Some have asked about what happens to the redeemed BTCD. Since the BTCD that is redeemed will already have gotten the komodo and the revshare snapshot, it is not expected that it will have a giant value.

But this is crypto.

You never know and so I came up with the auroboros plan. This plan would air drop all the collected BTCD at the end of the one year redeem period to all the komodo stakeholders who are identifiable, ie. not locked in zkp. So it will go to all transparent komodo holders.

In addition for usages as a testbed, the BTCD 1.0 that will be locked for a year will come back to life and people can do with it what they will.

0

To run a notary node and get $500+/mo you need to be one of the top 16 in any of the four regions: North America, Europe, Asia/Eastern Europe, Southern Hemisphere

We will have ways for people who want to run a notary node to campaign so stakeholders can see the qualified node operators, their geo-location, bandwidth, server specs, experience, etc.

We want to get as diverse stakeholders as possible to ensure no single stakeholder is getting anywhere close to controlling 33 notaries. That wont allow any double spending or funds stealing, but they could prevent new notarized hashes from being created and make creating new blocks intermittent.

It is the same 51% issue that all crypto has, so with a one node per geographic region and 1 vote per geographic region we should end up with a diverse set of notaries and stakeholders. It is perfectly fine for a stakeholder to vote for themselves

Notary nodes earn komodo enough to cover the operating costs and as key part of the ecosystem, they will be able to participate in any price growth of komodo. A bit more than 1% per year is allocated for the notary nodes, which is far less than the 5% per year from staking.

did you miss: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1605144.msg16119953#msg16119953

I did not actually launch even BTCD, I joined midway through the PoW phase
I did conduct the SuperNET ICO

I did raise private investements for various NXT projects and most of them are still pending for reasons explained in the referenced link.

I am happy to answer specific questions about any specific project, but for ICO funds it is SuperNET 2 years ago. I would consider surviving the bear market and still retaining the majority of NAV while developing iguana codebase a middling success. Nothing to write home about, but nothing to be ashamed about either. And in any case the end is not reached for SuperNET yet, still has many many years

Also, please try to evaluate komodo dPoW on its own merits, it is quite the unique tech. The question is if after seeing a testnet for komodo if there will be a mainnet with notary nodes. Do I have the tech skills to complete the required komodo tech?

I did write a full bitcoin node from scratch in the last 9 months. Maybe that is an ordinary thing, but maybe there are less than a handful of people who have actually done that.

It was critical that BTCD not get an unfair preference over ICO investors, else there wont be much ICO investing. Also the fact that I am a large BTCD holder makes it doubly important that there isnt any perceived or actual artificial benefits.

If you are a long term investor in BTCD, this is a temporary pause of the constant volatility. the price goes up and it goes down, that is the nature of markets and maximizing short term price has never been any concern of mine. If you were under this impression, I apologize, but you had me mistaken for somebody else.

I have always been and will continue to be operating with the long term success of BTCD and SuperNET in mind. It is my opinion that the komodo ICO further's this and the amount of complaints by BTCD holders should convince anybody considering ICO investment that there indeed has not been any undue preference given to BTCD holders.

The goal was to make it as much of a sideways move as possible with a minimal reward to compensate of the temporary price ceiling during the ICO. this does offer arbitrageurs the chance to make a defined return, it will all work out in the end.

Thank you for a good technical questions!

1. One of the reasons notary nodes are required is to deal with any such black swan events. dPoW is designed to be a two stage confirmation process, actually there would be 4 stages of being confirmed:

a) mempool of komodo
b) confirmed in komodo blockchain
c) notary hash in mempool of bitcoin
d) notary hash in bitcoin blockchain

So you can see b) and d) will continue to accumulate confirmations and therefore more security. Now let us consider your hypothetical where bitcoin disappears. What changes is that c) and d) dont exist anymore and komodo security is "degraded" to its intrinsic security provided by the NXT-style PoS. Which for the years it is in operation has stood the test of time, so its not like komodo becomes insecure without bitcoin, it just wont be secured by bitcoin hashrate

2. I happen to be quite familiar with the btcfork project and its impact on komodo would only be if it becomes the most secure crypto by getting more hashrate than the existing bitcoin.

