Bitcoin Forum

Hi all.

I have an idea of bitcoin alternative, with another algorithm of money generation, network structure and so on.
Before implementing it i would like to check isn't it too crazy, so i need your feedback.

The idea is not to rely on CPU speed, electricity or any other buyable resource.
Each person will be allowed to receive fixed credit, but only once per lifetime. 100 units for example. To ensure that person is real it has to authenticate with Facebook, Twitter or account of some other social network supporting OAuth.

To provide anonymity we'll allow to create unlimited number of accounts in our system, similar to bitcoin, so after you got you credit using your real name in facebook you can create another anonymous account in our system and transfer credit there. There is no way to figure out is this 2 accounts belongs to the same person or not, so all transactions from second account can be considered as anonymous.

To prevent people from creating additional facebook accounts we'll dump(in some way) full list of facebook users existing as of today and embed it in our monetary system source code. It will take 100-200 Mm. Right, people who have signed up on facebook after this list was dumped will not have ability to generate money. As for me it's ok, because late adopters shouldn't care how money was generated. They will be able to buy it on exchanges, as it happens now with bitcoin.

Facebook is not considered as some trusted source. Descirbed approach will generate that in case if FB will decide to compromise our system it will be unble to generate money by setting fake account creation date, however it will be able to act as user, who didn't yet used his credit. One of easy way to protect from such attack it to also limit timeframe, when money can be generated. First year for example.

Foreseeing your questions:

List of users and other stuff will be stored server-side, so regular users will not have to download anything. Anyone can run server, so network is distributed.

Money will gain it's value in the same way as it happens to paper money - from goods & services you can buy with it.

Will be grateful for any feedback or criticism.

Well, honestly, it does seem a bit crazy.  A currency with money based on Facebook or Twitter accounts?  Everyone who doesn't get said free currency because they didn't have an account will likely shun your currency. Early adopters of your currency are not rewarded, who is rewarded, is the adopters of Facebook or Twitter.  Some people have multiple Facebook accounts, which will come across as unfair to anyone looking into your currency.  To make matters worse there's bound to be people with 100s of accounts to fake "likes" and work all that other social mumbo jumbo magic often done by "social consultants" these days, and one of these people will brag loudly about all the free currency they got.  On the other hand, many people have refused to use social sites like Facebook for privacy reasons, which are just the people you don't want to offend when working on a crypto-currency.

Another problem, is that it will be hard for you to get people to run computationally intensive crypto-currency software if it doesn't net them anything.  The way Bitcoin got such a large user base was to give people coins for their processing power.  When done properly, the more processing power you're throwing into the network, the more secure it becomes.  If people don't have motivation to let their computers spend electricity - and thus real money - verifying transactions, then you have the problem where it becomes more profitable to break/crack/fake/etc transactions to steal your currency for themselves, then it is to run your software and behave on your network.  You could probably work in mandatory transaction fees, but this is also not conductive to a new currency.

As per 49er, you need to give this some more thought.

One of the obvious questions is probably people who already have thousands of such accounts as of today.

(As for the hashing power, you could still award miners with transaction fees.)

I'm sorry, but I don't have "FacePalm" account. I don't like this social network. :(

Also, the number of Bitcoins is limited to 21 000 000. Each person of the world could have 21000000 / 7000000000 BTC, but... what happens if a new person born a bit latter?

Ps: I don't like the current mining system based on GPU power instead of CPU power.

It's coincidental.  It just so happens that GPUs are more efficient in doing the calculations needed to solve blocks.

I believe that getting 300 units instead of 100 does not make big difference in long term perspective.

I don't think that there is many people, who don't have twitter account within crypto-currency early adopters.

I have few ideas how to filter such accounts.

My algorithm has almost nothing to do with crypto and does not require cpu intensive calculations. It's more similar to IRC servers - 2-3 instances will be enough for first few thousands of users. Also, in my implementation bigger amount of computing power does not give you ability to crack/break existing network.
Also, running own server will ensure that nobody can change your financial data, so it's like additional security measure for people with big amounts of money in network. It will serve as motivation.

