I cannot improve on that answer, I have tried to say it before, although it took me a page and you a few words.

Do you mind if I quote you in order to add clarity?

Do they need to be currencies? can they not be bootstrapped or built on any blockchain?


Sustainable, yes. Fair to say practical? What makes a cryptographic currency impractical is also an interesting question.

First identify the 'right' features or focus, if the qualities to look for are known, then it will make identifying the potential currencies easier.

I completely agree, but would change hundred to thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

If the main focus of a project is centered around crypto currency people, traders, investors, miners, then there can only be limited success, if any. For a currency to earn any value, it must have significant outreach and prioritise adoption. simply it must try to be a currency for people.

The results of the Second Round of IPM testing have been distributed.

The final two rounds begun some hours ago.


I seek the communities input on some points regarding the above, please take the time to read it has significant bearing on Bitmark. Remembering that a 'Mark' is a unit of our currency, 0.001 BTM.

1. This project requires a domain name, I feel it will need to be short, do you have any suggestions? remembering that this will appear almost distinct from bitmark.

2. The process of marking must be as easy as possible for your friends and family, there are technical limitations on facebook / twitter / reddit which constrain our approach, urls are key, hidden behind a button when possible. Technical input on what we may reasonably do on each specific service is required.

3. Care must be taken to balance different communities of content creators and curators, whilst acknowledging that we must start somewhere that is not within the crypto community. Each Mark will have limited value to begin, so it should be considered more as fun or reputation rather than payment, yet still earned.

We can provide things which look nice for anybody with their own website, or blog, via plugins, widgets, and code snippets. Social platforms can use an url until later. Can we identify some good places/communities in which to start?

Some designers and developers have offered to help, and two servers have been donated to this side project. It has been a quiet, but positive response.

If the IPO is escrowed, they cannot do this.

That's a valid pattern I'm certainly not disputing, if it is more effective do it.


I agree, what you say there seems rational, my question was more to those who just run at any coin, even if it only has a 2 line announcement, and mine it. Seems more gambling than informed decision making? if that is a fair comment to make.

Thank you for your reply.


This is what concerns me, the difficulty reflects the estimated target hashrate so that blocks are created according to the schedule.

Consider a coin with a target block time of 2 minutes. You can work out the required hashrate from the difficulty as follows:

Difficulty 16: (16*(2^32))/120 = 572662306.133, or 572.6 MH/s
Difficulty 32: (32*(2^32))/120 = 1145324612.27, or 1,145 MH/s

If the network hashrate is 1145MH/s at both difficulties, and you have 10% of the hashrate, then you will receive 10% of the blocks at both difficulties.

If you scramble for the blocks all at the start you will not get more, rather you will get some slightly faster (or not because of orphans), and then later find you cannot get many at all because the difficulty is too high, or that you still get 10% but you have to hash for much longer.

In the end it means that any fractional gains from mining the first blocks at a lower difficulty are negated by having to spend longer hashing at the higher difficulty.
The effect is further compounded by any dump, as the later expensive to mine blocks take a much greater financial penalty, often resulting in loss.


Why would you do this? Surely if you pick a reasonable coin with some future to it, and mine it for a longer period of time, then your resulting risk is greatly reduced, and chance of fair profit greatly increased.


Exactly, by doing so you simply drive the market price towards the cost of production resulting on no profit or a loss.

I am interested as to why you specify these two thing in particular.

1) What innovation do you seek? If there is a particular problem you feel needs addressed then look for the people working on that solution, otherwise it is just token innovation.
3) If a currency has utility as a currency it will by definition be used and therefore exchanged on reasonable markets.

Rather than trying to identify the coin, consider trying to identify which properties it would need, then you can begin to make a rationale decision as to which you feel offers what is required.

use getinfo first to check you have the right wallet, a wallet with a balance and transactions.

also ensure you have downloaded the blockchain and it is up to date.

why not manage the private keys instead?

launch with a new fresh wallet, import the keys you need, do what you need, remove the wallet.
repeat as needed.

It looks like the wallet was created (or modified) with a version of bitcoin that was built to use berkeley 5.3, and you are trying to salvage it using the built in 4.8

Please let me make clear that I ask these with the best intentions.

1. Why do multiple miners all scramble for coins as soon as it is launched?
The block rewards received are proportional to your percentage of the network hashrate, not the difficulty, so it confuses me.

