Bitcoin Forum

Hi,
I see that the vast majority has a problem with the premine  when is about a new coin. But we have to consider that also the developers need to have an incentive to develop new and maybe innovative coins. If you take away the premine, the developers will find other tricks to make some money. And we all seen that with bitbar starting at low difficulty and everybody getting orphans because the devs and their friends took over the network, with the yacoin where the developer is suspected to mine with the GPU while the rest are mining with the CPU, and all other coins where everybody are jumping when the difficulty is really low and the payoff is insane only to be left frustrated that they only managed t get maybe 100 coins while some others have by the thousands in a few hours, and this is generating to sides: one side that will support the coin because they where there in the first couple of hours and the 80%-90% of all the coins and the rest that will simply be to upset because they miss the coin launch.
So i propose a fair premine schema (well, i think is fair):
1. Have a fair starting difficulty, like 1 or 5 or anything fair
2. The genesis block will contain lets say 5000 coins if the reward per block is 50 and it will mined by the developer
3. After that the reward for the first 1000 will be 0
4. After that the reward will slowly increase to 100 and when is reaching 100 will stay there for a while (to have some kind an incentive for the people to mine)
5. After that the reward will decrease until is reaching 50 and that will be the stable reward
http://s16.postimg.org/89awun8k5/premine.jpg

Ingeneious. The fairest way I have seen of starting a coin. May be hard to get people started since there is no reward for early adopters. But will create better stability at the exchanges because there will not be miners dumping 1000's of coins as soon as it hits the market or shortly after.

Edit: Ya I don't agree with the pre mine though. Unless its a trusted author and it all goes towards bounty's

No premine is fair.

Bitcoin was not created by someone who wanted to make a quick buck. Bitcoin was created by someone who wanted an alternate system for digital money and transactions.

Anyone who creates an alt coin for the purpose of getting a profit has dubious motivations.

The way I see it, *any* kind of premine will give you a bad PR hurdle.

At present it seems an all or nothing thing.  Either dont premine, or premine everything.  Ripple premined all and had a bigger market cap than btc now.

Ripple may currently have a bigger market cap, however it should be noted that most of the Ripples are not in circulation.

Plus, I'm ramping up my marketing efforts. If it takes tens of thousands of dollars to kill ripple, I will spend it. (Check who is bidding for all the available ad slots here).

Im thinking about a premine strategy where 10% of all new coins (and tx fees) go to charity.  

The list of acceptable charities is agreed by consensus (but they MUST accept bitcoin) and the miners are able to influence where the funds go.

Additionally these coins should be tracked, so that you find out exactly what happened to them and who got the benefit.  Perhaps there will be some blogging/microblogging for success stories.

This is equivalent of the historical "tithe" system.

There was Devcoin with pretty much this idea.

Yes, maybe the bitcoin was not created with the purpose of making a quick buck, but let's be fair, a lot of people got rich with the bitcoin. A lot of people that are shouting that all premine is bad got rich by just pointing some hardware to the network on the early stage and sit on their asses. Yes, everybody want to make a quick buck, to think that someone will do something only for the good of the humanity is just plain silly. If this is the case, then why everybody is buying ASICS? To see a better world? And is only fair that the developer will benefit in some way from his work.

When bitcoin was launched, almost nobody knew about it, and the core team was mining a fair share, and this is fair. Now, when a new coin is launched everybody with launch at it massive computing power, and so the dev, to make something out of it it will use some tricks to have a fair share. Again, if you think that someone will spend countless hours of work just so some guy with a powerful rig to make a quick buck you need to think again. What if the guy that developed the coin has just a normal GPU and is generating maybe 400 kh\s on scrypt, you think that he will work just for someone else to get rich? No, he will use tricks to have his fair share, and everybody will scream on the forum about orphans and other problems

Thanks for the pointer.

The problem with all premining is that it can be gamed.  Even if it is hard or impossible to game, you will give a potentially bad impression.

I'm very interested to look at mining strategies.

Firstly, devcoin only gave 10% to miners.  That's not enough of an incentive.  I propose to give 90% to miners.

Secondly, I strongly feel that all this electricity should be at least in part used for some kind of common good, we should optimize the good, not the devs pockets

Thirdly, the big problem in the world today is distribution of money.  This is *always* gamed ... you need a water tight system (think Satoshi strength) to reduce or eliminate gaming.  Even charities themselves spend too much on admin costs.  We need accountability, not random awards and bounties.  We need league tables with transparency.  Tracking in realtime.  Amiller used the term 'competative giving'  -- this is what I think would be an effective mining strategy ..

