Bitcoin fork for a small town

[TradersEdgeDice]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Basically, the people I am working with want to foster barter in the town.

I think it's obvious that we cannot ride the coattails of the bitcoin project with the first mover BTC.  Too much chaos in the exchange rate.

One thing I would add to this fork is to control IP addresses that are allowed to mine.

I want to keep the difficulty low enough for CPU mining.  That means no random entries to the network.  Everything beyond mining is encouraged to be as anonymous as possible.

I cannot, and do not want, to stop a verified miner from going nuts with a farm.  I think it's highly unlikely that this project would suffer the same mining chaos of the main branch.

The key is white listing IP addresses.

Can this be done?

This post is short and I have to go for the moment but I would really like opinions on how to make this project work.

Thanks.

[grondilu]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

 .  You are a local tyrant or something?

[MoonShadow]

This can be done, but we aren't going to help you do it.  If you try it, change your currency's name and start with an entirely new genesis block on a different port number and different IRC channel.

This is doomed to an epic failure, but you are welcome to try as long as you don't intefere with Bitcoin doing it. 

[koin]

This is doomed to an epic failure, but you are welcome to try as long as you don't intefere with Bitcoin doing it. 

Some other attempts:

 - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10278.9
    (see the post suggesting the instructions from Freecoin)
 - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9493.0

[markm]

Why don't you want to stop a miner from going crazy with a farm?

If you want CPU mining to work reasonably even just one miner using a GPU instead of a CPU is a kind of "going crazy" isn't it? I thought I'd read somehwere of GPU power being thousands of times faster at this than CPUs? So you would need over a thousand people using their CPU just to match one miner using one GPU?

Of course if you issue all the coins right in the genesis block instead of having them minted with each block the town council or the barter network organisers or whoever has a better ability to ensure the system doesn't get upset by new coins magically appearing from nowhere / anywhere and also there will be less incentive for someone to "go crazy with a farm". Instead of "going crazy" anyone with a bunch of GPUs can become a highly respected pillar of the community merely as a deterrent to attackers by having power in reserve ready to bring online at any moment if the difficulty is observed to be rising higher than one, or higher than whatever normal power-conserving level of diffficulty the town finds it needs to allow due to some of the participants not understanding exactly how to keep their node from processing too fast.

You might even be able to keep difficulty so low that when someone does a transaction they turn on processing on their node for a half hour or so so that their node can generate a block to contain that transaction, if not enough other people are currently already doing the same thing.

Any time the difficulty starts to climb, promptly start auditing everyone's connections to find out where the rogue processing is coming from, maybe also turning on the town's cyber-defense GPU-equipped unit that can all by itself match the power of all the CPUs of all the verified / authorised participants.

It would be lovely to work this out, because various blockchains already in existence face similar concerns. So far many of them have settled for all sharing just one machine using just one CPU to "mine" so that between the lot of them sharing that one CPU none of them have any worry about their difficulty climbing higher than one (1) and in fact it has turned out that by this means they also are not having to deal with 7200 new coins each day but far less than 7200 new coins each day. This means they also hopefully will not be facing the kind of complaints about early adopters getting too much of the pie that we keep seeing in these forums, because they are in fact keeping the issuing of new coins very low even compared to what just one CPU not sharing its power across many blockchains could achieve.

If you have access to people willing to dedicate only one CPU or less to "mining",  that could be great to co-operate with.

A lot of electricity could be conserved by having the majority of the available hashing power not actually in use during periods of not being under attack, so that any attacker would not be able to actually know just how much power they would be up against if they attacked until they actually do mount an attack.

-MarkM-

[TradersEdgeDice]

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

A town of 36,000 has a 0% chance of affecting bitcoin in any way, up to and including the name "bitcoin."

It is easier to sell the concept from scratch than it is to explain why bitcoin is over $8.00.

Seriously, cool your jets. Nobody is stepping on your turf. If I was planning to interfere with bitcoin, why would I tell you about it?  If telling you is part of your logical conclusion, you have epic Asperger's. 

