Update:

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

The next generation of the skycoin website is online
- http://skycoin.net

Several bug fixes
- race conditions in networking pool fixed
- blockchain explorer moved from node to golang backend server
- congestion control added in meshnet library
- new wallet build etc...
- CXO was completely written from scratch and is now half the size and simpler
- the CLI interface is battle tested and all the major bugs fixed. Automated deposits and withdrawals are working flawlessly now
- reenabled peer to peer exchange of peers (PEX) and several improvements, such as only relaying peers that allow incoming connections.
- skycoin now has installer on OSX and Windows. We do not have auto update or anything advanced yet

We are
- creating a skycoin blog and moving appropriate content there
- creating marketing content and a press kit
- creating our next generation infographic set, revealing more about the project. We need to communicate more clearly and with a message that audience will understand and which they will come away with and be able to transmit or communicate to others. We will have another set of messages for developers/technology focused segment.


We also made a significant mathematical breakthrough on the skycoin economy
- you already receive coin hours for holding Skycoins (holding 10 coins for 1 hour, gives you 10 coin hours). These are used to pay transaction fees right now
- we figured out how to make Skycoin and coinhours convertible into tokens exchangeable for networking services
- This means that Skycoin holders will be able to collect a bandwidth or network services reward
- We are still evaluating if we should do this and if it would making holding Skycoin more attractive.

For marketing

We are
- opening up development community
- starting chatrooms for the development community and skycoin community
- starting a systematic and sustained marketing effort (content creation, internal channels, push to external channels, press kit). This area we have put no effort in to date. This has to be ready, by the time the first applications on our platform launch.

>Any technical updates on mesh network and all those exciting topics?

Yes. We are trying to get the first application working on CXO. Which is our peer-to-peer immutable data storage/exchange standard. We will start with a simple BBS system.

The meshnet works. Except when you try to send 50 MB at once, it dies because there is no congestion control. Look in skycoin/src/mesh . You can run a skycoin meshnet daemon and command line client now.

As soon as we have congestion control implemented and working, then we will get the old VPN application working on top of the new meshnet.

After almost a year of development, our cross platform terminal/app store/application widget is almost done. This will allow us to bundle and distribute all Skycoin applications with a single executable and installer.

Right now we want to package
- skycoin daemon (and web + CLI client)
- CXO daemon (and CLI client)
- meshnet daemon (and CLI client)
- the BBS application (and web client)

Those will be the first applications.

The meshnet, we may rename "SDN" for "Software defined Networking" or just call it "Skywire". "Meshnet" will just be a specific transport module or configuration. This type of networking is more general than "Meshnet" and is something new completely. This is a new type of networking, mathematically and it is its own namespace and independent from the current internet.

The meshnet or this new type of network, requires a centralized coordinator (Which can be decentralized, using a decentralized, shared state machine, like a blockchain). Eventually we will federalize the network into "Domains" or server groups and are trying to figure out what the best way to federate the network is.

This type of networking will work very well for a few hundred or thousand server, but to go to a trillion devices, we run into the BGP problem and have to logically split the network up into smaller groups, so that each node does not have to maintain the state information for the whole network.

The test network will have a "Coordinator" service, which will be federated like XMPP, that will act as a messaging backbone, to allow nodes to message each other and do route setup and teardown. The messaging backbone will also handle payment settlement and clearing for bandwidth.

This will create a sort of "bandwidth bank" that will create demand for Skycoin tokens. Then we may have a second token that only exists on an internal ledger on the communication backbone for network coordination.

I think people will give away bandwidth for free or allocate a fixed percentage of excess capacity to free level, but in congested areas where bandwidth demand is high (such as between cities and crossings of national borders), where there is congestion, there will be speed and throughput advantage for payment to receive a lower packet queuing delay (latency) or higher throughput. We are trying to figure out the best economic incentives and how to structure the Quality of Service and economic factors. For instance, the lowest latency and highest capacity routes will naturally be "congested" and there is a natural premium that will be earned to create an incentive for more network capacity in the choke point regions. For simplicity, we are starting with a fixed cost model, but will evaluate auction models later.

We also found several trade offs in testing. A node operator to have the lowest latency path, wants to minimize his packet queuing delay by keeping 10-50% congestion rate (only utilizing less than 50% of capacity on network). While a node operator who wants to have the highest capacity route and to carry latency insensitive traffic, will queue up to two times the product of his transmission rate, times the latency to receive a packet ACK from the other end.

