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241  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 25, 2015, 10:17:51 PM

I have the base layer designed. I am implementing a simple tool like shadowsocks, that can connect point-to-point between multiple servers (the node), assign itself an address and then just copy/paste packets. Then a simple "control plane" for remotely controlling the node over json. Or just a json configuration file to start. Then a web application for integrating all the data from the control planes for multiple nodes, to allow multiple nodes to be controlled from one place.

Once you are inside the network, no one can find the IP address of the servers being used. So they cannot be raided or taken down. However, if you have a list of public nodes, then the government can identify them and take them down.


Why you are not using I2P for that?


Yes very similar to I2P. That is exactly what it is. Except I want to keep everything on one codebase in one language, with standardized crypto primitives. I2P works very well, but new techniques and ideas have been developed since it was implemented.

I2P was ahead of its time. I cannot believe that it is twelve years old already.
242  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 25, 2015, 10:15:43 PM
Development Update:

I ran a server, with the public interface exposed to the wild internet. It ran for four months without crashing!

Then a bot stumbled upon this

Quote
[gnet:DEBUG] Convert, Message type daemon.GetBlocksMessage
[skycoin.daemon:DEBUG] Got 0 blocks since 233
panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal 0xb code=0x1 addr=0x0 pc=0x50a38d]

goroutine 13 [running]:
github.com/skycoin/skycoin/src/daemon.RPC.GetConnection(0xc2081ea000, 0xc20816936d, 0x9, 0x18)
   /home/user/.gvm/pkgsets/go1.4/global/src/github.com/skycoin/skycoin/src/daemon/rpc.go:51 +0x33d

Triggering a "invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference"

Then I just patched that

https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/commit/7e25e061d7a950a8f1ce2fc11af914d71dd87010

The Skycoin client flow paths are so streamlined, that the reliability is really amazing. I have only found very of these kinds of bugs so far.
243  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 25, 2015, 07:48:41 PM
Development Update: Peer Exchange Algorithm Problems

There is no satisfactory solution for sharing peer lists. You should only share peers if they accept incoming connections, otherwise the client spends a lot of time trying to connect to the majority of peers, which cannot accept incoming connections, so sharing the peer does not help anyone.  Knowledge that the peer accepts incoming connections will not propagate until it receives at least the first incoming connection. However if a peer accepts incoming connections, it will initially only connect to peers in a list using outgoing connections, so no one will ever connect back to the peer and learn that it accepts incoming connections.

Peer-to-peer has major problems because of this and became the majority of peers do not accept incoming connections. The majority of connection attempts fail and it takes too long to connect to the network. At once connection attempt per 5 seconds and with one in ten peers accepting incoming connections, it takes up to 50 seconds to connect to network and sometimes two minutes.

There is no solution, so the brute force method might be best. I may put exponential back-off per per on outgoing connection attempts and then change the 5 seconds per connection attempt, to 1 second per connection attempt.

Development Update:

Skycoin could be made into a very solid coin, that is efficient, has no unneeded features or clutter and has a secure and innovative consensus algorithm that could be the first coin that offers a viable alternative to Bitcoin's mining. That would put it around litecoin.

Then the priority is on creating capital inflows.

About 10% of internet users are using VPNs for accessing content that is blocked in their geographic region. The Chinese firewall is severe and another large market. Meshnets in the long term. All of Youtube, video, music content on the internet will eventually be pushed into the darknet and unregulated spaces. Reddit, blogs and secure communication applications will eventually be pushed there also.

So the bulk of internet traffic.

The content is not being pushed to a darknet space, but to a distributed space such as IPFS, content addressable networking and OpenBazaar. This will happen over the next twenty years. It is already happening now, but piecemeal and the base layer of the software stack does not exist yet and developers are just duct-taping together whatever tools they can get their hands on.

If you have the SHA256 of a video file, you dont care where you download the actual data from because you can verify the data.You dont care where you downloaded it from, you so you dont need a centralized server. If you know the SHA256 hash of an html website, then you dont care where the data comes from. The website becomes decentralized. You do not need Youtube anymore and the HTML and video gets moved into a content addressable space and the data gets replicated peer-to-peer.

I have the base layer designed. I am implementing a simple tool like shadowsocks, that can connect point-to-point between multiple servers (the node), assign itself an address and then just copy/paste packets. Then a simple "control plane" for remotely controlling the node over json. Or just a json configuration file to start. Then a web application for integrating all the data from the control planes for multiple nodes, to allow multiple nodes to be controlled from one place.

Once you are inside the network, no one can find the IP address of the servers being used. So they cannot be raided or taken down. However, if you have a list of public nodes, then the government can identify them and take them down.
244  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 24, 2015, 11:05:06 AM
IPO Update:

IPO problems:

Some people are having trouble receiving messages.

Make sure you leave bitmessage open long enough to receive the response message. To receive Bitmessage messages, you have to leave bitmessage open for about an hour. Bitmessage has to download every message on the network. If you do no leave the client open for long enough, the return message will not be received.

I am replying to the messages in under an hour, but some people are not leaving Bitmessage open long enough to receive them.

IPO Common Questions

Here are common questions

Windows client is here: http://128.199.188.22/

Run the client and run http://127.0.0.1:6420/ in the web broswer

The windows client may still have bug, where it needs to re-download all the blocks every time it is opened. This means balances disappear until the blocks are redownloaded, then reappear. Go to http://127.0.0.1:6420/blockchain and check the block depth (seq).

The exchange rate is fixed with Bitcoin at 2500 SKY per BTC. This is the price it will float at once exchange is up. Adjusting price up and down is too difficult because of bitcoin volatility. This price was chosen to be equal to 0.10 cents per coin when Bitcoin was at $250.

To buy coins, download bitmessage and message BM-2cU8XJp3GPVQG75ZwMjiyzdDEa9eD4B7iM with your skycoin address, a return address for Bitcoin, username/contact information and how many coins to buy.

This is a good example message

Quote
Hi, I still don't have your response since april. I hope this time you'll read this message )
===
{    
contact: "bitcointalks: elelegzet",
bitcoin_addr: "1BrYV9NDuoXdxK46gcYvHDxj5J1WvC6dnr",    
skycoin_addr: "2bJVVKi3UU9FKEAnZpvNQRWMom9Pp1SYp8k",    
coins_requested: "1100"
}
===

Development Updates:

I have switched the peer list to json instead of csv and am merging in the blacklist and peer lists.

The new peer list format looks like.



This is first step to adding new fields to the peer list state and renabling PEX (peer-exchange). Fake peers were being spammed when we were using DHT for peer-discovery. This meant it could take up to two minutes to find a valid peer and begin downloading the blockchain. Under the new protocol, a peer will only be announced to peers if they have a port that is open for incoming connections. This will decrease the time to find other peers further.

The peer blacklist conditions were turned down, because it was being triggered by China's firewall and by abnormal networking conditions. A peer would get blacklisted for an hour if they made a connection attempt and the firewall dropped the connection before the introduction packet was received by the other side. Black list conditions were reduced and now clients are not blacklisted until they send invalid data.

II am adding periodic blockchain saving every 20 seconds, right now, which should fix the windows bug. This should have been pushed a while ago, but was pushed to wrong branch.

