we've applied for listing at poloniex, and theres been wonderful community support with retweets, so i think that eventually we will be listed there, but ive received no word from them regarding this. from the amount of vetting ive done regarding different exchanges, poloniex is one of the better ones, so i do hope we are eventually listed there. the slice of exchange exposure that id like to see SOIL represented on gets smaller all the time, as i want to ensure that exchanges we list upon are ones that we can count on.

in writing up the white paper for SOIL-ex, i did a LOT of research on the failed exchanges, and its an arm's length list thats generally populated with tales of fraudulent exchange ownership, and how quickly and easily they can make off with the money. thats something id like to insulate SOILcoin from, as best as possible.

that being said, im still trying to figure my way thru the chinese exchanges, as i think being listed there would bring a great deal of exposure to SOIL, and have talked to an exgirlfriend of mine about translating our OP into chinese in preparation of that.

polo, though... itll happen when it happens. im certain we WILL see it happen, as we continue to improve our protocol, to develop our services... and to have such a steadfast and involved community. the fact that we're being bandied about on the trollbox, though, is a good sign. if theyre talking about us, that will bring added impetus to bring SOIL in.

i hadnt looked into azure yet, but am doing so today. i noticed that the bizspark startup services looked good, but that every announcemnt from new currencies signing up are canned form letters, and that the "partnership" with microsoft that some are claiming is somewhat misrepresented. the bizsparks program allows $120,000 in Azure usage over 1 year, not as some currencies have claimed, that microsoft contributes these funds for software and services is given directly to the projects in question. after the first year, server costs will come into play, as well as software licensing costs.

microsoft is also known for its data collection techniques, the BizSparks EULA allows provisions for bandwidth control, keylogging, browser histories.. each "startup" that applies to use biszparks grants a limited license for microsoft to use the startup's trademarks, logos, and other business identifiers as well as grants MS the right to publish, use, reference and display the startup's name (SOILcoin, for example), including quotes, pictures, names etc. related to the startup.

the whole question is... where we exist in a decentralized atmosphere, with pseudonymous protection and strong blockchain security... how much of that is given up in order to have Microsoft provide exposure for a blockchain? theyve already stated that "microsoft's services can serve as an arbiter in cryptographic key storage" which says a lot... do your private-keys cease having the protection of exclusively being end-user controlled and stored?

ive opened a personal azure account to look around the system, and as a developer, its a great resource. ive started the process of application for bizspark as well, to see what its all about under the gift wrapping. its definitely something to look into, but my biggest concern is that we eventually give up autonomy to having everything run thru centralized (owned by microsoft) servers rather than produce the sorts of decentralized applications that provide the same services (such as storj for decentralized storage, or something like bitmessage for cryptographically secure messaging) sure, its EASIER to leverage these sorts of services and applications thru microsoft, but isnt the whole point of cryptocurrency to remain decentralized and not under control (however tenuous, its still spelled out in the user agreements) of a megacorp? 

i dont know if there are enough answers supplied or services easy to find with azure yet, but i dont have the experience necessary, with the platform, to make an empirical judgement call. i know that having signed up with azure, personally, i cant find any of the "Blockchain as a Service" platforms easily. i guess its a "six of one, half dozen of the other" sorta thing. it comes down to how much PRIVACY do we give away as an independent blockchain and cryptocurrency to have the convenience of a microsoft run and supported development environment? 

 

i need a community member with strong environmental renewal tendencies to volunteer to be a signatory on a multi-sig wallet that im building for a charitable organization for a project im working on. just need your wallet address so that i can include it into the contract wallet.

**my apologies for the lengthiness... this basically qualifies as the "white paper" for the SOIL-ex project. im presently working through the user guide that will be built in to the platform, but this gives a good overview of the need for such an entity on the blockchain, where the project is now and where its going***

SOIL-ex: A distributed subcurrency exchange on the SOILnet

THEORY
 
The financial services industry has recently accepted the benefits of the application of the decentralized blockchain, and its disruption of traditional ways of doing business. The blockchain is most popularily represented by the distributed public ledger of Bitcoin. This accounting technology, disseminated across a global network of user-participating computers records every transaction - with little or no cost - as a way to authenticate digital transactions, offering irrecovable proof of asset ownership with a traceable and immutable history.

This fiscal disruption, however, has remained unrealized in how complete a change it brings. While cryptocurrencies have revolutionized the transfer and control of assets, wealth, and commodities; a very specific hinderance has restrained them from reaching their full potentiality and mass adoption. This complication resides in the ongoing dependency on online centralized, privately owned, cryptocurrency exchanges.

As more and more individuals have embraced blockchain technology, myriad alternative currencies ("altcoins") have sprung up, boasting a wide range of innovations, providing multitudinous options for investing in cryptocurrencies. Online exchanges have permitted trading between one altcoin to another, and have operated very similarily to real-world stock exchanges, with many available options such as lending, trade-bots, binary options and derivatives.

Within the short history of cryptocurrency trading, though, there is a long list of defunct exchanges that succumbed to poor security, mismanagement, insolvency or outright theft on the part of their owners. The victims of these centralized altcoin exchanges have lost millions as a result, and due to the pseudonymous nature of cryptocurrency, these pilfered funds prove difficult to trace, the perpetuators nearly impossible to locate and prosecute. Extensive adoption of the digital currency ecosystem beyond the cryptocurrency subculture has been inhibited by this problem; potential users, having learned of these disappearances, have chosen to avoid alternative-currency investment, remaining steadfastly in the familiar world of fiat currency.

The most famous theft, originating from the Mt.Gox exchange has even lead to the term "getting Goxxed". Mt.Gox was established by Jed McCaleb on July 2010 as a place to trade Magic the Gathering playing cards, and was subsequently sold to Mark Karpelès on March 6, 2011. At it’s peak, Gox managed nearly 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. In February 2014, the company suspended trading, shut down its website, and filed for bankruptcy protection while 850,000 BTC vanished from customer wallets, valued at more than USD$450 million at the time. CEO Mark Karpelès was arrested August 1 2015, by Japanese police for falsifying data on the outstanding debts on Mt.Gox, and was later also charged with embezzlement. He remains imprisoned to this day, and the majority of the missing funds remain unaccounted for.

Bitcoinica, launched on September 8, 2011, suffered heavy financial losses on March 1st, 2012, when its web host was victim to an internal security breach that permitted the attacker to have access to the exchange-wallet in which Bitcoinica stored it's user's funds. More than 43,000 bitcoins were stolen by the attacker. At that time, its operators (Intersango Ltd.) issued a statement guaranteeing its users that exchange reserves were sufficient to cover the loss, but again on May 11, 2012 Bitcoinica suffered another security incident in which its hot wallet was emptied once again, which lead to Bitcoinica's immediate shutdown. On August 6 2012, several plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Bitcoinica citing "conspiracy, breach of contract, negligence and conversion". By February 2014, the three defendants representing Intersango had not responded to the allegations and plaintiffs were seeking a default judgement.

BitMarket.eu, launched April 5th, 2012, was a multi-exchange order matching market service that did well at first, but was prone to operator dishonesty. After increasingly degraded service, claims of being hacked, and refusals to process outgoing BTC transactions; on December 21, 2012, the operator Maciej Trebacz finally admitted that he had used the customer's funds for speculation, and that nearly 20,000 BTC of its customer's funds were lost. As of October 2014, many people were still searching for their refunds, receiving many excuses from Mr. Trebacz.

