Bitcoin Forum

I'm trying to work out which existing altcoin features are actually valuable to members of the crypto community - please share your thoughts so we can separate out the fud.

The extreme price fluctuation feature, or lets face it 99% of forum members wouldn't be here  ;)

Definitely the fast confirmations. I get quite impatient when transfering Bitcoins, because I'm used to pretty much every alts getting 6 confirmations in less than 10 minutes.

The other features are just icing on the cake, as long as the coin is secure.

I for one can NOT live with any alt coin worth less than .001. Build in to your next coin that price point but the ability for me to instamine a fuck ton of them so I can get one of them CryptsyBackroom(TM) level payouts.

I'm probably being generous when I say 99% of altcoins have nothing to do with being a legitimate currency. There are all the same and have no purpose other than to scam BTC from bigger fools based on illusionary nonsense at best or are simply outright scams.

You aren't dealing with companies backed by real assets and customers or fiat currency backed by GDP. Any value ascribed to a crypto currency, especially one without innovation is speculative in it's entirety and highly subjective.

Just like the dot-com startup mania of the 90's was based on inflated projections and capitalization that vaporized over night, few will survive long term. For an altcoin to have any real value it must function as currency that fills a need first, otherwise you are simply trading hot air.

It's the same thing for Bitcoin. If many users think the currency has value, and they use it, and they are relatively loyal to it, then it's safe to say that it is valuable.

To know if a crypto is legit, the most important thing is to study its userbase. If it satisfies the three critera mentionned above, then it will survive.

existing altcoin features that are actually valuable to members of the crypto community



to me it would be

fast

secure

payment gateway and accepted by business (great marketing)

no instaming, no ipo, no premine, dev's earn money off of payment gateway (the more the coin is successful the more the dev earns)

superior wallet (most wallets look like something out of windows 95) wallet should include everything, mining, trading, purchasing, accounts, payees, messaging etc etc etc

an app with the above all achievable on an android (no-one likes iphone but i could be wrong)


ohh ohh and mining that is done at one hash rate only (the more hashing you throw at the coin does not matter as it will only accept the one hash rate), so that it is achievable by all. Can be mined on a smart phone and every thing i do in the wallet  gets me rewarded with coins




    

This is already an interesting discussion that seems to be going in opposing directions.

Is it fair to suggest that many of the needs described so far are those of traders and investors? with little mention of currency users.

Perhaps user first design is required, the given requirements appear to be simple at first: fast and secure.

mymenace makes a good point about focussing on payment gateways, this seems to tie in with user first design, ensuring users can actually use the currency as a currency.

vann, you make note of innovation, is there any specific area you'd be looking to see innovation in?

So far altcoins seem to have focussed on solving: 1) anonymity, 2) altcoin induced problems with mining (new algo's, multipool handling and the like) - do any feature innovation which is useful for end users as opposed to those in the business of making/minting/trading the coins?

Indeed, these new features seem to serve no other purpose than to generate hype for investors.
The anonymity features since irrelevant; with BTC, there are ways to be anonymous if you really want to be (ie. the coin mixers, which are not more centralised than Darkcoin's masternodes, plus their is Dark Wallet in the work).
I also don't really see the point in new algos either. If someone is truly interested in a coin, buying a 120$ ASIC is quite accessible really. And they use less ressources, and prevent attacks by botnets. They seem to be simply a way for miners to make money of their old rigs.

I agree and would suggest it is fair to allow miners to make money from their own rigs of course - but only when using the rigs for a good purpose, which would be a coin which puts users first.

BTC was balanced with it's mining algorithm and technology increased over time. New coins can have a huge amount of hashing power available instantly which is where the difference is.

I have a feeling that if other parameters were tweaked on a sha256d or scrypt coin, parameters like starting difficulty, allowed block time deviance, and diff retargeting most multipool issues would be solved.

That is true, however, the new algos doesn't seem to me like they solve that problem. A huge amount of hashing power is available from the start no matter what the algorithm is, because a lot of GPU farms have been built this summer when scrypt-mining with them was profitable.