Just my 2 satoshis

Did you even read what I fucking wrote?

The problem with fiat currency these days are because they're controlled by people who want to make money.

A good alt coin exactly needs someone who donates their time to an open source project. They may be rewarded, but they need to play by the same rules as others.

Why do people contribute to OpenOffice?

Why do people submit patches to Linux?

Because they want to make a quick buck? No!

But that doesn't mean you can't make money off something like bitcoin. Think of it as offering support contracts for Linux.

There's millions and millions of people out there that are mentally capable and ethically entitled of taking part in the crypto movement. Will it ever be fair that just us the bunch of nerds around here is aware of a crypto launch?

If you want a fair launch first thing first, get it on the front page of the New York Times, so to speak.

true.  the coin developers recently have been creating coins with no real purpose.  they only go as far as getting onto an exchange so they can immediately cash out.  there is no long term plan in the coin.

what should happen is a venture capital funding into a coin.  developers and VC adopters that are funding the coin should be provided some stake for their efforts but those coins need to be "locked in" in some way do they are not allowed to be spend for a period of time "1 year"

maybe someone could build a website that monitors the first 5000 blocks of any new coins for transactions and if any are spend the coin is labelled insta-mined and dubbed worthless by the community.  only those coins that have sound long term investors would qualify as good investments.

Why do that instead of with code? For example, Bitcoin has had zero premine. The 50 BTC generated could not be spent at all, on purpose.

This cryptocoin movement is no ordinary opensource movement. Yes, they donate their time to contribute to OpenOffice, but if the OpenOffice will sold and the guys that are selling the OpenOffice will make millions and the developers that have donated their time will have to rely on the generosity of that guys, and possibly getting nothing, i don't think that it wil donate their time anymore.
Until now every coin had some sort of premine. Bitcoin had his premine, because at the start was only a handful of people knowing about it. The guys that are mining are making a quick buck, but the same guys want the developers to "donate" their time so they can make the money. Is this fair? Is this fair to donate your time and others to get rich using your work? Because if this is the fairness of the cryptocois, that some guys to "donate" their time and work hard while others will sit on their asses and make a quick profit, it will fail just like the communism.
And just for fun, who is here just to make a better world and they don't want any profit, please rise your hands and donate all your cryptocoins (bitcoin, litecoin etc.) to charity. Then I will believe it. But this is not the case, because even you are here to make a profit, but you are upset if some else is doing. Is normal, because this is the human nature.

I, like every human, do many things in life not motivated by profit. Bitcoin was a creation that wasn't motivated by profit, and that's part of the reason for it's success.

There was no premine. Sure, only a small group of people heard about it, but it was announced to the public in a mailing list. It wasn't a premine. Please also use paragraphs next time.

The fuck?

Let me ask you this.. is the only thing you value in life making a profit?

Not everything is motivated by profit.

The early programmers and hackers were not motivated by profit, but rather it was something they were passionate and excited about.

What happens when people start caring about profit and jumping in without any passion? Dot com bubble, hmm. Profit isn't bad or evil, it's required for a society and economy to function. It is NOT required for someone to code something that may change the world.

Why not simply disable the seed server until 24hr after people have had a chance to download the client software ans set up?

because people could still mine during that time?

The best way to do this would be a high starting difficulty - say 4000, and announce the coin launch at least a couple of days in advance.

Um you put it into the client code that the first block has to come from the seed nodes and is checksum so it can't be faked. And 51% of the miners wont have the invalid block from people that try to solo mine,  so it will be rejected, thee will have the real first block from the seed nodes.

I'm talking about a temporary locking.  A specific time before the first set of coins can be sold.  Like stock share structures.  Private investors are locked in for a period of time just after the IPO. 

Yes 4000 is a good idea, and so only people with big and powerful rigs can mine the coin, the same people that had made a fortune from bitcoin and they bought this rigs, the same people who are against of anybody making a profit except them. I don't believe for a second that the guy or guys who have designed bitcoin didn't think: "Hmm, let's do this and if is working we will make some money!"

And yes, again, bitcoin was premined the same way the others coins have been premined. I can make a coin, and then send a mail to some of my friends and then make a public announcement here after a while, and say: "Hey, is not premined, there where this guys that knew"

My feeling is that the whole premine and crypto currency in general is full of hypocrisy. And this is the true. People had made small fortunes with the crypto coins and now are telling how unethical it is to use the crypto coins for profit.