Example. If you can transmit one packet in 1 ms. And you have 100 packets queued up, then it will be 100 ms until the last packet in the current queue is sent. So the node wants to make sure that the rate the packets are coming in, is equal to the rate the packets are leaving. The node also wants to minimize the number of packets queued up, to minimize queuing delay.

For bulk traffic (like files or video) or latency insensitive traffic, the queuing delay becomes irrelevant and we only care about maximizing the throughput.

So the packets in/ packet out rate only has to be equal and average out over a large time horizon (1 to 30 seconds), while for real time traffic (video games and voip) the packet in/out rate needs to be balanced so that we keep the packet out rate above the packet in rate at nearly all times, to avoid queuing delay.

So for real time traffic, we want to have the transmitting, upstream node, commit to a data rate. Or the data rate over the transport, needs to change more slowly than twice the latency between when we send a packet and receive an ACK from the next node in the chain.

This works perfectly for constant rate, real time traffic but does not allow for instant burst capacity. Information about rate limits and expansion of transmission rates, propagates ~twice as slowly as data packet flow through the network. So the packet rate ramp up will be much better than UDP and the maximum rate will be discovered automatically and more quickly than TCP, but it will not be as fast as UDP.

So still researching the best way to do this. The congestion control is very important part of the network design and we are just researching it.

A node operator, who is maxing out his throughput, will incur larger latencies. While the lowest latency path operators, will want to minimize their capacity utilization.
- file download, video streaming, CDN and latency insensitive traffic will flow naturally along one type of route. Asynchronous communication
- real time traffic and VOIP or video game will flow naturally on the lowest latency route. Synchronous communications

Our congestion control algorithm, will have a single parameter for allowing the node operator to set the desired congestion level (percentage of capacity utilization and buffer size) to specialize the node for each type of traffic (lowest latency real time traffic, or throughput maximization latency insensitive bulk traffic).

We have the low level infrastructure and architecture working. We are now building the higher level coordination infrastructure.

Coin Supply Update:

Many people are confused about what the Skycoin supply is.

We added function to the blockchain info and to the blockchain explorer. It will automatically calculate the total supply, by subtracting out the locked coins.

This will make it clear what the Skycoin free float is.

We will also be adding a time lock, to make the locked coins unspendable until a certain date. We will post details to the blog when we figure out details.

ICO Update:

No matter what we do, three people end up buying all of the ICO. A few hundred people bought ~100 or 300 coins, but 2 or 3 people buy up the rest of the ICO round in 50 or 100 Bitcoin blocks.

We have decided we will distribute a portion of the Skycoin over time to people running Skycoin meshnet nodes. To promote network usage and to get users on to the network and balance out the whales.

This is probably the most fair way to distribute a lot of coins and no one will complain about it. If distribution lowers the price, we will cut back the distribution rate. We will have to determine empirically what the right amount should be.

So this will be very similar to mining and will be a good way of getting coins into the hands of the user community.

There are only ~120 people on earth that know about it.

Only a fraction understand what we are trying to do and we need to improve communication. We are studying messaging and method of communicating the project to a mass audience.

The coin is almost 100% done, but we do not have any documentation explaining clearly what we have built.

The rest is in development and we are even worse at explaining that. We need more technical diagrams, story boards, sequence diagrams and we need overview of the project and then need each component explained in one or two sentence.

I am not sure there are twenty people on earth who have looked at our repos and understood what it is that we have built. They will have to see it, to understand.

Then we need working applications that people can see and use and we need to build up a userbase and community.

I know. We are putting together teams to work on this.

We were pure technical team and bringing on the marketing people now.

Update:

Blockchain explorer almost done. Check github.
- github.com/skycoin/skycoin

New website
- skycoin.net

Exchange API and automated withdrawals and deposits has been in testing for a few months. Minor bugs fixed.

- We are working on "narrative" and explaining the differences between Skycoin and Bitcoin clearly and how the consensus process differs.
- Creating a movie to explain the project clearly
- Releasing the first applications that users can use and get coins.

The altcoin space is saturated with spam coins and we need to be very clear, concise and have a systematic marketing plan.

We might go back and just focus directly on the coin and the properties of the coin, instead of focusing on the ecosystem and software we are writing, because it is too complicated and long term to communicate easily.

No method or price will make everyone happy. We had to make decisions and trade offs.

There are twenty page descriptions earlier, about the different possibilities that could be have been chosen and what we felt the outcome of each would be and what the advantages and disadvantages of each were and what we chose.

