Paid out the bounty. Thanks man. Now I need to find time to do another remix.  |
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The easiest way to do this without forming additional governance structures is to simply inject capital into the coin.
My heart wants to agree with you Simon!! I'll donate 100,000,000 FUNK to the Mothership collective! By that I mean, buying up FUNK on exchanges. The releases financial resources. @loveyou. No, it's not dead! Far from it.  |
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Garbage men, toilet cleaners, and ditch diggers get paid. Why shouldn't musicians get paid?
I think musicians need to improve their self respect.
Yeah, totally. I completely agree. I'm not saying musicians should NOT get paid. I'm saying we should look at new paradigms of how value flows (like FUNK). People will give a person value if they thin that person deserves it. We saw how awesome Radiohead's "In Rainbows" did, and has since been copied to great success. Pay as much as you want. That's pure & natural price discovery. Looking forward to some of those packs!  @MadCow All interesting ideas. And thanks for your contributions. My feeling is, is that if we continue with our rate of growth, these incentives to deploy extra services will happen naturally (as you've seen with Bitcoin, Litecoin & Dogecoin). I'm a fan of decentralized interest in the community, people working on this out of their own interest, desire and passion. We don't want something like Scharmbeck in Worldcoin's case, where a big entity in the space killed the coin, because no-one else was willing to build and foster the community. The easiest way to do this without forming additional governance structures is to simply inject capital into the coin. @Cryptocoinrank Thanks for adding us! Really cool. --- btw, guys, really dig these discussions! Keep them coming. We are going to kick ass. |
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@MadCow
Interesting idea. Keep the ideas flowing.
It does a bit confusing though. Basically. What would P-FUNK do better, than just FUNK? If enough people believe in the idea then FUNK itself will find its equilibrium value.
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Sup guys. I paid for 3 months of hosting (less than a dollar) at AltcoinFaucet, and donated 1M of the 6.2M for the faucet bounty to it. http://cypherfunk.altcoinfaucet.net/It should be live soon! Cheers. |
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Thanks for all the suggestions, and discussions. I'm glad to hear about the playwithyourmusic.org, I'll check it out. I've been a fan of Peter Gabriel since the 90's, and always thought it would be nice to work on something with him.
I looove Peter Gabriel. The stems for Sledgehammer will be released. So keen to remix that! Excited. |
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@soundposition: Destroying the FUNK currency may drive up the price due to artificial deflation, however raising the price of something that already can't be used to buy anything useful, well... isn't useful. It's like if I had a big bag of rice, and everyone had plenty of rice and I said, "Yeah, but it's a really expensive bag of rice!" I don't think people would be lining up to buy it.
The value chain is different though. You can see what is happening with Blackcoin. People buy it simply because there's a guaranteed exit price, which is the multipool that mines other coins, converts them into BTC and buys up Blackcoin. The Blackcoin is then distributed to the people. But yes, it is artificial deflation. Not the best form of value injection. It IS still value injection though. How do you manage who gets the money? That shouldn't even be a question, so I'm not sure why you would ask that. The musician gets paid the money DIRECTLY to their wallet. So I'm not sure what the problem is there.
Sorry. I think I need to clarify what I mean by this. Let's say music is made for "The Cypherfunks". If this gets sold, then technically we "all" own it. We are "all" a part of the band. We should all get proceeds from Cypherfunks songs being sold. For example, think of it in another way. What if "The Cypherfunks" get radio play and we get paid out royalties. Who gets the money? We all own it. So how do you transfer that value so that everyone in the community reaps benefit from it. Tipping directly is a gesture to say thanks for the contribution. There's no reason to "sell" Cypherfunks music for FUNK. Just release it for free and get tipped for it. That makes the most sense. Selling it is only then an extra barrier. However. If you are a musician and want to get FUNK and not release music under "The Cypherfunks", THEN it makes sense to be paid directly. ie I can release one of my old songs, sell it for FUNK. Then I'm using the value network of FUNK to tap into. I'm then using FUNK as currency, not as stock. Did I clarify it correctly? I'm really interested in making this work. As I said before that means turning making music into an income stream with FUNK. How do we increase the value of FUNK? I don't think injecting capital is the only way to do that.