Again having the notary nodes allows to update the dPoW to change the blockchain that is used for the notary recording and any third party chains that rely on komodo for notary, will automatically switch over.

Some have philosophical issues with ICO, but as I explained above there are sound technical reasons it is needed. The primary one is that there needs to be a set of notary nodes that the stakeholders can trust to perform the notary duties in a timely fashion. And the best way I could find to have a representative set of nodes is from the bitshares witness voting. One could argue about specific votes, but it is unarguable that having a stake based vote is the best way to represent the stake.

Why are these notary nodes needed for dPoW? Primarily fraud protection. Without a know if data in the bitcoin chain is the real notary data, anybody can just post data in the bitcoin chain and claim it was! This is quite a serious flaw if not dealt with and using notaries allows the entire blockchain to verify it was approved notary. And by having the notary nodes properly elected on the blockchain, everybody can know that for better or worse the notary nodes are representing the stakeholders. So if there is a misbehaving notary, the stakeholder will need to elect a replacement.

There is separation of powers. Stakeholders have the power to determine the notary nodes. Each transaction can only be authorized by the proper owner of the privkey. Notaries can only approve valid transactions. All nodes can verify both the komodo blockchain and the bitcoin blockchain that everything validates.

I hope you can see the logic of why notary nodes are required and working backward from there why a large number of stakeholders are required and working backward from that, a large scale fully open ICO is required

Fair enough, if everybody feels that way then after some smaller amount is raised things will slow down. That's ok, we dont need the full 30k, it is just a max number and we had to put some max that was on the higher end of things.

Anything over 10k is a great success, likely the result will be somewhere in between.

Keep in mind if the full 30K is raised, then I will have a sizeable portfolio to make trading gains with and with such funding, simply putting oversized buy walls well below market price (of most any solid crypto) and then selling it at market price will produce far more than 10% per year in profits.

Remember the funds raised is intended to power the komodo machine and create profits from lower risk trades like above, with the occasional foray into new ICO for potential big gains. this strategy has worked out decently for SuperNET and with such a large bankroll, it starts becoming worth my time to maximize its ROI.

1% of a $1 mil portfolio is a nice $10000 gain, but my time is quite valuable especially if there is core coding to be done. 1% of $10 mil portfolio, well that is a different order of magnitude and from a $100,000 gain I can hire expert C coders. In any case, most of the work required for komodo is done via the iguanacore, so post ICO my tech skills are probably better suited for managing a team of coders.

But I am adaptible. If everybody feels komodo shouldnt get more than a few thousand BTC, that's fine too. Even that will be enough to jumpstart the dPoW and one people see that in action, my sense is that a light bulb goes off.

Bitcoin level security for all other dPoW blockchains. I might not have mentioned that I will make a way for third party blockchains to utilize dPoW, so with minimal changes to that chain it can get the bitcoin secured notary via the komodo notary nodes. That means instead of paying bitcoin txfees, a third party chain can pay komodo fees but be secured by bitcoin. It also means the complex notary node setup wouldnt be needed for the third party chain.

I am happy to work with any coin interested in exploring adding dPoW security, it is purely an enhancement and worst case if it isnt there, things are the same as now. If it is there, then your coin's blockchain cant be reorged without bitcoin itself being reorged. That is quite a powerful thing for any PoS chain or PoW chain without large hashrate

It is a maximum cap. We are not saying minimum amount or expected, just a max.

we needed to estimate the value of a blockchain that has dPoW (bitcoin level security with PoS efficiency) and zcash privacy and iguana tech and make sure that even in an overbought situation that ICO investors will have a very good chance of making money in the aftermarket trading

Maybe it is on the high side, maybe it isnt, but it is a max number and we are fine if less comes in.

What is your estimate for the value of a fully working komodo?

I understand.

Good news is that iguana is essentially ready for end user GUI testing any moment now. Remember we are still 6 weeks out from any fund collection and by then there better be a finished iguana GUI!