And is not about to value only profit, but I for one, if i make something out of passion and some guys are getting rich using what i done, and i get nothing, i will not be happy. Look at Tesla, he worked out of passion, but because he didn't care about the profit, he lost all his money and didn't have founds to finish his projects. Is fun to preach that other people should donate their time and other should profit when you are the one profiting and not the one "donating" the time

The way I see it the longer we take to actually introduce a crypto currency that was fairly implemented the more chance we have of one of the BIG governments making their own successful and unfair crypto currency and destroying everything we have done.

I do wish people would stop releasing junk and start actually listening to and working with the community on here.

I don't like resorting to personal results, but check the genesis block. It was not premined, because it had a message embed in it showing the date and a news article.

Learn what you're fucking talking about

errr... Which one of the 100 coins that were created in the last few weeks has another purpose apart from getting quick profit?

And the point is? If it had a message embed what is the point, since only a handful of people knew, and they mined like crazy, and made thousands of coins? What is point if i generate the genesis block now, i make the announcement and i throw with my friend some Gh at the network so everybody will get only orphans?


Yes i learned about bitcoin a month ago, and really i was surprised by the elitist attitude of some older members that had made a big profit with the bitcoin. Is like the religion where the priest are preaching poverty while dressed in golden clothes.

I have a feeling you have not looked through the blockchain.

Satoshi is leaving millions untouched.

And again, the point is? Because, no i didn't look at the blockchain to see what is doing X, i don't care, i have more important things to do.

 But again, what is the point that is leaving milions untouched? You say that he not changing his bitcoins to dollars? Good for him, i will do the same, it his idea and he believe he can go a long run, and it will go, probably also because now satoshi can found on his one the project and not be dependent on a 3rd party entity.

But where will bitcoin be now if from the first minute 1000 people would have had thousands of Gh/s pointed at him?

DeVCoin is merged mined. The miners basically get it free on the side while they mine bitcoins.

Even with GPUs mining bitcoin is still profitable, and the merged mined coins add to that profit.

Miners who also add namecoin to their merge make even more profit, it looks like Slush dropping namecoin from his merge might actually have made merging it even more profitable for everyone else too simply because less namecoins are being given away free on the side to miners who don't care about them. Less people who don't want namecoins so throw them away cheap might lead to a better exchange rate, or maybe it is just that lower difficulty encourages more people who actually care about them to add them to their merge.

DeVCoin doesn't need to give a large percentage to the miners because there are already lots of coins the miners get 100% of while merged mining. Bitcoin already pays their electricity, all the other coins are mined effectively free.

-MarkM-

Discussions of to premine or not, to make such and such coin with different block times and total coin amounts are all mute if the original idea (Bitcoin) is doing it's thing.  No matter how a creator of a new coin wraps their argument up with a pretty bow, the clear goal is to get rich quick. Otherwise they would be helping Bitcoin be the best it can be.  The groundwork is there, growth will come with time.  Are you following Satoshi's steps of fixing a broken financial system or are you trying to find the elusive golden egg? 

Bitcoin isn't broken, so which is it?

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

Although it never took off, I sort of liked the Solidcoin (1st version) pre mine method. There was a pre mine to test the chain and what not, but the coins were given as bounties for the first people to set up pools, services, etc. Of course looking back the system as a whole didn't work for various reasons, but I don't think that the SC premine method was a bad idea. Or at least if a pre mine is necessary, it wasn't a bad way to go.

+1000

Really well put

People who mined bitcoin early on deserve every bit of their profits because at that time, they were basically mining just to support bitcoin while taking on all of the costs of power and risk of having the whole network fail and become history. If everyone knew you could just print money back then that would be worth a lot today, everyone would have gotten in... We didn't know that, but the early miners believed in bitcoin.

Well, bitcoin can be considered a beta, but in no way this design can be used to overthrow the banking system because:

1. the cap is at 21 millions and there are 7 billions people on Earth, so everybody will have to work with decimals, and this will not work for multiple reasons.

2. the block chain is big and it will get bigger. Moore law is not the answer, when you will need 1 BTC hardware to store 0.1 BTC. Plus you can't get it with you to pay at the store

3. The transaction time is huge.

Because of this reasons, bitcoin is only a good investment and saving currency, is not a currency for spending. We need a currency that you can take with your phone, to go with the phone and buy something at the store and we need to wait a maximum of 10 seconds for confirmation and not 2 hours, and we need to pay 1 or 0.5 for a pack of biscuits and not 0.00000000732

Yes, i know, all of the early adopters will say otherwise, and is normal because they have a lot of bitcoins and they want them to have a big value.