"Capital" in this sense is any forms of value really. Currently that means using LTC/BTC/Doge to buy it one exchanges. Any additional income streams can hopefully feed directly into increasing value of FUNK. That's what I mean by injecting captial. You summed it up in your last post:
"increase network effect of the coin -> increase demand for the coin -> get financially rewarded."
When I break that down, I don't follow the logic. How does increasing the "network effect" whatever that is, increase demand for the coin? Next, how does increasing demand for the coin translate to me getting financially rewarded?
If more people know about Cypherfunks, more people will want to get involved. In order to get financial reward from it, one should own FUNK. Using the currency represents the community of people, the idea. The value of the idea hopefully, over time, increases the demand for the currency beyond just the idea. As a reference, check out this post about currency as a language (I wrote: simondlr.com/post/81166506190/currency-as-language). It's like looking at new coins. The only way their value gets increased is if people are willing to jump in and take the initial risk (like the guy who bought the 10k BTC pizza). As the community (and network efffect grows), so the sum of the parts become more than the whole. People will exchange it for goods/services/etc. You get financially rewarded because you hold FUNK. Think of it like stock. It's true musicians CAN get tipped FUNK coin, but will they? What incentive does someone have to tip a musician with FUNK when they can just hoard them, sell them on an exchange for BTC, and buy cheeseburgers (or whatever else with the BTC.)
That's how most alt-coins work at this moment. Bitcoin is a conduit for value for experiments like this. We rely on the fact that FUNK has real world value because it can be exchanged back into BTC and then back into Rand, Dollars, Euros, etc. Direct payment (a store accepts FUNK directly) or FUNK/fiat exchange only decreases the hops. You tip FUNK because you want this network to grow. It's like people giving out Bitcoin in the early days (I got 0.05 BTC from faucets back then). And it's not just free. We tip because we like things. To say thanks. To give kudos. Can even they exchange their FUNK for BTC? In theory FUNK should be able to be exchanged into your currency of choice. That's only if people want them, and since they don't actually do anything useful, hardly anyone will want to buy them with BTC. So, you can put your FUNK up for sale on the exchange, but I'm not sure anyone will want to buy them, because they ask themselves, "What can I do with a FUNK coin except give them away for free?" Why would you want to buy something, and give it away for free unless you are a charity?
Like I mentioned previously, it's an investment in the idea & the community. There's an initial kick-start period where that is where a coin's value resides. All altcoins & Bitcoin you couldn't do anything with it except send it around like monopoly money. That's until enough people believed in the future potential to build out infrastructure so it becomes more useful besides just that. I'll take GPUCoin for example. Started by Jaymes Reilly, he had bad experiences with computer retailers with a lack of stock and over priced goods. This was due to the high costs of the middleman, such as Paypal and Ebay charging 18% fees. As a solution he made his own alt-coin - the GPUCoin, which he accepts exclusively on his online store so he cuts out the middle men to save the customer money.
What increases the demand for the GPUCoin? It's not the "network effect". The high demand physical commodity (Namely, the GPU) that is sold at a reduced price and only sold in GPUCoin is backing the GPUCoin.
That's cool! That's what we also hope to achieve. Adding additional value to the currency besides its value as an idea. Music products can be digital or physical commodities. What we need is to accept the FUNK coin as payment for REAL (or digital/virtual goods/services) that people actually want. It could be music, tickets, t-shirts, food, Gridseeds.. Whatever.. As long as it has a real demand in the real world.
You had it spelled out on the website that in the "future FUNK could be used to buy products that assist in musicmaking." Why stop at products that assist in musicmaking? Why not back this currency with something of real world value so people have a real demand for it like the GPUCoin?
There is not going to be a demand for a charity that tips musicians from money coming from donations of regular people. In other words, regular people aren't going to buy FUNK coins to tip musicians, so they can get continue to get free music.
