the earlier points on protecting the coin from falling flat on its face if it's decent tech when someone comes in with a big marketing budget and buries our little community. It's a balance, and the only thing to offset a big marketing budget is some steady growth to show it's a good system that was built on the good faith of those who supported it and the developers. That will take a little bit of time.

It will be open source. There is no doubt, and there will be no turning around on this. Question is when and how much until it's all open source. If we keep 100% closed source and pretend this conversation never happened, you can crucify me in hell for it. You have my permission.


I couldn't agree more. As a bear minimum there will have to be pools from day one on mainnet. I believe an optimal solution to this launch drama that we keep seeing is everyone mining on testnet for a while on pools and use everything that will be there for the mainnet launch so any issues can get ironed out. If pools get DDoS'd, let's get so many pools up and ready that it's impossible to target them all. Obviously this is a while away and logistics will need to be discussed, but I think anything less ends up screwing people over. We'll need tons of help with that though, but there will be community engagement nonstop.

I stayed up two nights for the Maxcoin launch thinking it sounded like something decent and let me just say I even posted a profane Walter quote from the Big Lebowski in that thread. If our launch goes like that and we treat people like that I will kill myself. Because I don't want to do that, we will make sure things are planned properly and we'll work with anyone who steps forward and who is reasonable.

Please submit any suggestions for a name using this form (http://goo.gl/JbkTih) (Google Docs Form - MC2 Project Name Suggestions). I'll ask tacotime to add the link to the first post when he's back.

I've also been following MC2 for a while and I want to thank you guys for your continued hard work.

Indeed interesting particularly with the Conformal backing.

Looking forward to this.

Long time lurker also. I just want to say this looks like a commendable project.  To do something vastly different than the typical clone coins is a breathe of fresh air. I hope you guys succeed. It seems like you guys are realistic in terms of your goals and aren't over stepping which is reassuring. I wish you guys much luck and success.

Thanks guys have a reply now ;D

It's truly a community driven effort. The project appreciates all the help that we can get in order to bring this to the top! That would mean participation or suggestions regarding important decisions, such as the name, logo, color scheme, etc. So please use that Google Doc form!

Whatever name you come up with, please run it through a focus group. Please ask random people what you think of the name on the streets, at the cafe, or at the shops. Do some research. Do they like it? This is very important.

I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that the ultimate goal would be to get critical adoption of this coin and that means that this is not going to be a coin for just the technologically literate, but also the general lay people. And that must be represented and their feedback must be addressed over the name.

Whatever name is present is critical to the success of the project and the subsequent marketing of it.

Don't be like Peercoin (originally PPCoin), which realized its ways until considerable adoption.

Been in, still in.

And still not negotiating with terrorists.

Already seeing some great names in the submission. Even if we can't get the top-level domains for some of these, they can work really well for components of the system. No efforts are in vain.

When we get the forum, wiki, and the landing site up, I'm hoping we can put a community effort behind the image we create out of the cryptocurrency. The primary focus is the tech behind the system, but what I hope to do is kind of present a blank canvas for people to paint on. Maybe we can provide some pastels and general ideas of the picture we're trying to paint, and it's by no means an ugly canvas, but there's a long journey to walk.

NEVER!

Have been following MC2 and Taco for some time - I don't know how many newbies have used Taco's GPU mining rig recommendations to get involved in cryptocurrencies, but I was one of them.

At least as an investor/supporter, I'm in. Time permitting, I'm happy to assist as I can.

Nice to see you in this thread, canth. :) Have you gotten in touch with tacotime about getting put on the queue? Want to make sure everyone gets included who's taken the time to seek out this project. We'll probably get screamed at eventually for not having enough exposure by the time the queue is full, but we don't have a big marketing budget and the project is only now really finding its feet after almost a year of discussion, thinking, and searching.

Everyone who's interested in contributing/donating to the project should let tacotime know so he can keep record and know about your intentions prior to the process starting. He's going to start coding full-time in March and our stuff will start going online at the same time.

I'm on the mailing list and I've let him know, but I'll remind him. :]

And yes, once/if things are successful there will always be someone that will complain about missing out, no matter the exposure.

