We had no idea. They listed it, less than twelve hours after the ICO finished.

We had a desired order of exchange, but it depends on mood of exchanges.

We wanted to add one exchange month, going from C2CX to Bitfinix to Kracken to Polonix. Synchronized to marketing and publication cycle.

However, some exchanges responded VERY quickly (listing within twelve hours) and some took longer or are non-responsive or we only have contact with them through a chain of three people. Bitfinix wants someone to do a face scan and submit DNA sample and TSA style extreme verification etc.. before will do listing, so we have to find someone who wants to go through KYC "extreme vetting".

Listing on cryptopia.co.nz was fast, but would have been four times faster if our API documentation has been better. We also had to fix a bug.

Our marketing material, video, info graphics, white papers, exchange listings will not be synchronized or coordinated. They will be released as they are ready, which will be at random times.

---

The next three targets are
- coinmarketcap.com
- livecoin.net
- bitfinix or bitrex

People should message them to get it listed.

Yes. One of the problems with NXT was
- total ICO was only 10 BTC
- they distributed all the coins from that 10 BTC
- they shut off ICO early, to stop other people from buying it
- 3 people (the NXT insiders owned ALL of the coins, but could say it was "fair" and no one complained)
- each of the three people, owned about 30% of the total each

Then 1 of the 3, wanted out and started fighting with the other two people. Then he started selling off his coins, a little each day. NXT went from 150 million to, being destroyed. Otherwise, NXT would be where Ethereum is today. They were doing a lot of innovative projects.

Ripple had the same problem. With Jeb leaving and threatening to dump 30% of the coins, which would have destroyed the market cap.

That is why we are not splitting the Skycoin evenly among the developers and instead have a multi-sig, shared secret distribution pool with tranches.

If the user base has 5% of the coins and an insider starts dumping 30% of the coins, he can suppress the price for a decade. So in Skycoin, what will happen is the coins become inaccessible and are just never distributed, unless someone resets the blockchain and there is a fork, to continue the distribution.

Then when new coins are unlocked, they are in 1 million coin blocks (1% of total) and they are in sequential accounts.

The maximum number of coins, that are in the hot wallet at once, that can be stolen before distribution is 1% (although has actually been 1.4% for a minute once).

And the computers for unlocking the coin tranches are off line and then the private keys have to be generated and moved to online computer (although we really should just be generating a transaction for moving the coins, right now its easier to move the generated private key).

So there is very little probability, that the undistributed coins end up dumped on the market or stolen.

Then in the future, we will also time lock the addresses holding the undistributed coins. The outputs will be unspendable until a certain date, once we have a clear distribution schedule.

And if they are stolen, anyways, then we will probably hardfork and reset the blockchain, to prevent the thieves from benefiting from the theft. Or atleast release update to freeze the address that the majority of stolen coins ended up in.

>many dev's once receive the funds have nothing at stake many project develop very slowly and do not care at the end of the week..

Ethereum did not have vesting. After the coin was listed and popped, their whole development team quit and went on vacation and spent all their time shopping for condos, women and sports cars.

We have at least a two year vesting and shared secret/multisig for all the Skycoin developers and are holding back enough coins that they will be comfortable but that 90% of our staff wont quit.

We also lost a third of of the Skycoin development staff from the Ethereum ICO, because they are too rich to work. And the early Bitcoin people who have been helping us, are just traveling and vacationing for the last six years and they are dead beats, who talk about the things they are going to do but do not carry through.

We have first world problems.

Another reason we kept the coin supply thin and did smaller incremental ICOs, is because if you do a 30 million dollar Ethereum style crowd sale, then do 30% to dev team, then coin price goes up 50x, then you will lose all of your staff. We did mixture of Skycoin and Bitcoin disbursements from future distributions at higher prices, to keep the dev team on, with Skycoin compensation that is enough to buy three houses if coin goes up 20x to 50x from the first round ICO. We are already up 5x.

We have to constantly bring on new developers and recruit outside of the Bitcoin space, because there are not enough experienced people. They have not even lived through seeing three waves of life destroying new wealth from buying $20,000 in some altcoin that ends up popping 500x.

I do not think there is another ICO round, right now. Maybe in a few months.

No one is selling the coin, everyone is hoarding so there is no liquidity. It was seven times over the ICO price for a while. There are only 5600 Skycoin on cryptopia last time I checked. You cannot even buy a large number of coins if you tried.