Yep. That's what we'd love to do. It's really really hard work though. I'm already strapped for time & money (put in so much into FUNK). Our initial selling point will be products for music making. Stuff that fits our niche. But it will hopefully expand past this! If I may be so bold and lead the way. Take something of value and sell it for FUNK coin, anyone can do it. Just like anyone can accept BTC for payments. Just make sure to charge the right amount. 34 million GPUCoins is worth about $300 which is enough to buy a video card. So 3 million FUNK coins should be worth about $15-20 about as much as a cheap ticket to a concert, or something music related. Price things according to the current exchange rate.
That would be cool. So in short. FUNK's value is currently the belief in the idea (like how all altcoins start). Otherwise, no-one would mine it & no-one would want it. It firstly represents decentralized stock in a decentralized band. This is how we hope to catalyse the network effect. Grow, grow, grow until we start absoring more and more musicians. Once the value increases (people that take the risk), we can start rolling out other services to make the currency even MORE valuable. That's the plan. And remember, this is an experiment. This is a world & reality that we think can exist. A currency kickstarted by a bunch crypto-musicians. How cool would that story be if we could make it work? But pulling reality into this timeline is not easy. It constantly feels like we are pulling people out of quicksand into this reality: telling them. "Look! How fucking awesome is a currency that represents musicians freely making music together from across the world? Look how far we've come already. Thought it would suck? NOOOPE. Look at the kick-ass tunes we've made already. Want to be a part of this awesome community? Then help us become so much more. \m/" @MadCow so the task is to COMPEL the 'buyers/audience' to pay in FUNK, and to CONVINCE enough suppliers of the other raw materials to accept payment in FUNK also (i.e. venues, equipment hire, sound engineers etc). You need to encourage people to hold their FUNK payments and not convert to fiat, otherwise people will mentally calculate exchange rates rates and feel like they're playing for free.
Yep. It's hard work. But that's the risk we take to create such a future. We need more people who would love to spearhead such projects. I wish I had more time. btw. Thanks for the discussion soundposition & MadCow. |
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This would be an interesting service for FUNK, Coinlock is a neat little service which allows digital content developers to easily sell their content for cryptocurrency. Sell anything in seconds. No programming, no infrastructure, no hassle. Immediate payment via Bitcoin, Litecoin, or Dogecoin but perhaps they could be persuaded to include Cypherfunks FUNK. https://www.coinlock.com/#/https://www.coinlock.com/#/faqWhat is this?
The short answer is that Coinlock is a platform that lets you sell digital content. The long answer is that Coinlock is a fully encrypted anonymous escrow service. It is designed to help you sell your content from anywhere in the world without any infrastructure or up front commitments. We operate entirely within the Bitcoin ecosystem, so no traditional banking or other relationships are required.
What are the main advantages of this versus other options?
There are no up front costs, no required development, no infrastrucutre, no integration, and no commitments. Payment occurs quickly without charge backs on the Bitcoin network. You don't need to host a shopping cart, and you don't need to design your site to serve large content or handle scalability if your content is popular.
Could a similar but superior service be created for the Cypherfunks FUNK? We can try. Easiest would be to just use http://min.io (which I developed a while back). You will be able to sell any digital content for FUNK. I just don't have the time atm. I'll try, but I can't promise an ETA to get it finished. |
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Hey Michael. Thanks for the response. I'll clarify. I'm really doing backflips in my mind. I supposed I'm dischuffed. So we support traditional music platforms with fiat currency?
We also don't pay musicians by encouraging them to give away all music for free, and take the proceeds and destroy the FUNK coin? Is this the same Simon?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. The idea is to use the traditional systems to our advantage to inject capital into the coin. Destroying the coin is a more verified, fair way to increase the worth of the rest of the cryptocurrency. You are simply cryptographically provably removing supply, which if the demand stays the same, increases the price. You could also use the proceeds to redistribute the FUNK, but is decidedly more difficult to do as you have to figure whom to give it to. ie 1) sell songs 2) convert to FUNK 3) redistribute to artists. Except now, who gets it? I don't know how long you have been in the music biz, but I've been doing this for at least 10 years. I have had several releases on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and the like (look them up and have a listen). They cost me $30 a year for the first year if it's an album to put in the stores, then like $55 the next year and they keep jacking up the price, or they threaten to take it down. Guess how much revenue I get from that? I get about less than $1.00 a month. So when you talk about proceeds from traditional models, there really aren't any which is why I came here in the first place.
