Thanks for the update. Those guys were one of the earliest supporters of BLK.   

Yesterday BitPro added BLK as a gateway for businesses luckily: 

https://bitpro.cc/start

Rating a PoS coin based on ROI is foolish. A high ROI  either means high inflation or high transaction fees, or both. A high ROI means that stakers are forced to keep their funds locked up or be thrown out of the stake race and even worse, it makes the coin a highly toxic asset to hold if you're not staking.  

A PoS coin needs a fine-tuned ROI, one that isn't too low that that nobody stakes and one that isn't too high that everyone has to stake to the point where it loses it liquidity.  


8-10%  a month means you double your coins almost every year. How's that sustainable?   

Yeah that's odd. This seems to be alright:
https://node.blackcoin.io/insight/

People think a coin is safe when it's controlled by a single individual or a group of people. Their logic is that as long as a coin acts like a company it will take care of it's promotion and pump it out of their own interest, on which everyone else seeks to ride.

But truth is that a coin sustained by a single actor won't last long. Coins that last long are open-source projects in which many people participate, either volunteering, through bounties or propped by donations. A coin that isn't ruled by any specific person is the safest thing to invest in. 

BLK doesn't have nearly as much participation as we'd like to have in order to guarantee a healthy growth. But at least it's set up in such a way where anybody can jump in and work without being fucked over by the core. Simply because there never was a core to begin with.

Coins that started on a core however, nearly every other token in the current market, will never be able to separate themselves from that core. It will turn into an opaque and parasitical entity that has a monopoly on the rules and will gladly bend them for their own ends whenever they can get away with it. 

I want my coin to be Linux rather than Microsoft. 

Recap:
Two people to keep an eye on:  

'Rat'/'Dolittle': Original creator of BLK but really reclusive and non-communicative. Recently appeared after being gone for nearly a year.

janko33bd: Developer who's here since the start but did by far the most development work on BLK since the release. Constantly modernizing the coin and keeping it up with the latest features in crypto (all in the Lore build). Also responsible for the coloured coin for BLK system IRIS.  

Rat made a cryptic announcement about a Blacknet airdrop. No further details whatsoever. Yet at the same time it became clear that he wouldn't accept any updates on the regular BLK chain. We don't know why, and ultimately it doesn't matter, Janko is just able to continue working on BLK through Lore, the major exchanges already side with his build anyway.    

This means that for Rat to be able to do anything at all, he needs to get the community's consensus. He can release an airdrop on BLK or not, but it's not going to affect BLK itself unless he involves the rest.  

So that's where we're at now. You can play the 'time the airdrop' game if you want, people have gotten very rich of it in the past. But truth be told is that Rat is currently the only person who knows what it actually is, and exchanges absolutely don't accept unannounced snapshots which are fraudulent. In other words, although I very much would like to see people buying BLK in anticipation, there's also nothing wrong with holding back and wait for any actual confirmation that exchanges are on board with this, because as of now, they're not. 

The rest of the community just proceeds on their own term, which is quite exciting in and of itself as we're moving towards ETH-style smart contracts soon. The coloured coins are already operational, the scripts and release platform is up next.  

Just check for yourself how diligently Janko works at this. It's insane really.
https://gitter. im/BlackCoin_Hub/Development

Yeah I'm hearing that a lot on reddit as well. Many people seem to believe that Ethereum is PoS. Though the truth is that Ethereum still has yet to implement it. Their documentation about their PoS research is great though: 
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ 

My dad is seriously struggling with your chess puzzle book btw. You're torturing him. 

Most coins behave like delicate animals, complex flowers, colorful butterflies, some mythical deer prancing through the woods, niche species that can only survive in a specific habitat with just the right resources, once their revenue stream only sways slightly, they go extinct. You want a coin that needs nothing, an extremophile species that can exist in the darkest most rotten of places, thrive without nutrition and explode in spots where you least expect it. Something like, say, black mould.

I'm not entirely sure to be honest. Janko was talking about it on Gitter a while ago, he was quite opinionated about it but I forgot and. It's probably also going to need some means of distributing the tokens. Like ERC20 has a very simple ICO algorithm. Most of these ICO companies only need to understand those few lines of code to get their circus going.