Introducing cryptocurrency without the yakuza, Russian mafia or the CIA in the background can only help the main project.

Yes, I need to establish a genesis block and choose a different port, IRC channel etc., etc.,  etc.

I doubt I will get to 1000 miners.  My biggest concern is keeping the universe of miners in this town.  There won't be an incentive for a gpu farm like there is with bitcoin.  Is there a way to white list IP addresses?  If not, my second thought is to somehow limit mining to a pool.

It's a very low key operation.  It will be introduced through the barter site rather than a political statement about alternative currencies.

Why the hostility?

[error]

Why not use Bitcoin? A lot of people in that small town are going to be pissed off at you when they find out about the "real" Bitcoin.

[markm]

How is there no incentive for a GPU farm?

Even with game currencies valued by no-one outside the game GPU farms are a very real threat.

Why would anyone in your town who does have a GPU refrain from using it instead of or as well as their CPU?

Are you maybe not mining coins with each block?

Or are you valuing your coins very very very low, so low that even with a CPU they do not really cover the cost of electricty so even CPU mining will only be done by people who think of their electricity as free or maybe feel they are not using as much electricity as their landlord computed into their power-included rent so running a miner is a way to help get their money's worth instead of overpaying for their bundled electricity or who simply like the idea of donating electricity to the effort?

Even with no "real money" to be made by running a GPU farm I already see people trying to come up with ways to win games, win wars against other game nations in game wars, and so on by running a bunch of GPUs. It is hard to believe a town's teenagers, or even adult citizens, are going to refrain from making use of what GPUs they have on hand if by doing so they can grab more of the town's new barter credits than the Joneses next door.

Skeptics or cynics might even go so far as to suggest the reason you want to deliberately not rule out GPU farms is because you plan to use one yourself!

-MarkM-

[Vladimir]

Satoshi's little fortune interferes with sound sleep pattern of some noobs apparently...

[MoonShadow]

What I think that he is really looking to do is start a LETS system that is somewhat distributed, entirely digital and automatic.  Modifying Bitcoin is a good way to do this, because it's already pretty close to a LETS for the Internet as it is.  A blockchain for a LETS need not be secured in the same fashion, however.  There is no need for a currency limit if transactions are based upon mutual credit, nor any kind of currency distribution process as in Bitcoin.  The blockchain would only serve as a distributed ledger system for the LETS, and the difficulty would be largely irrelevent.

[Vladimir]

...
Any time the difficulty starts to climb, promptly start auditing everyone's connections to find out where the rogue processing is coming from, maybe also turning on the town's cyber-defense GPU-equipped unit that can all by itself match the power of all the CPUs of all the verified / authorised participants.
...

Now what will they do when someone rents and unleashes some awesome hashing power from me and others which would dwarf their GPU defences.

[markm]

...
Any time the difficulty starts to climb, promptly start auditing everyone's connections to find out where the rogue processing is coming from, maybe also turning on the town's cyber-defense GPU-equipped unit that can all by itself match the power of all the CPUs of all the verified / authorised participants.
...

Now what will they do when someone rents and unleashes some awesome hashing power from me and others which would dwarf their GPU defences.

That is why I am aiming at using games instead of local LETS systems as a way of starting up new blockchains.

I feel no need to defend a town's local LETS blockchain so won't rush to answer on behalf of such a blockchain.

On behalf of game currency blockchains though I suggest to players that they compare the price you charge for such massive hashing power to the price the game(s) charge for game currency and consider whether they would be better off in game currency by directly buying the currency instead of buying hashing power from you.

If they would not, the game currency is maybe being overpriced and should lower its price before someone does perform the arbitrage of buying your hashing power to apply  to the game-currency.

-MarkM- (Hey, did I just say in effect "let the market decide"? )

P.S. Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp. though should probably look into your pricing...

[smooth]

There won't be an incentive for a gpu farm like there is with bitcoin.

Of course there is.  

But maybe you can force mining to be dispersed in some way.  