Even as recently as this year, Cryptsy threatened bankruptcy, claiming 13,000 BTC and 300,000 LTC were lost in a hack on their system. These losses were experienced over 18 months previously, in July 2014. Owner Paul Vernon claimed in an official blog post that trojan malware was inserted into Cryptsy’s code by the developer of Lucky7Coin giving access to the company’s wallets. Instead of relvealing these losses to users, Vernon kept trading open in the hopes of regaining solvency, and did not report the theft as he did not know to whom he should report it. The exchange website remains online, but is considered inactive and has zero volume in trading on it.

These are just a FEW of the failed exchanges, at least three dozen exchanges have fallen by the wayside over the last few years, some due to regulatory issues, some due to security failures and some by sheer fraudulent practices by their owners. As altcoin exchanges go down, smaller currencies, many of them with hard-working development teams, and limited exchange presences, find they are losing their exchange platforms for their currencies. Crosschain integration bringing currencies such as this to be traded on a decentralized exchange will let smaller cryptocurrencies get out from under the thumb of trusting a third party to provide them a place to sell their currencies.

Thus, the need for a better approach: a way forward that will help bring an end to the phenomenon of getting “Goxxed”, a decentralized exchange built on the SOINnet virtual machine, SOIL-ex. SOIL-ex is built from the Ethereum project, EtherEx, and will serve, currently as a subcurrency exchange, and will grow into a pure cryptocurrency exchange with two-way pegged sidechain cryptocurrencies and commodities futures being traded in a secure and distributed fashion.

In August, 2015; Ethereum was launched, providing the opportunity to build smart contracts directly into the blockchain, enabling a previously unrealized scalability of innovative disributed applications (dApps). SOILcoin launched on October 17, 2015 as a fork of Ethereum, with a stated purpose to build dApps that would serve renewable energy, automatized agriculture and computational scientific concerns. Building SOIL-ex to include a pegged hard and soft commodities exchange, attached to a decentralized and contract driven cryptocurrency exchange platform, is where id like to see this project go, and while this basic layer of exchange is based on the EtherEx project for Ethereum, which is what drew me into the idea of truly freeing ones digital assets from any potential breaches of trust presented by centralized third-party exchanges.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Concept
2. Limitations of current platforms
3. The distributed order book
4. Requirements
5. Challenges and potential solutions
      -Blockchain bloat
      -Cross-chain coins and fiat integration
      -Features
      -Adoption
6.Conclusion


1. CONCEPT - The NEED for asset exchange decentralization

SOIL-ex is composed of several smart contracts running on the SOILcoin blockchain, chiefly etherex.se and etx.se. These contracts interact with each other to commit cryptocurrency trades, executed directly between users, with no middleman or fees between, excepting the computational cost of the transaction in gas. Users simply enter trade information and send funds to the master contract. Once this master contract receives and confirms both sides of the trade, it executes and sends the appropriate assets to the respective parties involved. This contract executes on the blockchain and requires no third-party human interaction to complete the trade. Even should the project be abandoned by the developer, the contract will remain live on the blockchain, its functions can be called by API and javascript bindings, and the open sourced frontend can be cloned via GitHub repositories within minutes, either on a cloud server or as a local instance by the user, maintaining market reliability.

Further contracts and interoperability can be seamlessly interwoven into the operations and features of the exchange, leveraging the web3 protocols and javascript in the frontend design, and will create a suite of contracts with an infinitely scalable and modifiable method capable of decentralized exchange of assets of many conceivable values. The present release of SOIL-ex is built to test out these contracts, in a live manner. To find new use concepts for subcurrencies, for "crosschain interoperability". This is the foundation upon which to build on, to improve. The "Frontier release" of decentralized asset exchange in the Wild West of a global smart contract machine.

The primary differentiation between a decentralized exchange such as SOIL-ex and a traditional online centralized cryptocurrency exchange is simply the location wherein your funds are held during a trade. On conventional exchanges, that are able to pay out withdrawals instantly can be said to be paying them from a "hot wallet"; one that is connected in some way, live, to the Internet. An exchange hot wallet provides easy access to an asset, but suffers the greatest risk of unrecoverable theft to the user in the event of security breaches or administrative fraud.

Operating a "hot wallet" is also a risk to the centralized exchange owner, as bugs or malicious exploits against their underlying computer systems have already revealed hidden vulnerabilities of one sort or another, and the probability of hackers or malware creators continuing to try to break into the system and steal the balances of digital assets in the blink of an eye, which can create immediate insolvency on the exchange, the inability to honor the digital representation of what proportion of exchange funds your asset represents. This scenario has played out with unfortunate consequences already. Users have no choice but to trust the exchange's owners to execute trades, and to hold their funds in a principled, honest and secure fashion, when many examples, recent and otherwise show that while many ARE honest, some definitely aren't.

The bottom line is, your funds are not really YOURS when theyre held in an exchange wallet, you do not actually own the security behind those assets. What you have is essentially a promissory note that you own this much of the represented asset that is held on that exchange, but there is no guarantee that those assets are absolutely secure. There is no warranty that the private keys owned by the exchange are definitively protected from malicious code or hackers, and you have little chance of retrieving those funds in the case of loss thru security flaw or criminal enterprise by exchange owners or employees.

Furthermore, online cryptocurrency exchanges often require much more detailed personal information, tied into your user account, and therefore tied onto your digital note of ownership to the balance of funds you have stored online in your exchange wallet. Ones private information security is another potential risk of centralized, privately-owned cryptocurrency exchanges. Some exchanges require scanned government issued photographic identification, scans of bank statements or utility bills displaying your name and address, even a photograph of yourself holding your photo id. Some exchanges will now use credit reporting agencies to access your credit score or potentially, the contents of your credit file using your name, date of birth and address information provided during account creation, in order to process user verification. Coinbase, one of the larger and well-established exchanges, has as of 2014 closed accounts of customers who transferred bitcoins from gambling sites.

In the case of a decentralized exchange, like SOIL-ex, the exchange takes advantage of an independent smart contract deployed onto the SOILcoin blockchain. This contract - and not the exchange contract deployer (owner) - controls user deposits and exchanges. This contract has no suicide function, that is: there is no ability for the contract owner to kill the contract and retrieve the contract wallet balance back to themselves.

Embracing the vision of true decentralization, SOIL-ex would maintain no user identifications. Exchanges are done, via smart contract between one private SOILcoin address and another. Ones identity on SOILex is ones wallet address, ones password is their private key, which remains stored on the users computer and off the blockchain. There are options in other sectors of the dAppsphere where one can, via smart contract, register their name or other information against their wallet address. In many cases, creating a verifiable digital identity and reputation is bound to become a more and more important need in this emerging PostCurrency world, but the level of personal information one broadcasts with their wallet address is by personal choice, and as such, not required by the exchange contract to complete an asset transfer.

SOILcoin will scale to produce a full exchange platform, beginning with the exchange of contract subcurrencies built into the SOILcoin ecosystem , which can be assembled with many imaginative parameters, to represent anything of "value", against the base currency (SOIL). There are many use-cases where this method of decentralized asset exchange can be useful on the present SOILcoin network.