Shit. That doesn't indeed suck. I know streaming sites pay next to nothing.  Now if you've been into music as long as I have, you know that equipment and software costs $$$. Lots of cash! I've spend lots of money on equipment so that I can mix, master and produce high quality music. That money came out of my hard earned money I spent on equipment, sounds, instruments, software etc. So now that I'm really poor, you tell me I should release my music for free and not earn anything.
I can tell you now as a musician, this is going to run musicians out of here really fast. Someone mentioned musicians are used to working for free. Maybe in some circles, but not in mine. All of my musician friends expect to get paid, and they don't work for free. Producers, Recording artists, promoters etc. all expect to get paid.
Yep. I really don't like it when musicians who want to make a living does shit for free. We are creators & crafters and we should expect to duly remunerated. I agree. Simon from the idea you described, the only people to benefit financially from FUNK are the old traditional music distribution platforms. You imply that if I weren't in the FUNK community you would pay me money to master the song, but if I'm in the community I will just do it for free. In that case I'm better off leaving Cypherfunks, because at least you will pay me to master your songs.
So when you say we need to start figuring out the costs, I'm thinking "The costs?!" I thought we were talking about figuring out the income, not the expenses. So now I need to shell out money to someone outside of the community so they can master the song?? I could master it but I wouldn't get paid because I'm "in the community". This is maddening!
This was more a reference that if we don't have someone who could master a song, then we'll just pay one. *crowdfunding it*. Think of it like this. We are a band. If someone in the band can master music, then it's a bonus. We don't have to pay someone externally to do that. You showing me a payment processor solution that you own, which could be repurposed to compete with the traditional models. Instead you insist on not using it for what I suggest is a way musicians could earn a living - finally. We could cut out the middleman, but instead you want to court the middleman and bring them in, and for us to benefit them - financially while at the same time insisting on making the musician into a slave to support the middleman?
We can yes, but the question is, how do you manage who gets the money? This is something we need to figure out as a community. For what it is worth, I'm okay with anyone just taking any of the songs and selling it for FUNK. Releasing songs for free doesn't also fit in the paradigm of selling it. That's why a coin was invented to fit with the decentralized band as ownership becomes decentralized. It makes more sense to release free -> increase network effect of the coin -> increase demand for the coin -> get financially rewarded. I suggest you think this through a little bit more. I've poured my money, time, resources and heart into this project so I'm getting a little bit upset. Other musicians would be upset too. Notice not many other artists have released music for the Cypherfunks. They want to keep their tracks to themselves, because they ask "How does it benefit me to put my music on Cypherfunks?". They could see that it gives them free exposure and way for people to tip in FUNK, but I don't think anyone really believes they will be tipped in FUNK. I've been releasing tracks and the only FUNK I've been getting is from you Simon. People running their computers are earning more FUNK than I am making music.
I apologise if I came across wrong. It feels like there is some miscommunication here. The mining part is integral to keep the concept decentralized. We are also only a few months old. Down the line as the mining reward halves, making music and receiving tips for it will become much more profitable than mining. Making music is expensive, especially when nobody cares about the musician getting paid for their hard work. I don't want my music to become a multipool, I want my music to be an income stream.
I hope you really spend some time thinking about this.