We are getting a lot of messages from people who want to buy OTC because there is no liquidity on the exchange. If you tried to buy 5000 SKY, you cannot, because no one is selling.

We are talking to market makers, who will set up a bot so that people can move 10 Bitcoin in and out of Skycoin at a time, without the price moving much. We only have market maker bot for C2CX right now.

We are trying to address issues

http://explorer.skycoin.net/api/coinSupply

The reality, is that we are only able to focus on one thing at a time and do it well.
- we focused on
-- getting wallet fixed and on website
-- APIs implemented
-- blockchain explorer
-- website
-- exchange listing
-- quality assurance

we finished that
- but we had to cut back on hiring for new software development and hiring developers

now we are doing
- hiring marketing people
- infographics
- narratives
- video production for introduction and educational videos
- translation of website
- exchange listing
- communication with user community
- building up user community

Then after that, we are doubling the number of project managers and tripling the number of developers.

We have a single frontend developer, spread across three applications and he has backlog of 80 tickets. It will take him eight months, just to get through those ticket and that does not even include our next generation "universal wallet" and completely redoing the wallet from scratch, for multicoin, exchange and thin client support.

Then we have to do consensus/node explorer

We have to get first meshnet applications working

We have to get meshnet binaries on the website

We have to upgrade the execution environment so it runs headless

We have to add UDP firewall hole punch and STUN to the meshnet node

We have to implement first version of orchestration and bandwidth metering for the meshnet node.

We have to do benchmarking and optimization

We have to do four months of work on consensus implementation, moving consensus over to CXO and then have to gut and rewrite the whole skycoin networking stack (this is six months worth of work).

Then we have to hire two to three developers per team and need six teams working on six separate applications on top of Skywire and CXO.

We need to hire more infographics, marketing, community managers. We need to hire person full time just to prepare infographics, narrative and press kit and do media relations with the bloggers and pod casters.

We have to get part time devops guy to build bot for running integration tests. Our automated golang installations are failing because of DNS blocking and we have to switch from docker to coreOS. We have to have custom golang program written for doing SSH proxying so we can access servers behind firewall that do not have static IP.

We have to deal with peer-exchange for skycoin nodes, which was just enabled and get peer-exchange working for CXO. We need some type of DHT or tracker service for peer-discovery.

We have to start upgrading the skycoin and CXO networking stack, so it will be ready to run over Skywire in the future.

We have to have mobile team start on a native mobile wallet, now that the gomobile API bindings are done.

We need to do website, wallet and mobile translations into English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and French.

We have to hire people for writing script, story board and then for video production and animation for our first videos. Then as soon as those are done, we need to start from scratch and do second round of improved videos.

That is just the next 8 months and is intermediate term.

ETC...

---

ALL OF THOSE THINGS ARE HIGHER IMMEDIATE PRIORITY THAN DISTRIBUTION

---

There are people who sent us 2, 5 and 50 Bitcoin and we cannot find them or communicate with them because they never sent us their Skycoin addresses. We are still trying to just get people the coins they bought and figure out who was sent what, from a year ago.

It is absolute chaos over here.

Within six hours of cointopia listing Skycoin (which we were never notified about until after it happened), we had to do emergency bug fix and take six nodes down off of network and had to fix bug in blockchain explorer.

We do not have enough people in place to respond. Everything is happening very quickly.

---

The "distribution issue" is not something we can "solve", so there is no time or anyone assigned to it. We have to stop focusing on issues that have no practical solution and need to focus on what we can make progress on.

We have determined that no solution is possible that a large percentage of people will not complain about, so no amount of effort will be able to make progress on that issue. So any effort placed into it, will be unproductive and wasted.

While we have MASSIVE backlog of bugs just to fix, and also massive hiring backlog and massive project management backlog, and massive marketing backlog and massive backlog of future development tasks to work through.

http://explorer.skycoin.net/api/coinSupply

Our distribution schedule is based upon Bitcoin's distribution schedule. We are only at 5.5% of coins distributed. It is going to take at least five years until we get to the distribution percentage Bitcoin is at right now.

We are not even at the development point, where the infrastructure needed for optimal distribution is implemented yet. The meshnet is not operating and it is impossible to run a node right now we have several years worth of development work and several dozen applications to implement, to just bootstrap the core network.

