Great idea. Perhaps also including usage with bitmark-qt and inuit as two practical examples.

The bitmark wiki is editable by all, a good place to start writing such things so that others can collaboratively edit and review.

I'd just like to say thanks to Crypto Cloud Hosting for the free VPS, I'm very impressed with the service, I've fully configured it for everything I need to create a staging server without any problems, daemons, nginx, git server, deployment scripts all kinds of things, an excellent service all round complete with OS of my choice - the latest Ubuntu LTS.

I am very glad that the first BTM business is a fully fledged company with hardware and offers something of a high calibre, as opposed to a quick reseller account accepting alternative currency.

On another note, I received a donation earlier of 0.06xx BTC, but have no idea who sent it, can you let me know so that I may say thank you.

As a gentle reminder, if you have not updated your clients already to v0.9.2.2, please do so by following the link in my signature or from the OP - it will help keep our network, and your currency, secure, and also provide you with full alerting to be notified of any disasters; not that any are planned.

I've followed this thread since launch, purely by accident as they at first used the same currency code as bitmark.

I'd like to reach out to you all to simply ask why? Why did you mine or buy this coin? What did you see in it that made you go yes I'll support this?

Was it for a quick mine and hope to profit, to hope the value went up for some unknown reason, or did you believe it had some longevity and was worth investing time and money in to?

I'm genuinely interested to have a little bit of discussion about this, as such currencies pop up every day and often get abandoned or turn out to be scams really quickly, this one seemed obvious it was going to be one of the two. Even if it was legit, there was no plan offered to do anything. So I have to ask, why?

This is meant with the best of intentions, I seek to understand the honest thinking of anybody who either bought / backed / watched / mined.

I contacted MIT, they immediately removed intellicoin.mit.edu, and also cloakcoin.mit.edu - they have not responded formally to me yet, although their actions are enough for me personally.

Drupal cloud sites can be created freely at drupalcloud.mit.edu by anybody with a touchstone id. I was concerned as I know several lecturers and students at MIT and none of them knew anything about it, and having been involved in several projects I knew myself this was a highly unorthodox project, especially requesting money from the public.

Perhaps you have misunderstood blocktime, it is a target not a pre-specified time. If the network is mining faster than the target speed (determined by the difficulty) the blocks will be found quicker until the difficulty adjusts higher. If the network is mining slower then blocks will be found slower than the target speed until the difficulty adjusts lower.

The developer you hired cannot 'fix' the coin because it is not broken, and you not understanding how crypto currencies and difficulty works should not entitle you to request a refund. If blocks are being found they have created a currency that technically works.

Whether you are a developer or not, you really should understand these most basic of things before launching a new coin, and certainly before asking for a refund.

Please before you go any further, take the time to understand the product you are trying to launch.

It's already possible, but a little pointless and more of a novelty thing. ASICs are of course far more efficient than any other device when it comes to mining, they will produce the most hashes per watt used, and become more efficient as time progresses.

The primary point is that hashing, doing the work, has to be financially expensive and costly as that is what keeps the blockchain secure. If bitcoin or any other coin were secured by mobile device GPUs then mounting an attack with custom hardware would be very feasible and very cheap.

A hash matching a difficulty is just proof that some work has been done, it's the work itself that secures the blockchain.

Great, when you have something feel free to pass it my way for review, if that would be helpful

Surely it must be defined somewhere? Is there no document or paper or even a wiki specification?

Where can I read the technical details about this "Web 3.0"? I am very interested as it's an area I've worked at the forefront of for many years and understand very well, the article didn't mention anything about it, which is why I am asking. I'd love to review any technical documents, and provide feedback if it would help.

Cryptographic currency offers multiple benefits but also has limitations. For example we can store and manage our own money, send unlimited amounts to anybody without any barriers, and with minimal fees, often large transactions are faster than legacy systems. Conversely it is relatively clunky and slow for every day transactions, it cannot be sped up, and the interfaces for usage with legacy wide spread systems do not exist.

We have choices to make, do we try to come up with new things and replace what exists, or do we try hard to become part of what exists recognising that it is not an omnipotent solution to everything money related?

Within Bitmark we have named a concept micro-trust. The game provider Steam is a concrete example, we deposit funds through some methods then perform purchases instantly. Prepaid debit cards, credit cards, paypal, skrill, multiple services and many stores, giftcards and loadable credit, all of these things are examples of micro trust. The important thing to note is that we do not trust these services and companies with all of our money, only small amounts for whatever purpose we need. Micro trust for micro transactions.

We consider that the blockchain is great to store larger amounts, and to transfer funds between services. The latter point is where it can really shine.

To be usable however, for every transactions, we must become part of what exists. We will get nowhere fast if we try to get a Gas company, a gas franchise, or even a franchisee to accept our highly latent systems which require them to jump through hoops and change their infrastructure.

Back to your litmus test, consider a reloadable debit card that you could fill with daily use money from time to time quickly by depositing crypto. It's a simple solution enabled by the presence of just one service provider, made optimal by the presence of many.

As for fees, because crypto is entirely digital and isn't integrated in with heavy fee taking legacy systems, new lean startups can be created, or older companies can adopt and save money behind the scenes. 0.25% to an exchange for the conversion, and 0.75% on deposits to us to pay for the service, on currencies which change 10x that in a day and 100x that in a year, is a minor concession to make.

Where Bitmark and Marking come in, is that we enable the flow of money between people for the smallest of every day things, you can write a post or share something online and get reputation+money for it. Now imagine if the money you deposited to your daily use card, had been earned by two forum posts, a commit of some code, and a funny video shared on line? Does that not change the way money flows and the way we think of things quite a lot?

