Bitcoin Forum

How to distribute a coin so that it reaches the most people and becomes distributed evenly?


The options we have are based on POW or POS with ensuing distribution of coins by either pure mining + economic activity (ie. selling buying coins for goods and services) or by giving them away selectively by making use of bounty programs, give aways + economic activity. Are there any other conceiveable strategies to distribute the coins evenly and at the same time incentivizing improvement of the coin ecosystem? How good do those practices work in practice? Are managed distributions, like bounty programs better then market based distribution that give coins away for successful services or public fund raisers?

Pls discuss and share your ideas!

Proove your ID & share coins out to miners that can prove they're human.

You mean in case of POS?

There is no most feasible strategy for correct distribution.

Server power (higher monetary assets).
Investment power (higher monetary assets).
Knowledge power (personal asset).

We are not even on a mass scale yet. Correct distribution cannot occur simply due to others lack of knowledge within our entire society as a whole.

We're experimenting with distribution via social networks authentication.

Checkout: www.planetdollar.org

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=524080.0

Here is a game-centred distribution model

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=526900.msg5864066#msg5864066

I think twitter giveaways will provide best results

Social network distribution is probably the easiest to game, one can buy thousands of accounts.

Country coins anyone  ::) ???

When you want the system to be anonymous it is not so easy.

I would say something in the middle (pow/pos). Use POW with limitations for distribution. If there is a way to lock each device in terms of kh/s (computer/laptop/asic) at least there is a bigger chance for fair/equal distibution. This also would make a 51% attack harder i think.

Probably a different blockreward system could help with this. Instead of a single fixed block every x seconds for the lucky one, there should be multiple blocks  every x second. Example: 1 block per 60 seconds per user, eventually with halving. The more "users", the more rewards and the faster pos starts. When the set amount is reached (it is now user independent instead of time independent) pos starts.

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Why a currency should be fair ? It is a non-sense to me.

You want a new currency to give you an advantage on others. You aim for inequalities. You want to humiliate others with your wealth to appear superior.

If something is distributed equally and in abundance, can you imagine its value ? none, absolute zero.

Money is the opposite of fairness. Money make the world unfair.

You don't see the point. There is no need for a currency to be fair, yet we can do our best to initially distribute the coins equally. This has many advantages.

All money brought into the world trough banks. People make money with money but there is not a single rich man in the world that simply supplied money and became rich of that. Now, the bigger your money making machine, the more you earn. This is very unfriendly to the environment and makes no sense.

The perfect currency flows smoothly in the market and catch up with the demand. The more people join the network, the more coins.

But it can be done with zero knowledge proofs. Once Mike Hearn explained to me how that could work. If I recall correctly you could have a digitized passport instead of the analogues one we are used to. Some countries are already putting chips into their passports to make them digital documents in addition to their physical issues. Zero knowledge proofs enable an application to read the whole document and only check for specific information that you want to proof without giving away any other information that the source also contains. After parsing the doc it puts out a verifiable proof that the input document actually contains the requested information, eg that you are Chinese citizen or that you have a certain age or name. All the proof states is what you want it to verify without giving away further details.

I don't think it work.
You want something that you don't have.
You want FIAT money because you know that you don't have enough of it compared to others.
If you distribute something equally, no one will consider it valuable.
The value we give to things come from the unfairness of distribution.

Take tap-water for example : For us, it is equally distributed and available. We consider that it has no value. You wouldn't buy my glass of tap-water.
If in the future we would lack of it, water would become the new currency because some people would have most of it while others would die from the lack of it.

No one is forcing the adoption of cryptocurrency so most people are bummed out when they see they have to pay 1000x as much today as a few months ago, humans don't like missing out so that is what we are doing now - experimenting with distribution.

Most efficient would be complete spec of a premined POS voted on and agreeable and trusted by all parties who eventually go into the currency, which actually means a huge foreword and work so they can't claim ignorance... I would think a massive retail company saying that anyone who buys from our stores provides the unique receipt number in 2014 can have that amount in targetcoins would be the most efficient considering their reach and volume. but as superresistant said must be room for unfairness to create the need in the first place as the buyers are the most but no so much to create a general distain for it.

Social media distribution is the best one at the moment, unless we are thinking of ID/ address checks

Social media distribution can be gamed in most cases rather easily.  Requiring a Facebook verified ID helps level the playing field a bit.  I like what Silicon Valley Coin did.  They mailed coin vouchers to random addresses in Silicon Valley.  Finding ways to get coin in the hands of those who didn't request it is probably the most fair.

My thought would be to create something that is not really a coin or currency, but more of a token. That token then needs to be related to something a large community has positive emotions to and are therefore willing to adopt it.

It also most be fearlessly kept away from any exchange so it won't get any valuation based upon markets. This way the token remains worthless in terms of "fiat-thinking" (by that I mean most of us maybe saying they only exchange to BTC, but in the back of their minds they still do the math from BTC to USD). Neither will governments and banks be opposed to it, because it does in no way qualify as currency.

If the community embraces such a token and is willing to use it in real life to get discounts or use it for verification, then the distribution can begin in the most easy form I can think of. Just drop it on who ever feels they want it, but let them verify with email and sms. Then use that data to convince merchants to accept the tokens for discounts (in exchange for direct marketing towards the coin holders (we've got their mail and cellno's!)) This is a win-win situation. The token holders get updates on where they can use them and the merchants get to contact a motivated group of potential customers as well.

I think if you premine 80% and drop that as fast as possible upon the community (created before the premine!) and let the remaining 20% be earned by miners then you can open exchanges to generate real value so miners have their incentive as well.

This might not work on a global scale, but in smaller communities it is already a proven concept. It will never be seen as cryptocurrency from the start, but will be accepted by a wide group willing to use it and the gently (as markets always work) evolve into currency in the end...