These days I think in order for a new coin to compete it should with anonymous transactions and coloured coins(asset exchange) at least.

New mining algos or a good PoS system(or a hybrid) is interesting too.

A good non-joke name is also something that I think people underestimate the importance of. Dogecoin was probably a one time thing.

Is there any reason to have anonymous transactions baked in, when third party vendors offering this service can compete with each other to innovate and excel, far more than a developer or developer team with other commitments can?

I would ask the same question of coloured coins, the extensibility of the bitcoin protocol, and therefore anything based on that protocol, allows any module built on top of bitcoin to be built on any to be developed coin also.

Contrarily the native addition of any feature like this will most likely preclude the use of possibly superior third party solutions which could otherwise be integrated seamlessly, offering choice and competition in the marketplace.

I hope this doesn't come across as being against such features, full discussion on the positives and negatives is useful before making decisions to include something.

You have raised some interesting questions, and make a fine point about coin naming.

Theoretically or even ideally 3rd parties would build upon it like they do bitcoin but in order for people to use a new coin from the beginning it has to offer some utility I think. It shouldn't be a requirement per se but the altcoin community is definitely hungry for a true anonymous coin. And an asset exchange adds another dimension to a coin.

If a coin has other innovations I guess these things aren't mandatory. But I think the demand for these features is high right now and seeing a coin offering these cutting edge features adds a lot of credibility I think.

You make a solid argument there, utility above what is standard will add credibility.

Perhaps something can also be done to prevent 51% on PoW - security and decentralization is important.

A refined and more useful API, one that is truly RESTful and HTTP compliant may also help.

So far we have the basics covered:

• basic chain configuration to ensure a healthy distribution of coins over time
• a friendly minimal remuneration approach
• multipool diff handling
• user and gateway focus to the entire project

[/list]

and we are starting to get some core feature requirements. This is initial brief still needs some work before it can be specified correctly, certainly a good foundation to build on.

Are there any other features, requests, or common issues you can think of that we could potentially address?

merge mined with bitcoin


only need anonymous transactions if we have something to hide, maybe a feature you can turn on and off, e.g. i do not want transactions to show up of any "personal items" ;) my spouse and I buy


+1 to silkcoin and the new wallet, very pretty and functional

This is where you went off the rails.

There are ZERO cryptos that are a "legit currency"...
Even Bitcoin velocity has flatlined in spite of zillions of new retail outlets.

The IRS was correct when they ruled Bitcoin was "property"... essentially a commodity.

Do you have a general problem with "property" or "stores of wealth"...
Like golds or silver or silver or goats or sacks of potatoes...
Because that is what that $8 billion in coins = storage of wealth.

People need to get over this "currency" fetish...
It's just not gonna happen in this generation of crypto.

This only applies to the united states, here we have to declare crypto to the taxman to be taxed as earnings, e.g. it is a currency

regardless of what the IRS says

if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck it is a duck

e.g. you buy with btc, your sell with btc, you trade like forex with btc, sounds like a currency to me

mymenace you are the man

I want this coin, i want it nnnnoooooooooowwwwwwww!!!!!

Thank you for all the feedback, I've reduced it to the items which may warrant some discussion.

1. Swiss Army Knife / Monolithic Wallet
The introduction of all the features you mentioned feels like bloat and the introduction of many attack vectors. Whilst they are all cool/novel things, which would you say are the bare minimum requirements for the coin to have utility?

2. One hash rate only
I need to think about this properly, can you enlighten on why you suggest this, is it so that everyone has a fair chance at creating money, or are there alternative reasons?

3. Merged Mining
If we go past the specification stage and implement this, then the project will be a very long term project and aim to offer a viable alternative to bitcoin. I can see that merged mining could help the miners, and that it could theoretically make the network more secure (a higher difficulty and more hashing). But I worry that it would force fee reduction, making the network less secure, and that such tight association would be sending a message from the off that this is a second class coin, always to be subsidiary to Bitcoin.

Can you comment?