I might do quick change to the client to show block height at bottom of the screen and to show connection count.

245  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 23, 2015, 11:42:11 AM
Update:

Shadowsocks was taken off of github, by government.
https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks

Shadowsocks is the only way to access the internet from inside of China. This is disturbing.

I am fixing a networking bug that took network down for an hour yesterday. Some types of abnormal disconnections or blocking by the chinese firewall can cause the client to get black listed for an hour and show zero peers. I am removing some of the black list conditions to improve reliability when internet connectivity is being attacked/blocked/disrupted.

246  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 23, 2015, 08:30:39 AM
Hello Skycoin,

I need help with regard to how the wallet is working.
I am still unable to get any coins you have sent to show in wallet.

I am having problems with the way it is working.
I have to take my old wallet files out of the wallet folder for skycoin to run properly, and then when it runs it creates a new wallet in the folder.
If I place my older created wallets back into the wallet folder, skycoin wont start up.
So I am stuck with not being able to receive the coins you have sent me with the older wallet files. This problem has lasted for months.
Do you know about and understand this problem? Will it be fixed and will I eventually be able to receive my coins?
Will skycoin eventually be able to run with the older created wallet files?
Will you have to send the coins again with newly created wallet address, and if so what happens to the old address and coins, and it may be possible that the problem repeats itself anyway?

Please can you let me know what is the problem here and what is to be done to fix it? I am using windows.

Thank you.

LOL. That wallet file must be really old. Do this.
- Open the wallet file with a text editor. The old wallet file, its JSON. Get the "seed" that generated the wallet.
- Now, go and hit "Load Wallet From Seed" in the Skycoin client. Put the seed value in the text box and hit button. Now the wallet is loaded.

Then should work.

I tried to design this, so you can just remember a pass phrase and access the coins/wallets anywhere. Without having to carry around a thumb drive or file, that can be confiscated or stolen. If you have bitcoin on an encrypted wallet, encrypted on the thumb drive, the thumb drive can still be stolen at border crossings. So even if they cannot steal the coins, they can stop you from having access to them. Where as a pass phrase in the brain cannot be stolen or confiscated.

So if a SWAT team breaks into your house and shoots your puppy and then steal all your computers
- you will lose access to the coins/funds stored on the computer  (Bitcoin)
- if you do not have disc encryption the funds will be stolen
- If you have remember the wallet seed, you can regenerate the wallet and get access to the funds (Skycoin)
- If you have disc encryption and use a brain wallet, the wallet cannot be recovered by the thieves and you can regenerate the wallet from the seed pass phrase.

The disc encryption in use on windows and OSX is backdoored. It uses the TPP (Trusted Platform Module) and there is a law enforcement and government back door. Windows was modified to prevent users from using file system in user space (FUSE) and the developer of true-crypt was threatened into taking it down and not working on it anymore. When a truecrypt partition is seized by mafia/government/terrorists, the thieves cannot read it. So it has to be banned.
247  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 22, 2015, 02:50:25 AM
====== IPO ========

More receipts were processed. Check bitmessage

I will try to process as many as possible while the Bitcoin price is low.



I do not know if problem is on my side, but messages are not being confirmed. If you did not get a message/response and sent request more than a few months ago, then can resend.

There are about 400,000 coins left in IPO before it goes on exchange and is allowed to float. Target is 1% distribution before floating.
248  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 21, 2015, 04:40:15 PM
Update:

Golang 1.5 has support for android and iPhone now.
- https://blog.golang.org/go1.5
- This means can do mobile wallet soon or get Skycoin to compile for arm at least.

gox says it can do cross compilation even if cgo is required, but I have been unable to get it to work yet. There is a debian package for the cross compilation toolchain now, so it is easier than six months ago but still not easy.

Security Update:

Windows 10 lets the government go onto your computer and steal your Bitcoin wallet. OSX will be the same soon (if it is not the case already).

I think private key storage will inevitable have to move to a separate device, like Raspberry PI and off of the main computer. The blockchain server and where the private keys are stored and signing occurs, will definitely need to be separated.

The FCC passed rules that lock down routers and prevent people from running open source firmware. Microsoft and government have pushed secure boot on all computers certified to run Windows 10. This is an incremental move, towards preventing computers from running non-government/corporate approved software. In less than a decade, computers may not be able to run software that is not signed and which cannot be revoked by Microsoft and Apple.

The intent is to slow boil the public and push these kind of features in incrementally. Windows 10 is already a government mass surveillance platform.

Bitcoin Block Size

BitcoinXT is a coup. This is classical divide and conquer. The Bitcoin reddit was taken over and anyone opposing BitcoinXT was purged. Then they attempted to claim consensus and that everyone supports the changes and dissenters were shadow banned.

Chinese mining pools are correct in rejecting this change. The change was rejected unanimously by every sane Bitcoin developers and is being pushed by demagogues and the incompetent. This is a classic divide and conquer strategy for destroying Bitcoin as a standard and splitting the community.

Nick Szabo, Gmaxwell, Sipa, The guy who invented side chains. While it is being pushed and shilled by people who want to infiltrate, usurp and undermine Bitcoin.

Bitcoin volume and the network slowdown was also intentional. The fee for transactions was lowered from 5 cents down to 0.2 cents, when it probably should have been raised to 25 cents. Lowering the transaction fee was a mistake.

In two years, we will have other solutions, such as side chains. No one has looked and asked "Are these transactions $3 transactions or $250 transactions". They would see that the transaction limit is only being hit by because of small transaction spam.

Bitcoin is doing 7 transactions per second or 7*24*60*60 = 604,800 transactions per day. Bitcoin does not even have 604,000 users who have wallets. Each user is not doing even a single transaction per day on average. That means the transactions clogging the chain are spam and not real economic activity.

Paypal can only support 115 transactions per second. Visa only does 2000 per second globally. So when you have four billion people using it, you will need to increase the block size by about 300.

Bitcoin has 1 MB blocks every 10 minutes. So uses about 1.6 Kb/s (10^6/(10*60)). Skycoin is capped at 5 KB/s for now. So for about two billion people, Bitcoin might need about 600 KB/s. Which means 360 MB blocks.

Bitcoin wont be the dominant crypto currency. With 5 second block times and 600 KB/s of bandwidth, each block is only 3 MB. With 10 minute blocks and 600 KB/s the block size is 360 MB. So with a few small changes, something like Bitcoin is in the range required for replacing VISA for global payments.

That is before side chains and other advanced methods. I think future methods will shave a factor of 300 off easily.

The volume of wire transfers and bank-to-bank settlement is much much lower than the volume of VISA transactions. Bitcoin could easily handle this scenario. So if Bitcoin restricts itself to wire transfer type situations and does not focus on 2 billion people shuffling pennies around, the problems go away.
249  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 17, 2015, 10:19:45 PM
Yes, please, release the roadmap for investors.

I want a head mounted display, so that I can program without getting out of bed.

The exchange and getting contractors and misc overhead are taking up all my time right now.

