Sorry I edited my above post with more points.

This is very useful and will help manage IPM pools, I have just tried it.

The only feedback I have is that it would be easier to use if the 'quick rent' box floated on the page, otherwise you need to continually scroll up and down to see your current order as you add miners. Also a button to empty the quick rent box would help.

It would be helpful if users could create orders for hashing power which miners could fill, for example 2.6GH/s at 0.00095 BTC per MH for 24 hours. Miners could then 'fill' the order with their rigs until the order is full.

Finally, do you have an estimated time as to when we may be able to order rigs via the API, this would be a very valuable addition.

The fault was that the block file on the hard disk could not be opened.

I would suggest backing up your wallet immediately if you have not, then closing bitcoin and running some health checks on the hard disk.

The article concludes that "What gives bitcoin its value is that it is accepted as having value."

The word value refers to two things in the context of the statement

1. Bitcoin's current 'price tag', or market valuation.
2. Bitcoin's 'utility', or value proposition to users.

If we write "What gives bitcoin its price tag is that it is accepted as offering utility." then it makes more sense.

We can then conclude that bitcoin is not backed by bitcoiners who simply believe it has value and therefore it does, rather it is backed by an acknowledgement from users that it offers utility.

The valuation of bitcoin is not it's 'value', it is a price tag that reflects it's perceived value.

I have made a mistake.

The wallet controlling the bitmark foundation had two accounts, one with just under 60 BTM left from the first blocks solo mined, and the other with the Bitmark Foundation funds, 1001 BTM.

I sent Allow 50 BTM to thank him for his efforts on the project, however it came out of the foundation account instead of the surplus.

I have rectified the situation by sending the full amount in the wallet to the Bitmark Foundation address, which now has a balance of 1010 BTM.

The concerned transaction is c9d1f2740de46701d642da0b05dd95914dc6e5ca360bb978371cc6c7141369f2

The block explorer now shows that 2011 BTM has been received, for this reason, the true figure will always be 1001 less.

An amount of 0.9996 BTM was sent as change to the address bYwiBH1v7gF6sxgX26rR5CumWHQSnwNX98, this has now been lost forever.

The Bitmark Foundation key is securely stored offline, the wallet file has been removed to ensure that no foundation funds can be touched, accidentally or otherwise.

Good work Videlicet, I look forward to testing your code.

Which CPU are you using?

Thank you for your support and for taking the time to offer considered feedback as you see fit, that is invaluable to the project.

Your donation to the Bitmark Foundation, it puts us ahead of schedule with a total of 951 BTM donated so far, thank you.

The Bitmark Foundation is currently a concept which has a BTM address for donations. The real Bitmark Foundation will be created by everybody here over the next year. During this time I am holding the private key to that address until we have agreed what to do.

Our goal is for the created Bitmark Foundation to be a decentralized autonomous non profit corporation powered by the community, to hire resources and staff and pay for units of work with the BTM under it's control.

Over the next year I am working voluntarily in the hope that this creates an avenue of work for many people including myself.  I am not rich, I have lowered my standard of living to the minimum acceptable by my family, a little too low if I am honest. I am living on a small finely balanced income during this process.

This is a community effort, if you all want to hire people, by attaching BTC or BTM bounties to units of work over the next year you can. Or you can sponsor work, or donate to those who commit time to the project. You can also commit some of your own time and effort. You can also leave things as they are, I am already committed.

I resisted the methods other projects have adopted to do this ethically and fairly, so that value is earned.

If our work is good, our ethics are fair, and our reasoning sound, it should pay fair dividends to those involved at each stage.

More than one IPM pool could exist, for example two independent IPM pools with 17.5% maximum each. It can be distributed.

Initially I will control both the IPM Pool and the Bitmark Foundation, the Bitmark Foundation funds are considered locked until after 2015-07-13. This is to give us time to create a community and have the foundation controlled in a decentralized way, similar to a DAC. Consider me a central point of failure to the entire project at this time as I am leading it on all fronts, in the case of death I hope that enough has been published in documentation and posts so that others could continue the process.

