Bitcoin Forum

I started to post this on that thread about using Bitcoin for voting, but wanted to split it off. It's gone somewhere else.

Instead of people trying to make a blockchain-based system for streamlining the theft and aggression that is government, why not try to make a blockchain-based system for "voting" over the Internet (or even in the same building) for large-scale collaborative projects. Voting is not immoral in situations like that, and the blockchain would be perfect for it. Think "distributed software projects" for starters. The expand to "running a large company."

This type of thing would be the PERFECT candidate for creating new "coins" that aren't ever intended to be used as currency. Clone Namecoin, make a few tweaks, start a new blockchain and use it to run every aspect of a modern large private university, from taking attendance (if you do that) to course delivery to the accounting. If the blockchain got too big, make a new one every year. Or every semester. "StanfordCoin - Spring2015", etc. Or even make a new coin for each department for every semester (People involved could vote on the mascot to put in the branding of the coin too. lol. I'm picturing "SlugCoin" for Santa Cruz.)

A coin like this could still be very valuable in utility even if it were always easy to mine and had no limit on number of coins. Think of it more like making new daily spreadsheets rather than building yet another currency. It should probably be as easy to mine as it is to open a new document on a computer.  

And with all this talk on "what could we do with the blockchain" lately, this kind of slipped under the radar: we did something new and totally unique with the blockchain this week. It's small, but I believe it's important and could be expanded to a lot of uses. And it's not theory, it works, TODAY:

Software update notification delivered over the blockchain:
http://meowbit.com/meowbit-now-with-update-alerts-over-the-blockchain-a-new-feature-for-all-blockchains/ (http://meowbit.com/meowbit-now-with-update-alerts-over-the-blockchain-a-new-feature-for-all-blockchains/)

There are a bunch of grand ideas out there these days on doing grand things with the blockchain and I'm glad for it. But I think many will fail, because they're too far reaching. I think a flood of baby steps will more likely get real change done.

Namecoin has been around for 3 years, but not much happened with it being adopted for its intended use (distributed DNS-like domain resolution).

Over the last nine months, a guy came up with a way to actually VIEW Dot-Bit domains securely on one browser. THAT was huge. Namecoin finally fulfilled it's promise. But only on one browser that not a lot of people use.

Then in one WEEK, my team came up with a way to do that system-wide on Windows. (MeowBit - using none of the code from that first project by the other guy). And the following week, we added a new function (Software update notification delivered over the blockchain) that hasn't been done with the blockchain, ever, as far as I know.

And another guy came up with a new use for Namecoin (OneName. And he caught hell from some NameCoin folks for "not asking for input" on his Open Source - Free Software - project interfacing with the GNU-licensed Namecoin. And got accused of "trying to make money", when that is allowed and encouraged in the GNU license that everything Namecoin is licensed under. Not only that, people making money really drives much faster innovation.

I'd love to see people make new coin for specific small, important things. If your software team is called Acme, how about AcmeCoin, that you make specifically for you and your crew to collaborate over the Internet and your Intranet? A coin that is never intended to be sold or traded, but has utility in being used to run your company, collaborate, and also have a provable ledger of everything you invoice, take in and pay out?

You could also make network-only domains, like .acme, for making easily human-memorable document locators. Our Free Software utility, MeowBit, could easily be adopted to view those domains. Source code is here:
https://github.com/Derrick-/MeowBit (https://github.com/Derrick-/MeowBit)

Your organization-only coin could even be entirely private, running only on your own servers or desktop machines if you wanted. You could probably set up systems for particular vendors and clients to be able to view only specific parts of your blockchain. (Parts with a specific namespace, for instance.) And build apps for them to be able to easily view that. A private coin also would not be vulnerable to a 51% attack. At all.