If you look at the github issues for iguana the list is quite short and I fix most bugs pretty immediately. I still wouldnt use it for large fund transactions as it hasnt been fully validated, but everyone is welcome to test. We are seeing sync times that are multiples faster than normal. However on some windows variants there are still some windows specific issues, but I have a feeling it is due to some system settings as the basic sync process is indeed working even in windows

Realtime sync for multiple coins at once is working, that was the big one. most all the bitcoin RPC is replicated and working docs.supernet.org in addition to beyond the normal bitcoin RPC.

So from my point iguana is essentially done, and I will be using it to implement the komodo dPoW. Please hassle the GUI guys for the GUI though as I really need to concentrate on the low level core stuff.

I can always use a good tester, so if you are a good troubleshooter and can do command line curl for API calls, let me know. It is a paid position, not crazy money as I have to be frugal, but if you can find bugs efficiently I can pay you more

Please see the explanations above on the need for capital. The primary use for the capital will be to pay for the bitcoin txfees, which due to the size of the notary transaction will be on the expensive side. Depending on if there will be a fee market or not, will change the required btc fees. A blockchain must first and foremost ensure its continued survival and dPoW is unlike any other.

Also, there needs to be enough value in the block reward to pay the notary nodes. The estimated monthly reward will be $500 per month per notary for 64 notary nodes. While it is possible to run with less than 64 notary nodes and we will if we dont raise enough funds, I feel that 64 is the right range of notary nodes to have. Mathematically being N*N number is useful and fitting that many bits into a uint64_t makes 64 the natural choice.

We will be setting up a way for people to campaign to run up to 4 notary nodes, 1 in each of the geographic regions. North America, Europe, Asia/East europe and Southern Hemisphere. I want to make sure the stakeholders are able to easily find qualified notary operators of they dont plan to vote for themselves. It is entirely possible for anybody to invest in the ICO and vote themselves in as a notary node. The voting will be limited to one vote per region though so the most nodes any investor can vote for is 4. The most notary nodes that can be run by one operator is 4. Of course it is possible for someone to attempt to pretend to be multiple people, but that is the purpose of the election process, to make sure we have a solid set of geographically diverse notary nodes at all the major data centers.

There is no guarantee that we will raise the maximum amount, it is a maximum amount after all. So the guarantee is that we wont raise any more than that. There was some possibility of some crazy amount coming in due to the combination of technology and market forces and beyond the max amount there is diminishing returns.

So, given that all the bitcoin fees and notary nodes are paid for the next priority is to fund liquidity for all the DEX trading pairs. iguana DEX is a true DEX being direct wallet to wallet and already over a dozen coins are supported. I expect dozens more coins added to the list of supported coins, so it will take some liquidity to make sure all the supported coins are DEX'able without waiting forever for someone to take the other side. Having a liquid true wallet to wallet DEX is something crypto needs, before the next big exchange goes down in flames.

At the high end of funding, there will still be funds available and while for some high ROI situations, funds might be directly used, I like the SuperNET approach of making investment gains and then using the profits to fund non-mission critical things, like new projects, marketing, etc. While I know many view marketing as mission critical, my usage of this is in the context that the blokchain continue on securely.

Also, based on the vociferous complaints from the BTCD crowd, it should be clear that BTCD peoples are not getting any massive sweetheart deal, they are given a bit of a premium and I hope they can understand that this is in return for the 10 week pause in price action. After the ICO closes, a new BTCD called komodo will rise up and the price also will hopefully continue on its upward journey with the dPoW, zcash and iguana tech all combined and backed by a high performance notary backbone. So while BTCD holders get a sideways move for 10 weeks, it is not as if this is the end of the line for them, it is the beginning after the ICO. I think much worse things have happened than a 10 week period of low price volatility in exchange for becoming the first dPoW coin with cutting edge privacy and DEX technology integrated

Also note, we are not doing this in stealth mode at all! It is open to everybody and anybody has a chance to be a ground floor stakeholder and/or a notary node operator. We estimate the cost to pay for full price notary node services via corporate vendors at approx $500/mo per notary node. However if you have skills to run a dedicated server for less, then the difference can be your profit, up to 4x. So if you want to be part of the dPoW revolution, you can help by running notary nodes and make a bit of money doing it.

