I understand that you have a huge IPO going on, but you owe it to those buying to ensure that their data is safe.

This is your "authentication": http://crypti.me:6040/api/unlock?secretPhrase=lksdjfhsdkfjsdhfksdjfhsdkjfhsdkjfhksjdfhkjsdfhksdjfhaskdjfhksadjfhaskldf

That is SCARY that is not authentication, that is a passphrase being sent in plain text in an url, over plain http.

I cannot stress how bad this is, I have never seen anything so insecure in my entire life.

WTF? authentication isn't even used.. here view my balance: http://crypti.me:6040/api/getAllTransactions?accountId=15413165176907764021C

You need to do something about this now, people are buying with huge amounts of BTC!

pm me at the time, I try to follow other interesting threads daily, but do not always manage as I am also busy developing!

I can also test with windows xp/vista/7/8 and ubuntu 10/12/14.

You can upload binaries to github by tagging a release, I just went through this process and found it to be easy. You can download by wget as well, which is good for testing on servers.

The point of using localStorage and public key cryptography is to mitigate against MITM and replay attacks, cookie/session jacking, and keep the application stateless.

The "third-party local program" argument is invalid because a malicious third party local program can read a passphrase input in to a web page also.

I think code examples are already open source, or you can just go to the ripple client and look at the code. Many other things use this method too, it is proven.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Funded development: One principal of the bitmark project is that any value associated with BTM should have been earned rather than predetermined or artificially inflated. It stands to reason that if development is good and the project is focused, then the BTM acquired by myself privately, and the BTM in the development fund, will have enough value to hire or buy whatever is needed as the project progresses. I really appreciate that this is of concern to many of you, it shows that you too want a stable long term coin.

Innovations: The other principal of the bitmark project is to use what is proven, mature it, and be relatively stable. Coin based innovation is for other projects, we have a proven groundwork ready, and we will work hard to extend this with a new API and focus on ease of adoption.

I really respect and love innovation, following it closely including green mining, but it is not for this project, as innovations are proven in alternative currencies, and if they offer beneficial utility to users, then they will be adopted in the future.

As an example, I am commenting in another thread for another coin which launched on BTER today, with more than 80 BTC invested so far, and 5000 expected! In the thread we are discussing rudimentary simple design decisions and things which have been done incorrectly, really basic stuff like having https on a web wallet,  how to store a long passphrase without cookies, and how to use public key cryptography (on which crypto coins are built!). Bitmark is not that kind of project.

We will earn value through hard work, technical maturity, utility, and by focusing on users and adoption.

We just need a little bit of help to get running, a minuscule amount in comparison to common IPOs.

Hopefully this is in no way dismissive, as I hope to foster discussion rather than discourage it. Each decision should be questioned, as no person is infallible.

You can.

Use localStorage in the browser, this is a reasonable solution which requires no usage of cookies. The passphrase is stored in the users local browser. You may want to wrap it so that a traditional username and password creates the key which is used as the passphrase. Use Public key cryptography for this.

It is an existing proven approach, look at how ripple has implemented it.

I wish for your users this had been discussed and asked before going live.

This is a MUST.

If there is a web wallet which is not https, take it down and move it to https immediately.

Videlicet, I am happy to see a knowledgeable developer putting in so much hard work.

But I am worried about QA, with so much innovation and new code coming from a single source, there must be bugs. What is the QA process, who are the testers?

I do not mean to discourage the effort at all, or anything negative, rather to encourage this to go smoothly for you, since you have put so much hard work in to the project.

A new proposal, we'll call it a reverse IPO for now https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7764943#msg7764943

A new proposal, we'll call it a reverse IPO for now https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.msg7764943#msg7764943

I may have found a solution to this problem. Let me propose it to you all and see what you think.

Rather than premining for an IPO, we reverse it.

So any "reverse-IPO" investments are spent on mining rigs for when the network goes live. The BTM created is then split fairly between the investor(s), and a small percentage, say 5%?, sent to the bitmark foundation addresses, to be locked for a period of time and used in the future for development.