1> Get exchange up
2> Get consensus implemented and then switch public/main client/blockchain over
3> Meshnet/networking
4> Small changes to client and interfaces and cleanup
5> Admin/payrol/buying equipment/bug bites

I spent a lot of time on networking and architecture for simplifying the skywire router/node implementation over the last two weeks. I really only want to work on this part right now, but other things which are more urgent. There are three different groups working on the mesh net but I have not had time to stay updated on what they are doing. One group is doing the pseudowire implementation.

The exchange was originally going to require writing new software, but we decided to use bitcoind instead of libbitcoin. This is the fastest way to get it working.

The crypto library port from C to golang will be a lot of work. We spent a lot of time going through the code SIPA wrote and figuring it out and no one has time right now to actually do the port. It will not matter until the wallet has to run on android and iOS. This simplifies cross compilation, but is not essential and does not change program or functionality, but just improves the build process for cross compilation. So low priority and will take time.

Consensus implementation is important but is lower priority than the exchange.

Getting the exchange up seems to be the most urgent thing that people care about right now.

We need to hire more contractors to work on specific things and will spending more money at a faster rate. Everyone so far has only worked on what they felt like and its left tasks undone. We need to get contractors for those. There is a huge list of small things and I just want someone to start going down the list and checking things off, so that it gets done. I can only do at most two thing at once.

So I am personally ignoring everything not related to the exchange or the contractors.
250  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 11, 2015, 10:50:50 AM
Research Update:

Six months ago I began research into economic systems for the meshnet.
- routing (how to choose routes over the topology)
- payment (how much payment for transit should each node reach, how should price be set)

The naive system is to
- choose the shortest route
- choose the lowest cost route

If there are two paths, that transit from point A to point B and the lowest cost route is always chosen, then one node ends up with all the traffic. The paths auction their cost to zero and no profit or incentive exists for expansion. This deters adaption on the provider/hardware side. Similarly, when there is a single path between the two hosts, the path can charge any fee and price gouge, which deters meshnet adaption on the user side.

So
- one path between two points with no competition ends up with monopoly pricing (same as Comcast)
- two or more paths competing in auction model, bids price down to zero (zero marginal cost)

This is a contradiction in the economic model that leads to pathological behavior.

Another possible model is
- the price per bandwidth is fixed allow all links in the network
- the lowest cost path should be taken (in this case, the shortest path)

The optimal arrangement should
- minimize latency between any two points
- maximize throughput between two points
- guarantee profitability to the node operators, to incentive expansion

There are other contradictions, such as the coin being finite in quantity (a stock) and the bandwidth being infinite (a flow). If there is a 1 Gb/s link between two points and it is not used at full capacity, then the unused bandwidth is wasted. If you do not send 1 Gb this second, it is lost and the capacity cannot be stored. The mismatch between the units of stocks and flows means that the network will be under utilized.

If a mesh node costs $60 and the operator can make $60 in the first month, then the size and coverage of the network can double every month, profitably. So if the capacity requirement is 100 Mb/s for an area, then the network expansion will be slower if there are six nodes competing to fulfill that capacity, than if there are only two nodes.

There is Darwinian natural selection between competing economic models for funding and expanding a mesh topology. All of the current models are non-viable. The TOR "do it for free" model, only works because the NSA is paying for most of the nodes and its still slow.

This is a multi-agent coordination and control problem, optimization problem and cybernetics problem.  I found the optimal solution under a toy model and I am satisfied with it.

While researching the effect of different money systems on behavior of the network, I went through several scenarios
- fixed number of coins and no inflation
- fixed number of coins and constant inflation
- nodes create/loan coins into existence as credit (tit-for tat) with periodic settlement

In the third model, if user A uses a path, they give user B coin credit and and then if user B uses a path controlled by A, then it decreases the credit. After a while, the credit balances would be settled as Skycoin on the blockchain or the credit balances sold or traded. Or else the user gets throttled to a lower level or put behind traffic with a better balance of payment. This ends up being identical to Ripple Pay (the original, not to be confused with Ripple) but backed by a finite resource.

Under different currency systems, you get different network behavior. The profitability for the node operator varies, the bandwidth utilization heavily depends on it. The price and appreciation of the coin also ends up depending heavily on the economic model.

There is darwinian selection on economic forms and types of meshnets and incentives. To achieve dominance, a meshnet or decentralized model has to provide higher bandwidth at lower cost than the alternative monolithic ISP model. A meshnet or community controlled network may become the dominant form in Afghanistan or rural areas where monolithic ISPs have no incentive to provide service, while in an urban area or a different situation, the dominant economic form may different.

There are trade offs. The economic form that out competes the other forms may be better or worse for the node operators or may be better or worse than alternatives for the users or may be better or worse than other forms for the coin price and asset holders.
251  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 07, 2015, 06:29:23 PM
Update:

The FCC just banned open source wifi router firmware in the United States. All manufacturs selling routers have to lock the firmware down. Permanent NSA/FISA court back doors for everyone.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/07/FCC-Blocks-Open-Source
https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm?id=39498&switch=P

This comes after hounding of the TrueCrypt developer and suppression of meshnet project at defcon.
252  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 07, 2015, 04:00:59 PM
Lol the dev's still posting tons of useless text. He has been doing it for almost 2 years and because of it obviously the coin is still not released. See you in 2020 nothing will change.

Skycoin has been in development since Litecoin. It has been about four years, not two. It has been on github for two years.

The network has been running continuously for over a year and a half now I think. With a few blockchain resets.

Right now, altcoins are like horse racing. They only exist for pumping and are a form of gambling. I didnt want Skycoin to become like that, but over time realized there is nothing I can do about it. So went ahead and released it before its "useful" in a utilitarian sense, as being part of a larger system that justifies its existence and creates non-speculative demand.

It is mostly just developers and tech people now. There are a few steps we need to open it to the Dogecoin/Litecoin crowd.
- the domain needs to be up (not sure why this wasnt done a year ago; someone was supposed to do this)
- would help if the crypto port to pure go is done, so builds are automatic. this is what will make android/iOS wallet possible
- exchange.

There is too much going on right now and most of it is non-code related.  Global supply chain logistics and other misc.
253  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 07, 2015, 03:17:43 PM
A group of researchers have reverse-engineered the NSA's retro reflectors, and has recreated them using software-defined radio (SDR)
- https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/06/building_retro_.html
254  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: August 03, 2015, 11:37:58 PM
Update:

On the MtGox collapse. This is surreal

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/

According to this, MtGox ended up with the 500,000 coin deficient because Karpeles was spending bitcoin from customer accounts to pay office expenses back when bitcoin was between $1 and $30.

Quote
I finally gathered a small group of employees to pressure Mark into answering how we spent more money than we've made, his answer was simply:

"My grandmother lives in a castle in switzerland"

MtGox was basicly run like the FED.

The early Bitcoiners all thought that Bitcoin would eventually arrive at something trustworthy that was a replacement for fiat. Instead, Bitcoin, Dogecoin and the successors may end up dragging government fiat dragged down to the level of a farce.  All money is becoming RPG money.

