That should be more than adequate to qualify for airdrop. A forum profile with some posts engaging the issues constitutes reasonable activity.

Quoting this so people can see since we rolled over to a new page.

This is one way of looking at it. In my opinion, this view goes against progress. Let's stay in this perspective for a sec. You can mine "100%" and the devs have more incentive to dump everything and halt future development on the coin, because there's now zero incentive for keeping the system sustainable - unless the devs instamined a ton somehow. If the coin ends up having sustainability in mind, you end up in a situation where outsiders, not the users, buy a ton of influence and fund the devs that way. This is what's happening in Bitcoin right now. This is fine, but it's not what we want to explore here.

In the opposite perspective, that "10%" that you lose is an investment in the continued expansion of the technology - just like the network. It ensures the coin continues to progress and builds itself up. Just like the miners are doing a job securing the network, the devs are doing a job to make sure the technology is maintained and improved over time. Both things require a cost of resources, and what the development subsidy does is keep miners, users, and developers in harmony. The hybrid PoW/PoS system keeps everyone accountable. If you don't like what devs are doing with that 10%, stop mining, and they'll feel it - plus you have a voice to communicate your discontent by voting in the system. It's a check on devs, just like PoS is a check on PoW in Decred.

What do you mean by this? Could you explain further?

That's correct, assuming 5k people sign up for airdrop and it fetches USD 0.49 per coin. The exact numbers will be made public once the airdrop process is complete. The cap is set that high on purpose, so it can be as inclusive as possible - given that this project isn't built on hype. If it fetches less than than in USD, the devs lose because that's what they'll be buying at/exchanging for - that's set in stone now. The risk of the project is carried by the devs. If it fails, they lose the years spent working on it and the money they put in.


Nobody can determine what the price will be. That's how much it cost to develop and what's given to the community, so it's based on that:

• USD 165,000 in unpaid work and individual purchases by developers to fund the project
• USD 250,000 cost of developing the project, in terms of developer pay, which c0 paid to developers
• USD 415,000 airdrop made available to the community to "balance" the aforementioned costs (165,000+250,000)

Therefore, ((165,000+250,000+415,000)÷(21,000,000×0.08)) = USD 0.494047619 per coin. Anything less than that on a free market and the devs lose. Airdrop participants win at > USD 0, albeit in smaller quantities since 840,000 coins are divided between the community - but bear in mind this isn't a hype project, so there's no telling what the final number of participants will be. You can at least work it out based on the hard cap put on the number of participants.

I'm posting most of the responses at the moment. The current process is to consult with all the devs and non-devs working on the project and construct responses together for the "decred" account. However, it isn't always possible to construct individual responses since the devs are focusing on developing and testing (understandable at this point in time). I distil what's being said and run back and forth. Once it's mainnet time people will have more time to engage publicly and directly - I suspect most devs prefer technical talk around their work. I don't mind, since we'd all rather have what we're talking about than just talk about it.

The other reason for using the "decred" account is nobody wants a cult of personality, so we'd rather construct responses together. Also remember we're custodians to get it live, it's not ours. So "we" can't speak for Decred, we can only put forward information and see if there are objections or support. Anyone here has as valid an opinion as anyone else. Maybe that's not always practical, but it's worth keeping in mind when interacting from any position. A key thing to get up is a platform where we can have discourse and vote on a range of matters and then perhaps move it to another formal layer for voting (blockchain) and integration into Decred, that would be worthwhile. Experimenting with the platform for discourse/informal voting next week too.

I wouldn't say it's a defining feature of the project, but some of the people developing Decred come from an OpenBSD background (more specifically bitrig). So even though it's a small userbase, Decred runs on *BSD too. That may have been a more accurate way of describing the GUI statement.

That's mostly because the developers had great difficulty in getting the Bitcoin Core client ported to *BSD back in the day, so they started building btcd (which is now a package in btcsuite) from scratch. They then used that opportunity to improve on a bunch of areas where the Bitcoin Core client is lacking - i.e., documentation and test coverage to name two. There's an older CoinDesk article about this called "Developers redo Satoshi software" from early 2013.

Not to start a flame war, but in this case Go (golang) shows a lot more promise for the long-term maintainability of a complex and modular codebase than C/C++ without sacrificing performance. Makes it the perfect foundation for a serious alternative if we want to look beyond the scope of a few years.

Welcome back and nice to see you again! Make sure you sign up for airdrop, in case you missed it.

Wow, Gleb! I second this. You have dumped a ton of information here. I just woke up to all of this, and am trying to catch up on all the activity.

