id like to apply to this campaign, finally back to the world of crypto after a long hospitalization.

Btctalk Name: abvhiael
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id like to apologize to all for my absence. ive been trying to keep my family fed, and have been working full time and then some, still not really keeping up with the bills and expenses. ive been prety ill lately too, stress and seizures dont mix well. i truly hope to be able to get back to working n SOIL in the near future and hope that perhaps we can rebuild a new development team here, as right now im completely overwhelmed. i have been keeping up with my reading and reaseach, on renewable energy implications for SOIL, and this hiatus is not a permanent thing. if anyone is interested in joining into a new dev team with me, please message me here or on facebook. i would desperately like to get SOIL back up and running smoothly again, i love this project, i believe in this project, im just so damn broke right now i havent eaten in two days and im trying to figure out what things in my house i have i can pawn to et food for my son for school next week. its THAT desperate. i hope all are well, and ill kep you folks updated.... let me know if you want to be more involved and work for nothing n something that can make a massive difference in the world.

ive been giving this a lot of thought, and tearing thru google like a madman, about this problem thats faced Krypton and Shift. and the idea presented, hardcoded blocks, seems like the best scenario, assuming a trustworthy currency developer. Ive never veiwed SOIL as a financial engine... hell, theres more than enough blockchains out there that are hyperobsessed with fintech, and yeah, thats where the money is. but SOIL isnt about that, its always been about the technology, how it can change EVERY sector of industry. and to make that technology available, globally. its always been about building the dApps for distributed climate prediction, and microgrid systems, and food provenance and livestock lineage, its been about making this sort of technology, these smart contracts, available to anyone, with operating costs a fraction of what corporate interests use to line their pockets with. i think its sad to see Krypton abandon the EVM, and its sad to see Shift migrate to LISK, but thats the reality of the cryptopolitical landscape. to accomplish wwhat SOIL is to become, we need the EVM. and no, not Ethereum's blockchain or Expanse's blockchains, because those currencies are very good at being what they are building themselves into. SOIL should always be something different, and it should always be independent, and as open to its users as it is NOW. anyone can build on SOIL, anything. gas costs, comparatively, for computational intesive work, SOIL is gonna be the place to go. and i want SOIL to be a.. well.. a "humanitarian blockchain" or maybe the first truly GREEN one. ive said from the beginning that this project is going to something that takes YEARS to mature. what i WANT to build with it, technology has to catch up with. its a committment, and its been hard to really focus on it over the last few months, while finances were tighter than theyve ever been. but i weathered thru, and SOIL did too. i hope, if the 51Crew guys are monitoring these smaller EVM blockchains, and if theyre reading this, please dont attack SOIL. theres no money to pay off your ransom. for me, keeping my family fed is a near day to day proposition. i have NO cryptocurrency reserves. but SOIL is something different. we're under the radar, quietly building something that will benefit humanity in the end. its not about money, its about leaving something more and better behind than what we found this world when we were born.

that being said,hard coded benchmarks on the blockchain should be easy enough to fit into our protocols, and have those run by a smart contract. theres quite a lot of smart contract blockchain administrative stuff that i want to get set up under an umbrella SOILdev account, things already running on the SOILnet as contracts. this should be one of those sorts of things. at least, although the SOILcoin Foundation might maintain the keys to those contracts, the whole of it can be automated, and protected by a 2-of-3 multisig wallet, with at least one unaffiliated but active community member as a signatory.

this post really went sideways from where id planned, but lack of coffee in my system toay is likely the culprit. trying to catch up on these nodes, and cloud servers. to whom offered up a vultr server instance, id check the message list, but ive got KITTENS roaming across my mousepad right nw, and one wrong move... (sighs) will post again later if i can. i have a massive TO-DO list involved to get SOILnet back up and healthier than ever. then i can get back to building the neat stuff for it.

