Bitcoin Forum

I've been bouncing ideas on how to accomplish a true localization of an altcoin's network to a certain community, however this is coming from someone who is no expert in networking and network infrastructure. I have a bare understanding of the composition of bitcoin's network (nodes communicating through TCP). But the biggest challenge, it seems, in creating a local cryptographic currency is how to limit mining to a specific geographic area. I'm sure if I were to state that such a currency would only be used in a specific town, people here probably wouldn't care too much and throw ridiculous amounts of hashing power at it, try to open an exchange, and dump the coin, which has been done with several alts already (even though localization was none of their intentions). The more I think about it, the more it points to the use of a central authority, which I know plenty of people on here, including myself, aren't very fond of. However, I'm still open to that idea if that's what has to be done.

A couple thoughts I've had include:

• Creating a central website where people registering would be required to enter their SSN to be validated within a certain period of time, resulting in only residents of whatever community to be allowed to register successfully. From there, residents would be allowed to download a miner, client, and so forth (provided there are means on said website to help those who aren't tech savvy). However there are two caveats to this: 1) It'd require the cooperation of a local government to conduct said SSN validation. 2) It may have to be closed source, considering that nearly anyone on here (or elsewhere) can compile source code and run it pretty easily, thus destroying the integrity of the aforementioned security measure.
• As mentioned in elciptic's topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212430.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212430.0) (albeit in a different context)
  Creating a new network paradigm for the altcoin to run on. Not sure what this would entail or if it's even possible or practical, but I think it's worth discussing.

Also, feel free to chip in on whether this idea is even worth pursuing or not. :P

bump  :P

Quick/Dirty, just create a seed node that only accepts incoming connections from the .xx country code on the coins ports...

can by fakes through proxies.

Local will mean centralized, but if you have no problems with that - perhaps make the network require realID to join, with the centralized node keeping a copy of local citizens RealID's.