The market cap is not 50 million. That is fake. Ripple uses this trick to inflate their market cap, when the coins are actually locked or illiquid. The market cap is the free float, times the price per coin. The coins do not exist until they have been distributed (just as the coins in bitcoin do not exist until they have been mined). There is just a cap on the total number of possible coins that can ever exist.

The undistributed coins are locked in sequential designated addresses, so that the distribution can be verified. There will be software locks on the undistributed coins also, such as an upper cap on distribution rate or other mechanism.

Skycoin.net

We are trying to speed it up. We have a few thousand commits on github and everything took longer than we could imagine.

New wallet build soon.

Satoshi originally envisioned a network of hundreds of thousand of computers and a distributed cryptographic asset. The Bitcoin network today is controlled by three mining pools. Bitcoin is not decentralized. A network controlled by three miners is clearly not decentralized. In fact Bitcoin is very fragile and falls short of the intended vision for what Bitcoin was to be.

Skycoin has really been a multi year research and development project to achieve the original vision of Bitcoin.

The most important problems the successor of Bitcoin must solve are not anonymous transactions or a turing complete scripting language or marketing boondoggles but are things that are much more fundamental and basic. How many of the forks of Bitcoin have solved transaction malleability, signature malleability and duplicate coinbase outputs?

For instance, even four years ago, Skycoin was the first coin where as a transaction ID identified a transaction. In Bitcoin and all successive forks, when a transaction was injected into the network, the transaction could be executed, while the transaction ID would never appear in the list of executed transaction (because of transaction malleability). Therefore it is necessary to scan each transaction for the unspent output set and set of created outputs, to determine if a transaction had been executed.

In other words, in Bitcoin (and all the succeeding forks), a transaction ID, does not actually uniquely identify a transaction and the transaction ID cannot be used to track whether a transaction has been executed.

How do we create transactions, whose transaction IDs can be used to track the status of the transaction?

How do we fix the duplicate coinbase output bug so that we do not have to monkey patch it (Bitcoin allows users to construct hash collisions)?

How do we create a coin where the network will remain decentralized and wont fall under the control of three mining pools? How do we keep the network robust and decentralized?

How do we permanently fix the Sybil, block propagation and network level attacks that people merely ignore until the network is attacked. Bitcoin has been successfully attacked multiple times and it was quickly and quietly dealt with in an adhoc way, but nothing has been changed to prevent the same from occurring again. Today, the attacks on the public bitcoin network do not even matter, because the three mining pools controlling the network are directly VPNed to each other.

Does mining and PoW really give the payment network security? Doesnt PoW merely mean that the network is controlled by whoever has the most money to buy mining equipment? Is giving control of the network to the person with the most money, the best option for ensuring that network remains decentralized and not subject to CYC blacklisting.

The Skycoin "mesh network" is not really a meshnet, but a form of software defined networking, that is a requirement (along with source independent networking primitives) for preventing the sybil and block propagation delay attacks.

Such as mathematical requirement of transitivity for connectivity between nodes,
- such that if A can connect to B and B can connect to C, that A is able to relay messages to C. (transitive closure)
- And requirements that nodes are authenticated and identified by public key and that a third party cannot impersonate another node without their private key. (opportunistic encryption)
- And that even with their private key, that they cannot insert data into an active communication session.
- that it can determined and verified with high probability, whether all peers in a connection set have reached the same "state" and have achieved synchronization of a set of hash objects (prove that if there are N objects identified by N hashes and you are connected to M peers, that every peer you are connected to has the full set of N objects and that you have every hash object that the set of peers you are connected to has).
- Consensus is never guaranteed to converge, unless it can be shown that every node is performing the consensus process from the same inputs (the same function is applied to the same input data). This is actually a mathematical assumption and necessary condition, that is assumed and left unverified in Bitcoin (and usually holds true under normal conditions, but which may not hold true under attack scenarios). This is deeply related to the problem of net split detection.

How do we create a Bitcoin, that will survive the release of preimage attacks on SHA256. There are several papers entering the public domain, suggesting that in five or twenty years there will be general methods of preimaging attacking almost all of the current hash functions in use, in a general way (such as by using 3-SAT solvers). Near term technical and mathematical innovations may render Bitcoin worthless overnight and invalidate the premise of Bitcoin's PoW mining algorithm (which is already invalidated by its tendency towards centralizing control of the network in one to three mining pools).