I support tacotime and im in.

Fear of accusations shouldn't determine what we do though. In my opinion if there is inflation it must be for some specific purpose other than to avoid bad publicity.

If the argument you're making is that less people would want to use it as a currency if it's deflationary, this is a valid argument. I think different people will be attracted to deflationary currencies and that deflationary currencies may actually have many positive benefits.

One positive benefit that I postulate is a reduction in crime. A lot of crime is out of desperation or out of competition. Violence over turf happens among drug dealers often because in inflationary currencies the idea of saving doesn't make sense. You're punished for saving in an inflationary currency and I postulate that this encourages the thug capitalist mentality where short term profits rule.

If you want to promote long term thinking, long term investment, saving, and reduce violent crime I believe one way of approaching the problem is to offer a deflationary currency to allow people to think not just about day to day profit but the next year, the next decade, and not to spend all their money down so fast.

I use the street criminal as the individual in this metaphor because in American society the street criminal is the purest capitalist. Inflationary currencies encourage crime because why would anyone want to make and spend money slowly, or save money, when they can spend it as soon as they earn it and never save a penny? As a result of not saving this keeps the street criminal as an individual in a state of always being on a tread mill, or always struggling to stay afloat, and as a result it promotes a kind of ruthless competitiveness.

Let's take it out of the street level, how about it's stock investors? If you have a stock which dilutes over time then it requires that people keep buying it. The faster the rate of dilution the more people will have to find money to keep investing to maintain their position. This is like trying to keep up with the Joneses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses and in my opinion is a problem which would not exist if people were encouraged to think about long term investments.

Protoshares has it's problems because it over relies on prediction markets. The developer seems to believe that prediction markets will solve all of societies ills. But a lot of changes have been made to the design since the time when Cunicula called it a ponzi scheme. I don't think it's a ponzi scheme at this time, but if people wanted to make a case for it being a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme the truth is you could make the same case against Bitcoin.

1. Bitcoin itself is not decentralized. It's actually controlled by a mining cartel. This mining cartel controls the hashing power of the network. For this mining cartel because they make the chips we use to mine with, if Bitcoin were to inflate forever they would not mind because they are closer to the generation of new coins and stand to benefit from inflation. It is this same attitude in my opinion which leads people to believe inflation for the dollar is helpful, it helps only the people who are close to the creation of new dollars because the initial distribution goes to those people.

As a result of the centralization of both Bitcoin and the fiat currencies as well we could say they are both pyramid schemes which benefit (certain people) most the people who control the production capability behind the currency generation of the network. At this point Bitshares is looking like it will be more decentralized than Bitcoin just as Bitcoin is more decentralized than the USD, because they switched away from mining and moved into a transaction based proof of stake which allows for them to both minimize inflation while increasing decentralization. I will say this has not been proven in practice so it's entirely theoretical, we have to wait and see.

2. We have to in my opinion measure or quantify the level of decentralization and as a principle agree that greater levels of decentralization is better. This should apply to Bitshares, Bitcoin, Netcoin, we want to have some way that generation of new coins or shares is decentralized. Netcoin is in a position where it can easily be more decentralized than Bitcoin provided that it's hard enough to mine, but if it cannot resist centralization around it's mining then whatever that inflation rate is, whether it be 1% or 4%, it will ultimately be a tax on anyone who saves in Netcoin. So if that 1% tax or 4% tax to miners goes to securing the network or paying miners I would say that sort of inflation has a purpose but if mining becomes centralized then that 1% to 4% tax goes to the same few people who basically will use their influence to maintain high inflation rates forever because they now have a coin faucet which pays them at the expense of everyone else in the network.

3. I believe deflation has more social benefits than inflation. I haven't seen anyone make a case for the social benefits of inflation. Inflation is always promoted as if it's some kind of necessary evil. It's usually spun up by economists that if the currency does not inflate then people will hoard (save) too much money and the economy will grind to a halt. This hoarding in my opinion only happens if a currency is too centralized. If it's decentralized in the initial distribution then since no one is going to become a trillionaire there is no massive wealth disparity argument. Instead you could end up with lots of millionaires who saved for years, but the social impact of that isn't the same as the social impact of a few people becoming trillionaires. So it seems to me that over centralization is what makes inflation or deflation bad. If anyone can mine and earn a reasonable amount of coins or shares then there is no real complaint with deflation.

