Answered in IRC, but for others' info, you should be able to buy Decred from people/exchanges after mainnet is live - after the projected date of Jan 18th. For now, you can sign up for the airdrop if you want to participate and contribute to the building up of the project with others - but that is strictly unconditional, meaning you won't be held to any expectations (but everyone hopes you do care enough to participate when you sign up).


There will be a simple GPU miner built for AMD/nVidia cards. The project will start working with everyone interested in mining to help them set it all up in the week of Jan 4th - which is, as it stands, the projected date to turn testnet on.


That's pretty cool! Haven't thought about shortening "decred" to "dcred". Both could work well without necessarily being a "change" in name. Super hard to get consensus on a name though - especially when something is new and people are just now beginning to learn about the project and what it represents. One very positive thing about the name "Decred" is that the project was able to secure top-level domains (.com/.org/.net) for a short name, which is somewhat unusual and will help a lot for a general audience as it grows.


Hey iCEBREAKER! Never got the chance to thank you for stopping by. The plan now is to collect all technical questions for the day and answer them in one shot. The devs are working pretty hard, so these are noted and there will be a post to answer them specifically today.


Hah, yes. The vast majority of people working on Decred at the moment are not design-oriented. There has already been interest from new participants in playing with the logo here and here. Anyone who wants to mess with the logo can download .svg files here and here. But a warning: current Decred people are devs, not designers - so any help is greatly appreciated!

Subsidy is reduced every 6144 blocks in the simplest way possible. The starting reward is based around the premine amounts so as to approach 21 million.


Coin supply:

Catching up on some older questions. The project will have an FAQ section up where we can all collect questions from these early discussions to answer queries for new users.


In essence, the project centers around contribution. If you have contributed to things in the past, you are likely to continue doing so. The project asks for an online presence as a means to (1) confirm you've contributed work elsewhere and (2) try and help avoid abuse of the airdrop initiative so people don't try and sign up multiple times. The goal is to spread the network far and wide from the beginning. However, if you haven't made any contributions, you can still sign up if you get in touch with the project and you can contribute ideas for what you'd like to do in the future - that is valid too. Even an account on a forum where you've shown discourse on issues is great - because it shows you think. It's just so that we can avoid people who have no interest in building with the project. Decred wants people who are doers that also want progress.


This is completely valid and a fair point. It was honestly the best compromise the project could reach given the realities of life and that things cost money to build. Keep in mind that what's being discussed here isn't a proposal, it's a built system. The project isn't selling you ideas and asking for your money. Decred is announcing a project of made technology and trying hard to involve people in that effort, so we can progress and strengthen said technology. It's an invitation to walk that journey together. What Decred has done in order to build the technology is the following:

(1) Development funding came from the developers themselves. No developer got free coins, they had to pay or develop at a rate of $0.49/coin. Only the developers suffer if Decred fails early on. No one else carried any risk, nor will they be asked to.
(2) To make up for the coins developers bought in this way to fund the project, the airdrop initiative gives the equivalent to the community in an effort to strengthen the network early on and balance the "sin of the premine".


This has been mentioned, thanks! Let's put this up for discussion by the community prior to launch. Never the project's intention to override anyone else's effort - so that was an earnest mistake on the project's part. It would be good if anyone from DeltaCredits had some input on this matter.


If you were Gleb Gamow and did that, you would certainly qualify for the airdrop. My perspective as an individual is to applaud his efforts on the assumption that he is looking out for the community. He went through extraordinary effort to do research and present his findings - maybe some people think that's questionable, but it's nonetheless impressive. Speaking as a member of the Decred community, I would argue that's an important talent and a mind worth including in a project that wants to challenge governance and continue building new technology.

The others are still asleep. Once they catch up to this, and have information on what you've provided, I'll ask them to come on here and give you what they want to share about themselves. It's in the interest of the project to keep the account for project related matters (in my opinion as a person typing this), so this will be addressed individually by people working on the project.

Gleb, this is _ingsoc now responding with the project account to back up my long response above to you. Basically I'm the dumbest member interested in the project, so I'd rather the other guys work on code (the stuff the actually matters in the end instead of arguing on here!). I want to single out this point you made. This thread is not self-moderated because Decred as a project will never censor you. Never.