I want to give you my perspective on this as a community member, an individual working on the project, and as a matter of public record. I've been involved in the project since 2013 when I got to know tacotime. It was purely theoretical at that point - his work on hybridising PoW/PoS. There was an obvious desire to turn this into something practical, but things were absolutely crazy. Tons of ICOs everywhere. We considered at that point to do something similar - before things even got that crazy - but when lots of projects started taking people's money without deliverables, we got really concerned about the ethics of the matter, since there was always a possibility the project could fail and we'd let all those people down. This was especially worrisome as tacotime would be the only dev. We decided against this and would rather not have his work come to fruition than take the risk to mess people up like that.

So in late 2013 I learned about c0 (Conformal Systems at the time) and got to know Jacob through their open-source work. Obviously btcsuite represented, even at that time, a monumental contribution to Bitcoin development given all the devs employed to work on it. Bear in mind not all btcsuite devs (btcd and btcwallet primarily at the time) were employed, and we should all know these other people for their work and contributions to the ecosystem. Having said that, btcsuite is primarily the funded open-source contribution of c0. You can look at their Github account for that.

I wanted to find a way to bring the talent and effort I saw in their Bitcoin development and contributions to alternative cryptocurrencies - because why not? That's where we can try new things and experiment with new ideas. If you forget about the negative connotations some people hold against "alts", you can bring the same quality and progress seen in packages likes those in btcsuite elsewhere. That was my motivation in approaching c0 on behalf of myself as an individual and tacotime. It turned out c0 shared a lot of our philosophies of collaborative governance and pushing for alternative systems - not at the expense of Bitcoin, but as an extension of technology. It's healthy for the overall ecosystem, and we'll fight for this.

So then development began in early 2014 and here we are. The project didn't take anyone's money and it never will. The project isn't even ours - "we" are custodians trying to boost it so it can become collaborative. If we screw up, someone should call us out and take that position from us. That is healthy and proper governance. I want to get out of the mindset that it's "our" project. It's your project. As soon as it's public after testing, you can come and work on the code and become respected and established in the community based on your merit, not based on anything else. To me that's a fair system - none of us are anything else than people interested in this technology. We fill our positions on that basis - we get done what needs doing to get it up and running. Yeah, sure, we've put years of effort into it - but that's that, we do it as individuals because we love it. Anyone can come work on this. That's the system the project wants, and we'll all stand by that personally too. We'll also defend that philosophy as I am trying to do for you now.

(I'm going to split my response to you so I don't write essays in one post, so give me a sec so I can write it - I'm doing this in real-time and there's a lot to address here!)

Hi guys,

Please accept my apologies for posting this in English, but I wanted to extend my hand to the Chinese cryptocurrency community. We are in the process of announcing a new project, called Decred, developed by some of the Bitcoin developers behind btcsuite. We have two press releases in simplified and traditional Chinese that we would like to distribute in the near future in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. But first I wanted to come here and ask you to please have a look to see if you are interested in participating in the project. If you are, please come and join us at the Decred announcement thread, as we would be honoured to have Chinese involvement in the project. Please also have a look at decred.org and sign up for the airdrop if you want to be part of the community. Feel free to pm me if you have any pointers in how we can get the word out in Asia, or if you could help the project in that way, as we would really like to communicate in those areas too. It is a new project, so I wanted to come and share the news early with you.

Simplified Chinese Press Release
Traditional Chinese Press Release

Yours sincerely,
_ingsoc

I'm here too. Really sorry the images won't show - we'll try and fix that up (new accounts need higher posts for images).

Thank you for the kind words and taking the time to post again! In terms of dissimilarity to Peercoin - to paraphrase tacotime informally - we're more PoA-like, PoS miners don't make blocks, we have per block stake validation, explicit dependency on PoW validation, lottery requires locking of funds rather than all outputs, cold minting, and efficient decentralized stake pooling. We'll have detailed specs on the system up in the near future now that it's getting close to completion and undergoing testing, as it's changed a bit since the early days.

We've tried to put together an overall system that ensures a long-term future for what we're introducing. We want to make consistent and active development happen in a progress-focused environment. This is a central tenet of the whole system. For those interested in the bigger problems we're trying to address, you can read about some of the challenges we think exist in Bitcoin today (that we're hoping to address with this project). At very least, we hope to begin as an alternative system with a community where we can do things we can't do in Bitcoin at present.

We've got another entry coming to explain how the theoretical system that started in this thread will attempt to address the outlined problems evident in Bitcoin. I'll come post that as well for those curious in digging a bit deeper on the information side.

We're planning an announcement thread here on Bitcointalk in about a week's time, so it's official and we can all start engaging the issues directly as a community. We'll do a new thread for that and it'll be straight from tacotime this time. People can also meet the other guys there, but I'll come x-post so that those who follow here can find it.