I agree completely. All my music equipment I have, has been paid for by doing other jobs. I know how much hard work it is! Michael, I do think there's been a slight misunderstanding here though, and I still can't quite place exactly what it is. I'll try to clarify what I meant by my previous post. That is: The question is. How do we increase the value of FUNK? FUNK's value increases when we inject capital into it. Currently (as with most coins), the only capital that comes in is from other people that believe in the coin. Think Bitcoin is cool? Buy Bitcoin. Think Dogecoin is cool? Buy Dogecoin. That's how capital comes in, that drives up the price of the currency. Some are true believers, some are miners, some are speculators, all forming a family of contributors. With FUNK, unlike any other cryptocurrency we are also generating significant value: that of making music together. Contributors from across the world. That means it increases the desire to hold the currency. However, our strength is that we can a way somehow to use the music to inject capital into the currency for gains for ALL of us. Me, you, and anyone holding FUNK. One of the ways I proposed (which is just an idea), is to find ways to get capital flowing into FUNK that's unlike any other way a coin has done before. We sell what the community creates, and we take the proceeds to buy up "stock" in the currency. This means EVERYONE's FUNK becomes more valuable. There's more liquidity from a different source. Everyone wins. The proceeds won't be owned by anyone, but the whole community. As I mentioned before, the idea is that to increase the financial reward, to allow us to keep making music, is to instead of using the proceeds (from the fiat world) to redistribute it to everyone (which is difficult to do), we simply buy up the currency and remove it from the supply. That's only a proposal. I haven't been through the process of selling music through traditional fiat models, so thanks for your input. It helps with some perspective! You are an integral part of the community, and I hope this clarifies some of my thoughts. There's only good intent. All I want is 1) people to make music & 2) allow them do that in a new way & 3) allow us to be supported financially through FUNK. That way, we create a future where we can keep making music that's different from anything that's been done before. |
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Really nice Remix Simon! High five!!
Great job on the wallet updates.
100,000,000 FUNK is going for about 1.00 BTC on Allcrypt
This morning I really started to think about the economic reality of the FUNK coin. If you take away the music part of it, and look at the coin itself. It's undervalued because it's either unknown to people, or they think it's a niche market. That's no matter how you look at it.
The fact is that currently the prices have been stable and this is good, because if you add the music part of it back in to the mix, this becomes much more than just another cryptocurrency. Now take the currency part out and just look at the music part of it. You have open source music which like Simon said in his recent interview is that we are like minstrels of the old days. I really like that idea that we are bringing back the wandering minstrels of yesterday.
The only part I disagree with, and maybe I'm wrong is the part about the demand for the currency increasing with the popularity of the music. The way I see it, the demand for the currency will increase when people want something they can only get with FUNK coin. Right now, I make the music and it goes up on Soundcloud for free, which is what I wanted.
So here's where the reality check comes in to play. I can make more FUNK coins mining them than I can making music. It sours my pickle to hear that someone would have hundreds of millions of FUNK, which they mined just sitting there in a wallet. Now, imagine if the FUNK coin were a feed the hungry coin. A FOODCoin (why hasn't anyone made that yet?) that did something noble like feeding the hungry (which the FUNK coin is supposed to do BTW, musicians get hungry too). If someone just hoarded the coins in their wallets, no starving person would get fed.
If I spend an hour making a remix pack I can get 100,000 FUNK. I've been getting almost all of my FUNK contributions from the Cypherfunks wallet from Simon, and not much has come in from anywhere else yet. It feels really good to get some FUNK after working on music, because I feel like I'm finally getting paid for working on music. The problem is that I can make more money mining FUNK than I can making music.
The only way I can see the Cypherfunk work, (which I'm convinced it will) and by work I mean as a way to feed the musician and more.. Is to turn this currency into something that will provide people something they can only get with FUNK coin.
One of the biggest problems with BTC is how do people spend them? Solutions to that problem are appearing everyday for bitcoin. Still today we don't have a solution for the FUNK coin. We need a way to use the Soundcloud platform as a small teaser to convince people to spend FUNK coins to buy digital music or other music related products and services.
So we need a way to accept FUNK for purchases, just like Bitcoin can be accepted for purchases. A payment processor solution for FUNK.
I've been thinking of making an EP and releasing a single from the EP for free, and giving short samples of the EP to listen on Soundcloud. The rest of the EP you can buy with FUNK coin on my website or a Cypherfunks store.
I like the idea of everyone having their own website/store to decentralize the stores.
I just see what we need is a way to sell stuff using FUNK coins.
What are your thoughts?
