Oh.

We are supposed to have allocation for anyone who posted on the skycoin thread to buy at an ICO price, some nominal amount.

I think we forgot about that. I do not know who was supposed to implement it and everyone was too busy and forgot. Someone was supposed to message everyone on the thread, with some token they could use.

Skycoin has the first new consensus algorithm since PeerCoin.

We are working on the distribution issue. We cannot just dump 40% of the coins overnight. We have to do a lot of marketing, write white papers, line up exchange listings, fix bugs, schedule two months advance with the ICO website, make videos. Its going to take at least six weeks before we are ready for another coin sale.

"Distributing the coin" really means selling 30% of the coin, to three whales for 800 BTC each, before the coin gets listed on Bitfinex and Poloniex. Last ICO, no one bought any Skycoin for weeks, then one guy bought 1/3rd of the ICO in under 5 minutes like a bandit (despite per account purchase limit), then rest of ICO sold out almost at once, despite the ICO running before that for over a month. Then sells out as soon as it started finishing and everyone complained about not being able to buy coins because it was too quick.

If we actually sold 20% more of the total coins, then it will end up going to the three whales who are trying to buy 800 BTC from us OTC.... Then when the coin lists on Bitfinix and Poloniex, they are going to dump the 800 BTC  of coins they bought for at least 5000 BTC. And then pat themselves on the back.

We have to ask ourselves what we are trying to accomplish by distributing coins at all.

Fairness does not exist in real life. Even if we distribute more coins to create the appearance of fairness, it still wont be a reality.

The reason these ICOs all sell out, in under 4 hours is because the investors are all lined up ahead of time and its like 4 people and they know the coin is going to get listed on Bitfinex and Poloniex. They cant lose money.

We are going to have a fair distribution. We are just not rushing recklessness into it.

We might sell 10% or 15% of the coins and get distribution up to 20% in the next round. However, not sure yet.

Right now, we are just struggling with development, bug fixes, getting marketing materials together. The distribution problem can only be fixed over time.

We also need to save coins for the meshnet and distribution to community. As long as the inflation from the new coins entering the market, is less than the growth rate of the community, then it will not put downward pressure on the price. So having those applications and the user community is a requirement for any type of large distribution plan.

>This is absolute hypocrisy to the highest degree.

Distributing too many coins too early, causes more problems than it solves. It wont stop people from complaining either. No matter what we do, there will always be a loud minority complaining that we should have done something else.

>This is absolute hypocrisy to the highest degree.

Right now, people are trying to buy Skycoin and we have to choose between
- do we put more coins on to the market (so that people can buy in at a low price)
- do we keep the supply tight and allow the price to increase

The first option benefits people who do not own coins or who want to acquire a large position and benefit from future appreciation (new users).

The second option benefits people who already own coins (existing users) but at the expense of new users.

So easiest thing is to do nothing and just focus on development.

>This is absolute hypocrisy to the highest degree.

We will have another distribution, where people can buy coins without moving the price on the market. After the marketing materials and infographics are done.

This should stop the people complaining that they cannot buy coins happy (which is really the issue). As soon as people own enough coins, they stop complaining that we are not selling enough coins and they start demanding we restrict supply and allow the price to go up...

My attitude is becoming
- "Markets are a game"

But we can set the rules of the game and control certain things. Different rules will benefit different sets of people.

- I am confident that we can alway choose to do distribution in a way that will not lower the price.
- I also think dumping is part of the game and benefits the long term people

- Coins have a "real value" and "perceived value".
- People have different opinions about where a coin's price will be in a year
- The developers are like managers and provide vision, marketing, community and then the investors speculate on the managers (sort of like horse racing). And some investors also bring resources (marketing, connections, developers, reputation, social validation etc and are not just passively choosing).

When people dump
- the people with more information can buy up coins for cheap (etc, over 10x discount)
- then when coin approaches "truth value", then they make a lot of money
- the people with the best information, best reasoning ability, best understanding of human psychology make money and the people who are driven by emotions or short term events, lose money (they sell at the bottom and they buy at the top).