The only exception to this is if you do crazy stuff like make death threats and dox people personally (like their families, etc. for no reason) - pretty much horrible things. You haven't done this at all, and I am taken aback at the effort you've gone through to find information. In fact, it's almost unbelievable to me! I believe you are acting out of the interest of the community and those interested in the project, so I am going to respond to your points. For opinion and public information, you have complete freedom and this is why I am taking all this time to respond to you specifically. Everyone working on this project cares deeply about free speech and will defend it for you - even if it sucks for us individually (that will never change in the future either).

Hi lin0sspice, if others are curious, you're referring to the qualification to be included in the airdrop. All that means is the project is trying to make sure the coins go to people who are contributors - people who want to participate in the project, and a good way to check for that is to try and allocate it to people who have contributed to other projects in the past, since they're likely to continue doing that in the future. It's a good way to build something from the bottom-up and everyone can participate together.

That could mean an account on here where you've been engaged with the issues in cryptocurrency for example. If you don't have anything you think that would satisfy the airdrop qualification, you can get in touch and let the project know what you want to work on in the future and be eligible for it. It's strictly unconditional, since the project won't force people to contribute. I hope that helps, and thank you for giving it consideration!

The goal is to spread the network far and wide and help decentralization from day one!

Thank you for the kind words and stopping by! Please make sure you guys have signed up for the airdrop if you're interested in that! And I hope you don't mind me quoting you to get our post activity up (so the images can show up).

You will definitely qualify. Anyone will who expresses interest and shows some sign of contributory/constructive thought. The project is inclusive, so nobody will sit on a throne and make decisions to exclude people - it's only meant as a rough filter to try and avoid people who have no interest in building it up. It's also unconditional, but that's a risk the community will take collectively - better to give people the benefit of the doubt if they're prepared to give the project consideration!

This means a lot, thank you. The hope is that we can see Decred grow alongside btcsuite in a symbiotic relationship where improvements on either of those get fed back into the other. btcsuite has proven itself to be a strong project, stronger than ever, and that was part of the motivation to bring that consistent and high-quality development input into an "altcoin" project. We haven't seen that to date, at the very least limited examples compared to the sheer number of projects that don't keep up the dev work. That's part of a bigger problem that needs to be solved to legitimize alternative cryptocurrency systems.

Thought maybe cardboardoranges is a relative of tacotime's, but it doesn't look like it's the case. If you're a lurker, welcome!

Thank you for taking the time to read it all!



The miner is a fork of an older version of cgminer with a rewritten kernel. It has been built for both AMD and nVidia cards, but it is likely that an optimized miner for nVidia cards will take a little finesse and a fork of ccminer.

Those are fair comments. The project struggled with this for a long time. Back in 2013, we thought about trying to get people to contribute financially to fund the development that way, but then there was an explosion of projects who ran off with people's money promising to build stuff. Some of them did build stuff and many more didn't. It was really important to not do that - the community's been battered to hell with all the scams.

But the question remained, how do you pay for real development work and produce something that is worthwhile, whilst not putting the community at risk if it can't be built? The best alternative was to do use what's being built for that purpose so the devs carry the risk and then give to the community the same amount (spread across those interested), so that there's a form of balance. Both these concepts, premine and airdrop have been abused, so we wanted to make sure that's avoided - hopefully people will see that we haven't asked them to carry risk for the devs in that way.

At the end of the day, I'd rather opt for a solution that gets new technology that isn't vaporware and tries to make improvements, remains sustainable in the long-term, and delivers something real in the end.

tacotime came up with it while brainstorming with c0. If I remember correctly, it was on the topic of "decentralized credits". It's kind of taken on a meaning of its own now. It seems that most people who see it think it's pronounced "dee-cred".

Hey billotronic, thanks for having a look! Sorry about it being super long - there's been so much going on around the code as well! Getting that across in a short way is a challenge that's hard to meet.


With regards to your question, what Decred is hoping to do is get people involved who are doers - so it's not just a free-for-all giveaway. If you read it, and it resonates with you in some way, and you can see it growing from this foundation - in particular if can see yourself joining the project and being part of it, then you would qualify for the airdrop. Even just having an account that's been active in discourse on the issues, that's important and worthwhile.

