If you can make music, make a song yourself and release it under "The Cypherfunks". Otherwise, just get on board with mining, and spread the news!

Will update the thread today with some more details on the launch tomorrow.

@tibenian

I'll look into password protected wallets right now, but that means I'll have to generate the genesis block ahead of time (which isn't too bad, as long as mining starts at the planned launch time). So far, I'm going to do all this 2-4 hours before launch, so it is as fair as possible.

@majorminers

Unfortunately I'm GMT+2, so I want to give myself most of Friday to work through problems if there will be any. Sorry about that.

EDIT:

Password-protected wallets will be release before launch (aiming for 1-2 hours before launch). Genesis block will be created 2-4 hours before launch.

If it is released under proper creative commons licencing (which should be the default for any of the songs under "The Cypherfunks"), then anyone will be to freely do with the music whatever they want (including selling it). The cryptocurrency part of the collective means that it doesn't actually matter if someone does this for their own personal gain, because if more people get involved with "The Cypherfunks", the more valuable everyone's FUNK becomes. In this case, releasing it for free is anyway better as it means the footprint of "The Cypherfunks" increases.


Nailed it! With each new song that gets released, the bigger and more entrenched the network becomes. And as you say, it's going to be a wonderfully chaotic experiment! Already have more songs lined up. The band's been working hard.

I'm prepping everything for launch today (updating all the seed nodes and wallets to correct versions). Will try and get an IRC channel also going before launch.

Then tomorrow morning, it's all just about generating the genesis blocks and uploading the wallets! Let the #FUNK begin.

It's important to note that "The Cypherfunks" is not MY band. Everyone IS the band. Just like cryptocurrencies allow free reign to affiliation, so will "The Cypherfunks": but for music. Also, you don't have to release music under "The Cypherfunks" to reap benefits from it, just like musicians currently ask for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin donations.

WE ARE DISCUSSING V2. While the music side has thrived, the coin economics haven't been good. We will relaunch. Join in on the discussion!

The Cypherfunks

The Cypherfunks is a grand experiment in music for the internet age: crowdfunding a global band through a decentralized cryptocurrency. Since it’s inception in February 2014, the Cypherfunks have produced over 80+ songs that have been played over 3000 times on SoundCloud, have been played on a German radio station, featured on South African prime-time news & featured on popular cryptocurrency media spaces such as Coindesk & LetsTalkBitcoin. A rising global band, collaborating music together, attempting to redefine what music making can be in the 21st century.

Make music with the world. "The Cypherfunks" is a decentralized, internet band & cryptocurrency. A new way to make music in the 21st century! The cryptocurrency, enables the new music collective. http://thecypherfunks.com. Starter's guide here. Read the philosophy.

HYPE Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVulWS8PxRA&feature=youtu.be

Media/Exposure:
http://www.savannah.vc/blog/2014/03/02/what-to-think-about-bitcoin-virtual-currencies-africa/ [mentioned next to Dogecoin]
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/banking/98014-the-cypherfunks-cryptocurrency-and-internet-band-from-sa.html
https://ice3x.co.za/cypherfunks-band-twist/
https://twitter.com/JustinKennerley/status/443979656350695424/photo/1 [Live interview on South African Radio station: RSG]
www.coindesk.com/coins-for-bands-disrupt-music-industry/
https://twitter.com/Fredericklutz/status/446614591737323520/photo/1 [live on South African news]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKsQdQGhh6c [filmed insert on South African news]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXLdnLZNITw&feature=youtu.be [live interview on South African national news]
http://bitscan.com/articles/the-cypherfunks-disrupting-the-music-industry
http://10and5.com/2014/04/24/the-cypherfunks-a-cryptocurrency-and-online-music-experiment/



The currency



The Cypherfunks (FUNK) is also a cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin or Dogecoin). It's an scrypt coin with the following features:

Block time of 2 minutes: retargeted with Dr. Kimoto's Gravity Well.

About 50 billion (49 275 000 000) will be mined in 4 years, whereafter there will be a constant increase in supply of: 1 314 000 000 per year. The first 15 blocks have a smaller reward of 5000 to allow the network to adjust.

1st year: 100 000 per block.
2nd year: 50 000 per block.
3rd year: 25 000 per block.
4th year: 12 500 per block.
5th year onwards: 5 000 per block.

NO pre-mine. This is a community currency!