So
- a temporary decline in price is acceptable
- a long term decline in price is not acceptable

So we should ignore the short term fluctuations and focus on longer term horizon (what do we have to do to increase the future value of the coin, what do we need to do to create capital inflows and what do we need to do to ensure liquidity).

The four things we can do are
- improve communication (marketing, materials, description of what Skycoin is and what we have built and what are building)
- grow and build up the user community
- build applications and acquire users
- create a set of rules and distribution strategy that will benefit all the early investors and new investors (etc, avoid driving the price down, design the rules to build up liquidity)

It will be very important to describe
- how is Skycoin different or better from the other offerings
- how is Skycoin used
- future plans and roadmap for the ecosystem
- what we are trying to accomplish

I think right now, we should focus on communicating Skycoin's strength as a cryptocurrency and improvements we made in the design of the blockchain, consensus algorithm, security, networking and usability. The question of "Why it is better than Bitcoin".

Then we should focus on the applications and bringing in users that have never used crypto-currencies before. We should focus on usefulness and utility.

And otherwise, we just have to sit here and wait, because the number of cryto-coin users and capital inflows are going to explode by themselves for various external reasons.  So we just want to have a solid offering and good reputation to attract the new money flooding in.

We are going to see a mixture of crowd funding money for speculative projects or new ideas and the market for speculation and "fantasy football coin" will increase, but we will also see more pragmatic or utilitarian money coming in as people realize what Bitcoin/Skycoin can be used for.

There are only three real coins (actually three and a half).

The rest are just marketing scams, or they are doing tokens or something else.

I think smart contracts are interesting, but they are still just widgets a solution looking for a problem. Almost none of the existing coins are focused on what Satoshi originally intended Bitcoin for or have any concern with improving Bitcoin.

It is a fundamental question of values and purpose. The altcoin market right now, is like real money fantasy football. People are putting money into things that they know are non-viable (and everyone else knows that), but as long as it trades and the marketing is good, then they can make money.

Markets are just a game.

> The best coin ever developed is still barely traded while scams of all sorts are highly demanded... Mad mad world

It is our fault. We do not have any information on the website and we are not communicating anything effectively at all. We need to communicate "What is Skycoin?".

When it is very difficult to communicate people "What is Bitcoin?". Bitcoin itself was a new category and there was nothing to compare it to. It was completely new. Now that people are getting familiar with coins, there is something to compare Skycoin to, so it is easier to describe.

However, we also need to describe it to people who have never heard of Bitcoin. Who are completely new to the crypto space.

Update:

Bug Fix:

We found a bug last night, where the node goes into infinite loop when trying to create a new block and transactions on network stopped.

The node was assembling 5 transactions into a block, then failing because two transaction tried to spend the same output. Then failing and waiting a few seconds and then trying again with same result.

The code is now enabled to take the list of pending transactions and add random transactions from the list, one at a time, discarding a transactions which if added to the block, would make the block unexecutable against the current unspent output set.

The bug is fixed now.

We could stop these bugs from stalling the network, by adding randomization or enabling a flag; but we are running network in mode where errors like this will completely stop the network and with strict validation, so that we can detect these edge cases and make sure they get fixed. Otherwise we would not notice that these edge cases were not handled properly.

Yes. We do not allow blocks with zero transactions.

The consensus and whole backend is still a work in progress, so do not want to clutter blockchain with a million empty blocks right now.

The full consensus implementation requires CXO (the public broadcast channel) to be working and we are still testing the library and improving the API. Then will implement and test, then have to do consensus network explorer. Still a lot of work. We used a masternode so we could launch quickly, instead of doing another three years of work before the token could be traded.

So there are still a large number of changes to make.

I do not think it would be good to enable zero transaction blocks. I think it would just use up more bandwidth and storage requirements and slow down the blockchain download.

We had to write a cross platform application launcher and GUI thing, that uses OpenGL, but yes. It will work on windows.