The hope is to get people involved through the airdrop who are either interested in developing the actual Decred technology (software, etc.) or develop the project and governance in other ways. So that's really all it's about, trying to find people who are interested and want to walk this journey together. It's not going to be a project where those who were there first call all the shots - it's going to be open and collaborative. A place where contributing will reward.

Water.

Technology
Decred allows users to seamlessly transition from one set of consensus rules to another. This is a complex problem, as demonstrated by the difficulties experienced in Bitcoin governance. Decred uses an innovative hybrid proof-of-work (PoW)/proof-of-stake (PoS) system similar to proof-of-activity (PoA) to solve this problem and gives users of the currency decision-making power about the set of consensus rules to activate.

This hybridized consensus system is used to strike a balance between miners and users to create a more robust currency. Typically, the miners who operate the infrastructure wield considerable influence while the users have relatively little sway. Decred allows users to participate in the project directly without the need for expensive mining hardware.
Development
Decred fosters a multi-stakeholder development ecosystem that welcomes and empowers participants who want to improve on existing features or build new tools. Anyone can submit feature proposals, and developers are paid for work to fulfill requirements in full view of the community. Funding for this work comes directly from the Decred blockchain.

The main Decred development group started as the Bitcoin developers who develop btcsuite, a widely respected Bitcoin implementation in Go that has been used by several high-profile projects including, but not limited to, BitGo, Factom, Ethereum, and the Lightning Network. Several of Decred's developers have also been contributors to the core of OpenBSD, among many other projects. Anyone is free to join development as an individual, a group, or a company - as many have already!
Community and Principles
Decred is constructing a layered governance organization that extends beyond the miners and users to bring forward and represent insider and outsider voices in the community. Decentralization is a process, and a decentralized ledger is only the first step in that process.

The project is bound by the Decred Constitution, so users can know what to expect: a finite number of coins, decentralized governance and a place to share their views. Decred's community plays an important role in making decisions, both informally via the Decred infrastructure and formally via the blockchain.

---

---

Wallets

GUI Wallets (bundled with dcrd/dcrwallet):

• Decrediton - Windows, macOS, and Linux

⠀
Core software:

• Command Line Suite - cross-platform, automatic installer/updater for the command-line applications
• Webwallet - no downloads required

⠀
3rd Party Wallets:

• Exodus - friendly, all-in-one application, to secure, manage and exchange blockchain assets.

---

Roadmap

• 2017 Milestones
  ⠀
  
  • Public Proposal System
    • Introduction of the first censorship-resistant and blockchain-anchored public proposal system, which empowers users to submit their own projects to Decred for self-funding from the project's block subsidy
  • Stakeholder-directed DAO
    • Convert Decred into a stakeholder-directed distributed autonomous organization (DAO), whereby users are given further control of development funds through voting
  • Lightning Network support
    • The two projects' respective lead developers work closely together - lnd and Decred are based on btcsuite, which was also developed by Decred's own developers
  • Enhanced User Privacy
    • Highly anticipated project within Decred likely to attract widespread attention
  ⠀
  
• Completed
  ⠀
  
  • Novel hybridized proof-of-work/proof-of-stake (PoW/PoS) consensus system
  • Cold staking and decentralized stake pooling
  • Internal voting system for the addition of new features and hard or soft fork selection
  • Immutable transaction hashes ("transaction IDs") by separating transaction signatures from the rest of the transaction data
  • Elliptic curve cryptography over secp256k1 with optional Curve25519 support
  • Schnorr signatures with threshold n-of-n support
  • PoW mining using BLAKE256 hash algorithm
  • Hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets
  • Transaction expiration
  • Patches for intrinsic Bitcoin bugs

---

Who works on Decred?

Decred operates through a resilient contractor model that allows for new individuals, groups, and companies to contribute to the project. At present, Decred consists of a large number of contributing members who work on the project:

• 14+ developers who actively contribute new code, maintain current code, and implement roadmap features in Decred's free and open-source software and repositories.
• 19+ marketing/community helpers who develop a number of clearly defined areas for Decred: (1) advertising, (2) media, (3) networking, (4) platform management, and (5) special projects.
• 8+ designers work alongside the developers and marketing contractors to develop solutions in disciplines of (1) UX/UI, (2) identity, and (3) visual communications.

---

---