1. bare minimum of course is just your transactions but a better gui for marketing purposes ( i believe it would appeal more to average joe and especially if it is an app)

2. ...""so that everyone has a fair chance at creating money"... yes, alot of people do not get to mine bitcoin because of the hashrate. As well at any point in time you want new users to come on board and mine the coin to add to the network, this creates an ever increasing infrastructure that is very hard to fall down. Might even reduce that so called 51% attack if no-one is using pools and just mine with their pc or smartphone.

3. I do not really understand merge mining except that it brings more miners on board as they can mine both btc and this coin. Ultimately the miners are your infrastructure, not a prerequisite if you are able to bring new miners in at any time giving them the same chance as everyone else.

A side note -  these features all seem to me to reduce a pump and dump coin, but at the same time a profitable coin due to the fact every time you make a transaction or open the wallet it mines something no wasting money on hash rates, electricity and pc power.

A side note - i believe the payment gateway is the key to new users and profits, this will create a community that can use a coin straight away and that community can even help businesses adopt the coin by showing them a simple payment gateway for transactions.

I'm curious why you ask which features are important to the crypto community.  In my view, the focus on miners is probably doing a lot to hold back real innovation.  I view cryptocurrencies as being kind of like languages, in that no matter how good they are technically, their value/utility is really tied to the number of people who can be convinced to use them.  What I see in the alt-coin world is a bunch of people trying to further refine Esperanto while English (bitcoin) continues its dominance.  I do mine them, but only because some people are willing to trade BTC for them.

The world would be quite boring if everyone spoke english and had the same culture, wouldn't it?

That's the relevance of altcoins; each community which has different values than the others need to have their own currency, whose economic worth reflects the magnitude of trust that each member of the community has towards each-other. That is of much help for a community to grow and realise their goals.

Hence the relevance of many altcoins, with different purpose and often different technologies.

faster confirms are nice, but the best part about altcoins is how they convert to bitcoin.

Thank you for expanding. Most coins try to launch with a high value, on exchanges and with mining pools set up. Using Instamines, premines, IPO and other approaches to get free money. We want to do the opposite, a quiet low launch, lots of hard work, useful features, no exchange, no monetary value at inception and no pools to begin. We'll take every step we can to ensure it's a fair coin. Nothing wills top speculation, but we can take all measures possible to prevent anything untoward.


This is of primary concern, the coin should have limited monetary value and grow naturally based on merit.


Agreed, I've dubbed this user focussed development, lots of time spent ensuring the coin can be used as one and can be integrated easily by people. I want anything created to run entirely on its own merits as a viable alternative to the big coin(s).


There are many experienced and valuable members here, I'm trying to reach out to find the few real users of crypto that are here, those who understand specific areas exceptionally, and those who have noticed requirements that others may have missed (or missed the importance of).

Anybody can come up with a new alt coin, but it's only worth doing if it adds utility, innovation, refinement, and value (or should I say usefulness). So trying to take time out to listen to the community and get together a proper specification before put keyboard to code.

Don't know if it's mentioned yet ..

Paid developers  :o

Yes we've already covered this in a different thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656720

In short:
No premine, instamine, or IPO.
0.125% of the block reward as a tax to the development team
50% of transaction fees, halving 3 times (25%, 12.5%, 6.25%) then dropping to 0.

Many have suggested a higher % of block reward (1%), we'll confirm the actual amount if/when we get to a final specification. It will certainly be under 0.5% though.

Sure that could work. But it doesn't cover third party development, which will be the main driving force in cryptocurrency penetration in this year and the following .. and not just one centralized development team.

How can you keep them from becoming entirely closed source? Toward my point, how would you solve the problem of privatized GPU miners cornering markets? Take a look at BBR right now, over 50% of the coin is mined by Christian and Christian alone. Not all the hard-coded centralized developer fees in the world can stop that, and he's currently in a position where he would require infinite money to open source or even distribute his software.

What then?

Interested to hear what you class as third party development? Software, Hardware, Services, additional core development?


Open from the start, multiple contributors, patches from healthy up to date forks - the usual methods.