And a coin would not have the issue that Namecoin has of squatting. Namecoin's blockchain is almost 2 gigs, hundreds of thousands of names are squatted or reserved, and there are only about 20 real Dot-Bit websites with any content, and I own about ten of them.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting replacing Namecoin, it's great and I think it's going to take off, especially as website censorship and hijacking becomes more common. But this would drive interest to it. Which could possibly get someone to make a better wallet quickly. The wallet really is the weak factor in Namecoin currently.

Source code of new project-specific coins would of course be public (since you're deriving from GNU-licensed code), and GNU licensed, so anyone could take it and make it better.


MWD

if there's no limit on coins, then you dont need to address double spend problem and you dont need the blockchain...right?

You would still want to address that, to let's say, be able to prove that your business partner didn't go in and try to fake or change an expense report entry, or that someone competing with you on a different team in the same company/university couldn't alter your scientific research findings so he could get the raise/grant.



Mabye, but you'd still at least need/want the transaction chain.

MWD

Well interesting line of thought but I'm skeptical.   Seems you would need the financial incentive of miners if you want a secure decentralized network.

No you wouldn't. Using crypto-coins as currency is great, I love it and I do it. But it doesn't have to ONLY be that way. How much does a new word processing document cost a corporation or a novelist? Pretty much zero. But the corporation or a novelist cannot function without that document, without thousands and thousands of them. And a corporation or a novelist can make that blank document worth a lot of money by what they do with it. And they require equipment to use and maintain those documents. The corporation needs banks of computers, and an IT department. Some of that computing and personnel could easily be allocated to run mining rigs in different locations if it eliminated the need for other aspects of their IT work.

Making a new coin from existing code, you can tweak the parameters of a coin to where mining cost virtually nothing, and difficulty does not increase. If you're making it for your private use, you mine as many as you need to record and share what you need to record and share. If you need to make it public, to ensure it can't be lost, or to allow third-party verification, if it takes a low-enough amount of computing power, interested people would mine it. Think about the SETI@home project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI#SETI.40home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI#SETI.40home)

That was one of the first ever wide-scale distributed computing projects, starting in 1999 when a lot of people were still on dial-up and not nearly as many people were online as today. That project had 180,000 active participants running it on their computers, and not one of them got paid any financial reward, they just wanted to help.

I'd be willing to give some computing power over to helping run a blockchain for something I believed in. I'd also probably do it for something I'm against, if allowed me to see their internal documents in a truly open way.

MWD

I guess I don't really get your vision then.  Why not just use github or email or whatever... Seems unnecessary to make things a coin that aren't a coin.  Maybe someone else can chime in who understands what you're seeing.

Cool.

Doing it as a coin would allow proof that it hadn't been altered. For instance, even if taxes were eliminated, it would still be useful to a company to keep accurate expenditures records and income records. They'd go out of business without it.

A lot of this has been discussed with things like Namecoin. The three main differences I'm suggesting that make this different are:

1. Make it a non-currency coin

2. decrease mining difficulty to make it possible for any interested party to participate. You want true transparency? You've got it.

3. Make a new coin for each project/company/fiscal year/semester to avoid having a huge blockchain. This would also make it more workable on mobile devices, and lower-power computers and over remote slow Internet connections.....or even on fast ones. The Bitcoin and Namecoin blockchains are already unwieldy even on fast computers with fast connections.


MWD

The difficulty is that a database rarely requires a "proof of work". The Bitcoin proof-of-work result in real work being done in the real world. In the physical sense: Power=Work/Time.

Any alternate proof-of-work using less power may be less secure.

Is there a way to correct this?

MWD

Would it need to be proof of work for a thing like this though? Or could it be proof of stake like NXT, with the ability to create assets, domains, etc.
And if it's to be used only by your institution or whatever.. does it even need to be decentralized?

Yes, if you want true transparency and an ability to prove to the public that what was entered is what was actually entered.

The point of "proof-of-work" is to make cheating more expensive than being honest. So, no, I see no obvious way to use proof-of-work in non-currency applications.

