Skycoin (SKY) has source code on Github and has been in testing for four months now. That is different than "vaporware".

Developing a new coin is incredible work. Forking litecoin and change the logo is not on the same level with writing a new coin from nothing.

The original plan was to IPO early, have an alpha period. The block chain would be reset every week until code base was stable. What happened, was everything was unit tested to death and launch was delayed until coin was completely finished. The sooner the launch, the better.

Almost ready. IPO will be within 48 hours of the genesis block. IPO will accept Bitcoin and Dogecoin.

Todo:
1. Last minute refactor and cleanup.
2. Launch!

Update
----------

1. Skycoin developers are exhausted
2. We need developers for https://github.com/skycoin/darknet

Developer Positions: Many Coins, Much Riches
-----------------------------------------------------------------

1. We need a golang wrapper around ifconfig for controlling wifi dongles and connecting/disconnecting. Should scan for wifi connections, return list. Should have function for connecting and disconnecting to network. Should return information about signal strength and speed. Bonus points if it supports adhoc connections.
2. We need golang ChaCha20 wrapper
3. We need library that connects to peers using sykcoin/gnet (connection pool). Each peer has list of hashes and hashes are ordered. Each hash  corresponds to data. Each peer should should poll and download any new hash and from peers, that it doesnt have.
- given an ordered list of 100,000 things, poll peers, figure out if they have something you dont have, get the things you dont have

We have list of

type Entry struct {
Seq uint64
Hash [32]byte
Data []byte
}

The list is ordered by Seq. Poll peers and efficiently determine what they have that you dont.
4. Fifty other things

New Information about the Skycoin Meshnet Project:

https://github.com/skycoin/darknet

Development Update:

Skycoin now has bullet proof security.
- There are very strict rules in place for transaction propagation and signature verification.
- Bitcoin is only able to fix 6 of the 8 transaction malleability problems. Skycoin has 0 transaction malleability and 0 signature malleability bugs.
- Most of the code base is unit tested. There are three lines of tests for every line of code.
- we fixed bug in the struct encoder and the change broke compatibility with packets from earlier versions.
- the Skycoin connection pool library now has non-blocking writes. faster block propagation

The coin is almost done and the project is moving into the next phase.

New Anti Spam Mechanisms:

Skycoin has coins and has coin hours. You get 1 coin hour for holding 1 coin for one hour. Transaction fees are paid in coinhours, not in coins. When you spend an output, you must spend 50% of the coin hours. Therefore spamming transactions depletes your coin hour balance exponentially quickly. If there are 100 coinhours in the inputs and only 40 coin hours created in the outputs, then the "fee" is 60 coin hours. The number of coins in the output must equal the number of coins in the input. This is hardcoded.

Transaction priority is <transaction size> / <coinhour fee>. If the priority is too low, the transaction will not be propagated and it will not be included in blocks. This will dramatically cut down on small transaction spam and keeps the blockchain small.

Each Skycoin is 1 million droplets. Each coin is divisible to six decimal places. At launch, output balances must be multiples of 1 million droplets (a whole coin). This is to prevent transaction spam. As the price goes up, this will be reduced to 100,000 droplets. We want to keep the minimum output size to 0.25 Euros  Skycoin does not have 0.000000000005 dollar transactions.

All very small "microtransactions" must be executed as off blockchain transactions. Microtransactions are instant and they are free and they dont pollute the block chain with spam.

Skycoin Official Position on Scripting Languages on the Blockchain:

We are watching Ethereum closely. If powerful transaction scripting language support becomes something that is used widely, we will implement the best scripting language into Skycoin.  Until the transaction malleability issues are resolved and until we see widespread usage of scripting, Skycoin transactions will remain simple.  A later version may include multisig transactions if they do not introduce transaction malleability into Skycoin.

So far, most users are only using "send" and there has not been widespread usage of Bitcoin's scripting capacity. Scripting has however created numerous security, denial of service attacks and caused substantial increases in the size of the Blockchain . Until we see use causes for scripting languages on the blockchain, we plan to support scripting as an off-block chain extension.

polycoin is a trollcoin or a dramacoin. Only time will tell.

Go Polycoin! Polycoin is going to be even bigger than Panda coin. I can feel it.

IPO date will be announced after coin.

There are two options.

1. We set a date and the IPO occurs on that date, whether coin is ready or not.
2. We wait until coin is ready (keeps getting pushed back) and announce IPO after its ready.

The coin launch and IPO will definitely occur before Obelisk is implemented, which may take through July.

Does Febuary 24th, noon GMT time for IPO sound good? Is there a better day or time, or should the IPO wait?

>Anyhow, this is a Skycoin topic, let's stay on the topic here. Everything else can be discussed in the NXT threads.

NXT and other IPOs need to be discussed. The Skycoin developers are trying to have a fair IPO.  The developers need to know what other coins did right and what caused problems in the IPO.