Wallets

Github Wallet downloads:
https://github.com/The-Cypherfunks/The-Cypherfunks/releases/tag/1.0.1.0

Source available at: https://github.com/The-Cypherfunks/The-Cypherfunks

Bounties

100K FUNK per seps pack! Spread the word! EDIT: Now 4.7 Million available to give away! 400k donated so far
http://www.reddit.com/r/thecypherfunks/comments/1z9cti/separates_bounties_for_remixing_100k_funk_per_pack/

Bounty FUND for a faucet [donate here]:
CMshf9ZVrYoBPdjnsJ7zSgVFcfEZui85qw [6.2 million donated so far]
[1 M donated to the altcoinfaucet]
5.2 (old bounty still left) + 8881241(delievered from altcoinfaucet)

If you have a working faucet, the bounty will be delivered.

Bounty FUND for a reddit tipbot [donate here]:
CWKmoKce124SfTpPBby8uSyrxp9Log4bQi [4.8 million donated so far] [done! and delivered. Thanks n00bnoxious!]

If a working reddit tipbot is running for at least 2 weeks, the bounty will be delivered.


Pools

http://p2pools.org/funk

Sample Cypherfunk.conf

This is used if you want to solo-mine or run the daemon yourself. Sample:


[If you don't add rpcallowip to localhost (if you are a solo miner), then it is HIGHLY recommended you change user and password, otherwise someone can connect to your node if the port is open for inbound connections.]

Exchanges

AllCrypt
https://www.allcrypt.com/market?id=561

Comkort
https://comkort.com/market/trade/funk_ltc

Price Ticker:

http://crypto-prices.com/FUNK

Block Explorer

http://funkexplorer.n00bsys0p.co.uk/

Faucet
http://cypherfunk.altcoinfaucet.net/ [taken down for now]

The Music.



List of song are on SoundCloud!

Other links:

Twitter (main place for updates).
Facebook
Reddit
https://soundcloud.com/groups/the-cypherfunks [share The Cypherfunks songs here]
http://blog.thecypherfunks.com
Freenode IRC! #cypherfunks

This is a growing community currency. We need fans, miners, musicians and developers. Join!

Can vouch for Rebel24. Successful trade, and nice guy. +1. Would trade again.

You guys CLEARLY didn't even watch the video. So quick to jump to conclusions. Typical.

It's not required. AT ALL.

If you have an SPV client (ie Android Wallet, or MultiBit), it has to trust the nodes they are connected to (for 0-conf transactions). If you have an Android wallet, there are usually 2 ways to improve this: increasing trust-less interactions (although I'm not sure how) for SPV clients, OR improve the trusted-ness of the SPV clients you are connecting to. As Mike states, spoofing this isn't difficult. To make sure spoofing is decreased you have submit a proof that's expensive or hard to forge. A passport is only 1 such implementation. Thanks to wonderfully complicated maths of zk-snarks, it is ANONYMOUS. And you don't HAVE to use this method, then you'll just have to be content to possibly be defrauded OR you just have to more precautions to make sure you are connected to 'right' Bitcoin network: waiting for confirmations, and shuffling networks (wifi, 3g)/nodes. It's up to you.

Educate yourself, please. You also seem to miss Mike's Tor proposal. Or his proposal on merge avoidance, both INCREASING privacy.

P.S. If I'm wrong on the technical implementations, please correct me, that's how I understand it.

Before people go on another witch hunt.

It's a zero-knowledge proof. Doesn't reveal anything.

In order to run honest nodes, you either needs to make it expensive (and slightly prohibitive), ie proof-of-sacrifice, or cheap (using other forms of identification that is expensive to forge), ie proof-of-passport. With zk-snarks, you can prove you own a passport, but reveal nothing. This isn't the best way, due to possible government intervention, but it is a practical, cheap, anonymous alternative.

There could be other ways to establish identity, OR to establish honest nodes.

The bulk of the work on PayFile is done already. It's mostly bug fixes from here on out. And until floating fees comes along, to implement that. If you have any questions on the code, just ask.

I'm going to continue some part-time dev work on it.

Thanks for the comments guys.

@bluemeanie1

Yes, you make a good point regarding colored coins, you still have to trust the issuer. I haven't looked into confidence chains, will have a read!

@frictionlesscoin

Yep, people won't bother, as long the coin is secure. If alt-coins are beneficial to the maintainers of the network: ie, the miners then they'll be on board (or at least I think so). The donated based coin, creates much larger blocks in the future.

