I thought naming it FUNK might think it should be restricted to funk (as in the genre). Hopefully that's okay now. I am thinking perhaps changing the currency code (not the band name) to something new, so that people don't confuse old addresses for new addresses. Suggestions are welcome. Perhaps a more neutral name. BEATS? Other suggestions?

Last night, I spent considerable time thinking again. With a PoS currency, the incentives are more aligned towards the creators. As those that get rewarded (say through tipping), get rewarded in turn through the staking. It's better than PoW. However, ideally, as you mentioned, being rewarded for producing & consuming the music is what would be the best aligned incentives. LTBCoin does this through centralized issuance. This model works, and is fine. However, I still really like, and want to try at least keep it as decentralized as possible.

However, trying to tie in content production & consumption (of a specific format as well: music) into the blockchain tech is not easy. In fact, if you solve this, it could be huuuge. I've had ideas like: how can you prove you've tipped music? how can you prove you've listened to a song? how can you prove you've made music? etc. All difficult problems.

The halfway point with PoS, and especially Vericoin's network-depedent stake is great. Network dependent is nice, because it encourages the community to stay "up" and thriving.

So, the 2nd best bet is to design the economics of the coin in such a way that those who produce get rewarded (there should be incentives to give coins to people who produce), but at the same time reward those who have already contributed. That's why a coin-age cap is nice. If you hold 40% of the coins, your coin-age cap will increase quite quickly, so there's more incentive to tip new productions as it won't increase your staking power.

Just an fyi. I'm working out the details in my spare-time (busy full-time with a new start-up). Once done, I'll post the details here. We can critique details (such as coin-age caps, time of PoW, etc, coin-cap, etc). If most is happy, I'll do an official "project plan" announcement (as altcoins like to do these days) with a guide on what's going to happen.

EDIT:

What we can do wrt to a faucet type system. Each new musician gets a once-off payout from an artist pool (will be backwards compatible). We set it to something like 200 musicians. So, for example, the 4M coins could be broken into the following:

1.5M FUNK1 coins.
1M artist pool. To be distributed to each musician that contributes. 1M/200 = 5000 each. This will of course be centralized (and issued by me). It will be transparent, open and verifiable.
1.5 PoW coins.

And then staking?

Sounds good! I'll read up more on cryptonight!

So. I've been thinking. Want to get some thoughts on this. I quite like Vericoin's network-dependent-interest. For those that don't understand it: if more people have their wallets open and contributing to Proof-of-Stake, the higher the whole network's interest rate (up to max of 3%). In terms of FUNK: this encourages holding the coin, and the whole network is encouraged to hold it. However, this is perhaps counter-intuitive, as you want musicians to tip other musicians. One such option, to encourage it would be to include Fluttercoin's proof of transaction. Except that only works for PoW blocks. I'm not sure if it works with PoS blocks (will have to figure out). However, I have a simpler solution. We cap the coin-age to a reasonable period.

After that point, your chance to solve PoS blocks won't increase. So, you can still hold on, and generate new PoS blocks, but it doesn't get substantially easier to do so, thus coins be spent.

So basically. Using network-stake-dependent interest along with a cap on coin age. Thoughts?

btw. Here is the LetsTalkBitcoin episode! http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-122-curiousity-discovery-and-music.

Hopefully I came across well.

btw. Michael, your tune is on there!

Good point! Worth looking into.

At the very least, we can then improve the coin's economics. So if the price goes it's due to less demand, not more supply.

However, we probably only have 1 shot at this. We still need to do extra effort to make the coin useful above and beyond an improvement in the economics of it. Worth another go.

Welcome!

I agree wrt CPU algo. It can be ASIC-resistant as possible, as the PoW period is short. I think 4 weeks is fine. The people that will want to mine can get their fair share I reckon?

@nox. A new algo would add some buzz around the relaunch. I'll ping you about it! And yes. Preferably keep interest below 4% I reckon. Will take a look at Vericoin's dynamic staking as well.

This is probably going to take some time, but I'll try to fit time in to do that!

I'm excited!

Thanks man! Have fun!

So. Seems the coin is hashing along okay.

What I'd like to try and you guys have to work with me here (say it's stupid or awesome), is perhaps relaunch the coin. Have had several people tell me they didn't get involved due to the high coin supply. Another thing is: the mining part as distribution mechanism is not correlated at all to the "music making" part. So while PoW is cool for (reasonably) "fair" distribution, it doesn't have anything to do with the music making.

So, here's what I'm thinking. We relaunch the coin and do the following.

We create a pool of money that is for the FUNK1 owners. Anything after a certain block is not valid. Anything before a certain block IS valid. If you BURN the old FUNK (send it an non-usable address to destroy it), and prove you owned that address it was sent from (signing the key), I will distribute from this pool, the amount you are owed. This will be kept open for at least 6 months.

The coin supply will be much lower. Max 4 million (after PoW). After that, it will be moved to PoS with an inflation of 1% - 8%. Proof of Stake has additional incentives in this ecosystem, because 1) those who have FUNK, gets more FUNK. In other words, those musicians who have been tipped the most, will get more over time. It rewards the musicians, not the miners. We will have much more time as we don't have to contend with the inflationary pressures anymore. Music making takes time. Days, weeks, and even months. Pressure from markets need to be more relaxed. Keeping the coin supply lower, means we can hopefully also stay in the BTC markets. It's annoying to have to buy LTC or Doge to buy/sell FUNK.