Asset-backed DAOs can issue tokens in the value of shares, and have the ability thru their governing contracts to issue dividends. MicroLending and crowdsourced campaigns can issue tokens for value towards a funding goal in a fungible marketplace. Registered animal breeders can issue single-asset tokens representing a digital ownership and stored identification of an animal, which the rights to can be traded via a decentralized exchange contract alongside the physical asset, tracing ancestory, provenance and potentially veterinarian records. Microgrid renewable energy projects can build a token to pay participants with, as a reward for production, which can be exchanged for other assets living on the blockchain thru the exchange contract.

With next-step evolution in crosschain interconnectivity, and smart contract design, other offchain cryptocurrencies (altcoins) can be brought onto the SOILcoin network for purpose of decentralized trade via the exchange master contract. This will begin to mirror the general use-case of online centralized exchanges, with the difference that the user does not have to trust the opposite party in the trade; or trust that a private exchange owner will behave responsibly and ethically with user assets within the exchange's control, or to trust the security measures in place to protect both assets and personal information privacy.

Further scaling in operations towards bridging fiat integration for purchases on a decentralized exchange via smart contracts, and pegged hard and soft commodities trades in a decentralized mercantile exchange will be explored, as well as how to apply this sort of contract logic to other services. 

SOIL-ex has borrowed MIGHTILY on the EtherEx platform (https://etherex.org/), and the developers: caktuk, <> and we owe a great debt of gratitude for the fact their platform was released open-sourced, in the true sprit of decentralized knowledge, which has lead me to really investigate the technology and potentialities of what a decentralized exchange can BE and how it can serve the users of SOILcoin, now and into our future; and what the challenges ahead might be, and how easily surmountable.

SOIL-ex exists as a smart contract (etherex.se), code which lives on the SOILcoin network, and is auditable. The live SOIL-ex master contract address is deployed to: 0x87e45bfc1e0805b557790b00fbc878f797a185e6. SOIL-ex will also maintain a github repository of changes made from the parent projects, at: <https://github.com/abvhiael> We will add further commitments to the platform which provide added functionality and further security as able, and welcome the community to improve upon this project, find new uses for it, push its boundries.

2. LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT PLATFORMS

The concept of a decentralized exchange has been gaining ground in recent months, and several projects have already surfaced, some of which are presently operational: such as Coinffeine (which requires use of centralized payment processors) or Bitsquare (which still maintains a need for third party arbitrators). Both implement the concept of asset exchange in a p2p fashion, and are built to access the Bitcoin network. Bitshares maintains funds in an online wallet, and states that each asset is backed "by up to twice the reserves of traditional centralized exchanges" This still requires the user to trust that statement, and to hand over their assets to the control of a third-party. However, these exchanges are also limited by the restricted nature of Bitcoin's blockchain technology. They approach decentralization, but remain just beyond it's cusp.

Bitcoin, by its fundamental essence, is designed exclusively for secure peer-to-peer currency transposition and transaction accounting; and truly, it is highly proficient at securely providing the technology for this behavior; when one user sends BTC to another, the distributed public ledger will prove that the sender now has less BTC and the receiver has more BTC. But while Bitcoin's inter-mutual registry permits BTC to thrive as a cryptocurrency, its particular design also introduces major constraints. BTC records every users balance, and every transaction ever made on the system, and provides a cryptographically secure way to transmit those funds to other users, and thats about it.

It is these limitations that make the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which SOILcoin parallels, a distinctly superior foundation for hosting a decentralized and secure cryptocurrency exchange.

3. THE DISTRIBUTED ORDER BOOK

With SOILcoin, leveraging the Ethereum-based programmatic system, there is now a secure infrastructure upon which a decentralized exchange can be built which requires no concessions of personal anonymity and asset security. Limitations presented by first generation blockchains such as Bitcoin, and the need for coarse bypasses of built-in systemic issues are rendered inconsequential through the use of the EVM protocol, which harnesses an authoritative suite of programming and cryptographic mechanisms built in from scratch.

SOILcoin provides an impeccable platform for trustless asset exchange transparency. The order book, the trading engine, and every rule we need to make an exchange work can be centralized in the aspect of a pre-built front-end to the application- and we can do this in a way that can be achieved in a manner that is completely and verifiably transparent, with unconditional open-source availability, applying the demonstrable and substantiated security of blockchain technology.

When making trades, your wallet will use the SOIL-ex platform to find bid or ask offers opened by other traders. This service is centralized, but it is never involved in the actual transfer of funds so it doesn't require any trust. The trades are performed by the contract which the platform takes advantage of. This order book, built into SOIL-ex's front end, can be built and run on a traders own computer to access the contracts rather than viewed on the hosted server, and the determinative characteristics of smart contracts that run on the SOILnet brings a trustworthy explicitness to a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange.

4. REQUIREMENTS

Fully operational SOILcoin network, with a running local node capable of connecting to the front-end software component thru RPC.
Standard balance check API.
A trustworthy order-book and a secure network to process trade completions.
Cross-chain interaction with other cryptocurrencies.
A standardized subcurrency and token design parameter.

5. CHALLENGES AND POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

As illustrated within the theory behind the need for this sort of innovation, privately held and centralized exchanges suffer from genuine confidence obstacles, owing from past abuses by unscrupulous operators and weak security measures. A decentralized exchange disentagles these risks, but also creates complications of its own. These include:

Possible blockchain bloat
Cross-chain coins and fiat integration
Features
Adoption
Ecosystem

The integration of other cryptocurrencies and sidechain interconnectivity is a real predicament of a decentralized exchange - and remains a challenge for all aspects of blockchain technology at present.  This is one of the chief reasons why few have emerged so far, in any capacity. SOILcoin provides a compelling solution to the security and decentralization issues that are needed to build a trustworthy platform for asset management, but also introduces the mandatory constituents for other cryptocurrencies to begin interacting across blockchains. A true decentralized exchange will be among the first distributed applications to take advantage of these possibilities.

Outside of the SOIL-ex platform, a decentralized exchange will need to communicate with secure wallets (such as SOILsafe) and the related exchange APIs to communicate information back into the trading engine. The initial operation of a SOILcoin/Bitcoin (SOIL/XBTC) trading pair would presently require a more centralized approach, depending on the tools available to secure cross-chain transactions and SPV proofs. Alternatives for sidechain communication will present themselves as the associated technology advances, and these will have to be considered when they emerge as to how they can be utilized on SOIL-ex.

     -Blockchain bloat-

Commonly refered to as "blockchain bloat", the problem arises as more transactions are made, causing the blockchain to have more data to record, and as it grows exponentially larger, it becomes difficult to effeciently download or store. As a decentralized exchange gains greater adoption, each transaction, from listing buy and sell orders, to completion of trades, is recorded on the blockchain, which all users of the ecosystem record on their personal nodes. SOILcoin's blockchain is presently approximately 700MB in size, but should SOIL-ex gain traction as a viable alternative to traditional privately run exchanges, this could add much gravity to the SOILcoin chain.

Another consideration will be the cost, in "gas", to make those transactions into the SOIL-ex platform. As such, a decentralized exchange such as SOIL-ex will be inadequate for high-frequency trading (HTF), which is characterized by high speed, high turnover, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverage electronic trading tools, called "trade bots". Also, due to gas costs, and block-time delays needed to record trade orders and completions, this sort of platform will also be unsuited towards very small trades. These sorts of transactions, recorded on teh blockchain, would add to potential bloat issues as they accumulate.

As such, the system is set up with a minimum trade order value, equalling to 1 unit of the base currency. While SOILcoin maintains a fairly small market valuation, this 1 SOIL limit isn't prohibitive to trading, but as worth per share increases, such as Ethereum's current value hovering between USD $10-15, this can be a restraint against higher adoption of the system.