4. Proof of Work seems to be the main problem behind all of this. We need a better Proof of Work which rewards work which is actually valuable to society, or we will have to move away from Proof of Work in the current form. I don't think Bitshares has completely solved it with going to Proof of Stake and I don't think Proof of Work as it is now is very good either. Proof of Work right now generates an effort with minimal to no social utility, all of that computing power essentially goes to waste, we have to make Proof of Work both economically and socially useful. We have to also make sure it's as decentralized as possible and by decentralized I mean resistant on the social network level as well so that it resists the formation of mining or other kinds of cartels to try to control the hashing power.

Some of my ideas on how we might be able to do it, the idea of the mining lottery is a good metaphor and perhaps is a direction if we keep mining. This would make mining a bit less predictable for the miner in a good way because it would decentralize the power dynamics in such a way that any random person could hit the jackpot while mining. It would also create some disassociation between hashing power and the reward by adding an element of uncertainty.

It should also be that we can create some disassociation between how much money a person spends and how much power the person gets. Money alone should not be the deciding factor in Proof of X. I think in the case of Bitshares money is the deciding factor but that is because they are treating it as a decentralized autonomous corporation so it has to be focused around profit. I think you can easily create a DAC which focuses on profit but do the crowd funding donation in such a way that money isn't the only way to mine or send value. For example perhaps you can donate computing power, money, or anything to the network to earn credits/shares.

I don't have the solution I'm just presenting some directions to explore and trying to encourage a high level debate on strategy.

The only argument I can make for having a higher supply is for psychological effect. Like with Dogecoin because there are so many everyone who has them feels rich. People look at Bitcoin and they think Oh My God it's too expensive!

So you want enough of a supply so people even in third world countries can afford to have a chance. Long term it does make sense only if you think people wouldn't buy coins in fractions. I do think people could be convinced to buy coins in fractions though so I favor selling the coins in the Satoshi denomination.

Another thing which could be done. We have Netcoin as the largest unit but if there were fewer and not many people have them then you would use the largest unit for large transfers between businesses and for daily transactions people would use the smaller proportions.

Now this is important to note, depending on the blockchain technology and whether or not you can handle a lot of transactions should decide whether you go with a smaller or larger cap or even no cap.

If there is no cap then you still must limit inflation, as that is what is bad. If the cap is low or high it does not matter if inflation is 50%. If inflation is low, and the cap is low of course that is better. If inflation is zero and the cap is low like Mastercoin, Counterparty, of course that is best of all but then it's not much of a currency for transaction purposes and more of a stock.

What psychology do we want? To attract investors the cap and low inflation rate is good. To make people spend money having a higher cap is better because people are more likely to tip in a currency where they feel like a billionaire. The profit investors would make is the same no matter what the cap is, just so long as the inflation rate is low.

Hello TacoTime and IngSoc,

Great job on the whitepaper and conceptualization of the coin. A coin that is a worthwhile investment.

As with any great innovation, there is significant risk associated with the project. This is further exacerbated by the persistent inflation.

If you need to receive more funds, you need to reduce the inflation in the coin, this will increase the reward to risk ratio and make it favorable for investors.

I've followed the MC2 discussion a bit, and love some of the ideas in the whitepaper.  The voting based decentralized "central bank" sounds very interesting.  I can't contribute much, but would chip in a bit to the project, and don't think this funding model is unreasonable.

Also, I have a hat that says TacoTime on it, so hey, that's worth something.

I am following this proyect since tacotime announce it almost a year ago.

How can i be in the list? I cannot invest too much but i want to join.

Cheers

It would be interesting to address the POW and inflation concerns as laid out by Luckybit. Both valid concerns for the future of this coin.

I am a long time follower and supporter of MC2. I have funds and I'm ready to invest in tacotime. Please send PM when you need the money.