We want and need as diverse of a stakeholder base as possible to ensure a maximally diverse set of 64 notary nodes. I want to make sure there are no complaints about people saying they didnt know they could run a notary node and get paid for it.

I hope my track record of SuperNET funds management is an appropriate resume for my ability to manage millions of dollars in investment funds. If there is anybody else who wants to step up for this role and can be approved by the stakeholders, I do not insist that I be the one. However, I dont know many crypto investors who have a deep tech understanding at my level who also has a trading sense who will also work without any big salary. If you know of anyone like that, please let me know. I am trying to reduce my workload year by year, I hope to get by with 12 hour days next year

How would you suggest to pay the BTC txfees required for dPoW?
Or to fund the notary servers that are required?

dPoW needs BTC for this and I did not see any large donor who would fund this out of the kindness of their heart.

Now, do we need a dPoW system that allows anybody to get BTC level security for komodo txfee? I think we do, but if you dont, we can agree to disagree.

I have been very responsible with all the funds raised by SuperNET in the past and BTCD has never made any large donations, so I wonder how you are expecting millions of dollars of development out of thin air?

Now I havent been asking for more money, and diligently working toward completion of all the projects, but the dPoW is such a big idea I feel it deserves a chance to be born.

Once there is a dPoW system that is live, it means that any chain weaker than bitcoin itself can benefit from bitcoin's hashrate for its security.

I know everybody wants all the projects to be finished yesterday without any funds. But the reality is that dPoW is not something I can finance personally and I certainly cant be tapping into SuperNET funds to pay for it.

Also, a large scale set of stakeholders are needed without any undue concentration to properly elect the notary nodes. this is a technical security requirement of dPoW. So the ICO is coming from the need to have a representative set of notary nodes elected by stakeholders.

I know some people are philosophically opposed to any ICO as it isnt mining. If that is you, then this ICO is not for you. If however you are open minded and want to help bring bitcoin security to an entire dPoW ecosystem, then it might make sense to consider komodo. Bitcoin now is over an exahash per second! That is a lot of hashing and it benefits: bitcoin

dPoW will change that so all that hashing will benefit all of crypto. Bitcoin can and should be the heartbeat of all crypto and dPoW is how that will happen. iguana tech creates an ecosystem of bitcoin compatible coins so everything can interoperate, but without security a lot of weak chains are too weak for any serious capital to be locked into them.

For these reasons a large scale ICO is required. If komodo has a small marketcap then it cant be the backbone interfacing to bitcoin for the dPoW ecosystem.

UNITY is not abandoned: http://www.supernet.org/nav.php

please see my prior response

While I have done many projects, I think "dozens" is an exaggeration. Similarily your statement about no projects finished is a bit harsh.

jl777hodl is a holding fund for various crypto projects. As such it has been finished for years. It was the first asset that started trading and made history, this was something like 2 years ago. I would consider this finished.

MGW is multigateway.com and that also has been finished and in service for over a year. Since it is working and being used for over a year, I would consider that finished.

NXTventure is another one that has been finished for over a year. It has paid out in dividends more than I think any other NXT asset by value of dividends at the time it was sent out. Again, the future of NXTventure is hampered by all the changes with NXT that is out of my control, however I would consider NXTventure was completed.

SuperNET is a hybrid holding vehicle and technology incubator. At least that is one way to look at it. http://www.supernet.org/nav.php shows its current holdings and despite being hit by a 75% reduction in its NAV the first year (mostly due to NXT price decline and my not actively trading), the NAV has more than doubled to within striking distance of the original. This is achieved while paying for all the costs to run SuperNET out of the investment gains. Now what other project self-funds from investment gains that it makes?

I have issued more than a dozen proxy assets, such as mgwBTC and superBTC. These asset's function is to represent 1:1 the BTC to allow using the NXT AE to trade them via blockchain. I did this 2 years ago and I am pretty sure it was the first tokenDEX that allowed trading of crypto against crypto. This is 2 years ago, when just now we finally see other solutions of this kind appearing. I would consider these assets completed.