None of the documentation or infographics is done and 95% of people do not even understand what they are buying.

We do not even have the white papers for the network or skycoin ecosystem up yet or anything on website about applications or timeline. WE ARE NOT AT STAGE TO BE WORRYING ABOUT DISTRIBUTION.

--- How Skycoin Screwed Up

We did it wrong, we should have
- released no source code
- done no work on software
- focused completely on marketing, website and video
- raised 10 million dollars in an ICO
- spend 80% of the money raised, for buying media to pump the coins and then run away with the other 20%

Then we would not have to answer criticism over the distribution.

I have never seen anyone, ever complain about the distribution of the pump and dump coins or recent ICOs.

Skycoin seems to be held to a much higher standard than the other coins.

It is like people complaining about the distribution of Google stock. "I want free Google stock", "The ownership of Google stock is too concentrated", etc. To get the stock, you have
- contribute something to its success to get it
- buy it

Else you do not get any. They did not do a "Coin Drop".

One person started with 100% ownership and the ownership became more decentralized over time. The ownership never became fair or equal. Most people are in debt and working at minimum wage jobs and are one pay check from starvation and will never be able to afford to own even a single Google share.

I do not know what the solution to the "distribution" problem is. I do not think there is a solution, that will make everyone happy. No one has suggested any solution.

We should be focusing on the price per skycoin, not the distribution. If you bought Skycoin at a penny and the price went to $50, then no one is going to complain. The price per coin is concrete, while the "distribution" is ephemeral and meaningless.

And we should especially be focusing, not on the price, but what we achieve in the world. Even the price per coin is secondary to impact and the project goals.

In every other coin
- they raise a huge amount of money
- they spend the money on marketing, to pump the price up from the ICO
- whether they achieve what they set out to do, is irrelevant because the developers will become rich and quit as soon as the pump is successful. Even if the developers keep working, they will be lazy and slow. Everyone who knows the Ethereum people, knows this problem.

I think ultimately we have to say "Skycoin is not about the price" and the distribution is probably irrelevant also. I think Bitcoin failed, as a crypto-currency as soon as the community measured its success and failure based upon what the price is every five minutes. People forgot why Bitcoin exists and what it was a response to and then it just became a number that went up and down and became like horse racing or fantasy football, with no real impact on the world. It simply became irreverent.

We should not let the community get dragged down into discussion of the price/distribution and should focus on the project objectives and what we are trying to accomplish and how we are going to get it done.

Thank you. Fixed.

Packaging Bug. Will release new build.

There is no scheme of distribution, that will make everyone happy. No matter what we do, some people will complain.

Distributing 30% of the coins at once, like Ethereum did, is a mistake (for various reasons). We spent a year evaluating different methods and a slow tapered, Bitcoin like distribution was the best option. This means a constant rate of new coins being released on to the market over time, with that number decreasing over time.

However we have not determined the optimal rate yet. We need to find an empirically good policy.

We have to do this by hand, because of the way the coin is designed. No coins are created or destroyed when new blocks are created, which simplifies the mathematical structure of the blockchain and makes it cleaner, but it means all the coins are created in the genesis block.

So there are two separate issues

- are coins distributed and put into circulation gradually
- are coins put into distribution all at once, with a giant crowd sale

We chose a hybrid of a small crowd sale and then bitcoin like distribution schedule, as being optimal

The other issue is
- are coins put into circulation by automatic mechanisms such as blockchain rewards
- are coins put into circulation by hand, by the developers

If the developers put the coins into circulation, then it requires more trust in the developer . However, if distribution is driving down the coin price, then the distribution can be cut back to protect the earlier investors. Otherwise, the coin price would be eternally decreasing, so everyone would dump the coin because the price is going down at a constant rate for a persistent amount of time and the rate of new coins cannot be cut back because its an automatic part of the block reward.

Where as, we can cut back distribution (because we are forced to do it by hand), to avoid this.

It is not perfect, but this was the best system and policy we found.

The distribution rate the market can sustain, reflects how well the development, marketing and community growth is going. So if those are doing very well, it means we can sustain a larger development effort. And if not, then we can scale back and the coin will still survive and appreciate.