im hoping to have a few hard nodes running on cloud servers installed and running today. trying to set them up as btc-relayers as well, to further decentralize and automonize that function on the blockchain. peter was our blockchain expert, so im having to learn a lot on the fly regarding the parameters and such, going forward. i was always more interested in the smart contracts and dApp architecture, but if i can learn three programming languages in 6 months, i can get the knack of this part too. ive been working on the Homestead-compliant fork the last few days , and thinking about upping the block reward again was wondering what everyone thought of that as well. havent quite gotten to the fnal touches on the website, only so many hours in a day, and even less when you are raising a six year-old. will update as often as i can.

thanks for the rewelcomes! its feeling to good to get my fingers back into SOIL, and am hoping to put as many hours as possible into it, in between tattoo clients.


ive been reading up on this, and one might even think that the massive mining attacks that hit us (and lead to ridiculously long block times) during the past winter, may have been a precursor to these sorts of DDOS and double spend attacks. i like the idea of locked checkpoints, but i do also dislike the idea that it could lead to more centralization (a few individuals having control of when and where hardcoded checkpoints are set and handled.. which in malicious hands can lead to more double-spend attacks).

and perhaps this is the sand in the Vaseline; especially for smaller blockchains such as SOIL, or Krypton or Shift. (or whatever the newest ETH fork is); is that to provide stronger blockchain security, one must centralize more - which goes against the IDEALS behind cryptocurrency. ROCK -> x <- HARD PLACE. take the split in the ETH community, where now we have ETH, ETC, and EthRegenesis. This all led out of a centralized (Ethereum Foundation) decision to roll back the block chain.

Krypton seems to be moving onto a separate PoS chain until they solve the issue, moving away from the EVM. they purchased hash power and distributed it to try to regain control...  Shift is migrating to LISK, which I think has even MORE opportunity to be maliciously used do their their PoS delegates protocols as well as how the LISK sidechains are governed in relation to consensus and minting. Neither of those options seem very good, nor does the idea of sheltering as an Expanse-based asset, which makes no sense at all to me. `

we will be updating the core SOILcoin protocols with a fork, updating our system to Homestead compliancy. we will, i think, stick with following the protocol advances of the ETH-Core group, regardless of how i might feel personally about the recent fork and how it affects a radical shift away from decentralization. this will also be an opportunity to revisit the block reward issues, to increase supply and foundation reserves.

ill be watching VERY CLOSELY regarding the fixes that are discovered to prevent these attacks against small-hashrate currencies. setting out hard benchmarks on the blockchain, which is slightly decentralizing, seems to be the best answer right now, and perhaps a smart contract can be constructed to allow this to be done autonomously, controlled by a contract rather than an individual or even a 2-of-3 multisig wallet signature reliance to make those changes to benchmarks.

so, for the next week, ill be getting the hard nodes reset on servers. this will be an out of pocket expense, but if anyone knows of NEARLY FREE cloud servers that i can run the nodes on, vultr costs about $10 a month US per node. i will be updating the OP with up-to-date links and will get our website back up, hopefully with the soilcoin.com domain. ill get to work on the protocol upgrades, and update our mist-based wallet to the newest iteration.