The Bitmark Foundation is currently a concept which has a BTM address for donations. The real Bitmark Foundation will be created by everybody here over the next year.

I try to engage the community and people are already committing valuable time to the project, the IPM Pool proposal was reviewed and had input from 4 people before being published.

For the Bitmark Foundation, I envision that bugs, feature requests, and units of work will be democratically selected, bounties assigned to them, and then proposed units of work completed by anybody. Once a unit of work is marked as complete, it will be accepted by the community and the bounty released. The exact specifics of the system to do this have not been defined, but we have a year to create such a system and examples already exist. We can use githubs pull requests and issues to create the units of work and track them, then a BTM payment system which attaches a bounty to the issue or pull request.

The IPM Pool will be completely transparent, each day a report will be generated which shows the rigs hired, the price of those rigs, the bitmarks generated, the btc donations and the bitmark payouts.  It will always mint blocks to the same bitmark address, and the foundation address will not change. Public block chains ensure a level of transparency.

I hope to automate the IPM pool as much as is feasible, otherwise there is a time based maintenance cost associated with it.

Discussion about ideas as to how we can ensure transparency, oversight, and move to a democratic management system are gratefully received.

Thank you Chronikka for the more useful and rational input this time, I am glad you have taken the time to get to know the project.

Today Bitmark has proposed Investor Public Mining to the community.

IPM defines a fair way of balancing the interests of miners, investors, developers, and users.

If you are an investor, miner or otherwise interested in crypto currency or Bitmark, please take the time to read the document.

Subject to the communities approval we will implement the IPM pool over the following days.

Feedback and discussion is encouraged, please ask any questions you may have so that we can clarify the document.

Today we propose Investor Public Mining to the community.

IPM defines a fair way of balancing the interests of miners, investors, developers, and users.

If you are an investor, miner or otherwise interested in crypto currency and Bitmark, please take the time to read the document.

Subject to the communities approval we will implement the IPM pool over the following days.

Feedback and discussion is encouraged, please ask any questions you may have so that we can clarify the document.

Sorry Androidicus I forgot to say you were already credited on the ANN since yesterday, I had a thank you reply drafted and was then distracted by helping Danny.

I know you are joking, but I want you to know that I am sorry for the oversight, and value your donation of both BTM and time as much as any other.

Shortly I will have a proposal ready which takes 5 minutes to read, if anybody is available to take a look at it before posting it here, could they pm me or join the irc room.

Thank you.

Thank you for your kind donation to the Bitmark Foundation, it will do much to help the future of our project.


I would like to give the algorithm more than a day or two to see how it performs.

We are currently mining blocks on schedule, and the block time is reasonable for users.

More importantly, today a fully documented proposal is to be released which will address the issue of difficulty volatility for Bitmark. It will be published in the coming the hours.

It looks like you have mined an orphan block, and are possibly on your own fork.

Start the wallet with -rescan and -reindex to fix.

If it does not, close bitmark, delete the debug.log, restart bitmark then send me the output of debug.log.

Have you checked if it is blocked by a firewall? This is most likely.

The wallet automatically connects to seed nodes on start-up, all of them are active. You should get a few connections within seconds.

If you still have problems, PM me and I will debug it with you by giving you nodes to add and checking the debug logs.

Thank you for your support.


This is very commendable. To me this is even better than saying you had just donated 200 BTC.

Thank you.

I am a small miner also, you and I mined the first 16 blocks between us I think.
The pool had 90mh/s from the start, but it would not work until block 16 had passed due to a bug in stratum-mining.


Some people who wanted some Bitmarks hired some mining rigs to get some early.

It is fair, we get out an amount which corresponds to the hashing we put in. I only have 270 BTM so far.

In the future if any percentage gain in value is earned, it will apply to every bitmark.

You are a small miner, you will have a small share but the same ROI, the same stands for me.

If any of us would like more Bitmarks all we can do is mine them or ask a miner if we can buy some off them.