>Time Warner and Comcast.

Fuck Time Warner. Fuck Comcast. Fuck Verizon. They are throttling Amazon S3 and Netflix now. A political response has been ineffective and only won short term concessions. "zeroconf" hardware deployment, needs to be ready by July.

Even worse, many people believe the NSA blocked standardization of multihome routing in IPv6, to make it easier to spy on everyone. Everyone has slower internet in IPv6 so the NSA can read everyone's email more easily. Opportunistic encryption was also sidelined in IPv6 for the same reason.

>wouldn't it be more beneficial to change the name so that it doesn't have such negative connotations?

We dont have any influence on branding for the social movement. The media and reddit likes "darknet" more than "meshnet".  Darknet is "dark and sexy" and mysterious and slightly illicit. Meshnet is "confined" or "trapped".

1> Skycoin is not a financial instrument or a get rich quick coin
2> Skycoin is not about the money. Dont buy Skycoin for financial reasons.
3> Support Skycoin because you support the objectives of the project and want to be part of the community
4> All coins with a growing community will increase in value, but financial speculation does not create the community.

Satoshi never intended for Bitcoin to be about the price.

Also,
1. Skycoin development is being funded by the founders, not from the IPO
2. The IPO money is being used to buy Skycoin stickers. Many stickers. Great riches.
3. The IPO is a small initial distribution to the community and supporters
4. Speculators dont add anything to the project. Skycoin needs testers, developers, translators and other contributions.

For marketing, you dont want to know. We received message from fashion magazine writing story about Skycoin, Dogecoin and the Darknet. I have a feeling that the whole altcoin space is going to go insane soon.

----

This is what is going on behind the scenes in the altcoin community
 
1. Developers are being offered 15k/month, 300 bitcoin and single digit percentage of new coins to work on altcoin projects
2. Massive number of hardware wallet companies. Every developer in space is receiving a new job offer every week
3. Many other coins are "pumping" coin with marketing campaigns, selling at peak and then causing panics and buying the coins back after the crash.
4. Powerful people in media are pushing particular coins
5. Celebrity endorsements of new coins
6.  PeerCoin was bought up by trust fund babies NYC. They changed name from PPcoin to PeerCoin so it could be mainstreamed. Were paying models to walk around downtown Manhattan wearing PeerCoin tshirts. Massive professional marketing campaigns behind many of the newer coins.
7. If you start seeing Dogecoin on billboards, would not surprise me.
8. Viral video marketing campaigns for new coins ( ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgYafqOLHg0 )

Skycoin marketing is highly targeted at influence groups and communities who need to know about Skycoin. The objective of Skycoin marketing is to build out the community and build awareness. Skycoin is not doing broad marketing aimed at public to "pump" prices to unsustainable levels.  Skycoin will not be paying Lady Gaga to make a Skycoin music video.

Marketing tactics designed to cause bubbles and bursts are great for speculators, day trading and people organizing the pumps, but conflict with Skycoin's objective of low volatility and stable price levels. Anyone expecting the Skycoin Lady Gaga music video pump should put their money in other coins.

Subscribe to BM-2cXxcRpG1raeNYwDjcb6Axxqi4yiMdqvPf for broadcast announcements and public Q&A

1. Skycoin community members will get free coins, but we are not announcing mechanism yet to prevent cheating.
2. The initial IPO is $30k or 50 Bitcoin, valuing Skycoin at 3 million.
3. Most of the 0.1% per day of new coins will go to community members and people making contributions on project.

Also:
1> Developers working on altcoin projects such as Ethereum are being offered $15,000 a month, 300 BTC at launch and then single digit percentage of new coins. Skycoin has teams in place and is not competing on greed basis for developers.
2> A company launching a new brand of Tequora spends 60 million dollars in marketing to reach mainstream and build brand awareness, for a single territory.  To reach Litecoin level acceptance, a new coin needs a 200 million dollar marketing budget or has to be extremely compelling and appealing to a particular niche who will readily adapt the coin. No coin to date has reached widespread mainstream acceptance.

---

Skycoin is not a speculative coin. Skycoin is an infrastructure component in OP Darknet Plan and OP Redecentralize.

See:
http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan
https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet

OP Darknet Plan and OP Redecentralize are global social movements consisting of multiple darknet factions and globally distributed informally organized groups with a membership consisting of hundreds of developers and nearing a hundred thousand supporters across the globe. OP Darknet Plan was organized in response to SIPA, SOPA, PIPA, internet censorship and revelations of internet mass surveillance.

Skycoin can be used for peer to peer payments like Bitcoin, but is currently primarily the base credit unit and transaction layer for implementation of several proof-of-bandwidth and distributed service protocols currently under development.