It is simply impossible to choose an optimal, automatic and preset distribution rate parameter, because it depends on empirical things outside of the blockchain itself. No matter what the developers set the parameter to at launch, it will end up being either too high or too low.

A very important thing, is that no one actually cares how many coins there are or how many have been distribution. People only care
- how many coins they own
- what the price per coin is

So if you have 25,000 coins and you bought them at $0.10 and the price goes to $50, then you made 500x. The investors only care about the price per coin.

So we are focused on the price per coin metric. If we distribute too quickly, then it would drive down the price per coin. So it our opinion is better to keep the coin supply tight, than to dump a massive number of coins on the market (like byteballs and stellar did).

If the number of coins in circulation doubled, from 5 million to 10 million. It does not matter, because they made 500x. There is a multiplier for the impact of putting new coins into circulation, for effect it has on coin price
- if 100% coins are dumped for bitcoin, then every dollar of coins put into circulation will end up in the capital outflows for the coin (driving price down). This is what happens when people GPU mine shitcoin and the miners instantly dump every coin they earn for Bitcoin.
- if new coins are going to people that are driving improvements, community growth, development, marketing then every dollar of coins distributed, can produce multiple dollars of direct and indirect new capital inflows, driving the price per coin up faster than the inflation caused by new coins (This is what we want to see for Skycoin and what will determine how aggressive the distribution rate is)

We do not have a simple distribution strategy, because it depends on what we are trying to do.
- if we are trying to raise funds for development, we will do an ICO for bitcoin
- if we are trying to get people to run nodes, we will allocate 1% as bonus to be distributed over people running nodes
- if we are trying to get apps developed for the network, we will allocate coins as bounties for high priority apps to drive growth
- if there is a crash and we want the price per coin to recover quickly, then we might cut back distribution rate
- etc

As long as the distribution schedule protects the price per coin, then no one will complain

We also tend to do small experiments. Smaller ICOs, testing bounties. We never plan do Ethereum/Stellar/Byteballs style distributions, where a large number of new coins come on to the market at once. We want to do smaller tests and if they work, then do more of that.

Its fixed now.

Update:

The ICO sold out.

Then as soon as it sells out, we get thirty messages at once that people could not buy and it was supposed to last until the 15th.

Next:

- Next we will start with two exchange listings at once. Trading will start and coin will float
- Last time after ICO, people were selling Skycoins for 5x the ICO price, but we screwed that up by doing another ICO, so this time we are doing exchange listing

- the chinese translation of the website is done
- we are also getting a new website and redesign

Thanks!

The qtum discussions help create post volume and keep this thread on the top of board I guess.

>what comes down to it at the end, is do you trust the project, with 90% of the coin held by the developers.

1. People want us to distribute the coins quickly, so a small group is not hoarding all the coins
2. People want us to keep the coin supply tight, so that the price goes up a lot and want us to minimize distribution as much as possible

Those are the two contradictory objectives.

If I had to choose between one or the other, the most important thing is that the coin supply is kept tight. That means the price will go up and everyone will be happy because they made money and we will be able to expand development.

So from a moral, ethical, philosophical perspective the unfairness of the initial distribution is an issue.

However, from a practical perspective of the investors and people willing to put more money in to fund development, they want the coin supply to be kept extremely tight. The Dash and Monero have been experts at this and they have $300 million and $500 million dollar market caps and an extremely healthy volume.

We can achieve a fair distribution AND a tight coin supply, IF
- the inflation in the free float per month, is less than half the expansion in the growth of the skycoin user base

That means that if distribution pushes the coin price down, then we have to cut back distribution. So that it is below the rate of user base growth.

That means, that if we are expanding rapidly and have applications and are doing well with new capital inflows, that we can expand distribution without putting downward pressure on the price.

---

The ideal scenario is that
- we get the money to do everything we want to do
- we expand to 30 separate project teams of 2 to 3 people per project group
- we get our applications built and get 100 million users (there are several scenarios under which this is realistic, based historical examples; but not actually required for skycoin financial success or otherwise. The skycoin userbase can be very small and have market cap similar to monero, dash or maidsafe)
- There are 100 million users and only 100 million Skycoins. Each user can mathematically not each be able to own, even a single full coin.

This is a good example of full distribution and tight supply.