There are three steps left
1. Get all the apps packaged
2. Get it compiled and on the website
3. Get coin metering (bandwidth measurement and payments) done

We are trying to get the first applications out.

Update:

We are getting complaints about the distribution.

We are consider a three tier plan for getting to 20% distribution.

- people are trying to acquire large blocks of coins but no one is willing to sell them
- the people acquiring positions do not want to drive the price up while they are acquiring coins
- so there is no liquidity and market is frozen and there is a large spread
- we have people with heavy marketing and media resources who want to buy 200 BTC and 500 BTC blocks and we cannot accommodate them under the existing distribution plan

We need to figure out a solution.

Skycoin Market Making Bot:

We have a market making bot, that will sit on the bid/ask for skycoin for the following exchanges
- Poloniex
- C2CX
- Bittrex
- Cryptopia

The bot is in java and has three different trading strategies you can set. It was developed by a third party and will be released publicly.

You can set rules, like a spread and if the price between two exchanges goes more than 5% difference the bot will automatically arbitrage the spread and make you money.

Another strategy, adds depth to the order book by sitting on both the bid and ask around the moving average, so you can make money from volatility and the price doing a Yo-Yo.

C2CX Skycoin/Bitcoin Order Book

We are trying to get C2CX skycoin volume listed on coinmarket cap and get the APIs implemented.

We are also going to open up the SKY/BTC order book, so Skycoin will not only be pegged to the yuan.

Infographics

We are working on an infographics deck. We will have ~240 infographics and diagrams on various topics, explaining the internals of Skycoin and usage.

These are uncorrected examples with a lot of errors.







CoinJoin















Video and Marketing:

We have full time person working on video story boards now.

We will do a major cleanup and then start porting older content onto the blog.

We will start story board production for the videos. We will have eight videos on various topics.

Development:

We are trying to get the first two applications to release but dealing with bug back log.

New Wallet:

We are completely redoing the wallet
- support for multiple coins
- thin client scanning wallet
- new UI based upon the byteballs and electrum wallet
- fixed wallet size in pixels, so that layout can be controlled precisely to avoid cluttering

This wallet will
- force you to backup your wallet seed when you start it up
- will be able to run as a thin client if you do not want to download the whole blockchain

We are removing the full blockchain explorer from the wallet as it was a mistake and is too cluttered. And the blockchain explorer will be a separate application we will package with the node.

We will also start development of a "Consensus Explorer" to allow a user to subscribe to all nodes participating in consensus and to see the network status and global consensus state.

We also have to start development of a distributed logging system, that allows nodes to record and optionally publish publicly events such as
- consensus state updates
- time when block was received
- time when transaction was received
- node peer connection and disconnection events

This logging system will allow us to verify that the mathematical invariants for network consensus are satisfied (netsplit detection, early detection of non-propagating transactions, early detection of block flooding attacks, early detection of transaction flooding attacks).

The logging daemon will also implement a remote RPC (Skycoin Command and Control RPC) for allowing use controlled or chosen remote public keys to modify soft node settings (connection pool size, connection/disconnection from nodes, transaction rebroadcast) and will allow us to do cyber warfare drills on the live network.
- For instance if the network is flooded by 40,000 transaction backlog, we might use the command infrastructure to set transactions per block to 10,000 and clear the backlog.
- Or may increase the minimum coin hour fee for transaction prorogation to end the spam attack

We will have three sets of connections
- user defined hard coded connections (node your node must be connected to, that are chosen by the node operator)
- peer-to-peer nodes (random nodes chosen by peer-to-peer process)
- optional automatic recommended connections (command server suggestions for optimizing block/transaction/bandwidth availability)

Also in the next generation architecture
- block prorogation will be moved to CXO
- transaction prorogation will be moved to CXO
- transaction relay functionality will be something that can be disabled or enabled independent of other features in the node
- the key-value store for blockchain historical information and indices will be something that can be enabled or disabled independent of other functionality in the node
- the wallet functionality will be refactored out of the node and will be something that can be enabled or disabled
- there will be no difference at the API level between a thin client and a full node for wallet operations and no difference in API usage between a local node and a remote node operating over a network
- the blockchain history database will use range queries and user will be able to configure whether to index and store the full history since genesis or only the last few million blocks or whether to begin pruning the index after a certain range limit. The key value stores for each type of index data will eventually be independent programs exposing an RPC, that can be run on different nodes completely. With no difference between a locally running and remote node. This is part of the BlockDB architecture (however is a low priority and may take two years to get this done).