For instance, I do not think there is any difference between the counterfeit $100 US dollar bills and the real ones. The counterfeit 100 Yuan bills are apparently identical or even higher quality than the real ones. There is no difference between the counterfeit FED dollars and the real ones. So you have people that need to work to eat and pay rent and if they dont work, they starve or are homeless. Then you have people who have bought up sixty houses, in money paid as a gift, which is from an effectively counterfeit source. Similarly, banks counterfeit currency through derivatives and buy real collateral or leverage up. Another example being the two financial bailouts (secret, classified, completely fraudulent, a scam on the public), the quantitative easing program and the savings and loan crisis.

So you just have people printing money for nothing, in various ways of varying levels of obfuscation and buying up all the real assets in the economy. All the land, the gold, the companies and so on.

A cynical person would ask, if the laws exist not to stop counterfeiting but to restrict counterfeiting to group in political control.

Instead of creating money, the banks issue bonds that the government sells, then the banks collect interest on the bonds from the governments. All of the taxes people pay, are paid to the banks/families issuing the bonds and to spend money, the government has to sell more bonds to finance operations. Anyone attempting to re-monetize gold/silver or simply issue money with out a debt obligation, simply gets assassinated. Bribery and assassination is mostly how the system is maintained within a country and between countries that system of currency, was historically spread through military conquest.

Which is another reason that the United States keep threatening Russia with nuclear war whenever it threatens to adapt a "sovereign" monetary system system where the government can issue money, instead of paying interest to foreign banks for the privilege of having money.

Print fake money, buy up all the real assets. A cynical person could look at the whole global financial system as a scam.

When the Britain occupied a country and established a colony in Africa, people would complain that they dont have laborers or slaves to wipe their ass. So the first thing the British did was take control over the land, create an artificial scarcity of land through government regulation and law (assigning parcels and making huge chucks of land unavailable for sale, by giving them to oligarches for pennies or making them unavailable via law). Then the government took control over and monopolize food production and distribution (often through oligarchs). Before people would just grab land, grow as much food as they needed or barter for it or just take empty land and live there. Once monopoly control over land and food was established, people needed to work for money to buy food or they would starve. They needed to pay rent to the land owners or they would be homeless, while scarcity of land was maintained through force. That is how labor markets were created. Monopolization or forming a cartel over  everything that is needed for human survival and forcing people to buy it through the market system for labor.

The number of hours people need to work to pay rent, buy a hour or purchase food is centrally controlled by the United States Government. The FED goes in and props up the real estate market or gives banks money through the QE program to buy up vacant houses and remove them from the market, to maintain scarcity and current rent/housing prices, preventing rental rates from falling, even as demand for houses decreases. The government centralizes food production and pays farmers to leave land fallow or subsidizes them to produce or alternates between the two to squeeze out small farmer (who receive less from the government stabilization programs) to further centralize control over food into a smaller and smaller number of corporations.

You have Agenda 21, zoning laws and federal ownership of state land and other methods of artificially imposed scarcity over land. In San Francisco, for instance, a cartel of real estate developers has used zoning laws and other methods to ensure no new construction takes place, forcing rents to skyrocket to over $5000/month. San Francisco is the poster child for Agenda 21 development, with a person working 60 hours a week shuffling power point slides for a multinational corporation to make $150,000 per year and half of their money going to the government as taxes and the other half going to pay rent, with nothing left over after expenses for savings or accumulation. Personal ownership of property becomes impossible except for executives earning 10 or 15 million from exercising their stock options for Fortune 500 companies, being pumped by the FED Quantitative Easing program, while the rest of the economy is destroyed or centralized.

This is a labor extraction system. Taxes only exist to remove money out of circulation, so that more money can be counterfeited. The literal objective of the system is enslave people and extract the most labor from the population as possible, in the most efficient way.

The homeless, the people who cannot afford rent, afford to own land, or purchase food, under the government controlled real estate and food rates, become wards fully supported by the government (40% of US population currently). Useless eaters to be depopulated. The homeless and destitute, who clutter and shit on the streets of San Francisco, to be rounded up into FEMA camps, disposed of.

Prisons, foreign wars, welfare and fake government jobs serve to burn off the excess productive capacity of the society, to maintain a scarcity of capital. Similarly, only the wealthy can afford children, housing space, private education, child care. Only the most useful slaves in the labor extraction system gets to reproduce to the next generation.

When you look at the FED/government system, it is a labor extraction system. It is actually a superior form, merging Fascism and Communism.

Under communism, workers were assigned jobs and if a person showed up 30 minutes late to work, they were sent to a forced labor for six months. If they showed up late again, they were sent to Siberia. Communism in Russia was a system of slavery. Workers were provided with housing and food. Housing, food and the requirements for human survival only consumed 4% to 6% of industrial output. People were lazy and were not motivated to work or were not as useful slaves. Instead of labor camp, in the United State the threat is homelessness or being forced to rely on government support and losing access to good housing, expensive organic food and then developing diabetes, becoming sterile, obese and developing cancer.

So the United States becomes a society, where the industrial capacity to produce everything that is consumed for basic survival is less than 4% of expenditures or labor for inputs, but where the top portion of the society (the middle and upper middle class) has 80% of their income consumed by a rentier class that has through government regulation and manipulation monopolized ownership of all things required for human survival. The privatization and monopolization of water, electricity, communication, food (all Agenda 21 objectives).

In water monopolization, a private corporation buys up the water rights for a city and studies show that every year the rates are hiked by three times inflation. The monopolization of internet access (a single service provider per area) is not natural, as there were previously dozens of providers but was a result of government action at the local, state and muni levels (complicated). Once monopolized the provider then hiked rates at 3x to 5x inflation. San Francisco, where land ownership has been monopolized and where zoning laws and cartels prevent construction of newer or higher density housing, you see rental prices increasing at a large multiple of inflation and much faster than wages. The cost of healthcare is similarly increasing at 3x to 5x inflation and much faster than wages and the rate of growth has accelerated since Obamacare after the resulting market consolidation. Similarly, the tax rates are increased every year, leaving people with less of a share of their income to be spent on survival and life.

So the economy will eventually reach a point of collapse and crisis. With multiple oligarchies, each monopolizing one aspect of human survival and demanding a greater amount of each person's fixed income each year, until the whole society is driven into destitution and poverty or until a political change and restructuring occurs.

If you look at the trends, soon the US economy will consist of
- two communication companies, each of which monopolizes internet service in each geographic area
- two to four media companies
- two to four food companies who control the whole pipeline from farm to store
- a few water company that monopolizes water distribution in each geographic area
- two healthcare companies "competing' in each geographic area

For example, here is the comcast and time warner coverage and overlap maps. Notice how competition is divided up, so that there is no competition and a single monopoly without any geographic area.



There are similar maps for healthcare after Obamacare and for the food market.

This is the organic food market, that controls food distribution and pricing to the consumer



This is the banking industry



It is not going to stop there. It wont stop with 4 companies. For ISPs, there are already only two companies and Time Warner and Comcast have already tried to merge into a single monolithic national ISP with monopoly control. The merger was only set back temporarily. The government at the current rate will begin approving those mergers within a few years. Or else the companies will be separate, but owned by the same transnational holding company.

So we are seeing mergers within a country and we are also seeing mergers between companies. The stock price of these mega companies, is bid up with FED money and then they print shares to buy out smaller competitors. We are also seeing not only consolidation within the boundaries of individual nation states, but across national boundaries.