There is a particular very close user community of over 500,000 people, with over 100,000 actives. That was shutdown, in raid. As soon they get shutdown, three more new sites spring up with 300 users each, then start growing exponentially until they are back to 500,000. Just one of those community on network would send us past Monero.

We are seeing a huge uptick in ISP spying, government scandals and wonton abuse of power. VPN usage is skyrocketing year after year and tens or hundreds of million of people who care about their privacy are going to start tunneling all of their traffic because they cannot trust their ISP.

When you buy a mansion in London, the wealthy are already getting offered ISP packages that are five times as expensive as the base package, but which tunnel, mix and encrypt their home traffic so it is not recorded and sold by the ISP or intercepted by the government. They are buying whole house VPNs for $500 or $1200 per month.

While Comcast charges is subscribers $30 per month, to opt out of having their internet traffic, web viewing and search history sold to the highest bidder.

There are about fifty different things we could do on top of the existing technology we built. If even one of them succeeds, then we will be fine and have a good return.

---

Based upon the ICO and the response so far, and how fast the sales have increased per exposure. I think we could easily have 20x or 50x above the ICO just by
- increasing skycoin visibility
- getting listing on the top 5 exchanges
- improve narrative further

No one knows what the Skycoin project is or what we are building. The website is horrible and does not explain anything, yet the coin ICO is selling really well. Even with only a single small website, driving traffic we are doing 3 to 5 Bitcoin per day ($3000 to $5000/day).

One of the first objectives after listing, is going to be to get Skycoin into the top 10 slots of coinmarketcap.com

For visibility. That will require about a 20x increase in price over the ICO price. Which is like going from $0.50 to $10. Its not even like litecoin going from less than $0.01 to $25 in under 3 months, for no reason.

So I think that is a modest and achievable goal for the next milestone.

Achieving a wider coin distribution, will have to wait until we have the user base to support the distribution without putting downward pressure on the price. I do not think we can do that in the next milestone, while still keeping the coin supply tight.

I really dont know much about qtum.

We have talked to two of their developers and know some people from the project.

- I do not believe they are running a scam.
- I do not know if they will succeed and do not know anything about the token.
- I have not looked at the code
- I have no idea what will happen to the money they raised, but some of it will probably go back to development

From Experience:

- No one will care if its a scam as long as they were able to sell for a higher price than they bought it for, all the investors/speculators will be happy and attack anyone
- Even if Qtum's technology is the best, if the price goes downs investors will be angry and call it a scam

I think that 99% of the people putting the money in for Ethereum will never run a smart contract or even withdraw the coins out of the exchange. They are just 100% pure speculators.

If qtum's marketing is good, the price could go up very high from the ICO.

If qtum's technology is good and works; probably no one will care. The speculators will not even know it.

If
- Qtum continues the current success and intensity of its marketing
- AND Qtum builds a developer ecosystem for smart apps (even if no one uses them, like the ethereum smart contracts and apps)
then
- The price of Qtum will probably go up

The whole altcoin market, is driven by Chinese speculators, gambling on coins like they were penny stock or they were at the horse races. Altcoins are the new pink sheets.

Many of the altcoins are like real money fantasy football teams. That is what the majority of the Bitcoin community has become at this point.

---

What impressed me most about qtum, was how strong and focused their narrative and marketing is. The Skycoin team is studying their marketing campaign and narrative for how we can improve our messaging and how to do external media relations.

The development was never "revived". Look at the github. The development has been constant for years.

We have a lot of repos.


Yes. He invested in it, almost 4 years ago.

I am 100% sure that the federal reserve is a scam.

I am not sure that qtum is a scam.

I have seen other coins raise 10 million dollars in Bitcoin and through friend found out they intend to spend 80% of the money they raised on marketing, but I am not sure that is a scam either.

I think qtum is actually developing software. I have met one of their developers, but do not know many details.

Qtum seems to be a hot potato issue. Its the new blockchain size.

If the price goes down, we will cut distribution rate.

There are two conflicting things we have to deal with
- The community wants us to distribute at a rate so the coin becomes less centralized over time
- The community does not want us to distribute so quickly that it drives the price down

So we will do a Bitcoin like distribution schedule. With constant rate, that decreases and tapers over time.

However if this puts too much downward pressure, then we can cut the distribution rate.