Here's an idea:

Require miners to register with you, in person, with a photo ID.  Give each miner his own private key, publish the public keys where all the nodes can see them.  Modify the software so a miner has to sign a block with his private key, all other nodes can verify with a public key, limit the portion of blocks that can be signed by any individual ID over some time window, and reject the rest.




 

[markm]

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

All that does is create un-needed vulnerability.

The only reason to allow open season on mining is to quickly achieve a huge amount of hashing at a price that might well seem cheap to the originators of the system simply because they personally have no need plan or desire to ever hand over any goods or services of their own in return for the coins so they do not care who gets coins all they are really after is to convince someone somewhere - someone else, not themself - to hand over real goods or services in return for such coins.

You can in effect whitelist IP addresses that connect directly to you, but you cannot stop them from allowing more people you know nothing about from connecting to them.

Maybe you could run separate daemons, one per approved connection, each with its own copy of the blockchain, compare the difficulty on each of them to see if any of them are bringing more than one CPU worth of hashing to the task and if so disconnect them, then later connect all your daemons for a nightly clearing run kind of thing to resolve all those forks against each other to form one central blockchain containing all the transactions from all the chains that did not violate the one-CPU-power rule.

Here is another idea that might be better: run one GPU yourself for 36 days to generate as many coins as 36000 people using one CPU each would have generated, then give people the coins their CPU would have generated instead of giving them any ability to generate coins using their CPU.

In other words, avoid the whole can of worms about who generates the coins by generating them yourself and giving them out to anyone who you would have allowed to generate them had you taken the route of opening up the generating to the entire criminal underworld then tried to limit which of them were from your town.

-MarkM-

[torbank]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Awesome.

I was wondering when someone would try something like this.

Can't wait for First Nations or Native Reservations down in the states to get wind of Bitcoin.

[smooth]

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

[markm]

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

Transaction processing, yes, fine. The problems mostly arise when mining also mints coins. Leave out that minting of coins and all of a sudden you don't care whether the miners are in your town or anywhere else, who cares, anyone who wants to help secure the nework for you is welcome to do so, IF enough will do so to secure it against attackers.

Maybe the fixed address that minted coins go to would work best, if one of those addresses is the address of the Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp-or-Org.

That way the insurance body would always have plenty of coin ready to finance defence measures in the event of an attack, and attackers would have little incentive to mine other than if they thought they could achieve some attack other than simply mining more coins than the entire town's own citizens manage to mine.

-MarkM-

[FreeMoney]

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

But in this fork they have to trust a central entity to keep GPUs out. Might as well just trust that entity to keep the books.

[smooth]

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

But in this fork they have to trust a central entity to keep GPUs out. Might as well just trust that entity to keep the books.

Not if you take other measures to disperse hashing power on the network (as I mentioned earlier by requiring them to register).  If you limited the fraction of blocks any one miner is allowed to solve over time, it doesn't matter if they are using a GPU or not.  They can run a GPU for a small amount of time per day or a CPU for the entire day. Either way they are going to have the same amount of control over the network.

[casascius]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Basically, the people I am working with want to foster barter in the town.

If fostering barter is the goal, why not just print up some scrip or tokens?  The disadvantages of running a private Bitcoin network for this purpose far outweigh the advantages.  Trying to convert a town to using Bitcoins when the Bitcoin client is very much in its infancy, will be about as fruitless as trying to convince the existing Bitcoin community to switch to the "tonal" numbering system in pursuit of illusory advantages that appeal to nobody.

[markm]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Basically, the people I am working with want to foster barter in the town.

If fostering barter is the goal, why not just print up some scrip or tokens?  The disadvantages of running a private Bitcoin network for this purpose far outweigh the advantages.  Trying to convert a town to using Bitcoins when the Bitcoin client is very much in its infancy, will be about as fruitless as trying to convince the existing Bitcoin community to switch to the "tonal" numbering system in pursuit of illusory advantages that appeal to nobody.

All the more reason to not give them the client.

Tell them all about how bitcoin works, fine. Tell them to go use bitcoin itself if they want to get into the complicated techie stuff like the bitcoin daemon and client. Great, those ho do can even maybe earn barter-points by serving as local exchangers exchanging local barter points for global bitcoins and vice-versa.