When all the corporations have merged, to this degree and they exercise monopoly pricing power, the economic structure of the United States begins to look like communism. We have gone from decentralized food production by tens of thousands of small farmers, to two to four companies owning the whole food chain from farm to store.



There is less than 20 years before genocide, economic collapse, political instability, switch to a command economy or other systemic change. None of the graphs for the US economy can keep going for another twenty years.



For instance, no one can spend more than 100% of their income on food, rent or healthcare costs. The rates cannot keep climbing forever.



So the US is doomed. There is a mathematical certainty that the current economic/political system that is driving itself to suicide, cannot continue for another two decades. There is no way the current economic system can survive to the end of Hillary's second term.
- The crisis will likely start in the next 24 months
- all of the people responsible for the crisis will get together and choose the "solution" benefiting them the most, making it even worse
- the bankers/families are figure out some way of keeping the money fraud going in the new system, most of which are being pushed at the UN level, but already meeting fierce and increasing resistance at the local level as people figure out what is going on. If they go through with it, it will have to be at gunpoint and probably entail genocide or something like the Bolshevik revolution.

I looked at the Obamacare and digital health records legislation and how the healthcare industry is being restructured and its like some people sat in a room and said "What is the best and most profitable way to kill off 10,000 people a day who dont have any assets that are taking up resources we could use for something else".

Europe is about a decade ahead of the United States and they are already killing 130,000 people per year in hospitals as a cost saving measure and the US has five times the population.
- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2161869/Top-doctors-chilling-claim-The-NHS-kills-130-000-elderly-patients-year.html

The demographics are horrible. The US stock market is being pumped by the the QE program. The US stock market is going to crash to level it should be at because of demographics.  PE multiples will be about 12 after the manipulation ends. The pension funds are going to go under and there will be municipal defaults like Detroit in multiple cities (again forcing privatization of all assets, mineral, water, land rights and anything that can be sold).

Reality:

Then the fact is that debt, currency, laws, they are fake. They are just pieces of paper. They enforced at gun point. Texas might just say "no" and renegotiate of their terms to avoid municipal assets stripping. Its not clear whether power is going to maintain at the federal level or shift to the state level or shift to the UN level. Its going to be determined by military force, not by votes.

Given what I have seen over the last two years and the increase in assassinations and bullshit, I think the world is heading towards crisis, war and anarchy. The new rule seems to be "because you can". If you can do something, you have a right to. If the government can raid 60,000 people a year with SWAT teams, stick NSA anal monitoring probes up someone's ass or take 80% of a person's income, or police taking people's cash from them on the road, then they have the "right" to do that and will do it. If you have the ability to do something, then you have the right to do it, unless someone else can stop you. So the law is becoming absurd and everything is devolving back to realpolitik power relationships.

So people need to stop thinking into terms of laws and fake voting and talking heads on television and begin thinking in terms of realpolitik.

An example:
- The United States has the highest rate of obesity, cancer and diabetes in the world
- Monsanto sells a chemical that it knew causes obesity, cancer and diabetes
- Monsanto knew about it since the 80s and lied
- Monsanto gets massive class action lawsuit for killing people with cancer
- Obama signs bill giving Monsanto immunity from lawsuits
- Monsanto keeps doing it and then gets approval for even worse chemical to kill off the plebs even faster

People need to abandon the idea that the government cares if they live or not and just assume it is trying to kill them. If Wackenhut can make $80,000 per year per prisoner, running FEMA political dissent labor/reeducation/internment camps, then complaining about government torture/murder/assassination/fraud is going to be the new marijuana prohibition.

Another example:
- fracking water is cheap
- fracking water is full of cadmium and benzene and unknown secret chemicals which probably cause cancer
- lets spray fracking water on all the organic food in California to save money, kill all the plebs

So your choices are
1> Move out of California
2> Die of cancer in 20 years because of effects of chemicals which cannot be disclosed because of legal liability

When you complain or protest, the government response is that they pass an "Agro-terror law" that makes it illegal to publish lab tests showing what the chemicals are and makes the lab test inadmissible in court. They also pass a law making it a jailable offense to suggest that agricultural products are unsafe or harmful because of the chemicals they contain.

Another example:
- whistleblower leaks immoral government program
- punish the whistleblower
- lie about the program to congress
- keep doing it. privatize program to hide it in the private sector. pass fake law no one can enforce to pretend to rein in program that was already illegal. Does the government try to appear to address problem while doing nothing in reality.

There is no intent, or intention to stop anything. The focus is on stopping whistle-blowers and covering up corruption.
- No one intends to stop the program
- No one intends to stop the corruption
- Anyone pressuring for the corruption to be prosecution, gets murdered, prosecuted or punished themselves

So there is a question of
- "Is my government run by parasitic sociopaths?"
- "Are they going to do the right thing?"
- "Does my government address corruption or protect the corrupt? Does the legal system work""
- "When a corrupt and illegal program is revealed, is it shutdown or does it continue."
- "Am I being slowly killed? Does my country have a high cancer rate, diabetes or obesity rate."
- "Are people in my country attacked for stating obvious or verifiably true statements? Is truth and common sense criminalized?"
- "Is my government focused on absolute and totalitarian social control above the interests of its citizens?"

When Bitcoin Becomes Political Relevant and Dangerous:

So I think Bitcoin is reactionary. The open source movement, the maker movement, the redecentralize movement seem to be moving in a common direction in response to what we are seeing in society.

- people like to not have their stuff stolen
- people like not to be killed
- people like not to be ruled by sociopaths who make absurd proclamations and demand they are obeyed (laws)
- people like to not be poisoned
- people like to be free from enslavement/control grids and airport anal cavity searches
- people like to be free from terror threats and external danger used to herd them into "protection" by the people creating the threats
- people like to not be enslaved

I think Bitcoin and the alts are going to be ignored. Until someone
- buys up land
- moves people onto the land
- issues their own altcoin
- uses it for paying labor working on the land area and and making infrastructure investments/improvements.
- uses the coin to achieve self-sufficiency and for capital investments for generating exports

Then there will be a massive totalitarian response against altcoins and Bitcoin. That is when it enters the contest for political power. That is when it lays bare the reality of money.

The FBI and everyone but the CIA (Who was interested in using it), completely ignored Bitcoin. The FBI still ignores Bitcoin after almost six years and doesnt care. However the second an Indian reservation or territorial unit announced its intention to issue its own cryptocoin, the FBI descended upon them within twelve hours.

I did some modeling and found that internal transactions do not affect price at all. So if you have a barber and he accepts Skycoin, Bitcoin and Dogecoin, and someone gives him 10 dogecoin for a haircut, it does not affect dogecoin exchange rates. So the person issuing the currencies he accepts, can essentially print coins to purchase the services and labor of the people accepting the currency natively at its current exchange value. So people accepting bitcoin at $100/Bitcoin and keeping the Bitcoin is different than a merchant using bitpay who sells the Bitcoin immediately for cash. Bitcoin becomes a means of transmitting currency, rather than an actual currency.