Iguana is a bitcoin daemon and wallet that can sync the entire BTC blockchain from scratch in 2 hours. It also can sync over a dozen other coins, all from a self-contained codebase that I wrote from scratch. Its codesize is about 3MB and it has been ported from unix to osx, win32, win64, android and chrome app. docs.supernet.org documents its API bindings and it is now in the final stages of debug and will be used as a component within komodo. I have seen some GUI that is looking pretty good and for basic wallet function and parallel sync it appears to be working, though I do the core level code and not the GUI so I cant speak for it in detail.

Is iguana completed? Not quite, but it is very close and I suggest you take a look at it. The source code has been open and available during the development process at https://github.com/jl777/SuperNET and you can see that I have been quite busy over the years. docs.supernet.org documents the API

crypto777: this is an ongoing technology revenue asset and as soon as project start generating revenues, it will too. It basically represents revenues from the technology that I do that doesnt already have an asset to encapsulate its revenues. In some sense it is done, just that the revenue streams are flowing yet. Maybe this is in an in-between state, but there was no ICO per se for this, so not sure if you have an issue with it.

Now to the real unfinished projects list, however please note that there was NO ICO for these and it was funded by small number of private investors, so I dont think it is fair for you to criticize them as an incomplete ICO, as they were not even ICO:

InstantDEX: easyDEX is in last stages of coding/debugging and is part of the overall solution of loosely coupled blockchains using atomic swaps. The full InstantDEX was mostly working last year(!) however due to disappearance of GUI dev combine with NXT increasing txfees dramatically while reducing the available space to store data, made an InstantDEX built on NXT uneconomic. Should InstantDEX have been finished by now? Yes. I made a mistake of building the InstantDEX on top of NXT, which is a platform that I had no voice in and when everything was changed and made it so a few of my projects became unviable, my protests were met with a "you should have known better". OK, so lesson learned and now I know better, I wrote iguana from scratch so its entirety I am in control. Never again will I be at the mercy of arbitrary changes that break backward compatibility and the fundamental economic model of a service I built on top of it.

Pangea: this is a decentralized poker service that is in a holding pattern now due to the retooling required to switch from a NXT based service to iguana based.

Tradebots/NXTcoinsco: part of this is in the process of being completed within the easyDEX framework, but again the shift from NXT based to iguana based was a delay factor.

NXTprivacy: this is mostly a deprecated asset due to my shift from NXT to iguana, but I do have a plan to infuse some life to it after the dust settles from the other projects. In any case it never did any ICO and didnt even do much of secondary trading on NXT AE, so its priority has been low.

Do you want me to list the projects that I didnt even raise funds from private investors and are just various technology projects that I have percolating? Not sure why you would have any complaints if I have a lot of projects in the research phase that I have not raised funds for.

I proposed an Asset Passport system, which is a way to protect asset issuer and holders by allowing them to migrate from chain to chain. This was actually the genesis of dPoW which evolved from the need to secure weak PoS chains. I never raised any funds for this.

I have proposed Teleport, Telepathy and PAX within the BTCD context, but I did not do any ICO to raise funds to develop this. Teleport at a high level is similar to zcash, in that there is a blackbox of bits representing the transaction, but the math behind the zero knowledge proofs is a step above anything else and I always want to use the best tech solution for my systems, even if it means replacing something I made. Telepathy is a network level privacy "mixer" and this will work on top of the komodo, of course it needs for komodo to be finalized and also its urgency is much less due to the strength of zcash tech. PAX has been coded to alpha level, but as an unfunded project has been back burnered and also waits for the full transition to iguana. Is it is disappointing that these things have not been completed yet? Sure, but I am just one guy coding away most days and many have advised me to get more help at the core level. The issue is I cant find any other C coders at my level who will work for anything less than a lot of money.

I am also providing free consulting for many projects, they just have to ask and I try to help as I can, which is usually with some technical ideas. I am not the one actually doing these projects though, so I hope you do not hold me responsible for any delivery status of all the projects I have helped with my advice.