It will certainly help to have a unique use case for the currency. It is not required, but definitely helps. I wish I had more time to work on this (or at least more resources). I've been neglecting my start-up, so I need to get back to that asap. fwiw, we've been thinking of repurposing http://min.io (old side-project developed with a friend) to work with FUNK. But I wouldn't do it to sell the music. The music should be free (as much as possible). Also, how do we divide up sales? Theoretically, anyone has permission to re-sell it for their own gain, but it's not ideal. One thing I did think about recently... Every 6 months or so, we should compile a "greatest hits" album. We do a 1 week voting period of all the songs released since then. Do a voting for a cover. Get money for someone to master/mix the songs properly (if we don't have a person in the community to do that), then release it on iTunes, Beatport, Rdio, Spotify, etc. Everywhere. Then all proceeds gets turned into BTC. Now we just need to figure out what to do with the BTC. Either we keep it for projects (crowdfunding gigs or something), OR what I like more: we use it to buy up FUNK on exchanges and then simply destroy it (this is easier than figuring out whom to give it to). That way we increase liquidity, increase price, decrease supply & launch music to the world, making the network spread. In other words, our music becomes our multipool. Proceeds from the music (in traditional markets) feed into buying up FUNK on exchanges and destroying it. We could actually start that as an experiment. RIGHT NOW. We choose & vote for a song/single and we go through the whole process. If everyone likes it, we need to start figuring out the costs. Things that need to happen: 1) Choose a single. Best way to do this? Vote on Reddit? 2) Get a member to master/mix it to standards. 3) Do a contest for cover art. 4) Determine costs to get on iTunes, Spotify, Rdio & so forth. 5) Put for sale on bandcamp as well. 6) Draft a PR page. We send it all music media sites. Pitchfork, NPR, etc. The original unmastered version will remain free to listen & downloadable. All sales will be put into BTC/LTC and be used to buy up FUNK and then subsequently destroy it. I haven't through this whole process of getting music on these sites. Anyone have ideas? Thoughts? |
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Oh wow! MadCow! Thanks so much for the book recommendation. I've been looking for new books to read. Getting that asap. 1 - unused resources (e.g. a musician who would like to perform but isn't)
2 - unmet needs (e.g. someone who wants entertainment)
Very good way of describing it. An example of this that I envisioned is the capability for Cypherfunks to crowdfund gigs/venues from around the world for people. Being in the music scene, a lot of people tell me how they struggle to get gigs to play. To 'start', they try to piggy-back on top of other more successful bands that can pull a crowd. They can't afford to pay a venue as they can't pull a crowd (yet). So one method I thought where Cypherfunks could help is to help fund the minimum required for a small venue so the band play, get their friends in, jam & just have fun. Only requirement is that the band must have contributed to Cypherfunks at some stage. I'll talk to my friend about this idea as well. His band is still small, but really awesome. @Hanoosh. There's liquidity in the LTC market. https://www.allcrypt.com/market?id=562 |
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Mailed the faucet guy. Suggested we pay out the bounty to him for a few months of hosting. Is that okay?
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Finally! After ages of compiling for windows, I have the new wallets out. Please update (not mandatory, but recommended)! ALWAYS back-up your wallets before installing a new version. https://github.com/The-Cypherfunks/The-Cypherfunks/releases/tag/1.0.1.0If something doesn't work, please ping me. EDIT: Still need to mail the faucet guy! Will do that today. Oh, btw, during the editing I discovered fixes for Bitcoin. First code commit to Bitcoin Core itself! Very chuffed (even if it is just a small fix). |
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Beranie posted in the comments another address: https://soundcloud.com/beranie/yue-xia-du-zhuo-ep-mixCRuWSbx61MTcgFv9ZA3WFeJi9KTVo7g99U Hi Emman! Welcome. We are trying our best! Help us if you can. On the wallets. I've patched something else that I finally got working. Unfortunately, the pchMessageStart is similar to Litecoin (in fact, shitloads of coins haven't changed this). It is not extremely detrimental, but it needs to be changed so other messages from other networks don't interfere with ours. Unfortunately you can't change it without breaking (hardforking) it, so we are future-proofing it. Somewhere down the line we will hard-fork when no one uses the old clients anymore. Thanks to n00bnoxious for some feedback on this. |
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Oh snap! More good news. Derek Sivers responded to my mail! Ha! I LOVE it. Fucking brilliant. Thanks for telling me about this. I'm so glad you're doing this.
I'm full-up with my own projects, so no need to send me some FUNK, though thanks for the offer. For now I'll just bookmark it to tell some others about, and maybe take you up on your offer someday.
I asked him if he has some music lying around he wants to share. |
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