hello community. things, financially, have been finally clearing up for me and hopefully ill now be able to start working on SOIL again. its been a terrible summer, and living hand-to-mouth has been very stressful. ive kept up with my reading, watching whats going on with the crypto world, and am presently in talks with a couple people about coming aboard a newly reinvigorated development team for SOILcoin. i have remained working on some of the applications we have been working on.. the platinum and paladium based tokens have been built, and im testing the casting and recasting methods. i have a new website built and will be purchasing our domain name for a permanent home for SOILcoin. im sorry that ive not had the chance to really work much with you guys this summer, real life intruded and while abbsent, ive never given up on SOIL. i have always viewed this currency, this project, as a long term goal... five years out has always been my horizon, and with the advances going through the EVM and related fields, im excited for our future. i finallly have the time this week to get some servers back up and running, to get the stats, pools, explorers, website, SOIL-ex, etc. back up and running on their front ends. ive worked out a lot on using the tech from the btc-relay (which has SOIL running a BTC lite client, allowing for communication between blockchains) embedded in SOILex to also build the same for other sha256 currencies. (namecoin, peercoin, unobtanium, etc) and have defacto trading pairs set up between SOIL and other currencies in a decentralized manner. i have remained in contact with the folks behind climateprediction.net and integrating boinc servers thru the EVM via SOIL, and that project.. overall.. at least six months out. encryption of work units over the EVM seems to be one of the leading issues, but when futzed out should be an incredible application for the EVM in so many ways. i still strongl y believe that a cryptocurrency can have a dramatic real world affect, beyond that as a simple financial tool, and thta the projects we develop for SOILcoin, aimed at those industries we have targettted from teh beginning, will a half-decade from now, have some of the greatest societal impact of all. we're almost a year into this project, and while theres been a lot of stumbles, this is an emergent technology after all, im hoping that we can have a new development team in place by end of the m onth, with things running smoothly again soon after. if anyone else is interested in getting their hands dirty for little to no pay but the satisfaction of building a better blockchain for the world, send me a message. im trying to keep up on those things, and now that i have time to spare again, and the bills arent keeping me up at night and im not worried about how im going to feed my wife and son that day, i hope we can start making a lot of noise with this project.

my apologies that i havent gotten everything set back up yet. its a pretty stressful time here in my house, finances are bad, and im putting in as much real world work as i can to simply put food on the table. im managing to sneak in a couple hours a night in working on SOIL, and i hope that once the financial crunch has passed, i cn start focussing more on SOIL again. i SHOULD have the website back up by tonite, im done editing and such. i havent abandonded this project by any eans, but as i rely on a small pension to pay the bills and my expenses have shot up in the last month, its rough to make ends meet, or even come within the same zip code. trying to get enough money together to catch up on rent, pay the bills enough so we dont get cut off and put food on the table for my wife and son. ive dropped thirty five pounds over the last month, which is far too much for me, down now to 140 pounds, standing 6'4". thank you al for your patience and understanding. i still believe in this project very strongly, and have a thousand ideas for dApps to build upon it that would make a difference in our world. ive had to use my devlopers reserve to actually get thru last month, but even with no major stake in this currency, i plan on continuing working on it as long as we remain viable. its going to take a bit of restructuring, and we will need to look at a fork on the blockchain to implement homestead protocol changes (which will ensure a stable blocktime and distribution curve) with this fork, it may become necessary to rebuilt community reserves and developers funds, especially to pay for server costs which are presently beyond my means. as a community, what do you fine folks think about that? i value the input.

so, naturally, during the time i was "internetless", the whole of cryptoworld was sent into a tailspin ove rthe DAO. ive spent a LOT of time in the last week, reading up on the situation, from every different perspective, mainly because we are an Ethereum-based blockchain, what happens there sheds an aura on us as well. im not sure where everyone's sympathies lie regarding the hard fork, or the fundemental split in the ETH community, the emergence of two competing chains, the vitriol and insanity being spread by both sides of the coin in this situation.

so for the record, i dont support the hard fork, or how the Ethereum Foundation is using the split funds (their reserves of ETC). when those chat logs were released online, showing that members of the Foundation were COLLUDING to sell their shares of ETC, to drive its price down. this is PRICE FIXING. here in canada, where mr. buterin is from, and who was implicitly involved in the collusion, the penalty for such a conspiracy of action is a maximum of 14 years imprisonment and/or a $25million dollar fine. the evidence in that chat log, pointing to a cabal of conspirators prepared to sell off their ETC to drive its price down and create a panic is well documented, and sets a dangerous precedent and i personally feel that an investigation into what has happened, how Ethereum Foundation members have dumped ETC stocks onto the market as part of a coordinated effort to discredit "the competition", will result in criminal charges and convictions.

i dont view the DAO kerfuffle as a hack or exploit and, being that the DAO presented itself as "the code is the law", they should have sucked up their losses, because even though it was "bad code", it should have been IMMUTABLE and CENSORSHIP FREE. those ETC tokens that the Foundation received should have been IMMEDIATELY and PUBLICLY sent to burn addresses instead of using the situation to enrich themselves. i do hope that there are criminal investigations into the situation.