The fee model is only to provide a fair approach to remuneration. All aspects of the project would have to be open, right from the start, including the initial requirements and proposal, even before specification happens. As we are doing here :)

The fixed hash rate idea is really interesting and it sounds good except for the fact that a botnet would easily take over the network. Often the only thing that limits botnets is the fact that most of the computers in the botnet are not very powerful. But in this case it wouldn't matter at all and sheer numbers would be the only thing that mattered.

So in order for this to work the coin would absolutely have to have full protection against a >50% attack.

Interestly enough a white paper was proposed today with a solution: http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdf (http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdf)

Mycelium integration, closed source pools (https://minergate.com/) with their own closed source software, previous releases of cudaminer (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167229.msg7320842#msg7320842) not being released for distribution and are now effectively closed source, coinmarketcap, any exchange, there are now third party sources of entire coin development (https://cryptonote.org/) who offer the source for anyone to use but not for themselves to launch a coin, claymore's GPU miners (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=638915.0) are closed source 3rd party support, nxt asset exchange, blockchain explorers (http://monerochain.info) not provided by the developers supporting multiple coins of choice,  profitability calculators (http://whatmine.com), there's just so many examples. The future of new cryptocurrencies will come to thrive on these types of offerings. This is no longer a garage project, and the number of people who have originally provided these types of services for free of charge is quickly diminishing .. to the point where coins like BBR are left to consider a hard fork (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg7379632#msg7379632) because of lack of an ability to fund a third party developer.


This simplistic model is disappearing very fast, again using the BBR example (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg7379632#msg7379632). He is a very intelligent and good developer and even he cannot mitigate these risks.



The fair approach is being actively abused, and I'm trying to drive home the point that it's not just the core coin developers that will be needing paid anymore to survive. It's quickly becoming so dangerous that these people need to be compensated some how.

So what do you think is a good method to keep everyone paid? I don't think it's going to be automatic -- no amount of automated open-source coding can benefit everyone who has a say in these coins now. Some will find a way to assume control if they are not compensated.

I was wondering when someone would mention PoA. I don’t see this being implemented into Bitcoin, so there is a chance for another established alt to take it up. [Frankly, I wouldn’t trust another lame “clonecoin” with this implementation, even if it did it well. It’d essentially be another piece of crapshoot hype.]

Anyhow, with the capped hash proposal, you’ve hit it on the head. A proposal like this falls prey to the PoW uniqueness problem. The “instamining” would just shift from those with power-heavy farms to those with clouds with multiple distinguishable connections (i.e. botnets).

There's checkpoint consensus, but then consensus allows for islands to form.

A simple technical (rather than social) solution to the 51% problem must exist, for PoW.

What do you guys think about this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309073.0;all)?

Not a simple solution, but it's a big question to begin with ..

I don't know how viable it is in reality but the only thing I can think of to guard against this problem is a a coin that integrates human intelligence tasks in order to mine. Something like a capcha but possibly stronger than that.

Oh, I didn't see your link before I posted my post above. Just started reading it now, is it related in anyway to what I said above, or is this something solved by computers?

This bit concerns me greatly:

You mean the potential for underground websites like stakesignfavors.com popping up,
where signers can try to make a little extra money on the side?

No the unwritten bit which allows not including as many transactions as desired, together with the unreferencing of the tree of transactions from the block header. Merkle root must be in there.
edit: because the transactions merkle root isn't in the header they can be added and removed at will.. it breaks the strength and the point of the blockchain.

From the many proposals I've seen, it seems apparent that Proof of Decentralization is required, as centralization is always the root of the problems. To do this blocks need to be floated around the network randomly in some way until agreed, then the next block can be started.