      -Cross-chain coins and fiat integration-

SOILcoin is a private blockchain, and like any decentralized cryptocurrency, which is a world unto itself. Even though we run a parrallel algorithm with Ethereum, SOILcoin cannot directly speak with ETH, or leverage smart contracts deployed on the ETH blockchain. SOILcoin cannot directly communicate with the Bitcoin blockchain, or any other cryptocurrency. This means bridging cross-chain currencies into the SOILcoin through implementations of smart contracts and oracles to communicate with the outside world.

With further development, it will be possible to integrate BTC and ETH "sidechains" inside of SOILcoin contracts, to bring those assets, and their "digital ownership" onto the SOILcoin network via a "SOIL-->contract XCOIN sidechain-->XCOIN" which would allow pegged sidechains for other cryptocurrencies implemented as a subcurrency contract on SOILcoin. Thus, these "smart contract XCOIN sidechains" would be a property of the crosschain currency, but not a part of its protocol. This contract exists seperately from the currencys main-chain but is interoperable with it.

Other options that have been explored to one-way-peg a subcurrency to a crosschain basecurrency (e.g. BTC, GEO, ENRG) by releasing the units of basecurrency into a sidechain, which would trigger a "proof-of-burn distribution", which would send the incoming basecurrency to a "burn address", returning a cryptographic proof of transaction, which would release a 1-for-1 purchase of the SOILcoin network-existant subcurrency.

These features dont exist ESSENTIALLY on the Ethereum-protocol language we have adopted, the contracts and frameworks have to be completely figured out for this. The challenge with this, is building pegs to other cryptocurrencies while maintaining the pure decentralization and security of the SOILcoin network, as well as the need to ensure incoming crosschain protocols extend to support the SPV proof of possesion.

Ensuring that asset security is met, transactions between crosschain currencies and their contract subcurrency sidechain, must be done without counterparty risk (no ability for dishonest parties to prevent the transaction), and should be atomic (happen entirely or not at all). There is a complexity issue to crosschain interoperablility. On a basic network level, there are multiple, unsynchronized and independent blockchains acting as the transaction ledgers for their specific base currency. User interfaces for wallet management would have to be reconfigured, to recognize digital ownership of offchain assets.

"Smart contract XCOIN sidechains" would, by necessity, need to be protected from catastrophic failure of the offchain asset. The sidechain can act as a "fractional reserve" of the assets it is storing from its parent chain. Thresholds of "overall asset reserve" or an insurance contract could act as a way to prevent a "bank run" of withdrawals to or from the sidechain, leaving somebody eventually "holding the bag" on one network or the other.

Sidechains produce another potential issue, in mining. Miners will begin to need to validate transactions relating to sidechain asset movement, thus more resources are needed to track and validate them all. With a scalable sized block size, SOILcoin should be able to handle these extra work loads, but many cryptocurrencies have a maximum block size, and transactions can become bottlenecked. 

Another potential problem with a decentralized exchange, especially something like SOIL-ex which includes an inherent ability for any user to list their currency, is that some currencies LOSE developer support, dry up and die, and as a protection to users so that a market lister cannot just remove their market and disappear - once listed, a currency cannot be delisted. This will probably present an issue later on, but a process can be implemented to handle that when we have major upgrades to the system that require a new deployment, preferably with an oversight committee of sorts, with clear majority multi-sig decision having a voice as to not RELIST a currency during redeployment.

The use of certain contracts, like btcrelay and btc-swap, the latter of which is built in and deployed with the SOIL-ex exchange, act as an Ethereum-protocol smart contract for Bitcoin SPV. The underlying principle of the btc-swap contract is to purchase SOIL directly with BTC. Although its a little more involved, the simplest explanation is that an order is set, offering an amount of SOIL for a value in BTC, to be sent to an intermediary BTC wallet the purchaser creates. The purchaser performs a proof of work operation to solve a nonce based on the transaction hash produced by the BTC transaction. This nonce is verified, at which point the contract broadcasts the signed Bitcoin Transaction to the Bitcoin network, enabling the purchaser to claim their SOILcoins for BTC, directly, without middleman or centralized exchange.

What the btc-swap contract does, bare bones, is "send $X SOIL to A's SOILaddress if $Y BTC has been sent to B's BTC address" The code allows the smart contract on SOILcoin to take action based on a BTC transaction hash, with the assurance that the transaction has been sufficiently confirmed and present on the BTC blockchain.

Fiat integration directly towards SOILcoin, be it for direct transactions for the base currency or as a SOILcoin-existant subcurrency, has its own whole set of challenges, as by nature, fiat is not decentralized. One possible solution to this may be the use of SchellingCoin contracts, programmed to hold a steady value such as the USD, CNY, EUR and commodities such as wheat, cattle, oil and gold.


     -Features-

As a rule, SOIL-ex, as a decentralized exchange, will never require a sign-up process, of any kind, from users, to allow them to access its normal operations. Users will be required to hold an initial balance of SOIL to interact with the network in the first place. The exchange will charge no fees for contract profit as all transactions are paid for by gas costs using SOIL, which goes to the miners working and maintaining the blockchain consensus engine through Proof of Work. The exchange will feature a trustless interface to directly exchange assets between SOIL users, without any middleman. One's identity on the exchange is their wallet address, the password - their private key. 

Online, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges come with a lot of extra features, though. Implementing the usefullness of many of these will be integral to the ongoing maturation of a decentralized exchange. Some features online exchanges offer are in-house mining pools against many cryptocurrencies; marketplaces where goods are listed and requested in exchange for listed altcoins; daily and monthly cryptocurrency lotteries, and random number dice-games;random faucet-sized tipping rewards for making trades, participating in chats or forums, or sending "tips" to other users; altcoin faucets; arbitrage services comparing asset value across other exchanges; advanced market charts and studies, market news reports and releases; margin trading and cryptocurrency lending; incorporated block explorers... the list goes on.

Being that a decentralized exchange can have modular construction, adding in features such as those will be available as more and more dApps are created on the SOILcoin network, which leverage the (de)centralized order book.


     -Adoption-

The exchange of digital assets will play an important role within the growing SOILcoin ecosystem, and the provisions for a trustless and direct exchange of these assets will assist in currency and exchange adoption. Adoption of both exchange and base currency will accelerate once the exchange offers interaction with an assortment of cross-chain assets. A thriving subcurrency market, to start, will help build new ideas on how to redefine what we assign "value" to, and how we can apply the idea of "currency" to many many things. A full article on subcurrencies and implementations will likely be needed in order to cover the possibilities available therein. There are many different usage scenarios for subcurrencies on the SOILnet, and different stakeholders will have different needs, regarding how they might be traded, if at all.

The key is USABILITY. The test for a good dApp isnt the way its coded, its how its used. Or, more to the point, how MANY people use it REGULARLY. Use of the exchange creates transactions which enrich the miners, it tests out the possibilities of what we can "tokenize" and trade. As use of a decentralized exchange grows, so too does the base currency it rests upon. As we will base trading pairs exclusively against SOIL, this will hopefully increase the purchase and utilization of SOIL.

Naturally, the key to widespread adoption of a cryptocurrency is how it will have real-world usage. This generally relates to the ability to use and spend one's crypto to purchase THINGS. The way current payment systems work throughout the world varies widely. The added value of cryptocurrencies therefore also hugely differs per geographical area, and thus, the adoptability of ones currency. A study from the Netherlands identified the three barriers facing comprehensive espousal of cryptocurrencies in general.