---

One of the applications under development is the Skycoin darknet routing protocol. The Skycoin routing node enables "link aggregation" across multiple computers which are connected by wifi. If you have a 10 Mb/s internet connection and you have fifteen neighbors with 10 Mb/s internet connections who are running a nodes, the router node can aggregate the wifi connections into a 160 Mb/s connection.

- Peers receive SKY for providing bandwidth and transport to the network and users spend SKY to consume network resources.
- Skycoin is designed with native support for off-blockchain transactions for low overhead bandwidth micro payments.
- The nodes relaying traffic are unable to determine the full network path of the traffic (onion routing)
- The nodes relaying traffic cannot see the the contents of the traffic (end-to-end encryption and link encryption).
- the router runs on $40 Rasberry pi hardware
- Skycoin routers can connect at 1 Gb/s over 15 km using 24 Ghz Ubiquity hardware
- software defined radio devices running on FPGAs are in development

Skycoin is an attack on ISPs and wireless companies in the same way that Bitcoin is an attack on the banks. One of the long term goals of the Skycoin project to create the financial incentive and software infrastructure required for community ISPs. The Skycoin project is attempting to create the financial incentives to deploy open access community mesh networks that span the last mile between homes and fiber.

The routing protocol will be on github within two months and the coin will be launched within a week.

>But 5000 BTC?  (50 BTCs/ 1 million coins).....  I hope this thread doesn't turn out to be Ethereum...  

5000 Bitcoin cost a dollar a few years ago.

We looked at a mastercoin style IPO. We feel that selling all the coins at once deters user growth. We want to replicate the successful distribution strategy of Litecoin and Bitcoin.  The price has to steadily appreciate, but has to be kept artificially low by releasing new coins over time, in order to create an incentive for new users.

Mastercoin is worth a hundred million dollars on paper, but it has no volume,  no liquidity and no users. We are trying to avoid that by spreading the distribution over a longer time period like Bitcoin and Litecoin did.

1. The initial IPO will be 1% of the total Skycoin for 50 Bitcoins. This is a 2 million euro starting valuation @ 400 €/BTC. The IPO period will be announced five days before the IPO starts.
2. Then 0.1% (100 thousand) SKY will be sold per day at market price to fund development and marketing
3. Distribution will be over five years
4. The rate new coins entering the market will decrease over time
5. The rate of new coins entering the market will be less than the growth in new users

The Skycoin main and test net are running. We are doing unit tests and windows builds right now.

Changes to the source code are tracked here
https://github.com/skycoin/skycoin/commits/master

This is the top level API for the block chain parser
http://godoc.org/github.com/skycoin/skycoin/src/coin

This is the top level API for the Skycoin networking daemon
http://godoc.org/github.com/skycoin/skycoin/src/daemon

-- Todo --
1. Windows Builds
2. Obelisk white paper
3. Documentation for developers
4. Long term project plans
5. The alpha client uses a central server to produce and sign blocks until Obelisk is ready. This allows the coin to trade and be tested before Obelisk is completely implemented. The existing blockchain will roll over when Obelisk is ready.

The first client synced the blockchain yesterday. Will be publishing best testing instructions for testnet soon.

Skycoin Contact Info:
Bitmessage: BM-2cX8R4saGGUPnEkwUpTsQdP4Bu1YCqUtqE
Channel: name: skycoin, key: BM-2cW9oxq2cx8PmWgySvaHyJnTpcxpsiFhqD

The IPO is a slow "rolling IPO" not a pop IPO. Small amounts of coins will be released onto the market daily depending on demand.

Almost done, we are finishing networking. The test net client will be released at least one week before anything else. We want to make sure the client is working on all operating systems before launch.

You can run wallet with
cd skycoin/cmd/wallet/wallet.go
go run ./wallet.go

There are new tools in skycoin/cmd/ for generating addresses from the command line.

After launch several applications will be announced which are being built on Skycoin. In particular
- secure messaging
- low latency, high bandwidth darknet using Skycoin as bandwidth credits ("proof of bandwidth", users receive skycoin for providing bandwidth to network, based upon cjdns)
- peer-to-peer distributed altcoin exchange with escrow

New Wallet:

- We are translating the wallet into Chinese.
- Wallet team is working on the JSON RPC
- 1 millionth of a Skycoin is called a "Drop" or "Droplet". Skycoins are divisible to 6 decimal places
- Wallet can load/unload multiple wallets independently
- receive tab has been removed from wallet to improve usability
- chat tab added to connect to the Skycoin IRC channel from the wallet
- team is working on cryptographically secure messaging between wallets using Skycoin addresses. Skycoin addresses can act as email addresses and can send and receive messages securely. Working on "Identity Address" and "Wallet Address" RPCs.

Pull repo, fix typo and then put in a push request.

The Skycoin client is an HTML6 application. It runs a web server and webkit rendering in an application window. So its HTML, but without a remote server.