i personally believe in the statements regarding the sacrosanct condition of the code, and that the blockchain should not be forked to preserve the funds of developers who built the flawed system that was exploited. even to the DAO investors who would lose funds because of the problem, they jumped in without due dilligence, and while this may have been done (investing in the DAO) on the thumbs up regarding code review by the foundation, its still an investment and thus comes with ingerent risk. and when a system fails and stocks collapse because of it, there shouldnt be a bailout. EVER.

i do know that an investigation has been launched regarding Ethereum antitrust and price-fixing. money has been made by foundation members by dumping ETC onto the market, "free money" as they put it, and it was done to ensure that the value of ETC diminished in order to raise their own valuation for ETH. its gonna get ugly, and in the end.. both ETH and ETC communities will suffer for it.

one thing this situation with ETH /ETC has shown is how important community is, and that is what SOIL has had strongly ever since our launch. this situation legitimizes the need for "small focus" blockchains that will serve specific industries. a clear message of VERIFIABLE CHANGELESSNESS of the blockchain needs to be made a strong and central part of the message.

all that being said... ive had an insanely busy week with my real-world job, and hopefully clients will be fewer this week so i can finish what i was doing for SOIL. theres been a lot of reorganization thats needed to be done, and ive got a new server up and running, hopefully wil have our network intelligence back up by tonite. ive rebuilt the website, and am just doing final edits and should have that back up and running within the day as well. i will be revamping our social media presences as well, and will get those slack invites out this afternoon.

SOILcoin needs to be restructured, community wise, and we will be facing a fork of our own sooner than later to bring our protocols up to homestead releases on ETH/ETC. with peters departure, many of the funds in the community reserves were lost and this also may need to be restructured, and ive been looking at how we might use contracts to facilitate the flow of these reserves, with multi-sig wallets etc. so, while we begin to loook at a revamping of the SOILcoin infrastructure, and weighing against the experiences of Ethereum these past few months, id like to ask what sort of changes... to the protocol (blocktimes, rewards, etc)... to the SOILcoin "council" and security for community held reserves... that the community itself would like to see.

we've been under the radar for much of our existence, but with the changes that have occurred in the greater crypto ecosystem, i think we need to come out from under cover and present a viable and IMMUTABLE blockchain alternative to the politics and one-upmanship involved between ETH and ETC.

send me your email address and ill send an invite. ill be trying to keep a slack instance open on my computer and to maintain availability when im around

I have finally gotten back online! Ive taken the last few days, catching up on the news around the cryptocurrency world, and having to work a "day job" to bring in money to get this household running smoothly. The day job is doing tattoos so its not too bad> Anyhow, in the next couple of days, ill get the website, network intelligence, et al, back up and running. I truly apologize for the length of my absence, I had hoped to be back online within a week of moving but household finances were nearly annihilated during the move and our service providers here in canada are pretty costly, not to mention between $200-400 in requested deposits before service. Ive not been lax, and have been doing a lot of research during my down time, and have some great ideas for ismple (and scalable) contracts for starting to provide service to our core target industries. I hope to have the SOILcoin ecosystem back up and running smoothly again within a week. Thank you all for your patience, its been a nightmare trying to get thru last month, but I have renewed vigor to get back at things and really make a difference in this world using SOIL resident contracts. I have a TN of emails to answer, so if those whove written dont hear back from me immediately now that Im back online, I promise that Ill answer everyone within the next few days. 