Namecoin uses the same proof-of-work as Bitcoin. Currently, some of the currency is destroyed when you want to create a name:value token.

I knew about this destruction thing. But wouldn't this be made less of an issue by having a coin with a nearly unlimited limit? I don't want to say unlimited, but a much higher cap of possible units than BTC or NMC has.

https://ripple.com/currency/ does that with a 100% pre-mine.

The Bitcoin blockchain is the best way forward for voting because it is probably the most secure ledger in the world.

http://www.freedomfeens.com/2014/03/16/using-decentralized-technology-to-choose-centralized-leadership-is-so-square-freedom-feens-live-radio-archive/ (http://www.freedomfeens.com/2014/03/16/using-decentralized-technology-to-choose-centralized-leadership-is-so-square-freedom-feens-live-radio-archive/)

To be clear, I forked this off the voting thread, and say so in the first line of my OP here. So you either didn't read it, or you're posting in the wrong thread. (Or you're a statist trying to get a rise out of me, won't work.)

Thank you,
MWD

Now taking this idea a bit more in the direction of Namecoin, perhaps establish a pseudonymous SVOIP?  Not sure if that has been thought of yet, or if this would even be advantageous compared to other existing SVOIP, but from a rough perspective I'm thinking something along these lines (pardon if any suggestions are a bit off...I'm an engineer by trade, so more of a user than cryptographer or developer):

~Sending and receiving calls is analogous to sending and receiving payments. 

~One "phonecoin" gets you like 100 minutes of talk time.  Not sure how to work that out, as a call is "spent" rather than transferred.  TBH I'm not intimately familiar with how Namecoin does it, but perhaps something similar?

~The block chain would serve as a phone record, so you would probably want to anonymize it, perhaps similarly to how this is carried out with Anoncoin or Dark Wallet? 

I like it.
MWD

Yeah but phone coin has value still. It's not a noncoin coin.   Must have value to incentivize miners or in other words to participate as nodes.  Or... Find some other reason why nodes should participate (think TOR)

See my above comment about SETI project.

MWD

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you're talking about something very close to the ethereum project.

I did see that you forked it off of the voting thread but brought up voting for small projects or businesses in your OP. Why create a new coin that is more vulnerable to a "51% attack" when we already have a very secure blockchain that can be used for this? And the blockchain can be used for not only voting but for business budgets, decision making, etc.

Which blockchain are you talking about? Putting everything in the world that anyone wants to ever do will make the BTC chain, or even the NMC blockchain too huge to easily use. And they both have tight limits on character count for included information, which make them unusable for document storage.

I'm not talking about making "a new coin." I'm talking about making hundreds of thousands of new coins, each customized to a specific function. And doing them on a private network (or even intranet) would make the 51% issue a non-issue.

First you would need to define the difference between:

blockchain technology based project (like BitMessage for Messaging, Twister for Twitter, ...)
and
your "non coin-coins"?

Maybe what you talk about, wanna do and call "non coin-coins" is basically just using blockchain tech for other projects like above.

If it is not the same, you must explaine to us.

I had to look that up, and I tend to agree.  Although from what I've seen Ethereum largely covers the "how," whereas this post seems to be focusing on what it could be used for.


This was another motive for the Ethereum project as well.  As they described, if the blockchain gets into the terabyte range it would still be possible to use lite wallets for Bitcoin itself, although it would be impossible (or at least impractical) to try to parse other data out of it.  Unless of course you have a separate lite wallet server set up to parse that out of the complete blockchain, but by the time you've done that, why not just have a unique block chain?  Seems to work decently enough for all the other cryptos anyway.