We want to distribution coins, slower than the rate of user growth
- If we distribute 10% of the current free float (10% inflation in free float)
- Then the user base growth for Skycoin should be at least 10 or 20% over the same period

I think that is the best policy.

>Devs will dump coins on the market each month just to cover expenses

The max any one person holds, is 1% of the total coins. 1 million SKY.

These are early developers, who have been working on the project for years.

This is to eliminate dumping and prevent NXT/Ripple style situations as people join and leave the project team.

We have an extremely tight coin supply. No one person is in a position to do major damage, like what happened with NXT or Ripple. We studied every way, that every previous coin had failed and then explicitly designed our rule set to avoid those methods of failure.

>Devs will dump coins on the market (c3cx?) each month just to cover expenses

PoW creates a price ceiling, not a price floor. Miners dump 90% of the coins they mine for Bitcoin, the second they get them. Driving the price down for every PoS and PoW coin.

The ICO will end in about two or three weeks at the current rate. It is mostly small orders for a few hundred coins, coming in. This is a good way of getting coins to a large number of people.


They are not actually an exchange. The exchange is just them exposing their order book to the public. Which is very recent.

They have template code that is over ten years old and predates Bitcoin. So I do not know what their software was doing before Bitcoin existed.

On some days they run about 15% of the global bitcoin trading volume per day. So it is not a small or new exchange. The only thing new about it, is that they are letting people register and add/take liquidity from their order book.

c2cx will be the primary market maker for Skycoin.

>why you choose c2cx ?

We needed to partner with several larger companies, to handle things we did not have the staff or budget to do. The skycoin core tech people are mostly R&D and mathematics.

We had to put bug tracking, bug fixes, payroll, contractors, website, fund raising, exchange listing, customer support, marketing, etc to other companies. So that we could focus on writing new software.

We are using a consortium model. As the best approach we have found for moving the project forward.

Yes. The skycoin project started around the time of litecoin. In response to the transaction mutability, signature mutability and duplicate coinbase output problems in Bitcoin.

Some of the Skycoin developers predate Bitcoin.

It took two years just to simply and fix the blockchain and we had rewrites and codebases in four languages before settling on golang.

Then we took on the problem of fixing Bitcoin's consensus algorithm and finding a viable replacement for PoW/PoS. The results of which are under white papers on Skycoin.net

Then we took on the problem of figuring out what a coin with actual, concrete economic activity and value would look like. (which is what CXO and Skywire and these applications we are prototyping are about).

- The first thing we have done.
- The second thing we are now completing
- The third thing we are working on

There are a few special addresses. Where the undistributed coins are
- the total coins always exist, but we calculate the free float by only looking at the coins outside of the distribution addresses
- the coins are locked in 1 million coin tranches
- total_supply is number of coins "in circulation" that can be used for transactions
- max_coins is the total number of coins that can ever exist
- no individual controls more than 1% of the total coins. To prevent situation that happened with NXT and Ripple.

Future Measures:
- we are going to time lock the addresses in the future, so the node will reject transactions spending their outputs-
- we are going to put constraint in the code, so the blocks have to be distributed in sequential tranches

We are putting technical and human measures in place, to ensure that if any of the key contributors starts dumping that it would only be temporary. We want to avoid a situation where someone has 30% of the coins and the community has 2% and that person could dump their coins everyday on the market for a decade before they ran out. That is what happened with NXT and we wanted to avoid that.

>dev fund?

One address had 1.5 million coins in it for a transaction, while we were moving around
- coins to exchange for ICO withdrawals
- coins to compensation fund for people in the consortium
- coins to whales
- coins to companies funding development cost/staff/contractors

We are going to be distributing coin bonuses to about thirty contributors, on a vesting schedule over the next few years. For example
- one project manager who has help fix over a hundred fifty bug tickets is getting 250,000 SKY over the next four years (about 40k USD in SKY at price when he joined project)
- website guy/content/marketing/design guy who was critical is getting 60,000 SKY over next two years
- some contractors and major contributors are getting 5,000 SKY to 30,000 SKY distributions over the next two years for work on mesh network, bounties, bug fixes, etc


Yes. Its going to be very important.

There is not a quick fix for this. Where you create some hype and raise 10 million dollars in an ICO and the problem will be solved next month.

This is years of work. Some of the people working on this, have been working on it full time for a decade. Bitcoin itself took almost a decade to build and was itself built on top of earlier projects that experimented with different approaches.

