I don't come by here very often, so I missed all the hullabaloo. Mark's pretty much dead-on. We are attempting to create a viable international currency based on new/revived economic principles. That takes a lot of time.

Most people seem to be waiting for the foundation to issue its first grants, which we've said will happen as soon as we get a grant proposal submission site up. (You can follow updates to that on our forums and #freicoin IRC channel, and we can use volunteers of all types to help get it going.) Because of that I actually think it could be a good thing that we've had this boom-bust mining cycle, due mostly to the stellar rise of bitcoin profitability and lack of a high-volume FRC exchange. Getting more of the initial distribution out before there is anyone using the currency would not help in the long term.

I will be representing Freicoin on the Alt Chain panel at the “Bitcoin 2013: The Future of Payments” conference in San José, California on May 17-19, 2013. I haven't been told yet the structure of the panel so I'm not sure if I'm given a chance to talk or if it's straight Q&A.

Nevertheless, I'm curious what the community here would expect/desire to see discussed at the Alt Chain panel.

More likely - and this is coming from someone involved in the creation of an honest alt-chain - he didn't trust himself with the coins. In my case we locked the Freicoin Foundation keys in a safe deposit box, and legally transferred ownership to the non-profit. When those freicoins become worth $50MM, I wouldn't trust myself with the keys! And now I don't have to - if I did embezzle them I'd be held responsible (perhaps criminally) for doing so.

Satoshi didn't want to de-anonymize himself, and if he's human and honest (and not crazy wealthy to begin with) he wouldn't have trusted himself to not spend those coins. So in all likelihood he either (A) set the wallets to destroy automatically, or (B) put them in some sort of tamper-proof time capsule, gave them to his lawyer with strict instructions, or something similar.

At least that's my guess.

If I have any say at all (which is an if, as it's now a community project and what follows is just my opinion), it will be some combination of proof-of-stake and proof-of-work voting (a plurality of both) to enable merged mining if/when that functionality is added to the reference client, and the foundation won't take a position with its coins. I think it likely that most people currently using the currency would be against merged mining while it is in its early growth stage, unless faced with an imminent and credible attack, but in the long run merged mining obviously makes sense.

Those coins were never the miner's to begin with. Why do you feel entitled to them?

Because we want some coins to enter the system bottom-up as well, and mining subsidy is currently the best way to do that.

Yes - except for the part that mentions me specifically. The plan is for the Foundation funds to help facilitate the creation of a sustainable freicoin economy by either helping directly create a marketplace priced in freicoin (bounty/prize grants, subsidies), or providing freicoins to charitable organizations which would buy from that marketplace, thereby helping bootstrap industries.

Is that a little vague? Yes. Because I won't be the one doing it - the Foundation will, and I am not the Foundation. Once the Foundation is set up the private keys will be handed over and the people running the Foundation will handle disbursement.

It's not going to be my proposals that get selected, but yours. Have an idea that has communal value and helps bootstrap the Freicoin economy? Write it up as a proposal.

Give all of it away in grants. We're currently forming a review board to select proposals to fund, and coming up with bylaws and selection criteria. You can take part in this process:

http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-foundation-development-thread-t81.html

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128370.0

It was ultimately killed by its creator when one of the bitcoin core devs (either Hearn or gmaxwell, I think) pointed out the double-spend possibility on #bitcoin-dev.

Then don't use Freicoin.

I'm 'bitching' because there's a serious concern for user's security. Someone transacting on the hard-fork chain could be tricked into revealing signatures allowing their coins to be stolen on the main chain. If you transact with this client, be aware that there are security issues, and you risk losing your balance.

False (try it). Specifically, see lines #2004-2005 of main.cpp. And no, it doesn't matter if you change that line either - it only matters what code the rest of the network is using.


Come back to reality. Industrial mining has become dominated by a privileged technological elite. Maybe when bitcoin started it was democratic (before GPU mining, before ASICs), but it certainly isn't anymore. The purpose of an initial distribution is to get currency in the hands of everybody as quickly as possible, and to get money flowing in the marketplaces (and not just the currency markets). If you have a good idea for accomplishing that goal in a fair and democratic manor, submit it to us. Or come work with us and become a part of the foundation.

20% + perpetual subsidy of an active, vibrant economy is worth infinitely more than 100% of a dead coin.

@TradeFortress, please keep that discussion to your own fork thread. This thread is for Freicoin.

?

That sentence doesn't even make sense. You've made a hard-fork. Blocks created by your client are rejected by the network. Nodes running your client get blacklisted by the rest of the network for forwarding invalid blocks as a denial-of-service protection. By transacting in the forked chain you run the risk of having your coins stolen on the main chain. You could have million times the hash of the rest of the network and it wouldn't matter: the fork would still be invalid and summarily rejected. The OP incorrectly implies otherwise.

We've said this so many times I've simply given up on repeating myself. But here it goes once more: every single satoshi of the Foundation outputs will be given out in grants in an open, transparent process. You can take part in that discussion here:

http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-foundation-development-thread-t81.html

Or simply start drafting your own grant proposal.

This is incorrect. Any block that does not contain a valid budgetary output is summarily rejected by the Freicoin network, regardless of the hash-power thrown at this fork.

Want to share in the 80% distribution? Then spend your time putting together a grant proposal for something constructive.

No you're missing the point. We're talking about someone like Deepbit, Slush, BTC Guild, etc. attacking freicoin. Without having to tell any of their miner. How do you compete against that?

You also make it trivially easy (no-cost) for any large mining pool operator to kill the coin, and completely change the economics of coin minting. This is something which requires understanding and approval from the relevant stakeholders (everyone currently using the currency).

Any marge-mined variant of FRC would be a fork, and the blocks mined would be orphaned from the main chain, and anyone transacting on both chains would be in danger of having their coins stolen.

There has been discussion on IRC, our forums, and elsewhere on the subject of merged mining, and do intent to fully support at the appropriate time. Here is the current plan for merge-mining, accepted by most of the core contributors (jtimon being an outlier):

A generalized merge mining patchset will be applied, with merge mining disabled. In parallel, a system will be implemented for proof-of-work and proof-of-stake voting (something we want for other purposes anyway). A trigger will be coded into the codebase such that if a majority of miners and a sufficient plurality of stakeholders vote for merged mining, it will be enabled. This is similar to the proof-of-stake voting for the rollout of P2SH in the bitcoin network (another hard-fork).

If you want merge mining enabled for freicoin, I suggest devoting your efforts to this path. It would allow input from miners and stakeholders, and prevent unilateral action that might further divide the community.

Correct, although the provides only a minimum. There will still be transaction fees, same as bitcoin.

Which goes up with velocity. The real take away here is that there isn't or we haven't found a simple metric by which these properties are related. We have good reason to believe that the monetary velocity, freicoin price, mining subsidy, etc. will all be stable under demurrage approximately equal to basic interest. But we don't have predictive models that will tell us exactly what the point of stability will be.