Yeah, that's kind of the half-baked part of it at the moment.  As I was going to sleep I had it almost worked out in my head, but 16 hours later, you know how that goes lol.  I'm thinking it would borrow heavily from Namecoin, as if I'm guessing correctly once a DNS is assigned that portion of the coin is "spent?"  So it would still be mined, miners would be paid in Phonecoin that could be exchanged.  The block reward/inflation curve may be interesting to work out, as it would need to be dependent on the no. of phone coins that are un-spent and actively in circulation vs. those that are "spent" and destroyed.  Perhaps have a target no. of coins to be in circulation, and adjust block rewards based on the need to replenish coins that have been spent?  Just some brainstorming.

Doesn't the Ethereum project plan to eliminate all other coins? I've heard that and heard it called "one blockchain to rule them all."

I don't like the idea of a central authority for blockchain-based systems. I think the distributed networks should themselves be distributed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but all the videos on Ethereum seem to be so far reaching it's kind of hard to understand if it can/will be done. Whereas Bitcoin and Namecoin are very easy to understand, for me, at least on a surface level. I've also met people who are absolutely evangelical about Ethereum who cannot for the life of them explain it. I'm not saying anything against it, at all, but I've yet to have someone explain it cogently. Also, where is it at in development? I know there's some code, but last I checked (about a month ago) it looked like another coin with a few lines added. I'm not saying "it's not there"....there are too many projects to vet line by line, especially working on my own full-time project (which is very easy to define, and is out now).

But I sure hear a lot about the healing magical powers of Ethereum to revolutionize the world, without a lot of people really knowing what it is or where it's at in existing as a product/project, or when it will be ready for full testing. Kind of reminds me of the "Gabo" phenomena on the Simpsons maybe.

When a friend I know calls me and said "I've installed Ethereum, it kicks ass, let me help you get it running", I'll be excited and drop whatever I'm doing. Like three years ago when someone did that for me with Bitcoin.

I'd love Ethereum to do everything everyone says it will do.

I'm not criticizing it for not being fully formed. I'm suggesting things that are far less fully formed in this thread. But people talk about Ethereum in hushed, excited tones, and talk like it's already running everywhere. Is it? And is it "one blockchain to rule them all"?

I think the real answer is more coins, not less coins. Not just for security, not just for new uses, but even just on a user level / value for marketing the idea of coins. For instance, I think Dogecoin is silly and have even turned down offers of people donating some to me because I can't be bothered to run yet another wallet. But it's important because it's "friendly" and it will be many non-technically minded peoples' first coin.

MWD

You talk a lot but... Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you're talking about something very close to the ethereum project. :)

lol.

You tell me. Tell me in your own words what that project is and how far along it is.

I think you're just cranky because you think I insulted doggy coins and you're a fan and invested.

MWD

haha

Not at all.

"the real answer is more coins". I'm with you.

But, when you talk about the use of blockchain to solve other  problems than coins (if I understand you), it reminds me ethereum. I'm not with ethereum, I'm just waiting to see how it goes.

Ok, I like doge, and I'm with litecoin and bitcoin. I'm not a zealot coiner :)
It's quite alrigth to me if you don't like dogecoin. To be honest, I think a little weird to be radical about a 5 years old coin, maye because I'm an old guy.  :D

(sorry my english, I'm a foreigner)

It's all good brother.

I'm not really radical about a five-year old coin (Bitcion), but I'm absolutely religious about a three-year old coin (Namecoin), that is just really coming into being able to do what it was made for.

And I'm not a young pup either. I'll be 50 in May.

MWD

Hmm...perhaps I should learn more about Ethereum.  To be fair all I've seen so far is one article, and my impression is it was more of an open structure, more like another language (I know the article compared it to what Java did for the internet) than a method to put everything on the Bitcoin blockchain.  And I'm with you all on that...I don't see any reason not to have thousands of different blockchains floating around.  Putting everything on one blockchain is basically like a fusion center for information.  Far too much centralization of power, even if the system itself is decentralized at the moment.  Gives far too much incentive for an attack; it wouldn't even require a true 51% attack, all that would be needed is something along the lines of clogging everything up to disrupt any service that depends on it.  