The price of the currency is based upon balance of payments and capital inflows and outflows. People selling Bitcoin for USD, drives down price and inflows increase price. So people can trade the current 6 billion in Bitcoin back and forth in infinite volumes and it wont affect the price internally at all. The market cap is completely fake. For instance, I could sell Skycoin for 10 million market cap and then list them and say the market cap is 1 trillion. As long as everyone or most people agrees that it is 1 trillion and refuses to sell for less than 1 trillion, then any coins sold for less than that will be bought up quickly and the price just stays there. The people who the coins must circulate through (people in position to hoard or provide liquidity, control the price in absolute terms and have infinite scope for manipulation. Therefore coin prices might not be stable without fixed rate of inflation and foreign reserves to offset that type of manipulation. We saw exactly this type of behavior when currencies were pegged to gold, with countries determining the convertibility to gold by fiat/agreement among each other.

If a person lives in a territory unit and benefits from the infrastructure investment in that territory unit (community, town, village), then they are likely to accept that unit natively as payment. You may even have overlapping acceptance.

That is where I see Bitcoin going in ten years. I think smart contracts are interesting, but are a distraction. They are the direction that interests banks but are not going to be socially disruptive.
255  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 26, 2015, 09:08:41 PM
Update:

Priorities:

There are many thing we want to do, but have to focus and defer a lot of things for future. Right now, there are a few things in progress.

1> Porting crypto to golang.To cross compile (to compile skycoin for windows, android, linux and OSX from a single server) all the code has to be in golang. Skycoin crypto wraps a secp256k1 library. This is being rewritten to golang but is an incredibly difficult and time consuming task. The person working on this sounds like they are going mad. I have no idea how long this will take. Skycoin uses compressed elliptic curve points and signatures, so the library has to support these. Satoshi tried to use them for Bitcoin but gave up because getting them to work in openssl was too difficult and we have to do it from scratch. We have to do a lot of testing and generate billions of keys and signatures with both the new library and old library and make sure they get same results.

2> Skycoin exchange. We have to have exchange written from scratch. We need lib-bitcoin bindings for golang and there is contractor working on this. We dont want "paper skycoin". People never withdraw coins to wallets, so exchanges are free to sell fake coins that do not exist, in infinite quantities. If someone tries to withdrawal large numbers of coins to wallet, the exchange shuts down or delists the coin or stops withdrawals and goes and buys the coins up on a second exchange or just refunds the order in bitcoin at the current price. Many people are also buying paper bitcoin because they are not withdrawing the bitcoins to their wallet and the exchange is running fractional reserve. This severely suppressed the price of the altcoins and allows exchange operators to engage in massive price manipulation. For Skycoin we want to keep the bitcoins/skycoins in the wallet with the private keys on the computer as much as possible.

3> Hiring contractors. This is difficult. We have tried this a couple of times and it failed. If the project is too large or complex, then outsourcing fails. So we are trying to outsource smaller fixes and improvements that are limited in scope and are very clear.

4> Consensus implementation. No one is working on this right now, but its important that this gets done. The design for multi-round consensus is done and should be one or two thousand lines of code, its not that much. So will be done quickly after its started.

5. Getting the skycoin.net website up. The domain is registered and cloudflare is setup and has been for six months. There are four people with access to the account and I do not understand why the website is not online for wallet download.

Longer Term:

The GFW is a nightmare.  We funded three different teams to work on pseudo-wire implementation for tunneling traffic and designs for multi-hop, multi-homed VPNs. However, we now have VPN/TUN adapter code from the gohop project that works on linux and can seperate out the VPN front-end from the pseudo-wire implementation and get something working quickly.

Experience with the GFW has changed the design requirements for the VPN/meshnet.

- The GFW is doing protocol enumeration attacks, where if it suspects an openvpn server, it is making connection attacks to the server and if it sees OpenVPN, then it is throttling the connection. Therefore Skywire needs to use preshared keys and ignore or drop packets that dont the secret, to protect against network enumeration attacks.
- The set of nodes, if they can be enumerated by IP address are easily blocked by the firewall. An ISP can load a set of IP addresses for Bitcoin nodes, Bitmessage nodes, or tox nodes and just block that application. Making it impossible to enumerate the IP addresses of the nodes in the network, requires a change to existing idea of P2P. This is especially important for countries where authorities might try to identify and crack down on node operators.
- The firewall is cisco hardware and uses some type of simple machine learning to detect protocols differences. So if you use OpenVPN and it has an HTTPS/SSL wrapper and the protocol is similar to Apache HTTPS/SSL but there is a difference, like a single fixed bit or a difference in packet size during the hand shake, then it will try to determine that "This connection is OpenVPN and not actually HTTPS".
- The traffic is being blocked at the exit from the country. Traffic is being dropped based upon congestion and how much money is paid to the ISP by the subscriber. So going from China to Singapore is cheaper so those packets wont get dropped as much by China Telecom (unless it is peak hours) but China to California traffic will be dropped like crazy. Business traffic will be dropped less than residential traffic, because they are paying more money. This means, that to get the best speeds, you have to bounce first within china to a fast server, then bounce from that server out of the country on a business line. You need a multi-hop VPN and that doesnt exist, except for MPLS and expensive corporate solutions, so we have to write that from scratch.
- The traffic congestion varies over the day. China to Singapore works certain hours but gets congested, but China to Japan still works. The routes that are congested depend on the time of the day, the source city and destination and are constantly changing. This means the VPN needs to be multi-homed and have two or three routes and change routes based upon congestion and latency. This requires breaking the messages into chunks and doing a simple Trellis coding, fountain coding over a sliding window, whose size depends on the path latency.
- The network needs to support asymmetrical connectivity. Packet drop rate and throughput is not symmetrical. Similar things occur in radio environments.
- The internal network needs its own address space. China, Russia, Brazil and other countries are breaking off from the internet and we wont have a unified global IP address space soon. We already see proxies with IP routing rules, to use proxy A for Chinese destination traffic and use proxy B for Japan and proxy C for US traffic.
- The Cisco traffic shaping equipment is using packet sizes and statistical information to determine what applications people are running under the VPN and then throttle them if they see P2P, bittorrent or Youtube activity. The protocol needs to use padding and fixed sized packets and minimize the statistical information about the underlying protocols.
- The firewall is injecting fake TCP reset packets or is dropping TCP packets strategically to throttle connections. UDP needs to be used and the link-layer implementation may need options for different types of throttling. TCP just keeps increasing the transmission rate until packet drop, then scales it back by half. TCP ignores latency. Each TCP connection is doing congestion control independently, so when you have 200 sockets open, the all compete. Balancing traffic in this environment is an open research problem, so congestion control and traffic management needs to be component that can be swapped out.
- We need Skycoin payments and settlement to give incentives for users to setup nodes and relay traffic.

So this is a new type of VPN and will require new software.