These are some of the challenges that are the reasons for Skycoin to exist. These are the foundational problems.

We are past the hard technical problems and now moving towards building up
- a community
- applications
- economy
- ecosystem
- usability

Now we are trying to explain what we have built and we are building up a swiss army knife of libraries, daemons and applications and building out of an ecosystem. We are past the point where you can just clone Bitcoin or launch a new cryptoasset, there has to be a reason for people to use it. It has to be useful to people and has to get a large number of users in the ecosystem.

--- secrets of the coin

Skycoin has two sets of foundation questions
- technical and algorithm and architecture (mathematical)
- human and economic (psychological and behavioral)

Update:

Exhausting list of changes, updates and bug fixes.
- Most of the wallet bugs/issues are fixed
- The CLI and automated deposits and withdrawals are done, raw transactions, send to many
- continuous improvements to the wallet
- continuous improvements to the website

- CLI for meshnet daemon is working (try it)
- CLI for CXO daemon is in progress
- designing new, next generation cross platform environment for bundling our applications and daemons

We have more academic papers coming.

We have set a target to float Skycoin on exchange within three months.

Try the electron build and try the non-electron build.

The non-electron build is 10 meg
The electron build is 40 or 70 meg

Electron is embedded google chrome. It is what Jaxx and the Ethereum wallet use.

The electron build bundles google chrome.
The non-electron build will use the system web-browser to access the wallet

Will try to update download page with information.

- electron includes google chrome and runs in its own window.
- the non-electron build will use the system browser

I use non-electron build, on servers always. The non-electron, binary build is ideal for servers.

---

We fixed eighty wallet bugs. Look at commits on github.

The CLI is substantially upgraded and automated deposits and withdrawals are working now. Hundreds of changes and improves to the Skycoin CLI interface.

We upgraded to latest version of electron and the copy/paste issues are fixed.

32 bit windows builds should be ready in next release.

We are creating installers for windows and OSX, so that you can install skycoin like a native application.

--- meshnet

The meshnet daemon now has a command line CLI, that you can play with.

Starting off with a GUI was a mistake. We should get everything working with a CLI interface first, then attempt a gui interface after the CLI works.

--- CLI environment

We have too much software and are trying to package all of our application daemons into  a single executable and cross platform environment.

This environment will allow you to run
- the skycoind daemon
- the meshnet daemon
- the CXO daemon
- address generation
- skycoin command line / RPC client
- more applications later

There is a special phone number, for testing and privacy conscience. That phone number will return the same verification every time, to bypass the 2-factor authentication.

A work around is being implemented.

Can someone check the torrent file on skycoin.net for skycoin wallet version 11?

- http://skycoin.net/downloads.html
- http://skycoin.net/downloads/skycoin-11.torrent

It worked for two people, but does not work for me.

I am not sure if port forwarding is configured right on the seed boxes.

We will start heavily on the infographics, blog posts and videos.

Then posters and stickers and white papers.

Update:

Our technicals are done. I think we have fixed the last bugs. The wallet is getting polished up very nicely.

We need to start on marketing, applications, user community.

- We need to get blog and need to start getting content
- We need to start doing weekly content pushes.
- We need to pull in the market people
- We need to start doing sequential listings on the major exchanges
- We need to push out the first applications on the platform

So I think we are on track to shift focus to marketing soon. Definitely by the time the first two applications are running.

Also:
- can I get feedback on the infographics? Any suggestions?
- has anyone read the first three whitepapers yet
- we are taking bugs on bitmessage in the Skycoin channel and putting them into the issue tracker.
- feedback on website

Can someone fix all of the electron wallet bugs and test it on every platform. Then do a pull request.

Mining is a security flaw. Satoshi's original vision was for a decentralized cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin network is controlled by three mining pools. At one point Gigahash.io controlled over 65% of the network.

The objective of the Skycoin project from the start was to fix the problems in Bitcoin. This includes redecentralizing consensus over more than three people.

For security and incentive reasons, the blockchain consensus network has to be independent of coin creation. It is suicide to link coin creation to whoever controls the consensus network. Unless you want a "decentralized" coin whose consensus network is controlled by three for profit mining pools (who are basicly a cartel now, who splits ASIC costs and divides the hash power between themselves by agreement).

The idea behind mining is that whoever has the most money, to buy hashing power should own and control the consensus network. "Whoever has the most money should own the government and make the laws".