I understand if you see all these projects and there isnt the level of success you want to see. After all if it was all finished and a big success I wouldnt have to be working these 14 hour days 28 days a month, continuously.

However, the perception that I never finish everything is not correct. The perception that I do dozens of ICOs and just spend all the money and ask for more, is not correct.

I have done exactly one ICO outside of the NXT assets, and that is SuperNET. Its charter for use of funds is primarily to make investments and I have been funding operations from the profits, while growing the NAV from a low of .002 to its current .006 level.

If you can name any other ICO I conducted where funds were raised and I havent delivered anything, I am curious to know what it is. As you can see I am not limited in the number of ideas, nor do I feel their quality is low. What I need is more resources. I had hoped to get at least half a dozen volunteers to work on the core C projects, but alas, there were none.

With komodo there is the possibility of creating not only the first dPoW implementation, but also to fund all of the pending projects that are in slow motion due to my only having 16 hours per day to work and I am slacking off this year by working only 14 hours per day.

James

yes, of course, without zcash, komodo wouldnt be able to have the zcash tech.

it will be a zcash fork + dPoW + iguana

so zcash enables komodo, and komodo will help zcash. Many people only buy mined coins and with the slow start mining there will be a lot of miners trying to mine the limited number of coins, so I expect the trading price for ZEC to be boosted.

this only helps komodo, which isnt any simple fork, it adds dPoW which is a new consensus method and the iguana tech from the BTCD developments. And komodo requires a large diversified stakeholders to have a secure dPoW. A lot of people only want PoS coins.

So both should complement each other very well.

Of course komodo stake is purchased via ICO, instead of purchased via mining, but its dPoW consensus utilizes bitcoin's PoW

komodo is btcd 2.0, so all the advanced tech migrates over to komodo, though it is possible some variants become available in the BTCD 1.0 chain first, kind of like a testbed. Not sure yet, but the flexibility for this is in place with both chains alive. I would not count on anything that isnt "testnet" like for the BTCD 1.0 versions of advanced features

technically cant move to komodo due to effectiveness of the zero knowledge proofs

so it goes into its own self-contained asset

there is a revshare right attached to BTCD that cant follow into komodo for technical reasons, ie no way to tell who has what in zkp form

I dont have assetchains working yet, ideally I would make an assetchain out of these revshare rights based on the end of ICO snapshot balance.

However I can still do the snapshot and then issue an assetchain when they are available based on it.

So if you have BTCD hold until ICO ends, you automatically get credit for the revshare asset and when the assetchain goes live you can trade them. or keep holding them and receive revshares when they come online.

After the ICO and you get into the revshare asset snapshot, then you can swap for komodo at the .0053 BTC amount. but if you are busy or dont want to do it right away, you can wait up to a year

There will be a small gap as there is an added step of funding the genesis holding account before swaps can be enabled.
I understand the issue of wanting access the same time.

I think what we can do is make sure exchange trading isnt started before people have had a day to redeem their komodo. And I will try to make redeems available within hours of when komodo is generally available, or maybe even a bit before by releasing a redeem tool before mainnet wallets

I dont count exchanges like yobit that trade IOU they just make up!

BTCD holders will get a revshare asset as of an end of ICO snapshot, the value of this is hard to estimate

the .0053 conversion price is 50% higher than august average (we had to use trailing price) and close to 1 year ATH and also happens to be a slight premium over what it was trading at before the announcement

no set price will be perfect, but this is for only until the end of ICO and reduced volatility works both ways. BTCD likely becomes a much more stable prices during ICO

and the komodo ICO is not the end of BTCD, it is the start of BTCD 2.0 called komodo

I too, will like the 1000%+ profits and my opinion is that komodo is the best chance to achieve a sustainable valuation increase like that (just counting the BTCD share)

The ICO will end
genesis block and mainnet needs to be created using ICO investors and BTCD share
then it is possible to swap BTCD for komodo

so the BTCD holders will have a single swap step to take after ICO is over, but they dont have to do anything during the ICO. BTCD acts like an ICO token until the end of ICO