Naming:

We are probably going to rename the Skycoin transaction standard UXTO, to UXTX.

And we will call the old, Bitcoin way UTXO.

And we will call the way Ripple and Ethereum do it "The Accounts Model".

We have to standardize the naming conventions between different groups, because everyone is calling the same thing different names.

Applications:

We are trying to launch the first two applications.

Many people thought Bitcoin was expensive at a dollar.

The distribution is mathematically optimal. You cannot design a better distribution scheme than the Skycoin scheme. We enumerated all previous distribution schemes and chose the best one.

You are used to seeing pump and dump style distributions and that is what people are asking for and we will not do it. We are also not going to do some NXT style scam and pretend the coin was "distributed" in a way that the user base cannot complain, when in reality three people own 98% of the coins. The undistributed Skycoins are locked, for a reason and that is to prevent a reoccurance of the dumping that destroyed NXT.

We combined a publicly auditable distribution scheme with with a Bitcoin tapered distribution schedule, while eliminating the capital outflows from miners. We chose this distribution scheme, because mathematically it is the best possible that can exist.

Until someone proposes something superior to "I think they should do a massive coin drop on me and give me free coins", the "distribution" complaints are just divide and conquer, meaningless babble and foaming at the mouth.

The Skycoin distribution will follow the Bitcoin model of a constant number of coins over a time period, with tapering and halving over time, up to a fixed maximum value.

Distribution will take at least seven years. We are in a hurry and some of us have already been here four or five years. I think we will get to 70% distribution within ten years. Rushing distribution, only hurts the investors, so we are in no hurry to dump coins faster. If anything we will probably decrease the rate of releasing new blocks of coins.

This is to create  a slow, steady appreciation of the coin and reason for people to hold on to it. Instead of a massive Ethereum style pump and dump (which worked for Ethereum, but which is a very bad type of distribution style in general).

We think our distribution scheme is the best possible. No one has given any superior alternative, or even a proposal that would not drive down the price per coin. Skycoin's distribution scheme is designed to maximumize the price per coin over time and to avoid driving own the price per coin.

This is what makes sense for funding a large, long term project whose value is increasing. We are using this model, because it works.

If we can raise $1 and invest it in marketing, software development and hardware and produce a $100 increase in market cap, then we are doing well. If we are only producing $0.25 in value for every dollar spent, then we should stop raising money and cut distribution back. We do not want to crowd out our return rate.

Update:

We are doing misc quality control and major bug fixes now

---

We fixed a few bugs and path directory issues for the windows non-electron build. There was an error in the packaging script and assets were copied to the wrong path and the executable could not find the assets and server terminated on start.

This should be fixed wallet version 15.

---

We are hunting down and fixing a transaction prorogation issue, where a small number of TX hashes are not propagating to all nodes because of some race condition. We think it is fixed, but are still testing. We have implemented transaction rebroadcast, but disabled it by default because new state information flag for TX in unconfirmed pool should resolve the issue.