Bitcoin is not mature and is just a prototype of a better, future system. The crypto-currency space is still at its infancy.


>update my withdrawal has been pending for 5.5 hours now, that is not nice...

We found a new bug and it will be fixed in next version.

If the nodes connect and disconnect in a particular order, then there is possibility that transaction replication fails and that a transaction does not reach all nodes.
- We added a function for rebroadcasting transaction by hand on the CLI
- We are adding more instrumentation to track how many times unconfirmed transactions have been announced, how long a transaction is in the unconfirmed pool and how many times the transaction has been downloaded by connected nodes
- We are adding automatic transactions rebroadcast after a minute if the unconfirmed transaction pool is less than 1024 transactions
- We are adding an unconfirmed transaction page to the wallet to make trouble shooting easier
- We are adding a local time stamp to each transaction, to record when the transaction was first seen and how long the transaction was in the unspent transaction pool
- We are upgrading the transaction replication protocol when we have time.
- The final transaction synchronization mechanism will use CXO and will be much more robust than the current system (Which is using gossip protocol like Bitcoin does)

>how can I tell my friends to buy skycoin on the ico when I am not confident in the provided exchange..

C2CX is still being battle tested. There are new problems discovered everyday, but they fix them very quickly and competently. We have found dozens of bugs, but all of them were on the frontend and all of them were fixed within 24 hours.

We found out that
- SMS confirmation did work in certain countries
- SMS confirmation only went through 50% of the time in certain countries

And within a day, they disabled cell phone number and two factor auth, as a requirement for the Skycoin ICO.

They found out that SMS confirmation did not work, if a person put in their cell phone number but had not put in the email address yet. They fixed that issue in a day.

- They alerted us about a transaction in the unspent output pool not clearing (your withdraw) and then we fixed the problem in four hours.
- However, the fix was not merged into the code base until 24 hours later.
- And the nodes have not been upgraded to the new version year.
- However, we dumped your transaction as hex in the CLI and then reinjected it by hand on the CLI and it propagated and your withdrawal was processed

Normally, withdrawals takes ten seconds. However, your withdrawal discovered a new bug.


I do not know David Zimbeck. I read something about the bitbay situation but it sounded complex and confusing.

I personally think that Patrick was very young and inexperienced and he was taken advantage of several times, by different people, until he hardened up from experience.

Patrick does not come across as manipulative. While some of the people around him are extremely skilled manipulators and social operators.

Patrick tends to avoid conflict and will leave when the other people start fighting. He will not fight with them, even when he should. And he does not seem to defend himself strongly and loudly, even when he should.

In the business world, it is very common for companies to fall apart as soon as they become profitable or begin to make money. As the founders cannot work together as a team and start fighting each other. Teams that work well together are rare and most people out of college do not have a network of people they have been working with over multiple companies, for decades, so their rate of failure from personal conflicts will be high.

>And what is your take on Qtum's refusal to provide tx ids or addresses to prove ownership of the funds they claim to have raised during the ICO (~10 million in first 90 minutes, ~15 million total) and to allow investors to keep an eye on those funds themselves?

They did not raise the money. It was raised through third party platforms. It sounds like a hassle.

If the developers are bad, or they are drama. They are going to steal whatever they can and watching the bitcoin addresses as the coins are being stolen is not going to stop them.

So do not give coins to developers you do not trust. If people demand you dance through hoops, you should just ignore them because dancing through the hoops just gives credibility to the idea that you are untrustworthy. No one can "prove" their sincerity or that they are trustworthy.

So trusting the developers and reputation is very important. Or at least understanding their flaws and personality.

>Thanks for your time. And I am really interested in this project (and have been for some time) so I do appreciate these responses as this stuff with qtum is the first thing to make me have any doubts here and question investing.

Qtum seems to be a divide and conquer issue. Like the blockchain size.

My personal, long term view is that I cannot see what smart contracts and a coin/token have anything to do with each other. The "value" of ethereum is very abstract to me as an investment. I think that the market cap of these coins are driven by speculation and marketing, not by their usefulness or actual economic activity.

I think platforms like Qtum and Ethereum will however, be the prototyping board for the next generation of blockchain applications. I think people may also be able to make money just on the speculation and bubble, if they get in at the right time and leave at the right time.