The original premises (economic and human) required for the security of PoW established by Satoshi have been shown to be empirically false in reality.

Right now, eliminating mining seems absurd. In the future, that mining was accepted will be absurd. People only support the cost of mining as long as they make money from it and the price is going up.

Another objective for Skycoin, was to have transactions that were as fast or faster than credit cards. We are able to do 10 second blocks. In order to do that, PoW and PoS has to be eliminated. Decreasing the block time decreases securities for PoW/PoS coins.

Additionally, mining costs the Bitcoin network tens of millions of dollars per month and does nothing that anyone is willing to pay for directly. Bitcoin requires an exponentially growing influx of new users and capital to offset the mining costs. No one would use Bitcoin if they had to pay the mining costs directly and each transaction cost $50.

Skycoin transactions do not cost $50 in inflation from new coins being created every block.

It is my opinion that in the long run, we are going to see all the existing Pow/PoS coins die as people realize the actual economic incentives. The cost of PoW/PoS mining is bounce by the users and paid for in a lower market valuation as money is bled out of a coin by mining costs until the coin is abandoned. Only a few coins, like Bitcoin and Ethereum can achieve enough new users coming in with new money to offset hundreds of thousands a dollar a month to tens of millions a month in electricity costs, just to process seven transactions per second.

The price equation is simple
- this may dollars per month are coming in from new users and capital inflows
- this many dollars per month are being thrown in a pit and burned by mining costs

We are moving away from "free coins for miners" and moving towards "community coins" and treating cyptotokens as digital property and a type of equity. The objective is to make the coins useful and that people doing useful work people are willing to pay for should get coins.

Right now the Bitcoin economy consists of new users putting them money in and then the money being thrown in a pit and burned in a sacrifice ritual to the mining electricity costs.

If the average user had to paid the miners electricity cost directly as transaction fees, instead of it being robbed from them through inflation by the creation of new coins, then each Bitcoin transaction would cost more than $50. It would be more expensive than an international bank transfer.

Achieving mathematically provable consensus in a decentralized way, without the cost ($50 per transaction) and problems of PoW/PoS is a cornerstone of the Skycoin project. Solving the PoW cost problem is a requirement for stability and mainstream adaption of crypto assets.

Skycoin is not premined, because Skycoin does not have mining. The objective of the Skycoin consensus algorithm was to eliminate the miners and the downward pressure they create on the coin price.

The most important thing about mining however, is that when everyone had a GPU miner in their house and was getting coins, it was "decentralized". Now that ASICs and three mining pools dominate the network, there is nothing for the Bitcoin community to do or participate in. It is no longer fun and relevant. Its not fun anymore and people are unable to participate in mining in any meaningful way. This is what has driven a lot of the activity and community out of Bitcoin and into the altcoins.

We need a new model for people to get coins.

Yes. The meshnet is very excited.

We do not have the meshnet whitepaper on the website yet, but the three consensus whitepapers are online.
- http://skycoin.net/whitepapers.html

The "meshnet" Skycoin is not actually a meshnet. It is a new type of modular software defined networking, that could be used to build meshnets or community ISPs. It is also very useful for machine-to-machine communication, IoT and building VPN clients.

It is actually not even possible to build one of these networks on top of IPv4 or IPv6, because meshnets require features like route selection, multihoming, store-and-forward, connection fall over and have to have mathematical properties that IPv4/IPv6 networks and routing do not have. We proved early that it is mathematically impossible to meet the technical requirements in a stateless routed network (ruling out IPv4, IPv4. BGP), so this is a completely new networking namespace and essentially a new internet build on top of the existing internet (for now, until people run physical cables).

We are also doing experiments in content addressable storage and source independent networking. Which will be essential for fully taking advantage of this new type of networking.

Here some infographics.



















The meshnet is basicly working, but we have not finished the first applications yet.

lol. This is one of our marketing channels. I told him "SkycoinOfficial" was a stupid name.

He need to work on the name.

The marketing people are supposed to push weekly updates into each of the social media channels.

>This coin is 3 years old now, but don't see you in exchanges, so you will have an ico for funding? Cool.

We did a ghetto ICO, by hand on bitmessage a few years ago. To software developers who had to compile the wallet from source, on linux.

Now we are testing ICO on third party website. We are also testing order book and exchange integration. They will test out the bugs and write documentation for Skycoin exchange integration.

I think that is one of our marketing channel accounts.

I do not like the name "SkycoinOfficial" and he should change it to something better.