But for the everyday normal citizen or merchant, have them use the town''s modified MyBitCoin site that interfaces onto the town's barter-point blockchain.

There *is* a usefulness in going with a blockchain even while a short-sighted observer might imagine a daabase based system would be as good, and that is so you are ready to open it up in 140 years or maybe even less as a fully P2P system.

(Also of course as an excuse to tell them all about how Bitcoin works so you can tell them go use real bitcoin if the way you are locally using the code currently lacks parts of the full bitcoin benefits that they feel are important enough to be worth going to real bitcoin for instead of using your local thing.)

-MarkM-

[cloud9]

If  a  community  has  a  shortage  of  cash,  ripplepay.com  is  an  excellent  barter/credit  exchange  if  there  are  no  shortage  of  goods  nor  talents.  Don't  know  about  the  anonymity  you  require  though,  because  is  a  reputation  system  where  your  credibility  means  everything.

[AntiVigilante]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Basically, the people I am working with want to foster barter in the town.

I think it's obvious that we cannot ride the coattails of the bitcoin project with the first mover BTC.  Too much chaos in the exchange rate.

One thing I would add to this fork is to control IP addresses that are allowed to mine.

I want to keep the difficulty low enough for CPU mining.  That means no random entries to the network.  Everything beyond mining is encouraged to be as anonymous as possible.

I cannot, and do not want, to stop a verified miner from going nuts with a farm.  I think it's highly unlikely that this project would suffer the same mining chaos of the main branch.

The key is white listing IP addresses.

Can this be done?

This post is short and I have to go for the moment but I would really like opinions on how to make this project work.

Thanks.

I do have a model on how to do this, with bitcoin no less.

[Sukrim]

Transaction processing, yes, fine. The problems mostly arise when mining also mints coins. Leave out that minting of coins and all of a sudden you don't care whether the miners are in your town or anywhere else, who cares, anyone who wants to help secure the nework for you is welcome to do so, IF enough will do so to secure it against attackers.

To implement such a system you would just need to do a "endgame scenario" with all 21 Million (or however many you want to have) BTC (or "towncoins") in the genesis block and miners only get income from transactions.

You then can in the beginning 100% make sure that the initial conversion rate stays stable (1 cent or 10 cents per genesis-towncoin for example) and then let the economy develop on it's own. This might also be beneficial to convince others in the town council etc. (as in the end you hand out something similar to gift tokens).

To gain a few coins every once in a while, ppl. can mine themselves and to cover your own operation costs you can also run a few dedicated mining rigs permanently to make sure you have at least enough hashing power for difficulty 1.


I only see problems for implementing a highly deflationatory currency that is also very limited in the beginning - and people might not like it that much too.
If they however can earn a little bit through transactions (where fees could be as high as 1 towncoin, depending on th initial conversion rate) and otherwise play a little bit with electronic money adoption might be much easier + smoother.

[TradersEdgeDice]

I don't want a centralized entity.  Lord knows what these people will do.  It's a seaside town where the preferred smoke is not tobacco.  :-) Anonymity is a at the top of the list.

Let me address some points that were written since the last time I checked in…

Why not use Bitcoin? A lot of people in that small town are going to be pissed off at you when they find out about the "real" Bitcoin.

I am an open source preacher.  Not hiding a thing.  If people would prefer to work in BTC that's great. I want nothing to do with telling people what to ask for an exchange for what they're offering.  I think, however, they would prefer to avoid official exchanges (like mtgox) for cash.  I think that is where digital currencies collide with governments.

But in this fork they have to trust a central entity to keep GPUs out. Might as well just trust that entity to keep the books.

I don't want to keep GPUs out as much as I want CPUs to stay in as long as possible. A big deterrent to hashing farms is the power company.  One of the most expensive in the country.  With 310 sunny days per year, I wouldn't be surprised if the miners we get attempt to use solar.  Nobody in the town works for ATI, newegg or the power company to miners will be advised not to do these organizations any favors -especially the power company.