I'll have internet hooked up again. Finally! On Friday, and will be back hard at work on SOIL this weekend. Than you all for your patience. Can't wait to get stuff done again. It's been a lonnnnng month.

the move is JUST ABOUT DONE!! hopefully, by tomorrow, i will have the computer set up again and get those thngs that i had almost finished actually DONE> this move has taken much longer than expected, thanks to brake failures on the car, etc. it will be so nice to have the time to devote back to SOILcoin again after this insanely convoluted month. hope all is well with all of you!

i found the nodes in the message above worked fine. everything synched up no problem.

the problem seems to be that our new york "hard node" has gone down. these were set up by peter long time ago. i will reset these nodes as soon as i get my computer rebuilt at my new house (im using the public library right now) which will require new executables but should fix the problem forthwith. my move is going as smoothly as moves usually go. 8 hours of driving back and forth every day (three trips) and im exhausted. ALMOST done.

My apologies for my absence recently. As mentioned, Im in the middle of moving, and thus, havent really been able to do a single thing regarding SOIL in the last week. I should FINALLY be done with the move by this weekend, and internet will be set up in my new place by the time we're moved in, and then I'll be double timing it to catch up. Ive been in discussion with a couple people who would be willing to come on board as our blockchain expert, and hopefully I will have that hammered out before end of the month. Hope everyone is doing well!!

peter used the cosmo editor with one release he made. but, with the contract editing and development, which is what most end users would use, already built into the MIST wallet, direction was pushed in that direction. with dApp deployment, if its written in serpent, ive been using pyepm. its taken a lot of futzing to build the file right for deployment, but now that ive gotten comfortable with it, i dont find i even look at other development platforms like truffle or whatnot. and since im really working on top of other peoples work, vetting the contracts and javascript whatsits and making sure they implement correctly on the SOIL network, most of the time, the deployment package for development is pretty standard. ive noticed a commonality to using grunt for front end work, which gives me conniptions, it never likes to remain installed globally on my server. dunno why. gremlins. its always gremlins.

trying to get work in as often as possible these past few days, and have been talking with a few people that might come on board and help with blockchain development.. ill be less in over the next week as im moving from my comfortable place by the ocean into what passes for the big city around here (31,000 people) packing is neer fun, especially with a 6 year old helping.

heres a question i want to throw out there, just because... weve all heard about the demise of the DAO. even its developers have said theyve given up on it. and yet... its token is holding steady at 10,000+ satoshi, and ive seen it, last night, it even RISE in price. people are still investing in it, even after a public debacle. i dont get it. me.. i want to develop EVRYTHING on SOIL RIGHT NOW sorta thing, to make it worth something especially to those who have already invested in it. as a developer, i feel a responsibility to my shareholders, which is really what this loose sort of community is. many people have invested hard earned money and resources into helping drive SOIL, and i pray that by building it up right, and patiently, it will reap everyone rewards.

itll be interesting to see what sort of decision is made, regarding hard or soft forks, and the FUD and hallelujahs on both sides of the issue are amusing to watch. i still think ETH, as a unit, the virtual machine, is a hugely important invention, and i dont think the weakness is in solidity itself, although serpent is also a great working language. anyhow. we've seen how a contract can be manipulated, and im sure we'll see eventually, contracts that are malicious in intent as well. its a brave new world. how free we keep it... thats up to us. SOIL will remain free in that we have n ocontrol over what contracts are deployed on the blockchain. and dont want any. investments are the sole discretion of the investor, no matter what the platform is. people bought into the DAO without understnding it... just like people are buying into LISK without really seeing how centralized and monopolized it can become with a simple concentrated effort, and the "dapps minig" is a breeding ground for corruption. my prognostication is we see the next epic collapse from a "dirty dapp" on LISK in the next 6 months.

theres always going to be failures, its simply shocking to see when hundredsof millions of dollars are stipped off the value of something over what has happened. i wish the folks at ETH the best in dealing with this.