- a node will only broadcast a TX if it can be executed against the current set of unspent outputs
- if a new block is created, but a node receives a TX spending a UX output created in the next block, but the node has not received the new block yet, then the node will not announce the TX hash
- then when the new block is received, the state of the transaction becomes valid/executable but the UX object was not broadcast
- The node will ignore all future TX announces for that TX, without broadcasting the hash because the TX object is already in the unspent output set

This edge cases happens
- if TX spending UXTO object created in next block ,comes in before the block (happens to exchanges somtimes if doing transactions in rapid succession)
- if the node is just starting up after a few hours of being offline and receives a TX set, while still catching up on latest block set

To fix this edge case we
- ensure that nodes now announce the hashes of their whole unspent TX set on connect (we thought this was implemented but it was not)
- persist transactions in the UXTO set by default (now enabled)
- added a manuel TX rebroadcast JSON and CLI function
- track transaction status with a boolean flag. If a TX object in the unspent output pool goes from unexecutable, to executable on the current unspent output set, then it will automatically trigger a broadcast for that TX

This should also fix the unrelated bug where
- a TX is injected and the node has zero peers
- the node connects to one or more peers but the TX object never propagates

This bug was resolved by
- key value store persistence of unspent TX pool by default between node restarts
- announce of all TX in the unspent output pool by default on connection between nodes

--- exponential backoff with zero peers bug

If the internet goes down, all the peers in peer list get blacklisted by the exponential backoff algorithm.

We are resetting exponential backoff time for peer connection attempts now, upon connections falling below 2.

This will speed up time for node to reconnect to network, after internet is down for a period.

--- Peer Exchange Bug

Peer exchange is now disabled again by default. Needs more testing. There is problem with handling of unsolicited connections and the loopback auto disconnect, to prevent two connections to the same node.

If a node has an open port, then it can attempt to connect out to a node. That same node can also attempt to open a connection in to the node, so we end up with two connections between the node and we have bug in the loop back auto detect connection, for unsolicited (incoming connections), that end up disconnecting both the incoming and outgoing connection between the node.

We think this is what is causing a bug where server with peer exchange enabled, is getting zero peers but are not sure.

Will fix this soon.

I think we will spend 2 weeks training up marketing team and how to do story boards, so they can stat producing videos.

I really want to make video about CoinJoin and how Bitcoin works and how Skycoin is different. I think the Monero people would like this, because people still do not understand Bitcoin. We also need a "Skycoin is UXTO" video and infographics.

Then by 20th of next month, will be on development push. And will put all the new assets on getting the applications released.

The wallet and coin are secondary as long as they work. We could wait a year to do a lot of work here and people would not notice or mind. However, a good, polished multi-coin wallet and mobile wallet could push adaption forward a lot.

Yes. The best solution is
- raise money from early investors through ICO, to fund development
- do most of the distribution through the network operation (while keeping the price per coin high; this will not be a "coin drop")

The people who bootstrap the network should benefit the most. Although the early investors will get 20x to 50x from the pop, from ICO to exchange listing. The earliest investors are already up 8x to 16x from when the coin was sold for 10 cents per Skycoin.

The current market cap is $4,481,768.
- https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/skycoin/

This means for early network/bootstrap, we would need to see another 50x to 250x increase in price/coin after the 20x to 50x ICO pop. To show a good return for the early network stakeholders. Which I think is reasonable.

We are only going to be able to do that, if the coin supply is kept tight. We can not do "free coins" raining from the sky and people dumping them for bitcoin the second they get them.

We have a responsibility to achieve a good return for the early investors, project sponsors and stakeholders. We have to look at not the distribution and whether it is "fair" or "decentralized", but look at the price per coin and then make sure that the people who bought coins in early rounds, do not end up losing money. As long as the price per coin goes up, no one will complain.

- The people complaining about the distribution are all people who do not own Skycoins.
- The people who own coins, want us to keep the coin supply tight and are indifferent about the distribution . They want to know that we will not do anything to drive down the price per coin

And the most important thing is that we achieve the project objectives and get the software working.

Coin Burn:

If Skycoin has too much money and we need to do a "coin burn", we will sell $60 million dollars in coins and produce open source RISCV ASICs or will put a satellite into orbit with skycoin node for marketing. Or fund twenty software defined radio projects.

There are less retarded things to do, than throwing the coins in a hole and burning them for no reason.