So. The split will be as follows. 2M will be divided amongst the previous owners. A set exchange rate will be determined once it's decided at which block FUNK1 will end. Then for 4 weeks, we will have a PoW stage, where the rest of the 2M will be mined. From then onwards, it will be pure PoS.

I consider this pretty decent. Those who stuck around. Those who were vested in it have 2M of the new coins (if they burn it). But we want new blood and incentives for new people to mine and get involved and thus release 50% to them.

The PoW stage will hopefully be multi-algo (if we can find a coin that has done in such a way), otherwise we'll find a scrypt or X11 coin and fork from there.

So, at the end, we will hopefully have a much better "coin" part:

1) More time. We don't have to contend with a huge influx of coins the whole time.
2) Musicians can earn more FUNK through staking, not the miners.
3) Less supply so we stay in the BTC markets (not into LTC or Doge).
4) A second go!

Any ideas, or thoughts, or changes you can recommend, please do. I'll try and find time to get around to the technical parts. Once we agree on a roadmap, I will make it official. I will then dev the coin to match the requirements. And from then I will announce at which block the old FUNK won't be able to be exchanged to the new FUNK. Then when the block hits, I will then announce the date of the new coin's launch.

Seems like it is breaking some more. These spikes are odd. Doesn't make sense! https://i.imgur.com/9U7x7k5.png

oi vey.

Okay guys.

After today's hiccup, we're back on track with okay hashing... But. We can't deny that the coin part of the experiment has been going downhill.

As much as I don't want to admit it, it is. I've got a nasty knot in my stomach just thinking about it. So many people have invested time, money and music with this project (respect). We aren't down and out. Still kicking. But we have to face the facts. The music side is doing well. New people are joining and we are enjoying making music (I am at least). But the coin side isn't.

A token that represents the community might be enough, but not initially. There needs to be an additional incentive for ownership to catalyse the network effect. We CAN relaunch the coin [more algorithms for miners, lower supply, etc], we CAN add merge mining and so forth, but it won't change that the coin part needs a lot of effort to make it worth holding. As many of you have said, we need to make it useful for something. That's difficult.

Frankly. I don't know what we can do. All the options take time, risk and resources. I unfortunately don't have a lot of them available.

I can ask: what can we do? Unfortunately I don't think there's an easy answer. It will all take effort. New experiments we have to try. The easiest way out is to buy us time, and liquidity. That means getting someone to inject money into the system... but try convincing any investor currently to buy FUNK... Uphill battle.

I've had so much fun so far with you guys. We must find a way to keep this going. Going to spend this weekend with some introspection and figure out some way we can tackle this.

I guess just check the latency of the p2pool. Don't think it makes that big a difference if there is not a lot of competition. Thanks for helping Groggin. Monitoring the chain for a while, see what happens.

Some weird shit is happening though.

http://funkexplorer.n00bsys0p.co.uk/chain/Cypherfunk

Old and new blocks intertwined. I wonder if someone attacked, and withheld blocks? Feels like it.

https://i.imgur.com/aP2TY1T.png

Woohoo! It got unstuck! Catching up now.

Thanks Groggin!

Right. So we have 1.4MH/s online. Seems to be still stuck. Might have to hire a much stronger rig. Any help appreciated.

Like I said in the previous post. The chain is stuck atm. The KGW retargeted so hard, it wrapped (I think), setting the diff higher than it should. I'm renting a rig and throwing some hashes it at for the next 3 hours, to un stuck it.

So yes. It would say, it is losing sync.

Guys. It seems the blockchain is stuck.

There was a 20min block gap that pushed the diff way down, and it seemed like introduced a flaw in the KGW. It possibly wrapped around, causing it to spike to a diff of 1 for some reason. Seems to be still stuck at a diff 0.1 (which is too high for the current hashrate).

If someone could throw some hashes at it to see if it breaks loose, it would be appreciated. Here are 2 pools. http://p2pools.org/funk

Unless we figure out what to do, or get some more miners, the chain won't be sustainable. Shitty day for FUNK. What can we do??

Soundposition keeps delivering: https://soundcloud.com/soundposition/the-cypherfunks-electric-indigo

Hashrate keeps dropping. Very low now. Aargh. I'm not finding time to work on the safe merge mining.

MAX_MONEY is a limit on how much coins is viable in a single transaction. If such a tx propagates with such outputs, it's an obvious fake and thus clients just drop it (don't even bother to do additional checks). Ask Dogecoin about it. That's why one of their forks occurred.

MAX_MONEY has nothing to do with the monetary supply settings. It's purely getBlockValue's code.

3rd on Cryptocoinrank.

If only.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=807779959232453&set=o.1457258351160668&type=1&theater

Wonder where the glitch came in.

Wow. Tune. https://soundcloud.com/soundposition/the-cypherfunks-summer-scintillation-part-11

Michael. You are making the most amazing music lately. Almost got a tear in my eye.

Update on week's happenings. http://blog.thecypherfunks.com/post/89577507552/band-meeting-week-ending-22-june-2014

I realise now that there was indeed something shit with my internet. A quick reset fixed it. Sorry about that. We can try either and see what works.

Listened to more of cernfusion's contributions. This is epic: https://soundcloud.com/cern-schmelce/yellow-moon