Not having an 80% shady premine and absurd mining rate (2x MRO) with a two year jump from the start might have something to do with. A visible team that is working hard to develop the coin and its use might be another.

I don't believe BCN has a $20K market cap either. Where did you get that number? Back of an envelope calculation I get something like $10 million.

This is false. It increases by a linear factor. But you seem to claim to know beter then the developers, so perhaps people should believe you.

Also, as I've explained before, it is possible to have even an exponential growth of the anonymity set (i.e. essentially total anonymity) while maintaining a linear factor in transaction size using sequential mixing (which have some of the usage limitations of coinjoin-style mixing, but still none of the third party trust limitations).

There is absolutely a cost to anonymity but it is not exponential and not necessarily unmanageable.

 

The BCN abbreviation was not used prior to the first post on bct.

The first post by DStrange is I believe this one:


Replying to that post, there is a post by someone else who includes a screen shot, and the screen shot shows BTE, not BCN.


The following day DStrange started a thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512747.0

Some time later (on or before 2014-04-30) the site was changed to use BCN:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140430023418/https://bytecoin.org/

We can't be 100% sure that the change was made after the thread post, since wayback is imprecise, but from this chronology it is likely.

Nothing says they keep all the coins in that wallet, but as for risky, I consider all these crypto exchanges risky. No real oversight or transparency. Some or more trustworthy than others, but as hard as it is to believe some otherwise intelligent people were saying that about MtGox right up until the time it failed. I advise extreme caution.

That would actually be a good feature, they should let you create your own data feeds.

Look at his post history. The evidence is there.

Sigh. Why is the level of critical thinking so low in this space. If someone has an incentive to do something (say pump a coin), you can't logically believe that anything they say is actually legitimate without some kind of evidence. Talk is cheap.

Absent evidence I would assume the site didn't exist before it was posted here.

(Not directed at you equipoise, I know you agree with me.)

The easiest way to deal with this is to clean up your coins by transferring them to another wallet. So create a second wallet and as you get the tiny coins from the exchange, transfer them to the second wallet in bigger units of say 0.1 or 0.2 (just guessing at the appropriate size here). Then you won't have any trouble sending transactions of 1-2 coins from the second wallet, because those will only use 10 inputs or so, not hundreds.

Thread hijacking is not cool. With all due respect to the BBR work, you don't see us going over there and telling people why they should drop BBR because the slightly more conservative approach of Monero is better for a coin to maintain a high level of users confidence and value.

Please show us the same respect.

It's not really either. Without getting into the history of it all, this was the original thread but has been largely abandoned now. Occasionally people (and post bots) stumble across it and bump it, but I doubt it is malicious.

I'm not sure I follow exactly, but the way most exchange deposits (and web wallets, and merchant payments, etc, etc.) work with other coin types s that each user has his own deposit address(es). When you sent to that address it is credited to your account on the exchange. This is done by the exchange by creating a new address for each user (using a relatively lightweight wallet API) and then storing that address in a database.

The cryptonote coins don't have a wallet with multiple addresses. Each wallet has three files and one address. There isn't an API to create a new address, nor one to create an entirely new wallet. So integration with the above model is problematic.

So what the exchanges do now is have one wallet for all deposits and users identify themselves to the exchange for account crediting purposes with the payment ID.

A redesigned wallet with a proper database of addresses and a corresponding API would solve this problem. It is going to come up again and again with every type of service that wants to receive payments from customers, especially those that are already designed around the address-per-customer model that is universally used in crypto outside cryptonote. So it needs to be fixed.


Not sure what you mean by automatic? Are you thinking of some kind of autonomous agent or something else?

time in days = your hash rate * 86400 / difficulty

I'd like to see it just go away. There is not really any good reason to store blobs of data in the blockchain and there are good reasons not to. However, before that can happen the tools need to improve, especially APIs for wallet access. The tx_extra field is a workaround right now because exchanges can't feasibly create a separate deposit address for each user the way they do for every other coin. I don't have any inside knowledge but I would guess they rather hate it anyway, since it must cause no end of support problems when users mess it up.

What I think you are missing here -- and I think this is why lockups work even though they are evadable even outside the crypto space -- is that they are an efficient signal. It costs nothing to agree to a lockup if you really are committed to stick with something long term (if it is successful, otherwise it doesn't matter) and not pump and dump. But if you are not committed, agreeing to a lockup (likely with at least some sort of enforcements mechanisms) imposes costs on you, if only to evade it. So what we expect to see is legitimate risky ventures (which includes virtually none in the altcoin space with the possible exception of etherium) having lockups and scams avoiding them. Of course there is a red queen problem -- eventually everyone will have a lockup and it signals nothing, but then you have still raised the cost of fraud.