Transaction processing, yes, fine. The problems mostly arise when mining also mints coins. Leave out that minting of coins and all of a sudden you don't care whether the miners are in your town or anywhere else, who cares, anyone who wants to help secure the nework for you is welcome to do so, IF enough will do so to secure it against attackers.

Maybe the fixed address that minted coins go to would work best, if one of those addresses is the address of the Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp-or-Org.

That way the insurance body would always have plenty of coin ready to finance defence measures in the event of an attack, and attackers would have little incentive to mine other than if they thought they could achieve some attack other than simply mining more coins than the entire town's own citizens manage to mine.

-MarkM-

Then it seems that letting the difficulty adjust itself to a set amount of coins per hour is indeed the best way to regulate this problem. Leaving the mining out if it also kills the incentive to verify all transactions.

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

If you are going to run the system yourself, just do an online bank with book entry.  Cheaper and easier.

The point of mining is to distribute the transaction processing where no one controls it and therefore everyone can trust it.

Right.  I don't want anyone to feel they have to trust me at all.  That's part of the appeal of P2P distributed verification. 

Online bank with book entry is neither cheaper nor easier.  That scenario also leaves the organizers highly liable to all kinds of nasty government behavior.

Awesome.

I was wondering when someone would try something like this.

Can't wait for First Nations or Native Reservations down in the states to get wind of Bitcoin.

Matter of time.  The wealth of reservations can vary dramatically.  Would they be better served with BTC as it is or implementing a variation as I'm doing? I am almost certain that there's nothing in the treaties to prevent this.  The BIA might even be compelled to fund some of the buildout.  I'd love to spend BTC at the seminole nation hardrock.  :-)  I think it would be a great thread to open up.

Of course there is. 

But maybe you can force mining to be dispersed in some way. 

Here's an idea:

Require miners to register with you, in person, with a photo ID.  Give each miner his own private key, publish the public keys where all the nodes can see them.  Modify the software so a miner has to sign a block with his private key, all other nodes can verify with a public key, limit the portion of blocks that can be signed by any individual ID over some time window, and reject the rest.

Haven't looked over the freecoin code yet.  How much modification are we talking about?

What I think that he is really looking to do is start a LETS system that is somewhat distributed, entirely digital and automatic.  Modifying Bitcoin is a good way to do this, because it's already pretty close to a LETS for the Internet as it is.  A blockchain for a LETS need not be secured in the same fashion, however.  There is no need for a currency limit if transactions are based upon mutual credit, nor any kind of currency distribution process as in Bitcoin.  The blockchain would only serve as a distributed ledger system for the LETS, and the difficulty would be largely irrelevent.

That's how I see it.  Thank you, creighto.

[AntiVigilante]

I think I can connect three systems for you:
Community-exchange.org a LETS type system for posting work.
"Do bit" or millcoin (.001 BTC) trading platform for lubricating the barter system.
Some kind of Bitcoin credit union.

I have a model just let me know, I'll write it up as a proposal.

[markm]

So why try to limit who can use it? If you open it up to the world then the townfolk, as earliest adopters, could bring a lot of wealth into the town as out of town people discover it and adopt it.

It would even have one advantage over bitcoin: an entire town that accepts it in return for real goods and services.

-MarkM-

[TradersEdgeDice]

I think I can connect three systems for you:
Community-exchange.org a LETS type system for posting work.
"Do bit" or millcoin (.001 BTC) trading platform for lubricating the barter system.
Some kind of Bitcoin credit union.

I have a model just let me know, I'll write it up as a proposal.

I'd be grateful to read your model and proposal.

So why try to limit who can use it? If you open it up to the world then the townfolk, as earliest adopters, could bring a lot of wealth into the town as out of town people discover it and adopt it.

It would even have one advantage over bitcoin: an entire town that accepts it in return for real goods and services.

-MarkM-

There's a lot to be said for organic growth.  The endgame scenario is too problematic.  Unrestricted mining is a problem we're all familiar with.  I think the official exchanges and easy speculation will defeat any alternative currency.  Printing it is a fool's game in the United States of America. 