We're working hard on trying to figure out an agreeable name.  Honestly, _ingsoc and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on it.  So, hopefully what we use will end up agreeable to everyone.

Kinda-sorta.  I would argue inflation basically helps anyone who has money invested in things which do not consistently devalue (equity, precious metal) while destroying the wealth of those who do not.  But there exists a host of problems for any deflationary currency that Bitcoin doesn't solve as well, and doesn't even attempt to solve.

Tx based proof of stake has similar issues to those for Peercoin, in my opinion, so I'm not overly hopeful.  Even my proposed system has some issues, though, but I think it's an improvement.

That's the point, yeah.  The problem with Bitcoin is that once you get to the fees level of inflation (inflation = 0), you run into the problem that no one wants to conduct on-chain txs because it's poorly incentivized.  So, ultimately, for the system to continue functioning, you need to enact some inflation.  I chose exponentially increasing inflation, like fiat, but at considerable slower rates of inflation per year than are standard.  The reserve banking system (when/if it gets off the ground) is then intended to be a more dynamic system that is more responsive to world economic rates of inflation as determined by public oracle consensus.

My gut feeling is that neither inflation nor deflation solve what is a considerable social and philosophical problem: that people will more money end up usually having the means to obtain more money, regardless of the financial system they are working under.
Having slow exponential inflation also insures investment into mining technologies in the future, as the hardware will continually be useful.  However, with Bitcoin, eventually when inflation = 0, hardware investment will probably fall apart as far as I can tell.

Well, having something like this functional (useful PoW) is one of the the holy grails of cryptocurrencies, but doing it in a way that is decentralized seems unlikely at the current time.  You can kind of hack it on (e.g. RippleLabs), but you need to rely on centralization of some kind to make this work.  SCIPs (http://www.scipr-lab.org/) can give some kind of voodoo black moon magic approach to this where you can verify that you'd done some kind of very complex work very quickly and easily so long as you disseminate a massive (gigabytes or terabytes) consensus parameter set.  These are a relatively new technology though, and I want to see how ZeroCash fares with them (they'll be the first currency to use them, for the sake of anonymizing cash flow).

I prefer a higher cap in either case, because for whatever insane reason the laymen seem to believe that if the price of a single unit is lower it's somehow a better investment.  I want low long term exponential inflation, so that when compared to fiat it's much more desirable to hold MC2 coins.

Initially the coin will lower tx throughput than even Bitcoin, so we need to take this into account too.  In the future I can work on optimizations, but I wanna get the chain up and running first and then worry about that.

Inflation that is high and decreasing in the initial rounds are necessary to ensure that the coin is well and fairly diffused to people by miners.  The persons obtaining it initially then are incentivized to figure out ways to maintain and preserve the functionality of the network, and add new and interesting functionalities.

Long terms reasons for low exponential inflation are given in response to LuckyBit above.

yes. ;)

it took George Eastman, the inventor of Kodak film, four years to come up with a name for his product. His mother helped him, and had a few rules for what he wanted: something short, something impossible to mispronounce, something unique, and something that included his favorite letter, K.

it's hard but it really pays off. worth the time investment

Looks like peershare has a demand of mini-blockchain as well. http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2250.msg19235#msg19235

I was reading through the newsletters and have a question about funding.  

In an earlier letter you note that "Individuals themselves will be capped to contributions of $5,000".  Ok, fair enough, and not a bad idea to prevent accusations that the initial distro is too concentrated aka NXT.

Then later I came across this "Want to contribute, but don't want to put in a full $5,000?  We will be making instructions within the next few newsletters about how you can post on the Group Buys section of the forum and take users public keys in exchange for smaller amounts of BTC yourself, which you can then pool and use to pay one of the developers."

So we went from a max individual contribution of $5000 to a corresponding minimum contribution of $5000 with no option in between but some kind of dodgy pool scenario where who knows what can happen.

Do I have $5000 to invest? Yes.  Do I have $5000 to invest in MC2? No...because there are other crypto options and I diversify my holdings among them.  As do the majority of investors I imagine.