It's not that BLK is lacking in projects either. It already has a token creation tool release this year:  

https://iris.blackcoin.io/  

Next step is smart contracts on those tokens. By that point it'll be Ethereum but with the pristine PoS they're trying to figure out for a full year now.  

Biggest challenge is funding due to, again, the whole thing being community funded. For that there'll be a crowdfunding tool, Blacklight that's going to take care of any developers committing to what BLK requires.  

I respect Rat for creating BLK and launching it way that was so fucking perfect that years later I still wouldn't be able to find it's equal. But the way he communicated and co-opted the original ANN thread leads me to think that BLK's launch was so perfect only be accident, unintentional, a fluke. Maybe that's why no other coin was able to replicate it's success.  

But whatever he's trying to do with Blacknet, I really couldn't care less. I don't see how anyone could be excited for for something that's communicated so poorly.  

Meanwhile we're having one of the most industrious developers in crypto, Janko, really killing it by continuously upgrading the wallet. Not just implementing all the Bitcoin core goodies into the Blackcoin client, but also adding in features specifically for staking (like conveniently letting a locked wallet stake, creating more incentive to keep your node running 24/7) and adding in whole new features like Iris token creation.  

That's what makes BLK enticing. There's hardly any funding and yet the coin is one of the most up-to date and well-oiled machines in the cryptosphere.  

People are working their ass off for BLK in various ways, not because some fat ICO warchest is paying them for as long as it lasts, but because they genuinely believe in this project.

Because no 'core team' is getting a free ride here you have every assurance that any money or effort you're putting in this coin won't end up paying some founder's vacation. Everything you put into it will benefit you as well as the community, without anyone sitting on the throne on top raking in all the money, like what's happening with XVG today, fucking disgusting.  


I've been to modest and too restrained about BLK for way too long. Even if the market isn't recognising it for what it is, this coin is the real deal. 

Blacknet seems nice? Nobody has any idea what Blacknet is other than Rat. And I doubt he even knows what it is.  

Is the prospect of some free airdrop coin a nice prospect? Sure, but that's not what makes Blackcoin valuable. It's the complete community-ownership that makes it stand out amongst everything else. 

I wouldn't worry. Rat really screwed his plan up diplomatically already. You will get Janko's build (the one that has seen consistent updates and improvements for years now). Here's how it works, there are three possibilities:  

- Rat convinces the consensus his build is BLK and the old fork (ours)  is to be called 'Blacknet'  
- Rat doesn't convince the consensus, BLK stays BLK but he'll get a fork that exchanges support called 'Blacknet'  
- Rat doens't convince the consensus, BLK stays BLK, and he also doesn't get the exchanges on board to get his fork supported.  

The first scenario would be the worst for BLK, because it would require rebranding and everything. However, in order to do that Rat would need to convince all the stakers to support his fork. And that's not going to happen, Gritt already made sure of that by informing the exchanges that offer BLK. Exchanges really hate it when someone tries to sneak in a snapshot airdrop under the radar. They'll simply stake their reserves to lock Rat's idea out and it ends all there. IF they're generous and he's more transparent about the snapshot they might, MIGHT, support his second coin, but he really would have to make huge amends to get that done.  

One point I think needs to be discussed is the flat staking reward. This causes for a decreasing inflation rather than an inflation that stay proportional to total supply.  

With 1.5 BLK per block every 64 seconds, BLK inflates 739,125 per year. That's 0.97% right now, but because it's a static amount each year, this inflation will get lower relative to the total supply.  

So while BLK inlfates, the staking rewards do not.  

I don't think that's a very elegant system. If we agree that 1% inflation is reasonable (which it is) then that should apply in perpetuity. In other words. Each block needs a small increase on the staking reward to keep up with the increasing supply.  

But of course, only if the community reaches consensus on such a change. 

BLK is the only coin that the community truly owns 100%.  

There's no other coin that gets PoS completely right. In order for PoS to stay decentralised, it needs to start out fair so that it stays fair. This is because the power of staking is directly linked to the share of coins someone has in the network.    

For PoS to work it needs to meet several conditions:  

- Even dispersion
- No exploitable features (like coinage)  
- No unfair advantages to a singular party.  