The problem that I want to solve is the creation of fairly distributed currencies with better security than the current alternative blockchain approach. If we have a million altcoins in the future with millions of blockchains, there's going to a very large long-tail of poorly secured coins. This is one such proposal. I'll think about it some more.

Hi guys.

I'm doing some research on the history of the TestNet(s) for a book I'm writing. We are now on TestNet3.

Can someone provide some clarity on why the TestNet is on version 3, and what changed during each one?

As far as I know (what I could find), one of changes was to refactor the difficulty, so that when someone comes along and dumps a lot of mining power (to test them), they don't upset the difficulty for long periods, increasing block confirmation time (due to unreasonable high difficulty). According to the Bitcoin wiki, it also mentions that TestNet2 was killed off because people started trading it? Is that correct? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet

Would appreciate some information.

Thanks.

There's no concept of 'overpowering' with this method. The ACTUAL hashing power goes to Bitcoin's network. Bitcoin as currency is used as "proxy" hashing power towards alt-coins. And it is always proportional to the amount of BTC donated per block. Hashing power in this case is only used for the minting process, not the security of the network.

Regarding PoS. This method is kind of similar to this, but now you can take out the inherent inflation that happens with PoS. Instead of using coins to generate NEW coins of the same type, you are generating NEW alts.

But yes. I'm going to sit down and design the technical aspects fully once I kick this last thesis revision I'm busy with to the curb.


This is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve. A protocol to mint decentralized colored coins.

At the rate altcoins are launching, I think coins specifically built for use as currency should be added onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Small alts have way too weak security. I've conceptually devised a way to do mint decentralized colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that's nice to miners and keeps the small alts' hashing power dedicated to them (you won't have to compete with Bitcoin miners to mine Dogecoin for example).

I'm copy pasting my idea from the colored coins google groups (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bitcoinx/mUb86IOeXdU).

---

"Colored altcoins can be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain in a decentralized manner through the donation (or 'sacrifice') of Bitcoin to miners: turning those Bitcoin into a new colored altcoin at pre-determined rate."


In the past 2 years, plenty of new alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) have been created (namecoin, litecoin, dogecoin, etc), resulting in separate blockchains, and a distribution of hashing power. As we are heading towards a future where each idea, theme, and person will have their own currency, there are some problems with having the value locked up in different altchains. The problem is mainly due to the fact there will be a long-tail of chains with small hashing powers that will be extremely vulnerable to attack.

Why?

Currently, private or personal currencies can be minted through colored coins. These coins are unfortunately centralised. If I mint 1million Simoncoin, it will invariably be in my control. If other people want them, they will have to pay me Bitcoin in exchange for the Simoncoins. In some cases, this is what is wanted, but it brings about trust in me to maintain it. The beauty of the traditional mining process is that it is freer, and more democratic. It gives people 2 ways to get involved with the currency: through contributing processing power to it OR buying it from someone who has already contributed processing power to it. The pre-determined rate at which it is minted AND the fact that it is not to the benefit of a centralised entity allows trust (and invariably value) to more easily flow into it. What if the 21 million Bitcoin were minted instantly in the beginning? It also means that the entity/theme behind it (be it Simoncoin, a meme, a band, etc) have more incentive to make their currency work as they have to keep its network effect growing. Admittedly I'm trying to articulate a difficult concept. If some currency (or stock) only 'represented' an entity (decentralized), instead of being 'backed' by the entity (centralized), its value will be more. The psychological barriers to entry feels lower: because people are taking part collectively in the concept.

So, a future where colored coins can be minted in a decentralized manner, whilst simultaneously keeping the hashing power on one chain, solves the problem where the myriad of new altcoins will have to worry about keeping their chain secure and running smoothly. It should also be beneficial to the network.

How?

This scheme works by looking at Bitcoin (the currency) as a proxy for hashing power. By donating to Bitcoin to miners, you are contributing hashing power as a proxy for a new colored alt. For each block, depending on how many people donated to a specific colored alt (say Simoncoin), you are rewarded proportionally at a pre-determined rate.

As the idea is in a conceptual phase, I have not delved too deeply into the technical aspects of it, so I'm going to be using some 'psuedo-txes' to explain some parts of the technical implementation.

Let's create Simoncoin. In block 400000, there is a genesis tx that specifies a standard monetary policy: 50 initial coins, 210k halving: something like "OP_RETURN gsimoncoin50210000".