While we all believe in you, do understand that investing/donating in MC2 is highly speculative.  Requiring a $5000 commitment for direct investment means you are cutting out the average Joe like myself.  It seems arbitrary and exclusionary.  It's not that much more difficult to allow people to directly invest whatever they feel comfortable up to your maximum limit. I hope you will reconsider.

No, I do not think there is a minimum contribution, I saw the same newsletter myself. I'll double check in a second.

I'm pretty sure he meant that you guys could pool your contributions together if you wanted to reach the $5k cap. But as far as I know, there is no minimum contribution. You can donate as much as you like, but $5k per person is max. The ultimate logic and goal is to get this coin as fairly distributed as possible.

Taco, could you please clarify the message when you get a chance?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=486514.0

In a bit, I'm really sick with a flu/cold right now.  Hopefully another newsletter will be issued within the week to clarify things with regards to this.

Feel better dude...

Ultimately this all depends on how attractive you want to make the coin to investors and whether you want it to function better as a store of value or as a transaction currency. I would argue that the store of value mechanism is more important because if you have a good store of value people can easily create their own personal currencies on top of that.

The coins could in essence double as shares and those shares could be used as collateral to create new coins which are backed by the shares. To have a good transaction currency in my opinion you want to avoid both inflation and deflation so that the price is stable. Most people aren't going to want to store their life savings in a transaction currency though so if you want investment and long term users you need to create a good store of value.
I'm interested in seeing both of these solutions in action. If there is a way that we can agree upon to quantify the level of decentralization of the network we can use that as a metric to try and measure the success of things. What I do know is that Bitcoin isn't decentralized and if they stick with sha-256 there is no hope it will ever be.

The solution I would like to see and that I've been promoting is to have the hashing algorithm randomized so that no one group of people can optimize for it. If it changes at random intervals to a random hashing algorithm then you can't prepare in advance with a sha-256 asic farm or a scrypt mining farm. You simply will not know what the next hashing algorithm will be, how many days it will be in effect, and you would have to prepare for all the possible algorithms and have to purchase all machines or just pay really close attention to track it.

The other idea is the lottery effect where there is an occasional jackpot. The basic idea is if you put enough uncertainty into mining then no one can plan ahead and it becomes less about how much money you have to spend on chips or how many chips you have and more about how much you're paying attention and whether or not you're waiting for the opportunity to use whatever you do have when an algorithm and scheme favorable to your specifications kick in.

I understand this sort of randomized hashing would be a nightmare to code so it's only theoretical. I think the original whitepaper you had was to be something like that, so it's possible at least in theory.

I think there are ways around inflation but it's still experimental. I think you could simply just destroy the fees and the shares in the network would appreciate as the coins get destroyed. Of course miners would not have incentives at this time but once the mining network is fully built out I don't think miners will need that kind of incentive anymore. If you think of coins destroyed as a dividend, and then make everyone on the network a miner, why wouldn't that work?

The amount of hashing power available in 20-30 years if it's decentralized could be so ubiquitous and so cheap that you won't need to give any incentive directly to miners in the form of new fresh coins. You could destroy the coins at a 1-5% rate and disperse the incentive *which under the currently centralized Bitcoin network would go to a centralized cartel of miners as new coins* instead onto every participant in the network equally. As coins get destroyed with every transaction the fees would give a deflationary dividend to all who hold coins in the network. As a result of this dividend that would be continuously dispersed, their coins would become more scarce and thus more valuable so that the hashing power gets cheaper for them as their buying power increases.

And because technology is inherently deflationary, there is a synergy there. I admit this is theoretical so I only present it as an idea to consider rather than as a solution.
My argument is that because technology is deflationary (Moore's law), the currency backed by that technology should be deflationary. It's technological determinism. The focus in my opinion should not be on people and the pursuit of money, but on making technology more accessible and cheaper so that the cost of living decreases with deflation. If the rich are getting richer in numbers in some ledger but for everyone else the cost of living is going down then everyone wins. The rich feel richer and can invest in even more sophisticated technology, and poverty eventually ceases to exist because you can theoretically rely on automation, 3d printing, and decentralization.

Again this is highly theoretical, speculative, and philosophical so there is room for debate here. I just think human labor over time is being phased out in favor of automation and that technology will determine if poverty exists not monetary policy.