And we arrived at the last problem why the bitcoin alone can't overthrow the banks:
4. GREED.

The banking system is where it is because of the greed, because they want more that they can need. But the banking system is using a "centralized greed", but in crypto world is a P2P greed, envy and hypocrisy. The ones that have a lot of coin X (this is including BITCOIN) will defend that coin no matter how broken or flawed it is, the ones that are late will hate them and will try to bring the coin down or to clone it for a quick profit.

At this pace, the crypto coins will remain a geek only thing, where the guys that where early on the bitcoin can afford big rigs to take down new coins, and the late guys will clone some coins to make a quick profit.

Unless we don't get our shit together and don't acknowledge that:
1. we need incremental coins
2. the developers need to be payed in some way for their work, like the miners are now.

You think that a good programmer will quite his job to donate his time just so you can mine and make a profit?

I know when someone proposed that for first X block the reward will be 0, everyone jumped: and the miner mine for nothing?

3. we need to support the coins that brings something new and rejects the clone. I am still amazed that novacoin or PPC are ignored but everybody are so in love with feathercoin or china clone.

4. We really need to dump the old coins, when a new increment is ready.

And this is the hardest part. Because none of the ones that preach the world peace and the donation of time and other BS will do this, and this is because of the greed. So don't accuse other to be greedy when you are just as greedy.

For now the crypto coins are just a get rich scheme and speculation investment. If you really want to overthrow the bank we need this changes. And we need to use the greed for something constructive, we need to use the greed of the people as an incentive to work and improve the project.

If you jump on every developer who do something new that he has premined some coins you will just have a geekcoin and a bunch of useless clones and the crypto movement will die in a civil war.

FTFY

You can rebase to work in mbtc and add more decimal points if neceessary.  This was all envisaged by Satoshi.

But you can also create btc certificates, in fact you SHOULD do this.

Let's say a govt was to start paying workers in bitcoin certificates.  They would make them redeemable by their own mined coins, or exchanged for currency, tax credits or court fines.

Very soon the bitcoin certificates would be as valuable as money.  More importantly, as the economy is stimulated, so go up revenues, yielding lower deficits (and hence borrowing costs) and ultimately surpluses.  The bitcoin certificates can be bought back easily and more money gets invested into goods and services. 

I see what you did there, but you didn't fix anything. The incentive for mining bitcoin early was not to get in on a pump and dump like it is now with the latest alt coins. Hence, why premining is so chaotic and unfair.

There is still tons of money to be made just mining bitcoins.

Using p2pool to merged mine all the merged mined coins you get 15 second blocks with the GeistGeld for your fast block times applications/needs, so people needing fast blocks are already taken care of right there.

The bitcoins pays for more than just the electricity, even this late in the game.

The DeVCoins and GRouPcoins take care of the people who insist you need to keep creating coins forever.

The namecoins provide a p2p DNS system.

If other features are needed, at least add them to the merged mined mix, so they can be secured economically.

Also the merged mining mix is extremely fair, you can still get plenty of many of the coins in the mix mining with just one GPU, heck some of them are still low enough difficulty that CPUs could still get a block now and again even.

-MarkM-

Let's say that investors are needed to get a hypothetical coin to be developed.

What would be an ideal way to set this up?

1) Direct premine.  Make block 0 X coins and then give them directly to kickstarter investors
or

2) Tickets method.  Similar to a premine, but when the investors get the money is random.  Investors are given tickets to use to gain stake rewards proportional to their investment on kickstarter.  In doing so, these first investors also help to secure the blockchain.

your thoughts?

I'd start with a goal or reason for the new coin.  Something investors would want to invest in.  A good purpose for it's existence.

There is a goal and purpose (But let's ignore this for now. Assume Interest). But just wondering what the best way to award the early investors and what the community won't object to as a way of funding the development of the coin.

What are your thoughts on the methods that I suggested?

What does that actually mean though? If a developer brings out a new coin in the future full of innovations and took a year to code what is your objection to him profiting from his hard work?

Since ideally we would want a team that is expert at maintaining and promoting a chain, the best source of funding would be for them to get rich improving and promoting bitcoin so we all know they are qualified to maintain and promote such a product.