He can buy money from pre-existed persons via exchanges or other means of communication :)

I have given this subject lots of thought during the past several years and would like to add:

- Bitcoin is cryptocurrency defined by a decentralized protocol to control the information of value.
- Decentralization is key to longevity of any value system - no bottle neck within the network.
- Controlling information pertaining to value is the reason d'etre for cryptography.
- Value is what everyone argues about in the forums - hard to define or gather consensus.
- Value, specifically Bitcoin's, is tied to block discovery and/or any alt currency we wish to invent.

I remember Linux was despised for being free and open source software was vilified as unworkable in the not so distant past. Valuation of Bitcoin will remain steady, although our current attempts at comparison to fiat currencies, swing wildly on a daily basis. There will come a variant of valuation that is not tied to currency, yet mimic the decentralized, crypto nature of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin's wider acceptance in the greater population will rest with this 'value' system's ability to draw everyone, everywhere.
So, sometimes it's not all about the money - but what is it that you value?

FF

How do you expect a crypto currency with weak cryptography to be secure? Please dont tell me you plan to rely on trusted or centralized nodes.
 

This idea is not workable. there are a massive amount of issues with it that im too lazy to mention.  Why doesnt the bank just do this with the billions of moneyz for the bailout fund. give a little to everyone. yeh. lol.

This part is the most troubling--I'll need to see it in action to believe it can be done. As for the rest, there's nothing inherently unworkable about the theory. Try it.

[qoute]How do you expect a crypto currency with weak cryptography to be secure?[/quote]
Cryptography is not weak, it just will not be used. At first stage i plan to use it only for authentication purposes. Users will share their public keys with network and sign transactions with private keys. That simple. Servers interconnection & synchronization protocols is offtopic for this thread.

Each user will be able to run own node. It's just not necessary, because all accounts data will be stored in network. Users will have to worry only about private key.


Any other arguments against social networks?

sounds interesting

It's not really decentralized if it's based off of social networks, is it?

let`s try guy start new currency

I suppose that anon is just a troll.

How will you deal with guys like me(and other internet marketers) who have 10k+ Facebook accounts and 10k+ Twitter accounts? And I'm not the worst out there, I know a couple guys who have 100x the accounts that I have.

I should add that all those accounts use different IP's(for the most part) and most of them are almost 2 years old and are fairly active(thank you bots).
If facebook and twitter didn't notice that they are fake accounts how will you? And don't say that you are better than them at detecting fakes, because you aren't. For every live account that I have I can assure you that at least 4 were closed due to them catching up.

Or maybe i should just STFU and take your cryptocoins... ::)

As i already told i have few thoughts on solving this issue. You must understand that it's not really necessary to use all facebook or twitter userbase. Simple examples:
 - use only accounts who have the same username in facebook and twitter
 - use only accounts who have liked some non-commercial page or item. Use multiple such pages to make starters list big enough. Bots usually don't like something non-commercial.

Thank you for detailed explanation, but i know what is double spending.

Here is how i plan to deal with it:
Because server software will be run primarily on persistent network servers rather than slow clients, number of such servers will be much smaller than in bitcion and they will be much faster. That's why i expect full network synchronization time to be less than minute.
When server receives transaction it will keep it in queued state until it will receive confirmation from control list or majority of other servers. It will mean that there is no conflicting transactions.

If network will grow to such size, that syncrhonization time will become a problem, we can implement algorithm, that will discover fastest servers and give them higher priority. It's not so hard.

Decentralization means absence of single point of failure. It will keep working even if single server will stay alive. It will also keep working if facebook or twitter go down or ban it, because FB used only to create new money, but system can work with any amount of money.

I think the best mining system is Soildcoin's one. Hashing performance is relative to general hardware performance and price. Mining can be profitable on Intel CPU, AMD CPU, Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU. Of course the other aspects of the Solidcoin are... controversial at least but the mining algorithm is very good.

This is dubious at best - as RS has flip-flopped 3x on the accuracy of the cpu hashing.

If we're to believe his statement at the live launch of SC, GPU's outperfrom CPU's by 5x or so.

Until the source is released, no real way to tell.

I believe this is a source the algorithm:
http://wiki.solidcoin.info/SolidCoin_2_Hashing_Algorithm

And here's the open source miner:
http://wiki.solidcoin.info/Reaper

I'm not a programmer and can't verify if that algorithm is efficent or not. But it runs fairly well on any modern hardware, unlike the Bitcoin's one (Radeon 5000-6000 only) and the scrypt (strongly prefers AMD Phenoms on 64-bit Linux; no GPU support at all).