I think it's the opposite. If buying power goes down over time you could end up with the opposite effect. I think if inflation is low enough you could be right in the short term, but over the long term I think Moore's law is deflationary and when that kicks in the hashing power will just become cheaper at a faster and faster rate. The only way to find out is to watch what happens with 1% inflation and always leave in the capability of putting things into deflationary mode at a later date.
I agree right now it is too centralized. I think we will be able to decentralize it eventually using a DAC though. So I'm actually very hopeful on this front.


Very interesting. I think theoretically once we have infrastructure to have DACs and other tools available it wont be so hard to let the network itself or the artificial intelligence itself pay the human beings to do certain tasks on a list are are voted on. In that atmosphere it becomes possible to make Proof of Work beneficial and decentralized if human beings are used to verify the work or some process which uses human labor by paying human beings a bounty or fee is put in place.

I hope whatever Proof of Work you do decide to use is modular enough that you could switch it out for something better or improve upon it at a later time. As long as you have the flexibility to future proof it then it will be great.

Some additional information
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/how-technology-is-driving-deflation-everywhere-aOgVQHcASBqwtc9uFa1AGA.html

As long as inflation is low then investors will love it. As long as your inflation is justified then we know your reasons for including it are sane and rational.

If there is enough flexibility in the protocol so that it can adapt to new technological ideas or changes in the global economy then it will work out fine.

From a laymans perspective its much better to say "there will be 500M coins total ever" than "there is no cap but there is inflation blah blah blah"

This is one thing that appeals to people about Bitcoin. Theres 21M coins, so each coin is rare and unique. Thats important, from a marketing perspective.

When Doge went uncapped, I knew of a couple people who just dropped out because they didnt understand the technology and how Doge could have value being "infinite."

Peoples perceptions are just as important as reality when it comes to marketing.

Hi everyone.

This may come as a surprise, but I'm hoping it will come as good news to everyone out there.

I am eliminating any premine on this cryptocurrency.  I plan to do all the implementation of it over the next 4-6 months on top of btcd.

Looking back at all the cryptocurrencies that people actually have faith in, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Peercoin, it seems like the only practical and fair way with which to launch a cryptocurrency is by doing so without the premine.  The people who will benefit from such a model will be you, the future users.  In the spirit of everything that this community has ever been about, it seems only appropriate to try to develop this myself while I live off of my own savings.  It'll be a rough road ahead, but I hope I will have the continual backing of the community for choosing to develop this for everyone's benefit with no monetary expectations in return.

Development will formally commence tomorrow, and I have left my job so I am free to work on this full time.

I will still release the software as binaries for the first month or two, then formalize a public github repo (to prevent initial forks).  I'll have put too much of my life into this by the time of release to have it forked as whatever-coin in the first couple of months, and I hope the community can agree with me on this sentiment.  Any members of the community who wish to audit the code are welcome to talk to me.

I'll probably state something along the lines of, "There will be x many coins published in the period of time where the per-block supply in decreasing, which is during the first y years."

I'll be around to work on this as well. I'll be putting up the sites as soon as our machine is ready where we'll host all of it. As always, anyone is free to get in touch and help dev anything that needs doing! :)

Good for you taco! Follow your gut instinct. I'm still very keen to invest some funds in your work, send me a PM if you need support.
Good luck!

What will the coin per year outlook look like now?

Premine or no premine, full openness and transparency is a key part of any successful project. If this is the direction you are looking to take, all the power to you Taco. We'll be here when you need us to support you.

The community will reward your efforts and hard work!

I think this is a good move regarding no premine. Kudos to you by the way, I hope others are willing to help.

If you need anything from me let me know. I'm not smart enough to contribute any code, but anything else just ask and you shall receive.

Thanks & good luck with the development!

I would have preferred premine and presale. This is simple and easiest to invest in, like Mastercoin, and raises money for development. Now it sounds like this coin will become a hobby. Nice idea, hope it succeeds, but I won't hold my breath.

I think you can have a "fair" coin with premine and "unfair" coin without premine.
I am sure you can think of a few examples.
full openness and transparency is a key.