We see people launching all sorts of tokens on Ethereum now, without needing their own blockchain and they are prototyping different tokens.

For example, Xaurum is doing physical gold backed crypto coins. Where each coin created is linked to physical, serial numbered gold (that you can physically withdrawal). They had their own blockchain originally, but mining created inflation and downward pressure. So they moved to Ethereum and are just a token on Ethereum and now they do not have inflation.

If they serial number each piece of gold and track it on a blockchain, then it becomes impossible to sell the same piece of gold on paper to three hundred separate people (rehypothetication). So this would eliminate the scam that the current gold market is today.

If you swapped out your coins, then showed up at the vault and tried to redeem your coin for the bar it represents and they cannot produce it, or give you a bar with a different serial number. Then you know there is something wrong. Blockchain can be used to put constraints on fraud and create transparency.

So we are seeing these experiments enabled by Ethereum.

I think eventually, we will see tokens on Ethereum that are worth more than Ethereum is itself.

I have not seen the codebase of Qtum, so cannot say anything but experience, but I think it is good that people are trying to improve Ethereum. Ethereum is big enough and successful enough, that the ecosystem can support other chains and alternative ways of doing smart contracts.

Right now there is only Ethereum. In the future, there will be multiple chains that can run any contracts that will run on Ethereum. Eventually the most successful applications will move to personal or dedicated blockchains.

I would separate out a project being successful because of hype, marketing, speculation and animal spirits. Where everyone joins in because they can make a lot of money doing something exciting (and you can do very well in these areas if you understand human psychology). And value that is the result of something useful, concrete and that can be calculated.

Did you try downloading the wallet from the website?
- http://skycoin.net

Did you try downloading and running it from source?
- http://github.com/skycoin/skycoin

We have fixed many wallet bugs, but Electron still has bugs in it. Some web browsers have trouble with Angular 2.0 web apps too.

Update:

Skycoin is finally getting an order book. This took too long.
- next exchange upgrade/rewrite skycoin will float against bitcoin

The blog is going to be ready tomorrow and we will start migrating content.

We are going to announce several partnerships with large mainstream institutions, so have to cleanup a bunch of stuff and will migrate anything relevant to blog.

We will put a lot of content on the blog and things we have not revealed yet.
- information about coin distribution plans and any loose ends will go on the blog
- for the blog we are using hugo for the blog, which takes flat files in markup and generates static html files. So will work over IPFS and eventually CXO.

We are doing rewrite and improving the narrative on
- http://skycoin.net
- it will be easier for people to take a simple message away from the website about long term project goals, what is skycoin, etc
- we will test out a new, simpler narrative and see how people react. We will deemphasize the software aspects and infrastructure

We need to get the first application for the platform/ecosystem on the website.

The blockchain explorer is up at
- http://explorer.skycoin.net

We are doing the third generation skycoin wallet and completely redoing the wallet frontend and design, to start multicoin support (for Skycoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Qtum). The new wallet will be based upon the design of the Byteballs wallet.

We are getting more developers and focusing on improved project management process and expanding the development team further.

The CXO standard for immutable data objects and CXO daemon is almost done
- http://github.com/skycoin/cxo
- Skycoin block and transactions will eventually be stored, synchronized and exchanged over the network as CXO objects. The skycoin blockheaders and the transaction list in the Skycoin blocks will be stored as separate objects, to allow headers first download.

Congestion control on the meshnet is done. We have ~4 tickets left before will have something working. It works very well at 2 MB/s per core but needs optimization and there are still bottlenecks in the congestion control.

We have a skycoin introduction video in production now. We need to find a good narrative and message.

Development Chat:

http://skycoin.chat

We have a mattermost server now.

Byteballs and Qtum Crowdsales:

These are very interesting. Everyone should look at these

- http://byteball.org/
- https://qtum.org

Qtum, will probably replace ethereum because it is simpler and has fewer problems. The UXTO model is much cleaner. They have a lot of previous developers and have already done two previous coins and are the best team I have seen so far.

Byteballs is the first coin (besides skycoin) to be able to achieve consensus in a public network, without mining. They have gotten rid of the blockchain and replaced it with a DAG. I think the future is going to be with a variant of this approach. We have been considering this for years, for a Skycoin 2.0. I have not reviewed their code or implementation, but the concept is extremely innovative.