   1.Ease of use: generally, there is an opinion regarding cryptocurrency as having a lack of user-friendliness. Even though sending and receiving BTC has become much easier, it can still be difficult to actually purchase Bitcoin. With Ethereum, as was warned when Frontier came out, it came with the warning about its inherent unfriendliness. Much of the developments since have been to make it more accessible to more people. We've been trying, with SOILcoin, to demystify the EVM as we go along, and present things with a clear idea of how to actually WORK with it. I will have documentation written into SOIL-ex to assist users to work with it when it is released.
 

   2.Price stability: cryptocurrency, like ANY stock or tradable asset, will have periods of extreme price volatility, driven by speculation, lack of liquidity or outright manipulation, which makes it a risky proposition for a user to keep funds in cryptocurrency as the value deviates wildly, and oftentimes in a very short period of time. This undermines the function of cryptocurrency as a store of value. In financial markets, though, past performance is no guarantee (and by any efficient market hypothesis and analysis, it is not even an indicator) of future results of expected value, especially when as a movement, cryptocurrency has an established reputation for extreme volatility; even with Bitcoin, the so-called "gold standard" of digital currency, the price can move up or down by as much as 25% in a single week.
 
Analyzing trends is difficult as cryptocurrency as a whole has not been a tradable asset for long enough to provide a comprehensive sample size. What is considered a short term trend in the NASDAQ market, for example, is something occurring over one months time. In crypto, where markets are open 24/7/365, these are more compressed. A short term trend might last a day, and an intermediate trend a few weeks at most.

SOILcoin has had a very slow and steady increase in valuation, without the typical massive spike upon release followed by a quick drop and long slow rudderless glide into obscurity that 75% of altcoins go through. Though not a pre-set stable value peg, SOIL has maintained higher average valuations for each of the last 12 weeks, with the latter 2/3rds having a much more exponential growth rate. Spikes in value occur infrequently, and generally followed by a slow dip well above the previous floor, before rising to break through another resistance level. It is safe enough, though, to say that SOILcoin has been experiencing a stable uptrend, that is a series of higher highs and higher lows.

We have done many of the good practices to promote a positive valuation movement, mostly in reducing inflation of coin supply and slowing down the distribution model. Remaining in touch with our community and continuing to present a dedication to forward thinking innovation and development will make us an attractive investment. By adding SOIL-ex to the mix, I think we will see a slight increase in upward momentum, due to the new possibilities for USAGE that it brings, not only with promoting a vibrant subcurrency ecosystem, but other use cases that the exchange contract will bring about.

   3.Governance: One of the chief complaints about how the current BTC foundation is run is that it undermines the basic ideological aspect of cryptocurrencies by being very centralized and intransparent. I think we've done a damn good job with SOILcoin in that regard, as transparency is probably one of my most frequently used terms when Im posting, its one of the SOILcoin project's cornerstones. With our voting process on fundamental protocol changes, we have moved much closer to decentralization, but as we use a 1SOIL/1vote schemata, that still leaves the possibilities open to voting blocs and "whales" holding much more power towards decision making. But, this is also the general model of most corporations when it comes to shareholder votes.

The move towards adoption of SOILcoin and its decentralized exchange will improve every time there is a news article regarding another centralized, privately-owned exchange brought down with scandal, fraud or security flaws. Will SOIL-ex replace online private exchanges? Not likely. There will always be those sorts of entities, which with a framework already built towards moving assets in and out easily, there will always be users approaching that as a quick solution. What a decentralized exchange does is provide the alternative, and provides security that ones own funds remain under ones own control 100% of the time.

Its very clear that cryptocurrency is much more than an ephemeral phenomenon. It has shown that it is well on the way to becoming a new phase of technology driven markets that will disrupt conventional market strategies, longstanding business practices, legal frameworking, and established regulatory perspectives. It is creating a macro-economic efficiency. To speed up cryptocurrency’s adoption process and transition the product from one being used by solely tech-savvy innovators to one with mass market acceptance, the general public needs to be aware and educated on this new form of currency.

6. CONCLUSION

The "ecosystem" of SOILcoin is that of a programmatic machine which allows any user to build, deploy and interact with smart contracts written on the blockchain, and held there in perpetuity. A decentralized exchange contract residing on this network will improve the ecosystem. The first likely scenario will be a greater investigation into subcurrencies, and how they represent value. Other uses for an exchange contract will emerge, as will a quickening towards crosschain intercommunication.

Built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine model, users can create decentralized, autonomous, and highly extensible application layers. These can built as not only decentralized currency exchanges, multi-sig wallet contracts and distributed escrow services, but decentralized autonomous organizations, forums, and derivatives risk analysis. As a decentralized exchange, SOILex will provide not only the opportunity for trading in custom built subcurrencies, but to peg those against existing assets in a variety of manners.

This is the first version of SOIL-ex, and is definitely not the last. Features will be added as they become available or when obstacles are surmounted. A more efficient front-end and access to analysis tools will need to be explored. Ive built this exchange with much thanks going out to the EtherEx development team. Ive done little more than rebrand the platform towards SOIL during this release, concentrating more on ensuring that trades are completed properly and balances of subcurrencies were accurately moved from one wallet to another. I will be releasing the SOIL-ex platform with an in depth user guide covering the features built into this iteration, including btc-swap, which will allow users to buy SOIL directly, using BTC.

Ive also borrowed, in style if not substance, from the white paper presented by EtherEx, and while I would appreciate any donations people would send in appreciation for the work done (in SOILcoin, please), I would be remiss not presenting the idea that those developers at EtherEx deserve support as well. You can communicate with them, and see the present status of the EtherEx project at etherex.org.

the community development fund, at 0x3204a79b0245c5e1d5efe39179017a1c6c00b322 presently has about 665000 SOIL in it. i have no idea who's wallet that is that you are referencing. if its the first wallet (0) that is listed in the distribution tab on bittrex, i THINK thats the exchanges "hot wallet", hence the "0" listing for it. 

theres been nothing from polo regarding listing SOIL, and from what i understand about the process, they heavily vet projects before listing them. which is something that warms my heart. exchanges can be a tricky thing, and theres so many that have poor to nonexistent support services, or professionalism. polo seems to be one of the few that are trustworthy out there and we will continue to pursue a listing there, but right now, bittrex is a great place.

we have strong volume, and a market analysis of SOIL looks good. lots and lots of people buying compared to selling. SOIL keeps testing new resistances, and breaking thru them. if you look at the 1-day interval charts at places like cryptuitive.com, you can see that we've held two months of solid and steady upwards trending in valuation. it hasnt altered much from its slope, just nice and steady growth, but when compared to other stock growth charts, this is generally indicative of an imminent breakout. our market capitalization has finally grown above $100,000 USD..

as long as we continue to provide developments and push the USABILITY of SOILcoin further, we will bring in new community, and we will catch the notice of other exchanges.  we've been under the radar for awhile, and we've faced our issues with the currency and the protocol, but we've shown we can respond to those issues when they crop up.

