Thank you Trojane, appreciate the feedback and encouragement.

There were only a few places.. specifically it was a matter or do I allow undefined behavior or do I always add in a runtime check for it. But yes, security is very important, particularly if we are targeting blockchains as initial customers. So undefined behavior is going to be a new feature.  We've got a lot of great security features, thread safe, memory safe, a powerful yet simple typing system

Yes, it does. There is a "catch" when it comes to threading:for the most part, we thread your programs for you and you don't have to think about it.

Two ways threading works:
1) Functions are analyzed by the compiler and automatically parallelized.
A couple ways you can influence this parallelization:
  "Atomic" objects may be created which work like very flexible go channels inspired by go. Basically any function called on an atomic object or variable read/write is done in a thread safe manner using something similar to locks (technically it's lock free for performance but you can imagine it like locks). While automatically parallelizing we'll provide a suggestions that if you were to mark certain objects as atomic, the parallelization can be more efficient but we require marking it atomic and don't automate this because it may not make sense in certain cases.

  It's harder for a computer to estimate how many times a loop or recursion will execute than a human, so we allow humans to provide hints to the computer about this. Otherwise, computers can actually estimate more accurately and easier than humans.

2) Programmers can force functions to run in their own thread, again inspired by go and similar to go routines. This is particularly useful for say forcing a frontend and backend to run in parallel guaranteeing both get some CPU time.

Security above all.. ok in that case I'll put no undefined behavior ahead of allowing coders to skip the occasional if statement for slightly more speed. A couple of other things like this.

@NotATether Not planning on getting old coins to rewrite their code bases from scratch, more like write a second miner for improved security and performance. Additionally writing your miner in multiple languages is great for decentralized security.. a single bug is quite unlikely to take down the entire network more likely just those using that miner and coin will live on. But even more so targeting the smaller startups in the crypto space to help deliver them a language that gives them the security and performance they need while getting their projects up and running quickly. Not to mention being able to iterate faster and add new features faster.  Actually already have the first two future clients once I get this thing running.

@Syke Rust is actually what inspired this language.. it's got great ideas but the ownership and borrowing is a pain and I've come up with a much easier solution to the problem while achieving similar performance and security.. partly a matter of the compiler doing the ownership part for you, though there are a few cases where it isn't capable of it. It's sort of like the C to Rust's C++.. capable of anything Rust can do but much simpler. And I've both simplified a lot of things languages have taken for granted because the last language did it that way while providing a lot of flexibility and a nice set of core features. The goal is to make the language as intuitive and easy to work with as possible while maintaining peak performance.

Regarding the features you like:
#1 Rust ownership.. like I said I've automated this away so it'll have the performance of Rust, but be roughly as simple as garbage collected languages. Every once you'll need to worry about strong vs weak references but that's rare. Basically you don't need to think about it unless the compiler/IDE has a problem with the occasional edge case and there will be extra checks to make sure you didn't make a mistake in those cases.

#2 Type inference.. planning on it. Initially static and have to fill in the types but one of the first things the IDE will do is fill them in for you so it's as simple to write as dynamic typing but you can see the explicit types should you need them

#3 I agree.. Rust compiler errors/warning are a wonderful example for writing our own.

Regarding beating the Rust ecosystem.. if I can provide an easy way to wrap libraries made in other languages, I can allow integrating their libraries. So I don't need to beat them. It can be like Python that uses lots of C libraries under the covers, though over time there will be incentives to move to pure Flogram. Namely better performance and security as we can reason about native Flogram code better as the language was designed with that in mind.

Thank you for feedback!

I am working on Flogram, a programming language, designed to be perfect for writing blockchain projects. And I don't mean a language for smart contracts, though it probably could be used there too, I'm more talking about a language for say building a blockchain or miner or wallet or torrent downloader or other decentralized projects, etc.

After much studying of Rust and other programming languages, I've made some interested discoveries. I've spent 1 1/2 years of designing this language on top of a background high performance and security. I've found a way to automate parallelization, async, memory management and a few other smaller things. I intend to make it simple, secure and yet initial testing shows it to be extremely fast, faster than C kind of fast.

It's well designed and I'm working with a few others to build the compiler.  However, I would love to get feedback from programmers in the decentralized space.

Some specific questions for you:

• If I make trade-offs would you prefer performance or security? I'm thinking security by default allow using a keyword to opt out to allow improving performance via undefined behavior or
• What about building a stronger type system that allows 'dependent types' which essentially adds formal proofing to it to prevent bugs, would you use it? Adds significant complexity, significantly increases compile times, but also allows stronger security and bug prevention. Unit testing is currently a more popular alternative.
• What features do you most value in programming languages in general?