From the next block, Bitcoin donations can be transmogrified into Simoncoin. If only I am mining it, and I donate 0.00001 BTC to the block, I will receive all of the 50 Simoncoin. If 2 people donated 2 BTC each, it will be split 25, 25. As you can see, altcoins which are popular will have more competition in terms "proxy hashing power", meaning more Bitcoin is donated per block. Once the halving block is reached, less Simoncoin will be available to split up between the miners.

The donation tx should (probably) specify for what colored alt it is for, and which address the reward should go to (thinking quickly in terms of technical specification).

What about miners, mining their own donations?

If a miner donates 5 btc for Simoncoin, and he mines the block, he will get the 5BTC AND a large portion of Simoncoin, not really 'donating' or 'sacrificing' the Bitcoin.

I need some help thinking about this, but I don't see it as a big issue. Miners will have incentive to include all the colored alt minting donations as it will collectively be a bigger reward than keeping out other donations for a specific alt reward. In other words, all the transaction fees will be greater than the value of the colored alt rewards (that's what I'm thinking at least). Using Bitcoin as proxy hashing power also means that unlike traditional mining, ALL participants get their fair share. It's as if all Bitcoin miners (or miners part of a pool) got their fair share, even if they did not solve the block.

There are thus cases where a miner will donate some BTC and re-earn it as reward, but that won't be the intent. They were just lucky. If they want to continue minting the colored alt they'll have to respend the Bitcoin as donation anyway, potentially losing it to other miners.

There should also be a time-based incentives as well, mainly that IF no one contributed Bitcoin to Simoncoin for that block, the 50 Simoncoin is lost. This means miners won't just wait for a next block to win the reward.

Alternatively, similarly to proof-of-stake, "coin-age" could be used in some way. But you don't want to detriment users who buy bitcoin to mint quickly to alts.

Security

This process is beneficial to Bitcoin. It means hashing power don't have to distributed across alt-chains. One of the reasons why some miners turn to other altcoins are due to profitability. ie the altcoins are worth more than the hashing power when turned back into BTC or Fiat, compared to the hashing power being spent on Bitcoin itself. This process solves this. Miners will contribute to Bitcoin's success, but ALSO be able to rake in with the profitability of colored alts. If my small FPGA is earning 0.0001 Bitcoin per block, and I'm the only one mining Simoncoin, I will receive my full reward as IF I was the only one mining Simoncoin (ie taking the 0.0001 and donating it). It means like any altcoin, you are competing with the people hashing with you on that altcoin, but that hashing power now ALSO contributes to keeping the whole ecosystem of cryptocurrencies secure.

Strain on the network?

If this starts working, there will be a lot more donations per block, for each colored alt that exists. Miners will be happy as it is a lot more money, but it could push the transactions per second quite a lot higher, as for someone that is mining a coin will have to donate BTC for EACH block to be able to receive the reward.

A purer version could be where the mining rewards go straight as donations for the next block, paying/minting new colored alt addresses. In other words, miners also turn into minting pools. Your payout address is a donation directly to the next block, whilst simultaneously generating colored alts. I don't know if this is even possible.

SPV?

Personal currencies need to be used as easily as Bitcoin. Thanks to SPV, you don't need the whole blockchain to transact. It's unclear whether this scheme will work.

Bitcoins are being re-used again and again to create new currencies?

Yes. Value is subjective. Bitcoin acts here as the token for the security of the public ledger it moves upon. It's turning the hashing power into the system of the cryptographic shared ledger into support for additional currencies. It's like blood, keeping the system pumping.

So. A request for comments: please. I have to do my own research into colored coins first to think up technical implementations. If anyone wants to help design this scheme in a feasible manner, I would love your help!

Any questions are also welcome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Anything.

Agreed. Especially the mention of 50 state money transmitter legislation. Overly burdensome for American companies.

I've heard a story of someone that were broken into, and found that the only thing gone was their mining equipment. Can't find the story now.

It will be live here: 3pm EST.

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/

Start with basic concepts if you haven't yet. These are great.
http://codecombat.com
http://codecademy.com
https://www.khanacademy.org/cs/programming

It's going to be multi-year journey. Don't be discouraged. Start small, tweak, break things and see why it happens.

For crypto-currency? The satoshi client (the official client) is written in C++. That's going to be difficult to learn to start with. The other one, which will be easier to delve into is the coinpunk wallet, which is written in JavaScript (http://coinpunk.org/beta.html). Javascript has grown tremendously in the past few years and there are various tools and frameworks using javascript. But you don't need to know the language of the client to code with crypto-currencies (or interact with the blockchain).