Could you make an example of your scheme?

Many cities, provinces, states, organistations, and nations already have "fair distribution" currencies already in place.

They tend to be referred to as "democracies", the coins being referred to as "votes".

They tend to be distributed by the counting of heads, one vote per head, albeit often a head has to have been around a while before it counts.

It seems to me that most of, or certainly a lot of, the motivations people mention for wanting to "fairly distribute" currency are just the very kinds of things for which votes ought to be the currency of choice.

Just like cyptocurrencies, votes can be complicated and confusing to try to use.

So practice. Find out all the elections you can get yourself a vote in, and go spend those votes.

-MarkM-

but that's wrong because only the most votes wins

I can't use a vote to buy myself anything small
but I liked the planet dollar concept of giving out 100 free to everyone + 1000 free for a facebook like

it's like $0.75 a piece now (and very limited ability to cash out on a chinese exchange) but the idea is to spread it first before dumping it, so that the coin has first very little reason to get dumped (useless to dump it now) but to get acceptance first by exchanges (because of the large amount of stakeholders) and miners (low difficulty, but also low rewards at first - doesn't encourage people to get in early, encourages people to get in late as well)

the idea for the coin to get maximum distribution and popularity in maybe a year - where the mining rewards are at maximum so the high difficulty doesn't prevent people from mining it
and as the growth slows down, so will the mining rewards and the inflation keeping the price of the currency stable

I actually had the same idea, but someone already executed it the way I wanted to do it
so really you might even get tip bots, merchants, etc. a year from now and actually people will be interested in getting their 1100 PDR because they want to tip on facebook, not because they want to dump it

Nice. First I was like ;D. Then I was like  :(. Then I was like  ::)

Thinking of votes as currency (or rather reemable tokens) is an interesting concept. They might not be great as unit of account (because they are indevisible) but they certainly have value. You can also monetize them by selling (or renting) your votes to the highest bidder (aka parliaments ;)

The Problem with low value is that people wont regard their coins much before they become valuable. So if you give away your NoValueUntilXX-coins people will probably loose them or throw em away just like the early bitcoiners. So you have to hold them for them until they are willing to claim them. Auroracoin solves this problem.

Voting for a selection of pigs devoted to corporations & money is called plutocracy.

Democracy does not exist in the world of money.

superresistant is correct. People do not want what they would get anyway without having to work for it.

What if all holders of any coins could redeem them for a fair price for some kind of metacurrency that runs on top of all of them? Network effects would outwage all other coins including Bitcoin.

So is communitycoin a better idea? Only 1000 people get it, and they have to be active participants at bitcointalk or the greater altcoin community. It's also POS so it has no mining at all, only minting.

Proof of Time; be rewarded for the time you are connected to the network

I invite you to skim through this text:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=552226.msg6009832#msg6009832

Especially the paragraph "The filthy rich ..."

Does already exist: http://timekoin.org

It is all about incentives.

I am about to draw a concept that will reward stability. I'm pretty advanced, although it has some level of complexity ;)

It seems to be a mixture of POW/POS and actually physical distribution. Also, getting on exchanges ASAP, and press releases would also further distribution IMO

Does it work ?

Would this work like POS? Seems interesting, might start "mining" it.

Are you referring to Timekoin or to my "secret" concept?

Timekoin seems to work, it is online since 2012. Only it is pretty inflationary and some people believe that its security concept is not sound, but until now no severe flaw has been found.

Now the concept I'm developing is about value stability related to goods and services. In short: it would reward merchants and other people which "back" the currency's value, so it's not about mining or something like this. It needs a decentralized exchange to work, so it's pretty much science fiction for now ;).

Thanks!

How can you make sure that 1 participant doesnt cheat by connecting through 100k proxy identities (he gets all the rewards while the fair players get only whats left)?

Is there any service to the network the participants contribute while being connected?

Cross-posted from here:
MASTERCOIN VS NXT
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=639060.msg7456640#msg7456640


I agree with you that the fair distribution aspect on its own cannot secure a long term success. It depends on utility x scarcety to create (=) value. Only when a currency has those two qualities it will be used. Nevertheless a fair distribution can greatly contribute to the long term success of any given currency in a competitive environment such as the cryptocoin space. In a theoretical case of two contenders (Acoin and Bcoin) with equal qualities and environment, the one that manages to be more equally and broadly distributed would win out over the one that pursues a narrow distribution imo. The main causes would be network effects which constitute higher adoption, recognition, larger community in holders, developers and investors and faster innovation rate. A real world example that comes close to the hypothetical case described may be the Monero/Bytecoin case where both chains have been introduced to the public almost simultaneously, they have almost the same qualities (Monero is a clone of Bytecoin with slower emission schedule and faster block times) but differ in the distribution by a large extent (Bytecoin 83% stealth mined, Monero 0% pre/stealthmined). Monero in opposition to Bytecoin has already achieved a huge appreciation in price, market cap and daily volume, however this case is very young and no conclusions can be drawn regarding the long term development of this case.

Your second argument goes in the direction of what has been mentioned here before and is also valid: that in order for acceptance a currency has to be perceived as valuable by its holders or it will be dumped at the first best occasion. In case of Auroracoin this perception was most likely not present with most of its target group. Thus the biggest part of the claimed coins were dumped immediately. With floating exchange rates and legal tender laws not strictly enforced, the reverse case of "Gresham's Law" applies, which praphrased states that "Good Money will drive bad money out of circulation into savings". Good money being the one with most perceived value compared to its exchange rate. So yes, with value people will accept the new coin and try to accumulate it (like Bitcoin). Without value, they will dump it for any other currency (like they did with Auroracoin for Krona).