An additional point, is that we suggest crypto should be hidden through several layers of abstraction, if you can transfer money by clicking a button on a website, swap between services by linking accounts, and fill a debit card by hitting 'deposit' on-line or in an app, then why not? Blockchain and clients and daemons all still exist, they just become optional usage parts rather than required. It's perfectly feasible for people to only want to keep 25% of their weekly loose change in crypto and use it by clicking buttons, rather than 100% of their lifes savings stored in multi-secured extravagant cold storage.

None of this is exact or well defined or anything of the sort, but if you can follow the principles, and indeed agree it has some merit, then please do join in with ideas and discussion to make them reality.

It could be suggested that a trust based intermediary processor will be required in order to reduce transaction latency. When a third party is put in to the mix they handle instant transfers from account balance to account balance, and it opens the door to competing services with lower fees. If using blockchain only, there is the microtransaction problem, the safety problems of being under non trusted network control, and confirmation times to deal with. Imagine if putting gas in your car required a 6 hours confirmation because a block wasn't found quickly?

Perhaps worth discussion.


LOL, yes there is a bunch of reading to do, much has been written.

This should get you started: Generic Summary, Approach to Innovation, Marking (big read), Thread with links out to lots of information

Your litmus test is a great milestone to achieve. I especially appreciate you comparison of Darpanet -> World Wide Web. The first was innovation driving adoption, the second was adoption driving innovation. I firmly believe that it is now time for adoption to drive innovation where currency is concerned.


CoinHoarder, an excellent post and I agree with it in entirety. It actually prompted me to write this article today, I would appreciate your feedback.

Your quoted quotation reminded me of this

Wait it out, or mine consistently whatever the difficulty. The purpose of our long maturation and equivalent difficulty is to remove incentive from speculative short term miners. If people drive up the difficulty and then have to wait for 2-3 days before they can get their reward to dump, it's value is unknown.

Mining is a service where those who mine consistently receive the lowest overall average cost and the greatest overall gains.

This post explains far more clearly.

For now we are still in semi-speculative times, as demand increases so network will stabilize, drops only really occur in the early stages. Current transfers are not so bad, it is still faster than bitcoin, even running at one third of the target speed. We certainly are not stuck.

On the positive side, we have over 3 GH/s of service providing consistent miners, that is no small achievement. Thank you to all of you.


Thank you for publishing, I hope it is comprehensible as it outlines an important part of Bitmark's future.

Update

1. I am now unbanned from bitcointalk, which is nice.
2. Receiving extensive feedback on Marking from a Professor of Economics tonight, his initial feedback was extremely positive, I look forward to discussing it in more detail.
3. The Bitmark Foundation fund now stands at 3685.8817 BTM of 70k target
4. Pfennig has been updated to support full alerting and also git archiving - it's now consistent with bitmark v0.9.2.2
5. Bitmark checkpoints updated at 30688
6. Brain Wallet and Address Generator released.

As an after thought, if you can make a local ubuntu machine network accessible and pass me the ssh details, I could just connect up and set everything up for you on that instead.

Best to check this first... If you are doing API commands have you considered writing your applications to communicate with bitcoind's RPC API directly (or even via the command line)? You can also run programs every time a new block is received using the '-blocknotify=executable %s' configuration option, and maintain an index in the daemon of all transactions with the '-txindex' option. This would all be on a secure local bitcoin running on your server, with no duplication of data.

If you are certain that insight is the answer, and require that local visual browser part of it too, then the best way to proceed may be for me to do the process from scratch on a virtual machine and write the instructions for you to repeat.

Taking the latter option will require you to have a network accessible Ubuntu 14.04 machine. This could be a virtual machine inside VirtualBox or VMWare, or a physical machine on your network. You can run any version of Ubuntu, standard or server, one has the easy to use GUI and the other just a command line.

If you wish to proceed with the insight option, then I'd suggesting getting a Ubuntu machine setup, bitcoin downloaded, and to begin downloading the block chain.

As an alternative option if you can work over the internet rather than just local, then you could acquire a ubuntu VPS (digitalocean/aws) or cheap dedicated server and hand me the root access, I'd set it all up for you. If you are in the UK then I know a man who may be able to provide a good VPS for this quickly - I say UK as then network latency would be lower in communications to and from server.

Warm Regards,

Mark

Yes, I will help you

Let's first establish what you need, as insight may not be the answer. Do you need a constantly updated block chain database, or to analyse a timestamped dump?

Also, do you require the full chain data, or only certain parts?

Finally, have you ensured that all dependencies are installed, https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp details what you need.

Just in case, the two most common problems with node-gyp, are:

1. Gyp has a dependency on Python, so you need that installed
2. It calls 'node' and sometimes the node binaries are referenced as 'nodejs'.

I have to defend the BitPay guys and insight a bit, it does work very well I got one up and running here for bitmark very easily, on Ubuntu 14.04 however.

I guess you've found the Gyp issues then, a problem on almost every platform, quick fixes are available on linux, unsure about windows.

Take a look at this and notice blockchain64.exe https://github.com/jeffchan/blockchain-parser - I've only used it to produce statistics so far (on *nix), I cannot remember if you can dump everything to SQL or not.

Best of luck.

I am glad that's it working, and thank you for taking the time to consider helping further, the efforts of our small community towards the project and I are warmly received and solidify conviction.

Warm Regards,

Mark

That's it fixed