Skycoin is already at 5% distributed, so the distribution issue is no irreverent.
- If every coin was dumped, then coin supply would only increase 20x from current value
- The Skycoin price could easily go up 20x or more from current value
- If the coin supply increased 20x and the market cap goes up 600x, then the price per coin has still increased 30x.

Our distribution policy is to sell off coins, then invest the money in projects that will increase or grow the equity of the Skycoin network and ecosystem.

Locking up coins or throwing money in a hole and burning it, is retarded as long as we have productive projects to invest in to build the equity of the network.

A massive distribution only benefits the pump and dump people who want coins to stir-fry. It does not work for a long term project or anything that has to be around in a year.

>Having issues running the wallet on windows, it just gets stuck "Loading..." any fix for this?

Wallet build 15b fixed this (hopefully). We are hiring a QA person. Windows wallet could not find the interface asset folder because of bug in packaging script.

>Also is there a way to password protect our wallets?

We are discussing how to implement this

We have
- support for multiple coins
- support for multiple wallets

So it is complex, how we want to handle this
- Do we want one wallet with a single seed that can store multiple coins
- Do we want multiple wallets with multiple seeds that can only store a single coin type?

- Do we want to encrypt all wallets with same password (wallet folder encryption)
- Do we want each individual wallet to have password
- Do we want people to be able to check balance without putting in password, but unable to send without putting in the password

I think we will do
- one password (optional) for the whole wallet directory at startup
- one password (optional) for wallet, but only for send
- multiple wallets, but with each wallet have a single seed and multiple coin types

This is massive refactoring and rewrite of the whole wallet interface and backend.

Then if we are supporting multiple coin types, we need thin client support for every coin.

Our coin wallet team is not that large. We are trying to get the first application out for the network, so we still have a lot of improvements left on the wallet.

I know. What happened to IRC.

We cannot control what the user community does. Everyone is split across four or eight different chat programs.

The skycoin community is currently split across:
- skype
- telegram
- wechat
- slack
- mattermost
- IRC
- XMPP/OTR
- TOX
- QQ Chat
- Bitmessage

And I probably missed a few.

Bitcointalks is not working either. We need to make the website the primary source of information.
- we need our own internal chat or Tox type client for skycoin network
- we need our own forum software within the network
- we need the general and technical documentation and overview on the website

We need "core" communication areas for delegating work and for development discussion, which is most important thing.

Update:

New Wallet Version:

Skycoin Wallet version 15 is on the website, which fixes dozens of UI bugs.
- Transaction status should be working
- There is a combined installer for Windows 32/64 bit now
- The windows path issue was fixed
- Peer to peer connections and PEX (peer exchange) are enabled now

There is a huge back log of improvements on the wallet we are working through.

---

We have to decide what we will focus on for the next push
- Marketing / Infographics / Videos / Transslatoin
- 2.0 wallet, wallet usability improvements and QA
- Release of demo applications for the skycoin network

Update:











Skycoin is listed on two exchanges now.

It has been in development for over six years

Now $1.09. 

Look at the white papers
- http://skycoin.net/whitepapers.html

If we succeed we will have
- a solid coin (with the first new consensus algorithm since PeerCoin, pioneering innovation in UXTO model, transaction faster than a credit card transaction, pioneer in JSON APIs for ease of user with external applications and thin client interface, no external dependencies and solid security model).
- a solid wallet (with multi-coin support "universal wallet", intrinsic support for gmaxwell's CoinJoin protocol and improved privacy). I think we are the only coin who did CoinJoin correctly. It gives Skycoin ZeroCoin zsnarks level transaction privacy, using a trusted third party and with no overhead over a normal transaction.
- A solid user community and application ecosystem. The Skycoin application ecosystem will become very important for driving adaption.

Ultimately, Skycoin aims to be best in class in every attribute.

The coin on its strengths and technical merit alone, can easily achieve a top 10 position. But we will need the application ecosystem to get a position among Ethereum and Bitcoin and be a top 3 coin.

Update:

Listed on coin market cap.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/skycoin/