Or if not bitcoin, then there are already oodles of other chains they can catapult to success to demonstrate their expertise and oodles of chains that are sorely in need of some maintenance they can demonstrate their maintenance skills on.

Currently the community is not even able to keep up with maintenance of all the existing chains, so creating more seems kind of pointless. Lets prove we can actually maintain the ones we already have.

Already some of the latest ones are spawning "Is RecentScamCoin (RSC) dead?" threads.

So we are already overstraining our maintenance capacity. Maybe our hashing power too, as we also have not been able to keep all the existing chains at high enough levels of hashing to secure them all.

So again we really need to get off our asses and work on what we already have instead of piling up more work we likely also will not have enough hashing and maintenance-work to adequately support.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin was also made to get rich. Why else make the reward decay with a power series, the fastest decaying series there is. The difference is when bitcoin w born, there were significant doubts and risks and much less crowd interested.

Time isn't free. So basically only rich people or retired people will get to work on these projects? Not fair at all. And to think people will dedicate years of their lives for free or to expect slave labor to produce quality is basically the sweat shop model.

Developers should be allowed to get paid. How much is fair? Whatever they would be paid in the private sector + 10%. So $100,000 would be fair for the developer, but to expect the developer to work essentially for free, full time? We are talking PHD level work. Linux was developed by private corporations like Redhat, Suse, IBM, Oracle, they all funded Linux. The developers working on the Linux kernel and other critical components like Mozilla are getting paid.

The risks are still there today. What if the government decides to crack down on everyone? These risks still exist and every new cryptocoin faces these risks and every miner, investor, developer and early adopter faces these risks. Allowing them all to profit doesn't reduce the risk but it might give them enough money to move to a less oppressive location or hire a lawyer at least.

The purpose of developing a coin shouldn't be to get rich, but it shouldn't be expected that people will work for free. The purpose of developing these coins is to make peoples time worth something to the economy and to monetize things. The idea that the developers time is worthless, or that electricity is just free, is unfair. The developers time is not worthless, and electricity is not free. Developing a successful cryptocoin is not easy on any level, and while Bitcoin launched on the cheap it also took 4 years to go mainstream. The next generation coins may only have a year, or 6 months to launch and that is if they are planned out, it's also going to require a lot more effort in terms of programming.

Go read the Bitcoin code and see how it was hacked together. The design of Bitcoin is the design of a mathematician but the code is a hack job. New coins need to be designed by full time programmers with highly modular and secure code bases. No more just taking the Bitcoin code and adding a hack or two or a new hash or two, but we need new better rewrites of the code and that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of time. As a programmer go compare the QT5 code to GTK and see for yourself the difference in quality.  

The argument that people can and should work for free isn't going to build infrastructure. I agree with you all the various blockchains have to be secured, that hashing power has to be increased, that each coin needs to be promoted with websites, word of mouth, blogs, twitter, full marketing campaigns have to be launched for each.

So what we need to do as a community is actually put our minds together to develop a fair model to reward the behaviors we want to encourage. If we aren't willing to pay for infrastructure then we can't complain about the lack of distributed exchanges or MtGox going down or sites being hacked all the time and so on. In order to build this infrastructure, members of the community have to be compensated and Devcoin isn't working and probably isn't going to work either. My advice is instead of a centralized Devcoin which isn't really working, we should design an IPO funding model and test that model out and see exactly how well that model works in practice, then write up case studies and papers detailing what did work and why so the next generation can rely on those research papers and the scientific method to refine their launches to make them even more fair and more impressive.

To start we need to assume each developer will need $100,000, as this isn't enough to make a developer rich but it is enough to pay a US or Japanese citizen in the most expensive part of the country to live for at least 1 year. Also this is only slightly more than what developers usually make, so it's a fair amount and will get developers to quit their jobs and want to do this. The funding mechanism has to be something we continue to improve on and we have to find a mechanism to reward the people who do that, so that those people can research full time, develop new prototypes based on that research so that future launches can become even more fair than the last.

We can disagree on numbers, on how to get it done, but infrastructure has to be developed, new coins have to be developed, research has to be funded, and we cannot expect it to just happen or for it to happen for free, we have to figure out how to generate enough money as a community to create a vibrant self sustaining economic eco-system.

What about the very first amount of coins mined is non-transferable out of the wallet for certain amount of time (e.g. 1 year), by that we wouldn't see huge amount of coins dumped at exchange for quick buck and the price goes to near Zero.