Hey guys, not sure if anyone is still out there. The last correspondence from tacotime in this thread was over a year ago. I spoke to him yesterday, and we agreed for me to come here and share the story with you. Truth be told, the project has had a bumpy ride. It's been an uphill battle, and quite a few times it looked like it was going to end as just a theoretical piece. It was during this time that we decided to drop off the radar and get our hands dirty until we could deliver, lest we end up building hope and letting everyone down. So today I bear good news for you. tacotime has been coding on this for over a year now. He started solo while I searched and tried to build relationships with developers who care about this technology and the ethos behind it. We built a relationship with the group that develops the free and open-source btcsuite (formerly known as btcd). btcsuite is solely funded by a relatively unknown guy who I can describe as an open-source philanthropist. He has been instrumental in helping us get this going. The group agreed to help us build up the project, and what we hope to present is an "alt" that will have the same level of quality and development consistency demonstrated by btcsuite over the last 2.5 years since its introduction in 2013.

So the good news is this, the project is alive and well, and close to completion. We can begin to break the silence because now we know we can deliver. But ultimately this isn't about who developed what, it's about the community because it'll be dead in the water without your interest in using it. I wanted to come here first and reach out to the people who have supported this project during its darkest days (and hopefully for its brightest!). You should receive this news first. The plan now is to have everything finished and ready for launch in January. There will be an announcement soon, and from that point on, there is going to be open communication and transparency in every reasonable regard. Nobody will be able to own the project, just act as contributors and custodians where required. Once the infrastructure is up, we turn on the machine and everyone is welcome. The future for the project is not a big monolithic corporation that took all your money before a line of code was written, but small dedicated teams that work with surgical precision and efficiency on building this out beyond what is launched. The whole thing was self-funded at a fraction of the cost we've seen some projects take in this community. We took the risk and time over the years knowing it can fail, and every cent we take from it to cover the bring-up cost will be matched and given in full to the community for free to distribute the network effect as far and wide as possible. All of this will be documented in full at the announcement. As we work, I wanted to take a second and share this information with you if you're still out there.

I look forward to getting to know you all again. And I look forward to working with you now that we're so close to this being real. In this project, if you have a voice and something meaningful to contribute, you will have a place to share that with others. My personal objective is to make sure it stays that way. Can't believe we're going to get there in the end, community.

He's been working on it almost every day. Things are looking better for MC2 than ever before. Have faith, oh, ye of little faith!

Really good. tacotime has pretty much finished specs and detailed pseudocode. Implementation is built out from there, with lots of testing to be done, but it's moving.

That's a good point. Back it in the day, someone suggested Netcoin as a name and the community ran with it. It was great, until someone decided to launch a clone under the same name, and that caused a fiasco. I think some people even ended up buying Netcoin on exchanges thinking it was this project - which is terrible.

We had a survey on here too, and we collected a whole bunch of names from people. Using all of that input, and a lot of talking, we ended up with a name where we could get a solid domain. That's pretty important when you need to reach beyond specialised communities to people who can't access non-standard channels.

Lots of lessons to take in and learn from, that's for sure.

That would be pretty cool. We will have a place set up where everyone can chip in with whatever they want to help with.

It's also super important that people get to voice themselves and be active in the development of the community/technology. Informed users should get to determine the future of what they're using, not a small group of people, even though, realistically a small group of people is what you require to get things going - but that doesn't mean you keep a small group closed off from others (that screws up the whole notion of community). People can join together, whatever their aptitude, and work toward what they want.

Anyway, it'll be under a completely different name because MC2 doesn't describe the technology anymore after all the transitions, but it has a sentimental ring to it as a project for those who remember.

I think if you do that, it'd get pretty confusing. There have been so many transitions over the last year, both personal and project-wise, that it'd be a complicated story. I think today the people still working on this after all this time will tell you it's looking better than ever.

The people involved now I think have a lot of experience in the crypto world, and are thinking about the long-term health and sustainability of bringing a cryptocurrency to light. You want more than something that'll just be a one-hit wonder. You've got to start thinking about continuous dev, and making that possible is no easy task - especially given how small the quality dev pool is in cryptocurrency. tacotime even quit his job to work on this, and I think that's pretty cool.

Nothing, really. MC2 was (and to an extent still is) a project name. Development is happening under a different name, which I don't think is public yet. tacotime is working on the code, and I need to set up the wiki this week to collect progress and developments in the field. That will be accessible under the new name.

Can you let me know what this is about so I can follow-up and figure out why you didn't get a response?