After working on this for a year, we have a good idea of what architecture should look like to make it as simple as possible
- an interface abstraction at the link layer, so implementation can be swapped out (sstunnel/HTTPs for china, UDP for other areas)
- a basic or default link-layer UDP implementation
- an interface/abstraction for the return path for packet confirmation, to allow asymmetric connections
- a network namespace for nodes and service for announcing paths
- client side choice of paths (return to unix-to-unix copy type connection oriented source routing)
- an administrative control plane service or interface, for querying and controlling the state of a large number of nodes. Diagnostic information
- a path/route resolution service
- a VPN/SOCK5 pseudo-wire gateway server for tunneling back to IPv4/IPv6
- settlement and payment for bandwidth on external networks

So there is a large number of small projects. These are being outsourced to various groups. The main development team does not have time to work on this, except for design, until the high priority things on the coin are done.

This architecture requires a network daemon and requires a large number of small processes communicating with each other. Golang is very good until we got to this point. Then we have to choose network serialization like SWIFT, Thrift, capnpro, JSON or our own. We end up with two functions, one for golang when the service is being used internally and one when it is being called over the network and golang lacks the concurrency primitives to make this type of application natural in the syntax.

The networking primitives are subscriptions, events, synchronous and asynchronous RPC.

It is for instance, impossible to number the goroutines and then stop the goroutine in the middle of a function and then resume it from an external goroutine on an event. There are lower level atomic concurrency primitives that could be used to implement the golang channels, that are not exposed by the runtime and would be useful.

Right now, we have a struct and send it and then the remote server get it as an event and then there is a handling function. That works well for some types of programming (block sync) but
- in other instances you want to do a function call on a remote server and block within the function until the result comes in.
- Other times you want to do a "promise" for the result, so you can do N queries and not block on each query until you use the results. - Other times you want to push messages through and then have a channel that blocks until the responses come in and then processes them.
- Other times a process or object is receiving a stream of external events. Such as diagnostic information.

So the RESTFUL type handling does not always suit the application. I have to write a library for making writing these "serverlet" applications easier.

The functional or Nook/Urbit view would be to make communication between the serverlet, an ordered stream of messages, where each message is tagged with a wrapper with optional handler id echoed in the response, that denotes and object or function handling the response to the message.
- a message can be handled by a default handling function (RESTFUL, current, default) (all messages of type A are handled by the same function)
- a message can be handled by an event channel (all messages with tag A, are responded to with a message with tag A, which are passed to a specific event channel instance)
- a message can be handled by a specified function (all messages with tag A, get passed to a function instance A)
- a message can be handled by a handling function attached to a particular object (all messages with tag A, get handled by function attached to specific object instance)

The first type of response is used for static web content, like "Get me this picture" or "get me this page". The four type of response is used when when the page depends on user data (cookies, of whether the user is logged in) and there is an object or user state per user. The fourth type is used for challenge response (where state or communication history is required for the current message response).

- invariant functional (same data for all requests, all users, never changes. Ex. SHA256 of hash or javascript file by SHA256, content addressable networking)
- invariant (same data for all requests, but may change)
- state per user (depends on cookie or other user/auth)
- state per connection (state that depends on specific connection, such as bitorrent requests to specific user)
- state per request (request id)

When communication between two processes becomes a stream of ordered messages, then push and pull become the same thing.
- a remote server can push a message onto the channel
- the remote server can poll the server and ask for messages since message N

So synchronous and asynchronous message handling is unified or occurs through the same interface. Public broadcast channels and content addressable networking, generalize this to peer-to-peer multi-cast transmission and bitmessage generalizes to global anycast type transmission.

These are the types of requests in web-applications and the granularity for caching and building web-applications.
- web applications started with a page that queries database one by one and spits the html at the user
- web applications then were build by splitting them up to multiple backend apis, or separate serverlets and each serverlet gets queried and returns the results and the results are assembled into the widgets/components of a page. HTML is spit back at the user
- web applications are moving towards client side generation of the interface, with the client side making dozens of queries to the serverlets, which expose their APIs on the network. This is how Skycoin is written right now, especially the frontend and API.
- We are moving towards fully decentralized serverlets, where each process exposes an API to the network and the API is accessed the same for local severlets and remote serverlets. File systems become serverlets exposing an API over the network and a local file system becomes the same as a remote file system, which are accessed through the same interface. This is the direction that the Skywire architecture is heading

Skycoin is already very similar to this internally.
- The cryptography library is functional, it does not need an instance. It does not depend on anything external and can be used by external applications.
- The wallet library for reading/writing wallet files can be run on its own or used by 3rd party applications without running a skycoin node. Thin clients can query outputs over json and get the wallet and create/sign transactions and then inject them over JSON without running a node
- The history database for transactions (which currently does not exist yet) is a separate library/process that only depends on the blockchain library and the blochain database library. Most nodes do not have to even run this.
- The full node exposes most of its functions over JSON.
- The GUI and web wallet is built from data returned by JSON queries on the node.

Transactions, outputs and blocks all use content addressable networking.
- There is a single unique binary serialization of the object
- The SHA256 of the object is the ID or name of the object
- If you have a byte sequence that SHA256s to the same value as someone else, you have the same data, otherwise you can request it from the other person

There are a few things I would change about Golang, but it is "good enough" right now to use this type of architecture without writing too much code.

Skywire needs to be something simple, like Shadowsocks and it has to be written in phases, with the minimum amount done to get it working at each stage.  If you need a lot of code to get it working, it means the design is shit.

IPO update:

500,000 of the Skycoin have been distributed (0.5%) . About $50,000 worth. I think we raised about $35,000 after all the coins to developers and test coins were given out. That was spent over the last six months and we have to raise more money, because contractors are screaming about being paid.

Spending so far has been very conservative and I am worried about running out of money and how much additional contractors will cost. So getting exchange up and getting price floating is a high priority.

We want to spend $500 to $6000 on series of small projects, that are well defined in scope instead of doing salary at $15,000/month a month per developer, because we cannot afford $15,000/month Silicon Valley rates after benefits, taxes and salary. We are running out of things to code too. There are only a limited number of things we can think of, without adding junk, useless features or bloating the codebase.

In total we might raise $500,000 to $1,000,000 in the first 10%. I think $200,000 would be enough to fund to completion for the coin/consensus and major parts.

Most of the initial value seems to come from the first 90% of development to launch, then after that, there is a very limited amount of projects that money and effort can be dumped into, that have a positive return. NXT quickly ran out of stuff to do any began funding art projects for promotion and are going to be in a similar situation once we run out of things to code. We will be doing pure research, hardware and computer language development at that point.

Skycoin has several things like the meshnet and software defined networking project that could drive capital inflows, but the research and development effort is going to be moderate and about the same size and scale as the coin development.
256  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 17, 2015, 08:58:57 PM
Update:

It is Friday night and I am chained to the computer fixing all the things.

I have spent the last week probing the Chinese firewall. Rather long post about this.

I VPN is working now. I had to tunnel through server in China that is on a business line and then tunnel out over business line to another country. I now have 8 MB/s out of country reliably. To get good speed out of the country, you need a multi-hop VPN or a MPLS installation.

The Skycoin network is back up. I did some diagnostics. Blockchain download is 2 seconds and 20 blocks every 300 ms, in USA and France. In China twenty blocks are downloaded and then the connection drops or slows down.

A few Skycoin nodes were added in Singapore to improve performance and avoid stalled transactions. In France over VPN transactions are announced and echoed by six servers. In China that number is two. Will add a server in Tokyo also. Connections to Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo are less throttled and less likely to have connection dropped/blocked than traffic going to Europe and USA.