2. Why do many people mine to sell immediately, or use multipools?
It stands to reason the each coin varies in price over time, and if you wait for the optimal time or to hit a certain target then you will achieve a greater profit. Or better pick a coin you want to hold and mine that, taking out only expenses as you need to cover them.

I'd like to thank anybody in advance who takes the time to give a considered reply.

Mark

One Week Old
One week has passed since Bitmark was launched. Here are some of our accomplishments since launch:

1. A smooth release with zero bugs reported on any platform.
2. An interesting and committed community has started to take shape.
3. The standard of discussion on the thread has remained exceptional over all 32 pages.
4. No Bitmarks have been sold, and we are not listed on any exchanges.
5. Multiple people have started contributing work, software, hardware, design, and ideas to the project.
6. Achieved a fair distribution of Bitmark to over 200 miners, with 70 on average at any time.
7. Network hashrate has been balanced between Solo Mining, two fair playing pools, and investor hired mining rigs.
8. We have introduced Bitmark P2Pool support to further decentralize the network.
9. Investor Public Mining (IPM) has been proposed, is being tested, and the proposal has had significant refinements.
10. 110,000 BTM have been created, and 1100 BTM have been donated to the Bitmark Foundation.
11. Bitmark's value proposition has been clarified.
12. The first of many novel plans focussed on adoption has been proposed.

It has been a good first week, thank you to everybody.


1. decide how much BTM you would like at production cost, it will average out to around 890 BTM per 0.1 BTC, or 0.00011500 per BTM.
2. send the BTC to 18rai2ichzUfXG6PVmUQLNPqBjtctnVRAD and inform me of your Bitmark address.
3. after 24 hours you will be notified of the exact amount of BTM generated on the first mining day in a full report.
4. a further 24 hours and you will receive your BTM from the first day, and receive the report for the second day.
5. the IPM Pool Test finished, and you receive your BTM from the second mining day.

Here is a the report from two shorter tests already carried out.
The total amount of space remaining for the test is 0.554 BTC.

UPDATE: The IPM Pool test is now full, please do not send any BTC, if you do I will treat it as a donation, use it to create some bitmarks and give them to all the people who have helped (and maybe buy a beer).

Thank you. There is plenty of time to get involved, the block reward doesn't change for 18 months and when it does it only reduces by a quarter. No rush on this coin, let's do it right.

I would like to propose 'GetMarked' properly, a domain name for the project is required, and the obvious ones are already registered.


I created r/bitmark several days ago in anticipation that we may need it, it's there whenever people feel they want to.

There is still room on the IPM Pool Test, 0.554 BTC of space exactly which allows us to run the pool for a full 48 hours going through two difficulty changes and see how the network really reacts to it's presence.
I have been trying to hold off running it until more people join so that we can do an extended test, and consider how to handle the occasions when the rental contracts drift in to the next mining day.

I have been watching this launch.

The network target speed is: 7514.63877682 MH/s
The current production cost of each BMY is: 0.00105497 BTC per coin
Miners are paying 32,867% more per BMY than IPO investors, this doesn't count orphans or rejects.
The IPO issued 248.2 days worth of coins, 68% of the first years coins.
After the first days mining miners will hold 0.4% of the total minted coins, IPO members will have 96.4%.
If the network speed drops to 70MH/s it will take 8.3 hours per block, the network will take 4.15 days to retarget from this speed, and 4 retargets to start finding blocks on time.
Any price above 0.00000320 is a profit for IPO investors.
Miners are paying a production cost 210,894% higher than the maximum buy order.
The lowest sell order is IPO price.
The effective miner ROI for mining at the current difficulty is -99.9526%

Thank you for changing the currency code from BTM to BYM to avoid the conflict. I appreciate you doing this.

Thank you as always for your support and kind words.

Adoption
Creating GetMarked will be enjoyable, I feel it is something my friends and family would use.

Reputation systems such as scores, karma, and likes have proven successful, Marks are a distributed reputation system which can follow a user around the web, and also real life. The novel part is that they are backed by currency, they are literally currency, the more the marking system is used the higher the value of each single mark. This adds a layer of competition and incentivization for users, they will compete for marks and watch the value rise. Natural milestones exist, to get 1000 Marks, and later 100, adoption milestones where a mark is worth a cent, then ten. Eventually marking something could be synonymous with paying for something. Marks are to be earned, each mark earned by an individual adds value to all.