It will be introduced here as a way to lubricate barter without relying FRNs.  If it spreads to nearby towns, that will be because of the advantage of being accepted first for real goods and services, and second, for the big idea, and far behind, for the technical aspect.

[Littleshop]

I want to fork the bitcoin code for a small town of 36,000 people.

Basically, the people I am working with want to foster barter in the town.

I think it's obvious that we cannot ride the coattails of the bitcoin project with the first mover BTC.  Too much chaos in the exchange rate.

One thing I would add to this fork is to control IP addresses that are allowed to mine.

I want to keep the difficulty low enough for CPU mining.  That means no random entries to the network.  Everything beyond mining is encouraged to be as anonymous as possible.

I cannot, and do not want, to stop a verified miner from going nuts with a farm.  I think it's highly unlikely that this project would suffer the same mining chaos of the main branch.

The key is white listing IP addresses.

Can this be done?

This post is short and I have to go for the moment but I would really like opinions on how to make this project work.

Thanks.

I just can not see how this is a good thing.  The person controlling the whitelist can then be subject to cheating by allowing friends (ones even outside the town) to mine.  With such a small community the mining being controlled would allow some to profit greatly from the creation of new coins.  There would be no impartial market based control of mining as there is with bitcoin.

Just set up a barter system between your town, or convince them to use bitcoin as is.

[error]

Wait, if you're trying to run a new block chain to avoid FRNs, why not just use Bitcoin? Nobody is forcing people to exchange Bitcoins for USD or vice versa.

[FreeMoney]

If  a  community  has  a  shortage  of  cash,  ripplepay.com  is  an  excellent  barter/credit  exchange  if  there  are  no  shortage  of  goods  nor  talents.  Don't  know  about  the  anonymity  you  require  though,  because  is  a  reputation  system  where  your  credibility  means  everything.

How can this be? Are they running out of pennies?

[Sukrim]

I don't want a centralized entity.  Lord knows what these people will do.  It's a seaside town where the preferred smoke is not tobacco.  :-) Anonymity is a at the top of the list.

They could pay in cash...? 

If you want to create something exactly like Bitcoin, it might be more useful to just use Bitcoin itself.

To me it just seems YOU want to be an "early adopter". In 36.000 ppl one or two will be smart enough to google how bitcoin works, invest a few bucks in GPUs and mine the sh*t out of that village! As you could be happy to have a few hundred participants mining at home, if they only CPU mine, a single strong GPU miner might even be able to do 50% attacks...

Sorry, but first mining the towncoins out of thin air (and algorithms) doesn't seem very intelligent/useful to me. Besides there is NO anonymous way to guarantee that only townfolk have "mining licenses".

You could do something similar as the bitbill people did: Send batches of towncoins to addresses and print their private keys on cards or something. These then can be easily used to create a wallet and withdraw the money from there and also anonymously traded before. This would again look very similar to an already known concept (gift cards that are accepted in multiple local stores) but be more anonymous and if someone wants to, they even can mine along and earn a few towncoins from transaction fees.

It will be hard enough to convince even the town council (or however your hippie commune calls it ) of doing an experiment like this, adoption might be even more risky. The more you can relate to known models, the better I guess.

[TradersEdgeDice]

I don't want a centralized entity.  Lord knows what these people will do.  It's a seaside town where the preferred smoke is not tobacco.  :-) Anonymity is a at the top of the list.

They could pay in cash...? 

If you want to create something exactly like Bitcoin, it might be more useful to just use Bitcoin itself.

To me it just seems YOU want to be an "early adopter". In 36.000 ppl one or two will be smart enough to google how bitcoin works, invest a few bucks in GPUs and mine the sh*t out of that village! As you could be happy to have a few hundred participants mining at home, if they only CPU mine, a single strong GPU miner might even be able to do 50% attacks...

Sorry, but first mining the towncoins out of thin air (and algorithms) doesn't seem very intelligent/useful to me. Besides there is NO anonymous way to guarantee that only townfolk have "mining licenses".