therell always be naysayers in the crypto-community. but as things are going with SOIL, i think any FUD someone tries to come up with, is pretty unsubstantiated and without proof and merit. some folks are simply wet blankets. will SOIL be listed on polo? i think its a definite. when? well, thats the question isnt it? if they keep getting tweets tagged with SOIL and polo together, theyre bound to take notice. theres only so much the developers can do, and exchanges like polo have heard the "we are the greatest thing since sliced bread" claims from EVERY dev team out there. they want to hear from the community, to know theres a strong commitment behind the project. personally, id prefer to gain a reputation of persistence and competence with SOIL rather than as a flash in the pan and volatile currency. competence gets noticed.

the new SOILsafe is the up-to-date porting of the ethereum mist browser. the only difference in it right now is that the shapeshift functionality has been turned off. when and if we can get listed with shapeshift that will be a simple thing to re-enable. with our guide for DUST, we make it easier to start working with smart contracts, if thats an itch you need to scratch...

as for a hackathon.. there really havent been a whole lot of coin sponsored ones out there. even ETH, while theres been tons of hackathons based around the platform, most are sponsored by user groups or other blockchain connected companies, not the ETH devs themselves. we have the funds set aside, under contract. as SOILs valuation grows over the next few months, while the hackathon is ongoing, the awards funds, from us, grow in value as well.

im working on making inroads with other cryptocurrency development teams, seeing if i cant get small awards for specific types of dApps in the hackathon, say.. AnonCoin settting up a contract protected fund for the best anonymizing dApp or implementing Zerocoin or setting setting SOIL up with connectivity thru TOR or i2p, as an example... theres a LOT of currencies out there that have died or have no further development, and im avoiding those, seeking active developing altcoins... the other side of that is begin building those connections with other currency developers to be able to work with these cryptos in the future when we have crosschain interconnectivity... and can list those on a decentralized exchange...

speaking of which.. i had hoped to have SOIL-ex out last week, but life happened. im presently writing the "white paper" for the project, and trying to be as inclusive and informative in it as i can, and those of you who know my writing style and commitment to research and fact-checking, you know it will be long and well researched. SOILex is close to release, i promise you that, but i want to make sure i have documentation built properly to accompany it. i SHOULD have the white paper done later today, if not, then by sunday (have to drive to halifax tomorrow, a six hour drive, to pick up a couple ball pythons)

but, a hard working development team, as small as we are... persistent developments... a strong plan for future scalability... a verifiably transparent project... yeah, i can see how that wouldnt be everyones cup of tea. (chuckles)

3 million gas shouldve been way more than enough to deploy the contract. the only thing i can think of is that the tx mightve gotten uncled? (shrugs) the only other thing i can think of is that your account that you are deploying from is locked. you have to unlock the account when you launch geth (eg: gsoil --rpc --unlock 0 console) if you unlock in via the CLI, there seems to be problems. this stretches back to ethereum's end of things.

it much easier to deploy solidity contracts thru the DUST dApp/wallet. theyre up there for 32 and 64 bit windows, and if you are using linux, you can build it from our github repository. if none of that helps, let me know and ill dig deeper intot he problem for you.

i think its time to build a wiki for SOILcoin... (off to the books i go)

DUST - an overview -PART5

If you want to interact with the token referenced in this guide, the STAR token ("★") was deployed with 1,000,000 units and 2 decimal places, creating 10,000 whole units. I sent a transaction of 10 SOIL to the account, "backing" the STAR token with that amount. Essentially, each ★ is thus "backed" by 0.001 SOIL.*

The token address is:0xc9173b14c234d27cfEac02A4d66383560B7d1Ba0
The JSON interface you can copy/paste in the appropriate pane under the WATCH CONTRACT menu is:


If anyone wants some FREE ★, send me a private message with your SOILcoin wallet address on bitcointalk, I'll transfer you some.  
(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;u=541917)
~abvhiael (developer's reserve wallet: 0xe46731382FbC47621A6C480d4b6118026bBBCb3A)

***

Great help on using Mist, and hence... DUST.. not covered in this overview can be found in the wonderful guide written by "KLmoney" at: https://klmoney.wordpress.com/

New developments and troubleshooting the Mist plaform dApp/wallet can be found on the Ethereum forum. (https://forum.ethereum.org/categories/mist)

Further information on tokens (somewhat dated compared to the present token interactions in Beta9) can be found at: (https://www.ethereum.org/token)

DUST - an overview- PART4
THE CONTRACT INTERFACE

When you choose a contract address under your Custom Contracts, those written and compiled with Solidity will have contract interface controls available as drop down menus. Using the previous example, token.sol, it produces the STAR (Admin Page) with the capabilities of reading from and writing to the token contract.

This will give you the token name, symbol and decimals as well as an input variable to see the unit balance of the token on any SOILcoin address. If you copy/paste your deploying wallet address into the variable field, after deploying the parameters in teh above example, it would show the token owner as having a balance of 1000000 STAR (10,000.00)

Writing to the contract reveals a Function Selector drop down menu. These functions reflect the function calls from teh original contract and with the token.sol contract, you can make transactions that will allow you to transfers to or from another SOILcoin address, as well as Approve and Call a third-party spender address.

The buttons on the upper right of the screen will allow you to simply deposit this token to any address, produce a QR-code for the token, and pull up its JSON interface file.

Each contract will have different parameters and callable functions. With other solidity language compiled smart contracts, they will be available to be interacted from these pages.

***

DUST - an overview - PART3
THE CONTRACTS PAGE

All contract upload and token management is done under the "CONTRACTS" tab. There are three initial interfaces on the Contracts page, Deploy New Contract, Watch Contract and Watch Token.

DEPLOY NEW CONTRACT

DUST has a built-in soldity compiler which makes deploying a contract written in that language, and more importantly, effectively interacting with it once deployed, is one of the best features in the DUST dApp/wallet. You can choose which account wallet from your list with which you wish to deploy the contract with, and will use your password when you are approving the transaction at the end of the process. You can also endow a contract with SOIL by sending along an amount funds along with the contract creation. This is useful when your contract self-executes and uses gas to make programmatic transactions outside of direct user interaction.

You can copy/paste the solidity contract source code in high level language in the appropriate pane, which you can find in many GitHub repositories for various smart contracts and dApp projects related to the Ethereum-based Virtual Machine. You can also copy/paste the compiled contract byte code which can be obtained from other solidity compiler services and applications. This is useful, as smart contracts presented in other EVM recognized languages, such as Serpent of LLL, can be compiled separately and paste the resultant byte code into DUST to deploy the contract.

There are links to the right with sample contracts you can begin working with. "Create a Token" will help you deploy token.sol, an account wallet owned subcurrency that will be registered onto the SOILcoin blockchain.  After a few moments, the compiled code will have functions displayed to set Constructor Parameters. This contract produces four variables you can build in to your token incarnation. Initial supply will be the number of UNITS of currency you will produce, token name is your chosen subcurrency name.

Decimal units is the number of divisibility you wish for your token. For example, if you mint for 1,00,000 units of subcurrency STAR, and give it 2 decimal units, you would be provided with 10,000.00 tokens, with the smallest unit of currency being 0.01 STAR. Token symbol is the symbol by which your token will be assosciated. Think of a ticker symbol for a cryptocurrency on an online exchange, generally a short grouping of letters e.g.: SOIL, BTC, ETH. You can also use unicode characters as well, e.g.: ★, Ω, 不.

Once these parameters have been set, you can choose the total gas costs you are willing to pay for execution of this code. You can choose a cheaper deployment with a longer wait for the contract to be mined, or a hgher rate to rush the computations. Finally select the DEPLOY button.