P.S. I'm always looking for C programmers! Or investors who would be willing to help fund development.

I'm in the process of creating the most decentralized currency you've ever seen. Everyone mines as an equal, distributing power over the currency and therefore the everyday people as far and wide as possible.

I had the website we're using to kickstart it ready to go when a bug took out the backend, our codebase for that part has been such a pain to work with and would take more time to fix this then rewrite it.. so I'm rewriting it.

Features of the currency:
Everyone mines as an equal made possible through fully Decentralized, private IDs
Stabilizes much faster in price as much research that I've done shows a strong relationship between number of users of a currency, usage, and price.
Free transaction fees
Scammer protection
Scalable, decentralized IDs make it easier to shard the blockchain
And a lot more in the future

I could really use help rewriting the website's backend. Happy to pay generously with some Frinks (our currency).

Learn more about Frink at www.frink.global

Interested? Questions?

So Warren Buffet is anti-cryptocurrency because he is the single most invested person in the current system. (One reason I think Justin Sun is an idiot.. Buffet isn't going to change his mind)

But just found it very interesting watching the Bill Gates netflix tutorial and Buffet is saying that they are good friends AND that the bill gates foundation is heavily invested into Berkshire Hathaway since they own roughly half of Buffet's stock in the company...

Funny how most of the anti-cryptocurrency people are heavily invested in the current system if you look closely...

But as long as a small groups of individuals control it and charging for access to use it.. isn't it just as bad as the government controlling it?

When you think about who really has the most power and earn the most profit... it's the miners of a cryptocurrency. Assuming stable prices of course. lol

Is it fair to compare them to shareholders in a company, where the currency is the product?

Yup, looking to define such a benchmark and use it to score some currencies, couldn't find one yet either

I'm thinking something similar to this, look at the minimum number of people who could 51% attack the currency, and compare it to the number of users of the currency.

So for example, if Bitcoin is controlled by 4 mining pools and has 25 million users, then it's decentralization benchmark is 25 million / 4 = 6.25 million

So for Bitcoin, it'd have a decentralization score of '1 in 6.25 million' and the lower that number, the more decentralized the currency.

Alternatively, could be 1/6.25 million = 1.6e-7 aka 0.0000007 but not sure that number would be as meaningful to most. If I did that multiplying by 2 might make sense so perfect decentralization is every user is equal mining power.

Thoughts? Fair way to do it?

Thanks.

Would you not agree that perfect decentralization is only achieved when every user mines as an equal?

If you wanted to compare two currencies and compare the level of decentralization, what measurement would you use?

Assuming you could know any information you needed about the number of miners, mining power distribution, number of users, etc.

If you wanted to define the degree to which a currency is decentralized, where the more people who share the mining power, the better.. how would you do it?

For Bitcoin, do mining pools hold the mining power? Or do the miners themselves?


I'm writing and article analyzing various currencies and would like some thoughts from others on what is the fairest way to do this. I'm personally thinking it's the percentage of the users who have more than their share of the mining power. Agreed? Can you think of something better to measure?

Very interesting answer.

Something I'm trying to figure out: How nigh mining power would you estimate the average miner has? Is there any way not to get the distribution of mining pools but rather an estimated distribution of of individual miners?

That's why I said thereotical.

Though actually.. there is

Just not an ASIC Proof POW coin (or POS)

For the sake of argument, please assume it's possible to make an ASIC proof coin with "one person, one vote".

Would you mine such a coin?  Would an increased number of miners be more security from a maximum decentralization point of view? Or would you be more unhappy about it cutting into the profitability of your previous investment into an ASIC?

This right here is the reason for hot and cold wallets.. so in other words, I'd actually say that their security mostly worked.

From an emotional point of view, what emotions drive you to adopt cryptocurrency?

Fear of the government? Desire to get rich quick? The desire to be a part of a movement? A little bit of each?

If you didn't need to worry about the technical junk behind the scenes that makes it work.. what would be the features of the perfect cryptocurrency?

For anyone who comes across this in the future, I reached out to blockchain.com (which was blockchain.info) and they tell me that it is indeed the number of unique addresses used during that day for either sending or receiving. They also told me they'd update it.. but haven't yet and it's a couple months later.. someone else want to poke them?

Which coins are you mining and how do you choose to split your mining power across coins?