This way the network is supported, the coins distributed fairly between investors and miners, and the project secures long term funding.

What do you think?

If this were to go approved by the community and go ahead, then the donors so far would be included in the reverse-ipo. A total of 0.6 BTC would be removed from the total funds acquired to cover the resources required to launch the project mentioned earlier.

rather than having the coin "raped" with a huge hash rate at first, we would propose to have a fair amount of hashing power on the network for longer

I responded to tobeaj2mer01 privately also as he sent me a PM.

Something I said privately, which I realise I have not said publicly is as follows:

I have not entered in to this (Bitmark) lightly, and have organized my life so that for the next year or more I will be financially secure enough to commit most of my time to this effort. During which time the project should begin to fund it self through fair increase in value of BTM itself.

All I can suggest to anybody who is an investor looking for an IPO, is that you consider pointing some rented miners at the coin when it is launched, or buying some coins from those who do... and if you feel strongly enough that the project is worthy, to donate a small percentage of what you would have otherwise invested in an IPO.

Pandher, thank you for your valuable input. I am keen to follow the notion of donors being credited publicly, but have not decided exactly which form this will take. Certainly documentation and future websites will have a proud list of donors, that much is for sure.

Tobeaj2mer01, soon. First we must secure the remaining budget requirement (BTC0.2) so that network is stable and well seeded from launch, and so that we have the resources required to do this properly. Shortly after, we will launch the client and main chain. Everything is already tested and ready. 24-48 hours after securing a server, enough time to install what is needed, mine two genesis blocks, and give fair warning here to those following.

I should mention explicitly, I may have before, that any surplus donations received will be used to hire scrypt mining equipment to point at the Bitmark network, any BTM mined would be sent to the foundation address(es).

I am comfortable moving ahead with the suggested donations to the foundation approach for a long term development fund. Unless anybody explicitly says it is a bad idea, with reasonable rationale as to why. Otherwise consider this to be agreed.

Please see this post for details on why we will be avoiding an IPO, as tempting as it is.

No, it has been done before, and there are multiple ways to technically implement the concept including existing methods such as freicoin.

The problem is that any potential method of implementation reduces down to requiring a change to the block chain that would break compatibility with existing crypto currency software, at the very least mining and pool software would be affected, worst case far more.

Breaking compatibility is too much of a price to pay, so we are forced to abandon the taxation based development fund model.

Yes, when there is a pool. Otherwise to your own RPC enabled Bitmark instance, many scrypt rigs do support solo mining, but some do not.

I also do not have any mining equipment, ironically, I wish I did have a scrypt rig now.

I am hoping that since the value should be low to start, reasonable donations should be easy to achieve. Remember 10000 BTC bought a single pizza at one point, to achieve even 35,000 BTM over the next 18 months should be achievable, that's only 2.5 days of mining rewards.

We need a few more +1's before this is agreed.

Also a gentle reminder that we still need 0.2 btc to secure everything needed to launch the coin properly. Due to this change, the code is ready and we can launch as soon as we've secured a dedicated server.

I am +1 to this approach, as it is simple, reasonable and fair.

Let us resolve this quickly, with +1's.

A good suggestion, but I am uncomfortable with it for some reason.


I wish to avoid anything which could be used against the project later. The fund would have been 0.25%, the entire block taxation would have amounted to 70,000 BTM over the full block schedule.  Up front that is too much of a proportion, so I have to reject the pre-mine idea.

Perhaps there is another option.

1. I the primary first developer mine for myself, as others do.
2. We set up a "developer fund" address, or addresses, which are locked until a specific date, myself and other miners can contribute BTM to it as they see fit.

Any proposals as to how it can be done? We thought we had a reasonable approach, but we have had to abandon it

Taxation requires the presence of a "custom" or "forced" transaction in the block chain. There are many ways to implement it, but each one requires a specific transaction or output to be present. This requirement means that mining software, pool software, and potentially anything that reads the block chain would need to be modified to be Bitmark compatible, or face having blocks rejected. As an example, see Freicoin.