Consider marks to be spendable karma, an amusing post on a social network could pay for your coffee, marking a video of the crisis in syria could pay for aid on the ground, marking an article about a mistreated animal could pay for it's shelter, and marking this idea could pay for it's creation.

If I can explain it's far reaching impact in under a minute, then getmarked has merit and should be a priority for our project.

Transitioning
The process of a business transitioning from Bitcoin or Bitcoin based currencies to Bitmark is not so ambitious, and not so hard.

The question of 'Why?' is the one we must answer with a list of things of things which earn and maintain value. There are early bird incentives for any business who may adopt and take profit in BTM, the profit margin on a pair of shoes today may pay for a new point of sale terminal later.

Many of the technical considerations are minimal to any business who already uses cryptographic currency, as bitmark is always based on the current release of bitcoin, it is completely compatible today and next year.

I agree that it is wise to start work on an executive level model, and something which answers questions like 'can we use the same address?' and 'will our ecommerce system work with bitmark?', the answers to which we know are no and yes respectively.

You can be sure that both the community and I will support you in creating the document, as you are part of the community and we can all see this kind of support is what drives the project.


The ability to do this in any manner for any set of currencies already exists, anybody can do it in any direction. The flow of currency from one to another is a natural process, each entity chooses to do it based on their sentiment towards the currencies in question at that time.

The purpose of IPM is to promote fair balance and reasonable stability in all areas of Bitmark, as each area scales.

Suggest anything you like, all input on any avenue of the project is greatly appreciated and makes for an interesting discussion thread.

Miners and Investors
This is a proposed modification to the Investor Public Mining (IPM) Pool
The IPM Pool allows investors to indirectly provide up to 35% of the Bitmark Network hashrate through renting miners. Allowing investors a chance to acquire BTM at a price close to that of production.
IPM's variable hashrate according to difficulty provides a range of benefits to users, developers, miners and investors, whilst balancing their needs in a fair manner. It is discussed in the document in greater detail.

A key detail of the IPM Pool is that it relies on rented hashing power.

This modification allows for the IPM Pool to directly hire fair mining entities who wish to support the Bitmark network, and provides a revenue stream for them which should be more profitable than using existing multipool or switching pools.

Let us consider some example figures for a 100MH/s mining rig.

Mining Rig Running Cost: 0.0007500/MH/day (0.075 for 24 hours)
Rental price to the IPM Pool: 0.001/MH/day (0.1 for 24 hours)

Instead, the IPM Pool will rent the mining rig for 32 Hours at the running cost of 0.0007500, providing you with the full 0.1 BTC required to operate the mining rig for the period.

a) For the first 24 hours the mining rig is run on the Bitmark IPM Pool.
b) For the remaining 8 hours it is run on a secondary standard Bitmark pool.

The BTM generated under pool (a) follows the IPM proposal, with 4% to the bitmark foundation, 96% to the investors.
The BTM generated under pool (b) is split 3% to the bitmark foundation, 97% to the mining entity.

The Bitmark Foundation receives the same daily donation as 5% under the current proposal. 0.25% of total supply over 280 days, capped at 70,000 BTM.

This allows miners to cover all of their mining rig costs in BTC, whilst taking all profit in BTM.

If a percentage of the BTM generated by the miner (or for a syndicate, operators and investors) needs to be moved in to another currency, then that creates some downwards pressure on the bitmark markets.

This downward pressure is good, as it stops the market price from drifting too far from the production cost, allowing users and non IPM Pool investors to acquire some BTM at a fair price too.

The 'price-tag' of the Bitmark will then be pinned within a reasonable variance to the 'production cost', both of which would be determined by the network difficulty.

The network difficulty is then a measure of demand.

The demand is the remit of the Bitmark Foundation and the Community, both of which are supported greatly by the balance of investors and miners created by IPM.

I feel this balances the interests of everybody, and makes both the price-tag of BTM and the bitmark network harder to manipulate by bad actors.

As demand for bitmark grows, so does the difficulty, which enables the IPM Pool to hire more miners and bring them in to the fold as fair miners.
The investors gain because production cost rises pushing the price on markets upwards towards the increased production cost.

All of the existing benefits of IPM are then magnified greatly.

The real figures will need to be calculated, if you all agree that the theory is sound and that it is an interesting proposition.