The Chinese internet is completely screwed up. Using http://ping.chinaz.com/ you can show that Beijing to Singapore goes through very fast, but on China Telecom, Shanghai to Singapore traffic is just dropped or times out completely.

When server blocks, Skycoin blacklists the IP for an hour. Networking and the peer-list handling needs to be completely redesigned, to allow users to add preferred peers through the interface and to use exponential backoff and to only share peers they have succeed in establishing an incoming connection to and which have been active recently.

There is bug in windows client, where the blockchain is not saving on close. Fixing this. There was an earlier fix for this, that added periodic saving of the blockchain to disc and not just on close, but the commit was lost.

I setup shadowsocks server in Singapore and used it as SOCKS5 proxy for bitmessage. I have received IPO message confirmations for bitmessages sent out three months ago! Before, only half of the the messages being sent out, were being confirmed. Now only 1/4th of the IPO bitmessages are unconfirmed. Singapore and Tokyo seem to be only bridge between China and rest of world for Bitmessage.

Running bitmessage through Singapore seems to allow Bitmessage to work reliably for receiving/sending to China. I am trying to get incoming connections to work over bitmessage with SOCK5 proxy, but not sure if that is possible.

Chinese Firewall:

The Chinese "firewall" is not actually about censorship. China Telecom has to pay for overseas traffic, but does not receive any money for it, so they do everything they can to just drop packets for overseas traffic. If they detect you accessing Youtube, they drop your packets. If they detect you downloading a PDF from overseas, they drop your packets. If they detect you using bitorrent to overseas, they drop your packets. If they detect you making DNS requests for overseas website, they will do DNS injection/poisoning attack on your request to stop you from getting IP address of the server before the connection attempt is even established. They put all the residential traffic overseas onto a very thin, over subscribed pipe and indiscriminately drop traffic.

If you are foreigner or government official you pay them 50 to 200 yuan per month and they give you "VIP internet" and put "VIP" in front of your username and they stop dropping your packets. Your overseas bandwidth goes from 4 kB/s to 800 kB/s, The packet drop rate is just congestion and an ISP dropping unprofitable traffic. Business and premium users are on a different line and get over  20 Mb/s and their packets are not dropped.

This seems to be part of a China Telecom bussiness strategy. If you want to get access to China Telecom users, you have to pay China Telecom to co-locate your servers on their backbone. Or they will drop your traffic. They are even trying to cut peering connections and degrade traffic, the same way that Comcast degraded Netflix performance by cutting cables, to force Netflix to pay Comcast for access to its subscribers.

The most difficult part about circumventing the "firewall" is the VPN TUN adapter and I have the golang code for that now. More on this later.

Bitmessage Problems:

I was getting this problem before, but with bitmessage from Singapore server through SOCKS5 proxy, it seems to have gone away. All of the messages should be replicated peer-to-peer between all bitmessage nodes. The messages should arrive as long as there is a single connection out of China and yet we dont see that. People are reporting that messages take days to arrive.



In Skycoin, when operating in peer-to-peer mode, when the firewall blocks a connection to an overseas skycoin node it is a time out and the peer gets banned for 60 minutes. All of the Chinese peers end up with only Chinese peers and it fails. Bitmessage keeps a list of 8 peers and the peers overseas get throttled or fall out until only peers on the intranet are left.

When I connected bitmessage through the singapore SOCK5 proxy, messages started confirming that had not confirmed in months. The internet is just broken. I dont understand how this is even possible.

Right now, only China is firewalled and ran as an intranet. There is the Chinese internet and then real internet (the global internet). Soon there will be the Brazillian internet, the Russian internet, the Chinese internet and there may not be a global internet anymore. The network fragmentation and internet balkanization appears to be accelerating.

IPO:

0.5% or 500,000 out of 10,000,000 coins have been distributed. I think the issues with Bitmessage for Chinese users are almost resolved. Messages are coming in, within a few minutes now.

2% distribution before floating the price on an exchange is good target, but may be as high as 4% depending on how much money we end up spending.
257  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 16, 2015, 12:02:15 PM
windows binary of the skycoin wallet is available again.

What about my question at the previous page regarding the funds you collected? At least are you going to disclose how much you collected total from the ICO/IPO, so we would know where the project is never mind plans regarding how you would use the collected fund. I hope it is not unreasonable to ask this. However impressive your technical skill is and regardless how entertaining your post are because they are quality and entertaining materials, some report on the collected funds should be the part of the business as well, isn't it?




Wait for the guy always writing long long posts :-)

I am the guy developing the consensus algorithm, so I post the phase II consensus paper,
and the windows binary is also built by me, so I post the update on it.
I don't touch the fund thing.

So, be patient until he shows up.
258  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 16, 2015, 10:40:28 AM
windows binary of the skycoin wallet is available again.
259  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 15, 2015, 12:26:33 AM
The guy who often writes long long posts with also the *skycoin* account is now in china for over 3 weeks,
and frustrated by problems on internet connection through GFW.

He has suspended all the work on the skycoin project since he arrived at china.

Hope he will come back soon with the GFW problem resolved.
260  Alternate cryptocurrencies / Announcements (Altcoins) / Re: [SKY] Skycoin Launch Announcement on: July 08, 2015, 10:36:29 PM
Well people have coins and people have wallets, I guess we could start trading even now.

Perhaps we could start asking some of the exchanges to list Skycoin, although I'm not sure how mature the wallet is (no encryption for example), and it not being a direct Bitcoin fork would require some dedication and extreme care from the exchange to implement it.

I tried to do bitmessage for IPO. It has had a lot of problems. Most of the users are in China and I tested it and I was getting similar problems to what I experienced with transaction propagation for Skycoin through China. Messages dont propagate sometimes and its frustrating.

I will do website, send out codes for the people on Bitmessage. That is best solution probably. Then have an exchange.

Skycoin can hold bitcoin in the wallet. Its the same crypto and there is bitcoin address and private key generation functions in the codebase. I have used them and they work. So it would be good to have a "send bitcoin" button that sells skycoin at current exchange rate and makes a Bitcoin payment.

There are dozens of small things like that. We are trying to hire developers to go through and do them. scrum style, small, isolated, limited scope improvements that are highly specific.

I procrastinate when cleaning up code up or having to grind through features and am better at writing new things. I also burnt out and needed vacation. It slowed down project a lot, waiting this late to hire more people who can focus on details and improvements full time.

The good news is software developers are about $2000/month here.

So the three simple goals are
- make it easier to use (easier than bitcoin)
- get consensus implemented in golang (simple)
- get exchange like litecoin had in beginning (lib-bitcoin bindings and some work)

Once those are done, then its blue sky projects. The networking aspect of project is designed, ready and I want to work on that, but should make sure the above three things are in progress before going off on tangent.

Right now, I am still trying to get through the firewall and confirm that BItmessage is working. I have not received any messages in seven days. The connection to network keeps dropping. Even with VPN, I only get 8 MB downloaded each time I open bitmessge. It goes at 500 KB/s, then connection drop until its zero and it just stops.
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