You could do something similar as the bitbill people did: Send batches of towncoins to addresses and print their private keys on cards or something. These then can be easily used to create a wallet and withdraw the money from there and also anonymously traded before. This would again look very similar to an already known concept (gift cards that are accepted in multiple local stores) but be more anonymous and if someone wants to, they even can mine along and earn a few towncoins from transaction fees.

It will be hard enough to convince even the town council (or however your hippie commune calls it ) of doing an experiment like this, adoption might be even more risky. The more you can relate to known models, the better I guess.

I would use bitcoin but there's a little problem with the numbers…

Approximately six million btc at $8.00 for 10,000 people.  I have not been able to convince one person that that is not a scam in progress.

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

I don't mind anybody disagreeing with the merits of the idea but to accuse me of dishonesty is completely out of line.  That kind of attitude is just going to egg people on for truly forking this in the way that mambo was buried by joomla. 

"Mine the shit out of that village." Is that your bitcoin rapist threat? Are you 12?

Does anybody in the audience really fault me for exploring limiting *who* can mine in our town with morons like that on the loose?

To repeat: nobody in this town owes the power company any favors.  Nobody in this town owes ATI any favors.  Nobody in this town owes newegg/provantage/tigerdirect/etc any favors.

Furthermore, nobody in this town needs to share their local currency with luminary organizations like the [$ethnic_group] mafia or [$country] intelligence services.

Maybe I will do this straight bitcoin rules on a new chain under a different name.  I don't know yet.  I'm exploring the implications of changing certain points.  That's the point of this thread.

So you love bitcoin under 0.3.  Congratulations.  Some people don't.  I happen to like it quite a bit as is but it simply does not fit for the group of people I'm working with and I need to keep things a little less chaotic than the main project.

[FreeMoney]

You can try whatever you want. But something like bitcoin with an entity that excludes people is not anything like bitcoin at all.

[MoonShadow]

Approximately six million btc at $8.00 for 10,000 people.  I have not been able to convince one person that that is not a scam in progress.

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

You're really better off going with an electronic LETS system. 

[AntiVigilante]

Approximately six million btc at $8.00 for 10,000 people.  I have not been able to convince one person that that is not a scam in progress.

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

You're really better off going with an electronic LETS system. 

Which operates entirely on people forgiving the initial debt which gets passed around like a hot potato. Yes it's time based which is relevant, but it also isolates.

I got involved in LETS type things and the service development speed pales in comparison to bitcoin.

I think I have a few interested individuals looking forward to "towncoins". After tomorrow expect a formal proposal. The beast is coming down.

[MoonShadow]

Approximately six million btc at $8.00 for 10,000 people.  I have not been able to convince one person that that is not a scam in progress.

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

You're really better off going with an electronic LETS system. 

Which operates entirely on people forgiving the initial debt which gets passed around like a hot potato. Yes it's time based which is relevant, but it also isolates.

Isn't that the point of a localized barter currency?

I got involved in LETS type things and the service development speed pales in comparison to bitcoin.

There is a very good reason for that.  The potential market for a localized currency of any sort is, by intent, limited.  A bitcoin derivitive isn't going to change that.

I think I have a few interested individuals looking forward to "towncoins". After tomorrow expect a formal proposal. The beast is coming down.

Be careful what you wish for.

[Insti]

Another "just use bitcoin" suggestion:

You buy 1 bitcoin and donate it for the entire town to use and just trade everything in your town at around 0.000001 (or some other low value.)

If you really wanted to restrict it you could release a modified client that would only honor transactions based on the "town origin coin" (but I don't think this is a good idea - it brings back the scam angle.)

[markm]

Since it is so very easy to start a new blockchain, maybe you just start one up and have everyone use it with the -noirc switch or even disable IRC entirely in the cline (or in the config file if using freecoin client for convenience of configuring in config files instead of by hacking code).

Then if someone *does* let some foreigner connect to them, who lets more foreigners connect to *them* and so on, just issue new clients to the townsfolk using a new blockchain, leaving the foreigners to honour the now-foreign chain if they wish, and arrange among the locals to get their balances in the new chain set up right, accepting old coin from local on site at physical exchanges in town.