Im sure many here have read about the collapse (or hack) of the DAO on ethereum, and just wanted to see what people thought about that. i followed the Slock-it DAO very closely as i have been working on an implementation of the DGX token (which DGD was tied into, it receiving the transaction fees from DGX usage) using platinum and palladium to start with. DGX also works with a DAO attached, (DGD) so it will be interesting to watch what happens coming out from this situation.

hopefully this will lead lead to reputable auditing services and a propensity to publishing and verifying contract code, not only the bytecode. being that we have to trust smart contracts to, as the ethereum website originally put it, "act exactly as they are programmed to", we also have to have those contracts ENTIRELY open-source, both in repositories and verifiable on the blockchain.

i hope that they DONT do a hard fork for ethereum. the mission statement they espoused was that ETH was to be censorship-free. they need to have a distance between the blockchain (the Foundation) and the dApps that are running on it. this is why i take so long with the platforms we are releasing. i spent four months going over the code for SOIL-ex, trying it out in different ways, trying to find a way to have the "BTC light client" provided by btc-relay and btc-swap NOT cost so much to run....

i hope all in this community that are invested in ETH werent also hit by shares in the DAO.. hope all your losses are light.

essentially, just to keep moving forward with applications and working on spreading the brand of SOIL far and wide. presently, im working on our implementation of SafeMarket, as a decentralized marketplace; and on our precious metals market. the precious metals should be ready by end of june. we already have some platinum and palladium ready to be listed and sold as asset-backed currencies, and have a few vendors willing to participate. i have been watching "the DAO" closely, in how we might release something similar to the DGD token as a method of profit sharing related to the transaction fees and storage fees that are part of the minting/recasting process.

i continue to write emails explaining the project to community and industry representatives, each and every day, introducing them to SOIL, our mission, and the EVM and crypto in general. it is my hope that while we may not have dApps geared specifically to these industries yet, the groundwork is there and as they become more aware of the options we can present, will turn quickly to using SOIL and our cost efficient computational array.

im still looking for new core development team members, and encourage ANYONE with a desire to get their hands dirty, and lose all sense of free time in their lives, to write me. SOIL has a specific direction, but we need a capable team to bring us there, and we need to look at the protocols and such going forward to ensure a strong vibrant future for the SOILcoin project.

i may be a little less available near the end of the month as im moving into the city, and we all know how much fun moving a household is. especially with a 6 year-old. therell be new white hairs on my beard by the time this move is done.

as mentioned above, im rebuilding the website from scratch.
will go look into the pool right now.

SOIL isnt dead. presently its under a bit of reorganization, but im still working on the project just as obsessively as before.

if the success of a project like SOILcoin is to happen, its going to be through reaching out to those people and industries that wouldnt hae an immediate connection to cryptocurrency. ill start tweeting stuff connected to our core principles, making connections. tweet out to industries that would use those services that SOIL is building.

ive started posting a bit of a blog, gathering up posts from here, user guides for our Mist wallet, soil-ex stuff, etc. and will start keeping that up to date as well. soilcoin.blogspot.ca

just working on the new website this afternoon. i get a bit nitpicky when im editing, but im hoping that presenting a consistent message about where the direction of the project is going will help bring in people who want a clear road map. the beauty... and curse.. of this sort of platform is that we can build SO MUCH on it, and finding small niche markets that can be built out from..

as an example...

im working on a python registry. not the programming language... the snake.

my wife breeds them. the community has developed a very particular breeding and genetic registry of sorts, very ad hoc, with some breeders having thousands of snakes, many worth several hundreds to thousands of dollars thanks to selective recessive breedings, this whole industry has TRIED to build out a registry before, but it just got unweildy to MAINTAIN.

so, starting small, my wife and her immediate breeder people, will be producing a single asset token for each snake with IPFS registered genetic and ownership records. costs to run the registry rely on simple transaction costs, so minimal. altering data (via sale or breeding reords) would be another small fee, but altogether, a thousand times cheaper than what they paid to register their ball pythons in the first place with the now defunct registry.

something small like that can be scaled out for any sort of livestock or pet registry. which is where large scale usage comes in. beyond the regular gas costs for transactions and token creation during registry, youve got a low-cost, secure and pervasive kennel club registry, or thoroughbred horse registry. its also a step towards a full sort of provenance that can be easily traced back.... farm to plate or herpareum.

OP updated. still have some tweaking to do, as im just familiarizing myself with HTML code stuffs, which will be done after im done my supper.