Good luck!

The senate is going to think about it, regardless of whether the foundation or the bitcoin community complies. They can, and unfortunately are backed by the world's largest military (yes, I'm using this to prove a point). They have the authority and power to regulate it in some manner. Do we want them to make stupid, uninformed decisions? NO. That could happen if we don't rock up there. Snubbing them, will make it worse. If you also think the Bitcoin Foundation will try and introduce measures into the Bitcoin protocol to give control the US, then you are naive. It undermines the neutrality of it, and will decrease the value of Bitcoin, and even worse, create a fork.

We should be there at the hearing, be level-headed and make sure stupid decisions are not being made. The Bitcoin Foundation is perfect for this, and Patrick Murck is a wonderful candidate.

I think we should get more businesses in this thread, people like Circle who just received $9 million in funding. Do you think they want to snub the senate? No way. They have large amounts of money on the table, and are the people that are actively developing services that makes everyones Bitcoin worth more.

Good luck guys!

It's great to know it's going to be approached with level-headedness.

Hey. Here's an idea. I don't know if it has been proposed yet. Perhaps there's been an alternative.

I was trying to think of a way to combine a low-trust protocol with traditional verification of trust. For example, let's say there are 2 identical restaurants in town. You will go to the one that you can verify if they are good (been around a while, and fulfilled services). You use services like Foursquare, Yelp or you ask your friends.

Let's say there are 2 services that provide services to autonomous agents. Although it is low-trust, and does not have to worry too much about losing money, the only thing they can lose is time and resources spent engaging with a crap or malicious server/service. So if it is faced with 2 equal services, equal prices, it will want to choose one with a history of providing great service, so it doesn't spend time engaging with the worse service.

Looking at the blockchain, you can specifically look at micropayment transactions (with the micropayment API: https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/wiki/WorkingWithMicropayments), to determine if the server complied. If there is a full-refund transaction back to the client then the server did not comply with anything (or the client chose not start any incrementation process, but that is more unlikely).

If a server has one semi-exhausted (or fully exhausted) transaction on the blockchain, it might mean 2 things: It was a successful tx by both client and server, or that somewhere along the line client or server did not comply and it was broadcast. If the server did not comply, then the client will move on to another service (if there is competition).

But generally, having more of these semi (or fully) exhausted transactions on the blockchain indicate in some manner that it is more trustworthy. Because the other alternative is of course, is that if they were a bad service, they won't have a lot of transactions.

If a server uses deterministic address generation for its micropayment channels, it can publish its master public key, and a service can crawl the blockchain looking for addresses belonging to the server. If it finds semi (or fully) exhausted channels, it is an indicator (not a definitive one) of successful service delivery. You can perhaps even build a service that does this monitoring on its own.

So, in short. By checking what happened to micropayment channels (through deterministic key generation), and using volume as an indicator an agent can infer trust about a service.

There are still problems however:

1) There's an easy attack. A new site can simply generate micropayments to themselves to show that there is 'volume'. Potential mitigation around this is using time as an indicator as well. ie, you can't spam yourself to trustworthyness. If you've been providing a service for a few months, with decent regularity, it looks more trustworthy.

2) I haven't looked at deterministic address generation for some time, but is it possible by just having the master public key to determine if an address belongs to it (I remember it being vaguely possible with HD wallets)? ie, you don't need to generate millions of addresses ahead that you have to check.

3) The protocol can be improved by showing who closed and submitted the refund tx? In an ideal transaction, the client asks the server to close, and in the blockchain it could show that is what happened (possibly in OP_RETURN?).

Thoughts? Anyone care to poke some more holes in this? Has anyone else thought of this?

"Previously people thought UTXO bloat was an issue, but right now I'm quite convinced UTXO size isn't a big deal due to TXO commitments."

What is meant by this? Can you please explain a bit more? I'm slowly but surely delving deeper into the protocol, so I need to wrap my head around concepts still.

Thanks for explaining the other options. Another quick question: taking a look here (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script). anyone-can-spend output doesn't have a limit to when it can be spent? I assume that anyone-can-spend MUST be coupled with OP_VERIFY_LOCKTIME so miners have an equal chance. Or am I missing something? [EDIT. Forget this question. I read up on it. It uses nLockTime. For anyone else wondering: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fidelity_bonds#Announce.2FCommit_Sacrifices].