OK, I had some other ideas about Phonecoin...the way I've pursued it thus far is just silly; it's a solution in search of a problem.  Conventional P2P SVOIP handles everything I've mentioned, and there's really not a need for a decentralized third party of trust, all you need is an internet connection, and the records stored in the blockchain are more of a liability than an asset.  There's no reason for a Phonecoin to be something of exchangeable value if you can solve the problem with SVOIP for free, which highlights the problem with Phonecoin not really being a "non-coin coin" as Jonald mentioned.

But then I remembered the context of where the idea came from:  Cell phones being spied on by the NSA.  I know that you can buy wifi-only Android phones that are built in with SVOIP and loads of security, but the problem with that is if you don't have wifi, it doesn't work.  And from what I understand of wifi, it's just not suitable in the middle of nowhere; the signal just can't be made to get usable range on that band, or something to that effect.  But the technology behind cell service seems to handle that pretty well.

15 years ago when nationwide cell coverage was just being introduced, you could usually pick up some kind of cell signal if you were close to the interstate in the middle of Nebraska, but it would go off of Uncle Bob's cell tower, and he would charge the phone co. like $2 a minute.  Now there are tons of nationwide cell providers, including a whole lot of prepaid, semi anonymous providers, and I'm guessing they have some sort of agreement for tower usage.

Bottom line is, cell service can not be carried out P2P, because a trusted third party is needed to run the cell towers.  There are a lot of private individuals that do that already like the aforementioned Uncle Bob, or my old boss at a tire shop that rented out a cell tower behind his shop.  So this is how I'm sort of envisioning "Cellphonecoin:"

• Miners run cell towers.  Thinking some sort of hybrid small cell tower mated to an ASIC to handle the transactions
• Mining is incentivized just like any other crypto by having a market determined value
• Users buy a Cellphonecoin, which is basically like 100 prepaid minutes, or 100 MB of data
• The advantage of this is probably lower cost, due to similar flattening of the hierarchy and reduction in overhead seen between conventional banks and cryptos
• Another advantage is that the NSA (or any organization for that matter) doesn't have a single target, like Sprint or Verizon to leverage for compliance
• Yet another advantage is the system is quite well suited to have strong encryption built-in

I suggested a coin / system to replace congress in another thread.

However today I came up with this idea. Whereas the three main credit reporting agencies (experian, equifax, transunion)are just some punk ass bitch companies that collect random info and assign it to your person, then create a proprietary magical number that influences your interactions with the financial world; maybe the block chain can put them out of business?

I haven't really fleshed this idea out more so I'm sure it will be interpreted differently. But it would be like ID and credit rating coin.

You're not with the terrorists right? Then what do you have to hide? Lol.

Think about. Your data is already out there. Anyone can already get it for a few bucks. Is it really that much of a secret? If a car dealership can have access to your credit history And a potential employer can access records, and cops, and banks, credit cards. Is your info private or public. If its already public then block chain that shit and put those credit reporting agencies out of business.

The level behind the big three reporting agencies is called Lexus nexus. Pure fucking evil these guys. They have info such as who your neighbors were, their address, phone numbers, and last 4 of their social.

Fucking creep sauce.

Build it and they will come

You can calculate a hash of the data you want to protect in the blockchain, and attach it to a transaction with the OP_RETURN function.
You would have to find other places to store the data itself, but the hash would be officially timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain; you can refer to this hash in order to prove certain qualities about the data.

As to your "thousands of new coins" idea; this exists in counterparty (a decentralized exchange protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain). You can issue and trade custom assets. They are like altcoins, except they are protected by the full hashing power of the Bitcoin network. You can issue shares in batches, pay dividends, set a call back time and price, etc... These assets can be used for all the purposes you are describing, and I think the decentralized exchanges will make wall street obsolete.

Especially if there is an opening-night party.  :)

woot woot!