I can see multiple viable approaches as alternatives, which expand on PoW. For example:

nBlocks: a traditional PoW block is created and sent to the network, it is then recomputed with another hash, and repeat until n-hashes have been found, the block identifier becomes the sha256d of the concatenation of (nhash, n+1hash, ...). block-reward/n is claimed by each miner.

transactional block verification: traditional PoW block is created and sent to the network, each client which sent a transaction included in the block signs the hash with the private key they control associated with aforementioned transaction, once xx% of signatures has been received the block is accepted by the network.

combination of both of the above.

supernodes/unl, trusted nodes which much meet majority consensus that a block is good before it is accepted - perhaps with a latent design which acts a soft checkpoint for currentblock - n.

zero interest PoS and feeless transactions, discourage hoarding and just take it as a given that this computational processing is the fee for using the network.

and so on.

a side point: one cpu one vote was long gone, with the introduction of pools, which centralized the network. The pool problem is primarily a problem because it's been black boxed and miners are now "dumb" with no attachment to the network or awareness of the blockchain. If there was a way to force them to be aware of the network protocol and the chain again, it may open alternative avenues to solve the problems.

aside for tromp: you seem to have some overlap with CPoS and graph based data.. it would be interesting if the block chain was a graph instead, which was mined with cuckoo.

There are three features that are extremely important. 

1. Fast
2. Cheap to use
3. Very easy to use

These are the core.  If a coin is missing one of these three, it sucks. 

Most coins suck.

I'm curious, do you have any exemple of a coin that is expensive to use or hard to use?

Bitcoin is expensive and slow.

Easy to use for the most part. But could be a lot better for the average person.

All of these things are subjective and depend on the use case.

Bitcoin is expensive compared to random-alt, cheap compared to paypal. Slow compared to paypal, fast compared to international wire transfer. Easy to use compared to most software in the world, difficult compared to most online payment systems.

All of these things can be addressed by supporting infrastructure, extension, or third party software.

For example, we could easily make an open source skrill or paypal which allows multiple service providers to give abstracted access to the bitcoin system, whilst remaining interoperable. Decentralized does not preclude federated, and federated does not mean centralized.

Bitcoin the protocol allows the small operator to innovate and compete with the big guys in many market places.

Yeah, all of that is true.

I was comparing bitcoin to altcoins like you said.

There is lots of potential still and lots of uncharted territory still in this space.

Indeed, and businesses like Coinbase are working hard to support the infrastructure.
However, this external infrastructure seems to be adding a useless risk where we have to trust a third-party, considering that many of the features they add can be included directly in altcoins (like the faster transaction time and lower fees).

Imho, using an altcoin with better features is safer than using Bitcoin with an external app which compensates for its flaws.

That's true. And that's an interesting way to look at using altcoins. They are likely safer than using a centralised third party. So that might be a good way to market an altcoin to people using bitcoin already.

Open source, written in Java, ability to store multiple coins in a single client.

http://altcoinpress.com/2014/04/java-client-to-put-multiple-coins-into-a-single-wallet/

http://www.reddit.com/r/perfectcoin

Anon is a great feature, the only coin close to pulling this off is CRYPT imo.

Gridcoin

https://coinality.com/wp-content/uploads/company_logos/2014/03/gridnew21-250x250.png

Open-source, complete transparency, convenience of use, ultra fast transaction time, good cause i.e. advancing the progress of medicine, biology, climatology, mathematics, astrophysics, and more via BOINC contribution.


Cryptocurrencies are not only super convenient as a form of value transfer, but can literally save the humanity and increase everyone's quality of life.

Gridcoin FTW!

Great points, thank you.

There is another option to throw in to the mix. Applications (website and services) can be designed in such a way that they interface with a users personal detail without ever having any direct control themselves, and without needing to take or store any personal information. Consider an alt with a well defined API, a personal hosted node, and various client side web services which could interface with any node defined. You would then have a range of UIs and services which respected the personal and decentralized nature of crypto currency / block chain.

Over these threads I think I've collected enough information to begin specifying a project which has some merit. Would any of you be willing to give further feedback once I've collated everything in to a rough specification?

Yeah, it's a tricky problem to tackle. The idea of captcha-style verification is novel, but enabling it into a trustless sytem would be a significant hurdle to overcome.

I would be willing, yes. Keep us updated. It sounds interesting.

Please see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.0 for initial project details and discussion thread.