This will bring up the Confirmation Screen, with the estimated and maximum fees in gas for deployment, gas price and included data, represented in byte code, included in the transaction. Enter in the deploying wallet account's private key and SEND TRANSACTION.

The Wallets page will open, and your contract's deployment status will show up in the Latest Transactions pane. When the contract is mined, it will begin to count down 12 confirmations, after which you can consider that the contract was not deployed on an uncled chain and is in the SOILcoin blockchain securely.

Your token name will appear as the contract address when it is mined. You can choose to interact with this contract by clicking on the transaction bar, in its immediate listing in your Custom Contracts menu on the Contracts page, as well as, being a token contract, it will be added to your Watched Tokens list as well. The ownership and listing of whole unit and symbol (e.g. STAR 10,000.00 ★) will also be included on the home page of the deploying wallet account.

The other example contracts can be deployed in a similar fashion, as well as those found on repositories and the like.

WATCH CONTRACT
With the contract address and JSON interface information for a smart contract, you can watch a contract on the blockchain. This is the information you would need to provide anyone you want to have simple interface with your contract. Contracts you deploy yourself will be automatically saved to your "Custom Contracts" so you won't need to bother with the JSON Interface.

WATCH TOKEN
Choosing the Watch Token menu button will open a token editor screen for tokens that you own. This will allow you to edit the token name, symbol, and decimal places of the smallest unit.

DUST - an overview - PART2
CONTRACT ACCOUNTS AND WALLETS

While an Account has a password-protected private key associated with its address, a Contract Account has no private key, but it does have an address, code, and is stored on the blockchain. Contract Wallets (or contract-based wallets) are built with Contract Accounts, which are controlled by smart contracts, which makes it possible to customize their behavior. You will not have to do any the coding yourself; the Contract Wallets come pre-built with a user interface that makes it easy to select the type of required security enhancment customization.

Contract Wallets are controlled by smart contracts but this code also has a master, which is the Account used to deploy the Contract Wallet, with its password-protected private key. These Contract Wallets list incoming transactions; something Accounts do not feature. They can be setup as Multi-sig Wallets, which can be structured such that it can permit a specified daily limit, and only if this daily limit is exceeded will multiple signatures be required.  A Multi-sig Wallet has several owner Accounts, which are set up when the Contract Wallet is created, one of which will be the creator Account. Contract Wallets can also be setup as “Watch-Only” Wallets.

MULTI-SIG WALLETS

These are M-of-N type wallets, where more than one private key is required to have full access to the funds held. In a typical scenario, there can be up to three owner Accounts where two of three signatories (owners) are required to authorize outgoing transactions, making it a 2-of-3 Multisig Wallet. 2-of-2 Multisig Wallets are also usable, where BOTH signatories of the Contract Wallet are needed to authorize disbursement of funds.

In practice, Multi-sig Wallets have two typical use cases. Either, you own some SOIL and want to store it more securely, concerned that simple reliance on a single private-key may not meet one's safety needs. Creation of a Multisig Wallet where all the owner Accounts are under your control, that is, you control all the private keys serves this need. Or, you set up a Multi-sig Account jointly owned by two or three people, each of whom control their own single private-key used to authorize the wallet. None of the other Multi-Sig Wallet owners has access to the other person’s privat-key.

When you spend from a Multi-sig Wallet, all the signing (owner) Accounts must have enough SOIL in them to pay for gas costs to complete the Approval transaction. If not, you will have to revoke the transaction, which will itself incur a revocation cost.


To process a transaction from a Multi-sig wallet, if there are multiple wallet owner Accounts belonging to separate individuals, the first step is to ensure that all Wallet Apps participating in the approval/signing of the multi-sig transaction have already imported the Multi-sig Wallet. Each signatory of the Multi-sig wallet will need to import the Contract Wallet using the DUST Wallet App. All that is needed to import the Multi-sig Wallet is the wallet’s address.


To complete the Approval process for a Multi-sig wallet requiring more than one unique individual's signature, follow the initial steps from the example above until you arrive at the Confirmation Needed screen in the Wallet App that initiated the transaction. Simultaneously, the other Wallet App associated with the second (and third, if necessary) owner Accounts will display the Confirmation Needed screen in their DUST wallet. Secondary signatories will also click APPROVE in the confirming Wallet App and enter the required password.

The LATEST TRANSACTIONS pane in both Wallet Apps will show the transaction being confirmed.

CREATING WATCH-ONLY WALLETS

If you import a Contract Wallet (either Simple Wallet or Multisig Wallet), following the procedure described above, and your Wallet App does NOT have access to the keyfiles of the signatory owner Accounts, then you will create a Watch-Only Wallet. An eye-like icon next to the wallet name denotes a Watch-Only Wallet. Watch-Only Wallets update immediately as the linked wallet’s balance changes.

Going with our release of DUST, ive written up a (comprehensive) overview of the application which ill post in a small series of posts, with an explanation on a lot of its specific functionalities.

DUST - an overview - PART1

DUST s the SOILcoin implementation of the Ethereum browser, Mist. We are presently using the Beta9 release which has been optimized for the Homestead release protocols. Presently, we have released the Windows 64bit wallet package. See the link in the OP. Linux and MAC OS wallets should be made available in the near future.

Firstly, you will notice on the main Wallets page that there are two types of wallets available with DUST: Externally Owned Accounts (simply: Accounts) and Wallet Contracts.

ACCOUNTS AND WALLETS

If you are new to SOILcoin, before setting up your accounts, you will need to let DUST sync to the SOILnet blockchain. At present (March 2016) this is approximately 700MB in size, and should, with average broadband connections, take about an hour. Most DUST transactions will fail if your node is not fully synced with the network, or will take much longer to show through its confirmations. Along the top banner of the Accounts Overview screen you will find information relating to the current synced status of your node. *To check that all is copacetic and that you have the latest block, compare this displayed information with what is listed on the SOILcoin Network Intelligence page at stats.soilcoin.xyz *

If your syncing process seems stalled or you drop out to 0 peers for an extended length of time, try closing and restarting the DUST application. If this doesnt help, make sure your computer's clock is accurate.

When syncing is complete, choose the Start Using SOIL link, which will lead you thru the account creation process. When setting up an account use a strong password. Do not forget this password!! You will not be able to access this Account, including any SOIL you send to it, without this password. This applies to all Accounts; you must know the password of the Account before you use it to perform transactions.

The opening page displayed will list your wallet accounts, the one marked as ETHERBASE is your default (0) account. To change any wallet account's listed name, choose the edit icon to the immediate right of the wallet name.

Each wallet address is also identified with a colourful little unique Identicon, which is a visual representation of a hash value, your SOILcoin hexidecimal address, which serves to identify the wallet account address in a form of an avatar, which is unique for each address.

The Keyfile which stores your single private key/address pair are not stored in the DUST directory on your computer, but are found in the keystore subdirectory of your SOILcoin node’s data directory. For Windows, this is at: C:\Users\username\%appdata%\Roaming\Soil

Inside the keystore subdirectory, you will find one keyfile for each of the Accounts you have created. You must have an Account’s keyfile to be able to send any transaction from that Account, including contract creation and interaction. In other words, if you delete your keyfile and do not have access to a backup copy, any SOIL you have stored with that Account is lost forever. Each keyfile is a JSON text file which you can open and view in any text editor. The critical component of the keyfile is your Account’s private key. Importantly, this private key is always encrypted with the password you entered when you created the Account.


