Congratulations and keep up the great work.

Thank you to Medic for his hard work and help managing the project.

I'd just like to say that the mining concerns have been noted, we have to viable proposals, and potentially a chance to implement one of them in a different coin next week to give it a try before we adopt it properly.  for now the BTM supply is very low, in fact we hit 50% emission earlier today.  There should be 1.85 million and we have less than 924k so far, some days only 100 created out of a possible 14,400!  The mining is tough, but limited supply is doing it's job for now.

Back to work.

I cannot develop the coin long term as I am committed to my own project.  However, I can help you fix the bittrex-blocking issue with transactions, likely on Sunday, if that would help.

Alternatively, if you can get your community together to work out what you want to use the currency for (i.e. work on some services and real longevity), and get a long term developer on board (Edric?), then I will commit some time to helping you get up and running with a fork of our own (modern, tested) codebase, a premine equal to the coins in chain, and a fair balanced configuration moving forward.  We also have 2 proposed modifications to difficulty and emission calculation, it would be good to include one of them, after testing of course.

Warmest Regards,  Mark

Alternatively, BTC is the only in which you can own 1 BTC.  Also, BTC is an alternative currency.

Yes, some even make their own coins, mine them, and offer them for exchange.  Also many times.

As I read it:

First paragraph entails that the only voices on the network are the attackers, therefore the second paragraph is redundant since no other voices have been used to secure it.

Additionally, malicious nodes could simply reject other peoples tenure ending transactions therefore locking their funds in a denial attack.

Is this correct?

Trading does not equal demand.  Trading volume indicates nothing more than traders trading, BTC on a dive for example will have vast trading volume, yet smaller trading volume on a rise, then random slow days and random high purchases.  It's a rough guide to traders speculative sentiment, or post reactionary to bad/good news and little more.

You measure demand roughly, by usage.  What percentage of the currency is floating, in the virtual pocket of users who need or want to use it for some purpose. The higher that percentage, or the faster it's increasing, the more real demand there is.

IF there are this many good / skilled /  honest developers, more of them should be working together.

I would vote the same, along with: sirius, defaced, kora, and jl777 - all good people.

This is my primary concern, Bitmark is not being used yet, in the wild we do not have 14,000 BTM required for usage per day - floating currency, btm being used by people for a purpose.

When demand is low, production must slow.  Currently mining produces a much more reasonable ~500 BTM per day, a tiny percentage of the planned emission.  For the currency's longevity this must be maintained.  When demand raises, production will naturally increase to the planned emission.  Here is our BTM Supply: 922860 BTM, and we had planned: 1732540 BTM - there is 809680 less BTM in the world.

In the interim, we have a fixed block reward, and a very slow block time.  This serves it's purpose and limits emission.

If an alternative formula can be created which limits emission when demand is low, I would be very happy to discuss it.  I personally have not seen one, and cannot find one.

I would also invite discussion on whether confirmation time is an issue or not,  I know for a fact that outside of a few people trading, the only usage of BTM is to pay for hosting at Crypto Cloud Hosting, and they do not mind the slow confirmation.  Thus, I ask, who are the slow confirmations actually affecting?

I would suggest that the issue is that currency mined now at such a slow speed has a production cost higher than market price-tag, and that the market price-tag when the currency is spendable (in a few weeks time!) simply is not known.  It is unknown, therefore possible that people mining now at a perceived loss, may in fact break even, make a loss, or make a profit.

There are two reasons to mine:
1: it is your service, if this is the case mine consistently as a service along with your fellow miners, take a small loss some times and a small profit others, so that it averages out profitable, choose the optimal time to sell.
2: you want BTM, if this is the case, you will always receive BTM when you mine BTM, if you believe it has merit then you know that it will be worth having.

Sincerely, I understand that you may be mining at a perceived loss, and that it can be a worry, and I thank those high difficulty miners who have persisted for their support.  Your support has been a huge help to the community, it's kept the blocks moving, but crucially, it has enabled us to maintain a very slow production rate when demand is lower, which has prevented BTM from going in to the all too familiar death spiral that happens when emission remains high regardless of demand.  Thank you.

Yes, and no. http://bitmark.co:3000/tx/3c83a7337302f5460e0e36ec98a55adc02ba112ee620ff654b5862e12be9a0dc

I'll add lastchangetime, or the details of the block at last change, to http://api.bitmark.co/

Although this has a semi-formal release, I'd encourage people to take a look at ribbit.

The text on ribbitrewards.me is particularly informative.

Interesting project, watching closely.

Unique opportunity to be involved in 3 million+ people using crypto currency... nothing major.  Anybody?

That web layer opens up a great amount of scope.  So people can start making supernet web applications?

Will Katz has been inspired to write a song all about Bitmark and Marking: http://youtu.be/wl4rnEguL2w 

EvilDave, we're taking roughly the same approach.  Marking is all done off chain, microtrusted instant transactions.  We're looking at thermal printed wristbands currently, qr/bar/custom coded, scan to load up with marks, scan at checkouts to pay for things, mobile apps to augment the experience to mark acts/artists, transfer marks between people you meet, tip staff etc.  Also considering temporary branded tattoo's for such events, nobody can steal a tattoo on your arm.

The simplest, fastest, most cost effective approach is ideal.

Many other uses have been considered, for instance live beer score boards, based on marks received, or number bought, or both.  This opens up more things like betting on which will win.  Carry this on to acts, live voting on acts showing at the same time, feedback walls, marking the staff and volunteers at events.  All of these are "nice to haves", the basic load and pay use cases are the most critical first.  Crypto-Currency has the advantage of being re-usable, instant, cheaper to account and can't be stolen like physical tokens.

Finally, thank you for the compliment, but there are many other people also driving project bitmark forward, with or without my input.  It's a team effort, a team anybody is welcome to be a part of.

EvilDave - all the events are in NL - and we have contacts at the major NL music events, and worldwide through the music side (ADE, tomorrowland, ultra) they are watching real world festival progress closely and adopting marking online already.

The "reputation" metric isn't so important, and it is not fixed.

On day one reputation may be all marks received.
day two it may be weighted by the reputation of the giver.
day three it may recognise that somebody is classed as a domain expert and weight marks they give in their subject domain more highly, if one physicist marks a paper from another for example.
day four, who knows.

The ability to give reputation and have it be usable/useful is the important part for now.  Exposing the marking ledger allows for more advanced reputation metrics to be generated over time.

To draw an image and share it with friends, gain reputation for it, give some to another artist who's work you appreciated and also buy some art supplies with it, that's the important enabling bit.


This may be done, but the goal is to allow me to mark you for saying that, for reputable viral material to be naturally marked and crowd-rewarded, also including the curators, rewarding them for sharing something others appreciate.  For a listener to reward an artist, and an artist to thank the listener back with a store-able version of a song.  This is business, for bigger business, let us say the music artist was given some artwork for the cover by a designer, then they can choose to manually or automatically aportion a fair amount of reputation to that person.

Google et al, we do not preclude their business models, we just offers alternatives, they may use them too in replacement or to compliment their existing systems.

Complimenting is better than replacing.  From day one we have said "work with what exists".

I think people are used to posts like this being unfounded.

We have some specification and introduction documents to plan and finish before a meeting with the CEO and Board of a company who organizes the aforementioned events.

The meeting is on the 5th of November.  Please, if you have any time to contribute get in contact, there is a huge amount to do between now and May 2015 when we need to have full end to ends ready and working for test usage.  Between now and then there are regular small venues available to test the technologies.