My spidey sense is pretty calibrated to the altcoin space (though not so much that I don't still feel dirty around it) and it still goes off, but in the end I don't care because we have the code and we are running with it. Your interesting project sounds great, too. Looking forward to hearing more about it.

Something like that may be true, but it doesn't explain the active efforts at deception, such the claims of "store and services" in the deep web which clearly don't exist, certainly not on a large scale, the fake Cicada 3301 references, claims of thousands of users with a hash rate under 10 machines, etc.

It could be more like that the original developer died, but rather than open source and hope for the best, whoever ended up with it tried a ham-handed scheme to make a lot of money off of it, seeing as how that has already been done by a lot of people in the altcoin space starting with far less.

I mean really we don't even know the the people behind the web site and github actually have anything to do with creating the code. Maybe they do, maybe someone inherited it as you suggest, maybe they stole it, or some number of other possibilities. It has been claimed that this thread has nothing to do with the people behind the web site and is just effectively a fan thread, but we don't know that either. There is this cryptonote site, and they claim to be the designers, but again, there is no transparency to it. They could just as easily have read the code (found who knows where) and written it up after the fact.  All this is groundless speculation. But taking things at "face value" does not make sense when some parts of face value are clearly fraudulent.

So yes, I agree respect is due to the creator or creators here for the technical accomplishmens. Not quite at the level of Satoshi, but certainly significant. But we have no damn idea who to respect. So, I say, let's just move on with what we have (pretty much just the code and that's it) and build something viable. Which happens to be MRO at the moment, but of course that could change.

But as I said earlier, and you sometimes acknowledge, it is what happens later that really matters, and that pretty much required a fork, because apart from the premine, the distribution curve -- especially starting +2 years and even if not, is just way too fast. It will be nearly fully mined in a couple of years, which isn't enough time for it to gain anywhere near the level of adoption for that to work.

I actually agree with this nearly if not 100% (as well as what you wrote later), but this:

1. Contradicts somewhat your comments about how important it is to reduce rewards when the hash rate is low. If the value is only a few bitcoins, then it is fine for the reward in newcoins to be high. In fact I would argue that the simplest launch is often the best, because for the reasons you outline above, the very beginning doesn't matter all that much.

2. Argues against being the creator as anything with enormous inherent value or importance, since as you say, it is often what comes later that creates the "real" value (more than a few bitcoins). Thus I would argue we should dispense with the sanctimonious comments about the "original" developers being the most legitimate and "deserving"  fork and if they screw up the release and the disappear and do zero work to try to build anything after the release.

My biggest objection, by the way, with premines (including this one) isn't their existance but:

1) the lack of a lockup or vesting, something that could actually be fixed fairly easily, which entirely agrees with your point that the value isn't necessarily in the inventing, it is in the building of something actually useful (and in the case of a digital currency that is far more than code). With no lockup it is too easy to pump-and-dump, and too hard for anyone outside the inner circle to discern true intentions.  

2) The shady and often outright fraudulent actions that often surround them and try to hide them. This is not at all limited to this one, but this one is included.


Post an address. There is a magic Monero fairy who likes to drop coins in random addresses that get posted.

I'm perplexed at you how think a premine of 80% at release is only "marginally" worse than say Monero, which won't be 80% mined for about 4 years and which has only been mined about 4% so far. I don't know when you draw the line between early participants though. I kind of think that everyone involved with bitcoin now is an "early participant."

I like your slow-start launch ideas though. If I'm ever involved with another coin launch those ideas will likely be used.


Sketchy deoptimization games were never needed. The original code could have been released in at least a some baseline efficient form (e.g. not doing massive  recalculations inside a loop for no reason). It is hard to know you've released something that still can't be optimized in some clever way, but the obvious stuff?  No excuse other than pure sketch here.


I'm not quite sure how to respond to this except to say that you may well be on the wrong thread. First of all, the designers of BCN don't even seem to be here at all unless it is in the form of some sock puppet (I even doubt that). Second, while the Monero thread has its share of speculators, pumpers and FUDsters (apparently on a mission from the DRK side), we actually have quite interesting technical discussions over there. The Boolberry thread does as well. I can't speak for the others.

We do? Do tell.

The difficulty in the cryptnote implementation adjusts every block and pretty fast in practice. The block times stay close to the target. In fact you look at the overall block rate on all of these coins since launch they are pretty close to the target in terms of blocks mined per day.

There are definitely shitcoins that are launched with diff 1 and lousy adjustment algorithms that mine off absurd number of blocks on the first day or week until an adjustment hits but that is not the case here at all.

Sure, if people find these coins attractive and begin using them the difficulty (and likely the value) goes up but that is not guaranteed nor is it a one-way street at all. Monero and Bytecoin have had significant drops in difficulty and value as popularity and value ebbs and flows over the past month (I can't really speak for the others since I don't follow them, but I would guess the same).