The best network we can have is where people mine because they want to support the network and get some BTM for themselves. If you are doing it for short term profit then this is not the coin for you. It has no value yet. To get a large amount for nothing, then to cash in on other people's hard work, now that would be unfair.

The more long term small miners we have, the harder it will be for anybody to gain an unfair advantage by diverting resources. If you want a strong distributed network then you should stay and mine through all hashrates and difficulties.

The word launch is maybe wrong, I think of it more as showing people the foundations on which we will create something along with the idea of what we will make.
If you like what you see then come and help us build something which has value, and if you feel it will and would like a stake, then contribute some hashing power to the network to claim some of it for yourself.

top of page links
1. Analysis of how the Bitmark release went
2. Create a network of thin clients
3. Establishing priorities

Which resources do you feel are missing from the project?

We should prioritise which work to do this week.

Some I would prioritise are:

• the IPM pool
• block explorer?
• begin API design and architecture discussions (above post)
• website?
• identify potential adopters, good pools, existing crypto currency services which add value to users

Thank you for pointing this out. I have been looking at electrum and electrum server. If we are to do this, we should address two issues:

1. Electrum-Server knowing which addresses are controlled by which users
2. Electrum-Server reliance on IRC to find other nodes.

A solution to 2 will likely solve 1.

Consider that we could replace electrum server with a network of bitmark nodes which also store transactions, and which have certain api methods exposed to the public.

If we do this, we can bootstrap thin clients like electrum on to the existing p2p bitmark network.

This will allow for a number of thin clients to compete with innovation and usefulness, which would be good for our users. Many different people working on thin clients can provide a much better user experience than we can possibly hope to ourselves.

That would be better, to allow thin clients to work on established public bitmark nodes instead of custom servers.

Developer Analysis

I am very pleased with the launch of Bitmark. No bugs have been reported.

Mining has been interesting, the opposite of what normally happens when an alternative coin is launched.

Normally alt coins are hash-raped by people with mining hardware, ready to be dumped on 'investors' at an exchange. Mine a coin to dump for BTC.
Instead with Bitmark we find investors hiring mining rigs, with no exchange planned. Burn BTC to mine and keep Bitmarks.

0.1% of all bitmarks are now distributed fairly between early adopters.

The network has strengthened so that when the difficulty next changes, which we project to be Wednesday, 3 days will have past, 3 days of block rewards will have been mined, and the network will settle at a projected difficulty of 26 and a hash speed of 1GH/s.

The block reward does not half for 3 years, with an interim drop in 18 months. We can conclude that 3 days of coins will be fairly mined by both miners and investors over the first 3 days.
We could not hope for anything fairer.

The wiki article on the supply and distribution of bitmark reads:

Our next step for network health is to pursue the distribution of hashing power between more pools. We hope for Bitmark to have 8 major pools at a minimum as it the project earns value.

As quoted we suppose that the number of rewards per day has a strong impact on distribution.
Yesterday with a network speed of ~2GH/s I solo mined 6 blocks out of 1440 with only 0.45% of the network hash power. I received ~0.45% of the block rewards for that period.
I pointed the same amount of hashing power at the miningpool.co pool, I received the same amount of bitmarks as reward.

We can conclude that our block configuration is such that however you point your hashing power, you will receive a fair reward. This will do much to ensure a healthy secure and distributed network.

Hashing power was much higher than anticipated, it proved Bitmark's block chain configuration to be good.

Hashing power has halved, and still the average block time is only 4 minutes, which is reasonable for a working network, this bodes well for our future.

I am therefore also happy with the way the coin has been mined over the first days.

On average it is fair and reasonable. That is our goal.

The network will see to itself, our work on ease of use, ease of integration, ease of adoption will not see to itself. We should return to our discussions and work on bitmark.

I will conclude by saying that if I were to be offered a gift of BTC or a gift of BTM, I would choose the BTM. Perhaps many of you reading feel the same.

Thank you all.