If these conditions aren't met, then we enter in a 'rich get richer' situation where a small group accumulates power and wealth and starts controlling the network. Almost every competing PoS coin manages to fuck it up in one way or another, quite impressive actually.

BLK, however, checks all these boxes. BLK stripped away the protocol to it's simplest form, leaving no mechanics that give anyone an edge in staking (and voting), the devs got 0 BLK from the launch, they rely on donations from the community (there's a new crowdfunding feature that will streamline this further).  

The way BLK is set up is ideological, and so far everyone who truly 'gets' this ideal ends up having no other choice than to love this coin.

And it shows! Two months ago the founder of BLK tried to co-opt the coin for his own purposes, the community didn't agree with his lack of transparency and his unclear motives, and thus he wasn't able to do anything. Anything he would do to the coin would end up being an unsupported fork that would have to continue as a whole new coin. It's a powerful case as to who truly decides what happens to the coin: It's us. We own it. We decide.  

There's just always something wrong with mining. Either miners are too powerful or apathetic, or there's these ASIC exploits. In the end mining means users paying a network cost to those who don't use their coin. That's so perverse.  

The crypto sector as a whole is only slowly starting to understand that Proof of Stake will end up being the only option to truly secure value in decentralised network. Everything relies on having as much power in as many hands as possible.

When you realise that Proof of Stake is the only way and why it's the only way, then there's simply nothing that beats BLK.

After 4 years it's still my most favourite project by far. Whereas all other coins are trying to tack on more bloat and perverse mechanics, BLK keeps homing in on total minimalism. But hey, if 'back again' works better for marketing purposes then whatever, let's roll with that.

There are three types of caps:

- No cap
- Soft cap
- Hard cap  

Blackcoin's supply cap is 77m (currently existing) +740k (=0.98%) per year approximately.

The 740k is the staking reward that is handed out to the stakers each year. Everyone can stake. No barriers to entry, no delegates, only fairly distributed coins you can buy your way into.   

This is what we call a 'soft cap'. There's still a limit to the amount of coins can exist  at any given time, but the total supply does gradually increase at a flat rate.  

A hard cap is when there's an absolute limit on the total amount of coins that can ever exist, after which the network runs into a 'wall' where the network costs will have to be paid through a different means, usually transaction costs.  

Then there's the 'no cap' coins. These are centralized coins (usually ICO's) that can create new coins out of thin air whenever they want to because they own  100% of the consensus.  


---
Ultimately this boils down to the question 'Who pays for the network?'  

- No cap coins are to be treated like companies over which the 'shareholders' have no control over. Everytime they create new supply for themselves they are essentially letting everyone pay for it by inflating their amount. Nobody is able to tell when and by how much other than the core team.  

- Soft cap coins have a clear and stable answer to the question. BLK answers with 'All holders pay 0.98% (to the stakers) per year for the network. If you want to be part of the recipients, then stake, it's easy, cheap, and we encourage it'.  

- Hard cap postpone the answer to the question, often far away into the future. Until then that cap is reached, they are under (often heavy) inflation, and when they finally reach the end, the transaction costs will soar to pay the miners or the stakers. This is perverse, it discourages people from actually making the transactions, the very thing crypto was invented for in the first place.  

---
BLK choses this small and stable inflation to keep transaction costs low but enough to encourage as many people to stake. Currently almost one third of all the coins are staking. It's a delicate balance but I think BLK has nailed it.  

The only thing that can be improved is changing the 740k per year to a relative amount, just make it 1%. This means that the proportional inflation will stay the same rather than decrease as time goes on. If 1% is what we consider a good incentive right now, then so should it be in 100%. But this is a subjective point, I fully appreciate other view points on this last bit.  

On Reddit and Twitter the misery that comes with ICO tokens is slowly starting to seep into the community's awareness. Tokens are going bust, companies like EOS are dumping massive amounts of Ethereum, any holder of such tokens will be the last to know when that shit happens, and by then it will be too late. 

People want stability. And stability comes from lean coins, coins that don't rely on a treasury and/or continuous revenue stream to build their projects.

Take the Lore wallet
http://blackcoin.co/#downloads