DUST also contains some security features to warn you if an entered SOILcoin address is either illegitimate or may be incorrect. SOIL sent to incorrectly entered addresses are not retrievable and are lost into the "aether". The Beta9 Homestead-ready version of Mist that we have ported over to the SOILcoin ecosphere adds an extra layer of security which makes it extremely difficult to enter an incorrect address by mistyping. This is possible through the use of checksum enabled addresses.

SOILcoin addresses are case insensitive hexidecimal strings. The most commonly recognized format, in how one's wallet has been consistently displayed in SOILsafe until now has featured a 44-character long string beginning in "0x" followed by a series of numbers ranging from 0-9, and lower case letters, ranging from a-f. (i.e.: 0xe46731382fbc47621a6c480d4b6118026bbbcb3a) This can also be represented with entirely upper case letters as well.

A third option, is to display the address in a mix of upper and lower case letters. (i.e.:0xe46731382FbC47621A6C480d4b6118026bBBCb3A). This is a checksum enabled address. Notice that the addresses displayed in "Beta9" are all presented in this manner. They are the same account addresses as the original format.
This checksum security implementation is backwards-compatible, meaning that original, all lower-case or all upper-case addresses can still be used as before. DUST will warn you if you enter an address with no checksum security.


TRANSACTION FEES... "GAS"

You will incur a cost when you execute a transaction on the SOILcoin blockchain. Gas is the unit in which this transaction cost is denoted. When you do a plain SOIL transfer from one Account to another Account, the transaction cost is 21,000 gas. You pay for gas with ether. The cost in SOIL of one unit of gas is determined dynamically by the SOILcoin network. This gas price can be viewed on the Network Intelligence page. In January 2016, 1 unit of gas cost 0.0000005 SOIL. So a 21,000 gas transaction like the ether transfer you just did, would cost 0.00605 SOIL. Different types of transactions will incur different gas costs. The Wallet App will estimate the cost of the transaction you are about to execute, and allow you to increase or decrease this overall cost at the expense or benefit of quicker confirmation times. Any excess fee in that estimate will be refunded to your sending Account immediately upon execution.

TRANSACTION LIST

The transaction list will not show transactions in which any of your Accounts has received SOIL from a wallet that is not listed in your Wallet App. The balance of your receiving Account will be immediately updated and displayed correctly even though the transaction is not listed. Out-migrating transactions, including contract creation and asset transfer will be included in the Transaction list.

To see the details of a transaction, click on the particular transaction in this list to display the Transaction Box. Click on the Transaction hash or the Block hash to open an ABEE SOILcoin Block Explorer tab in your browser which will confirm and present much more information relating to the transaction..

came across this random blog post today, regarding the paradigm of ethereum, which helps explain too the way i look at SOILcoin:

https://medium.com/@davidhq/what-is-ethereum-caeb8f99cdff#.rd4y8axgs

i love some of the viewpoints in the article:


and describing why smart contracts are important, and why IMPORTANT smart contracts will rise to the top, not for the riches they might make someone but because of their UTILITY.

with the "dust" dapp/wallet peter released, which is based on the latest Homestead-ready beta from Ethereum, is really useful in working with contracts, from compiling to deploying to interacting and then watching them. you can interact with any solidity built contract by watching it, needing only its contract address and JSON interactions.

theres a reason why the EVM is important, and whats been built (and paralleled with purpose by SOILcoin) truly disrupts the POTENTIAL of things.

YoBit has refunded teh 0.1BTC premium listing fee we paid them six weeks ago. I have transferred that to Bittrex and was thinking of using it to purchase SOIL towards refilling my developer's wallet. is this a suitable use, in the eyes of the community?

well, im hoping to be able to release it this week. its march break and i have a five year old son home from school all week, so getting ANY work done becomes a challenge. is there a smart contract out there to bottle up little kid energy and provide it to the end-user?? (sighs) SOIL-ex has been my baby for a few months, and ive based it directly off of EtherEx. its stillnot what it COULD be, but as a subcurrency marketplace, it does its job very well. id like to test out the btc-swap aspect of the platform a whole lot more, but again, its not what it could be. or what ive envisioned.

eventually, it (or a similar iteration) will host an ersatz commodities exchange with tokens pegged to the hourly changes in hard and soft at the chicago mercantile exchange. it wont be, YET, something akin to the CME Globex platform they use for electronic ordering, and the pegged tokens wont be, YET, set as a direct purchase of the commodity futures, moreso it will be buying and selling against the changes in rates for such things as wheat, live feeder hogs, platinum, etc.

ive been watching the digix.io gold based tokens project pretty closely, as they plan on being available on EtherEx on Ethereum when they hit the main net, as that will help set a basis on how these subcurrencies can be interactive with outside markets.

id also love to able to turn it into a full fledged decentralized crypto-exchange utilizing sidechains to bring altcurrencies that have a harmonious ideal to the SOILcoin directives into it, and have studied the bidirectional sidechain issue quite extensively. most of it is in the "what if we could?" stage right now, but projects such as dogethereum (with its MASSIVE bounty) are looking into how to solve those problems.

still, by actually getting work done once the little fellow is in bed, after story time (geronimo stilton, all the time), im hoping to have it ready for saturday.

i wrote an article on just that about two weeks ago.
you can find it here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1176709.msg14017721#msg14017721

theyve listed ETH, as well as KR (Krypton, the most recent Ethereum fork), so i cant see that issues from the Ethereum wallet protocols would be an issue. i get it that they have tons of requests going in, and that it takes time to go through them all, but thats what i thot the premium listing fee was for, get one to the top of the heap. i like the format there, theres some fun and interesting innovations on yobit... the dice game... although id like to see the code behind that on a personal note to ensure it's provably fair... and the massive ammounts of faucets they host, which id love to add SOIL to.. the more people with exposure to SOIL the better.

anyhow, thank you in advance for trying to get an answer for us. id looked around on the site to see if they had a list of admins that i could approach on the troll-box, and had asked within the troll-box several times as well, hoping to talk to an admin. id just like to get this situation cleared up one way or the other. id still love to be listed there, it brings further exposure for SOILcoin, and might help us get listed on other exchanges.

its tough, the due diligence on the exchanges, as theres always cheerleaders and detractors for every exchange. i used to LOVE bleutrade, i found the format quick and easy to work with. but their support team was pretty non-existent when it came to responding to requests for listing SOIL there after we launched. ive since completely abandoned bleu. im also rather fond of cryptopia, i like their integrated mining, and the community there is one of the most positive ive found, but when i sent in the listing request, they declined due to "no github source". id tried a few times to get this rectified, as we've had our source up on github since day 1, but its one of those things thats slipped onto the back burner.

im thrilled to see that we have a decent twitter campaign foing for inclusion onto poloniex, from everything ive seen, theyre one of the most trustworthy exchanges out there, which is what we are looking for.

quoting from yobits "add coin" page


we decided to try to add another exchange for SOILcoin, and paid the .1BTC to yobit on february 9th. when 5 business days went by, i set up a support ticket. when it wasnt answered in a week, i added to that support ticket. ive posted against that support ticket 6 times now, in teh six weeks since we paid the premium listing fee, and have not once received a response. even when ive asked to just have the fee refunded and walk away from the idea of listing SOIL on their exchange, theres been no response in over a week. ive heard good things and bad things about yobit. i like their dice games and ridiculously numerous altcoin faucets. im not so impressed by the lack of response by support staff.