After a few iterations maybe foreigners will either have fun with the chains they hijacked or get tired of hijacking chains that no-one honours after they have been hijacked.

-MarkM-

[AntiVigilante]

Another "just use bitcoin" suggestion:

You buy 1 bitcoin and donate it for the entire town to use and just trade everything in your town at around 0.000001 (or some other low value.)

If you really wanted to restrict it you could release a modified client that would only honor transactions based on the "town origin coin" (but I don't think this is a good idea - it brings back the scam angle.)

Another idea I'm working on Glad to know I'm not the only one who understands 1 internet is worth 1000 internets.

Since it is so very easy to start a new blockchain, maybe you just start one up and have everyone use it with the -noirc switch or even disable IRC entirely in the cline (or in the config file if using freecoin client for convenience of configuring in config files instead of by hacking code).

Then if someone *does* let some foreigner connect to them, who lets more foreigners connect to *them* and so on, just issue new clients to the townsfolk using a new blockchain, leaving the foreigners to honour the now-foreign chain if they wish, and arrange among the locals to get their balances in the new chain set up right, accepting old coin from local on site at physical exchanges in town.

After a few iterations maybe foreigners will either have fun with the chains they hijacked or get tired of hijacking chains that no-one honours after they have been hijacked.

-MarkM-

With a series of water level locks you can go to and fro from lake to ocean and back.

A global reasonable system for negotiating different difficulties would not only mean there are no "foreign" blocks but it would mean the path to BTC = $100 by the productivity of the town.

The system of locks also results in bootstrapping / kickstarts caused by vendors trying to negotiate dollar value in mainline blockchains versus productivity in townchains.

Again it comes down to whether mining pools merely hide from fiat insanity or grow community.

I have a model that can work with very little change in the client/daemon. In fact I would suggest not even touching the client/daemon if possible and just adding a plugin. Pools who want to confirm the subnets can add it. The distribution can grow rather than force any philosophy on anyone.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Just turn them on to bitcoins ... $8, $0.8, $0.08, $80 ... who cares what the exchange rate is?

It is a decimal point and you are on a computer, it doesn't matter what the exchange rate is, only that it CAN be exchanged ... and what is this "mining chaos" you are obsessing about,  

Humboldt County then eh? nice countryside.

[Sukrim]

I don't care about being an early adopter.  I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency.  This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.

Well, then

"Mine the shit out of that village." Is that your bitcoin rapist threat? Are you 12?

Does anybody in the audience really fault me for exploring limiting *who* can mine in our town with morons like that on the loose?

To repeat: nobody in this town owes the power company any favors.  Nobody in this town owes ATI any favors.  Nobody in this town owes newegg/provantage/tigerdirect/etc any favors.

But anybody in this town could just use their kid's computer to potentially gain a lot of local money or screw with the whole system, if it is a bitcoin fork with money generation per new block.
If you start limiting mining, you start harming your local economy + you still risk mining pool attacks (if only a hashrate of 5 MH/s is "allowed", let 60 miners run on one GPU and create a pool). Bitcoin is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to mine, limiting this can have severe issues!

Again, there is also no real way to make sure only town people are mining (and if mining only has very small rewards it doesn't even matter!). IP adresses won't work, as you can go online with mobile phos too (and they usually are even NATed). Selling mining certificates (however you implement that into bitcoin...) makes mining non-anonymous again and harms your network security (and still certificate holders can form pools to attack the system).

Furthermore, nobody in this town needs to share their local currency with luminary organizations like the [$ethnic_group] mafia or [$country] intelligence services.

Maybe I will do this straight bitcoin rules on a new chain under a different name.  I don't know yet.  I'm exploring the implications of changing certain points.  That's the point of this thread.

With straight BTC rules you favor early adopters and high hashrate miners far more than people who trade with that "money" initially.
This is intentionally with BTC to make sure the network kicks off with a secure hash rate until enough money is in the system to really start an economy (which is currently happening as mining gets harder and harder + ppl start to sell stuff for BTC instead.)
BTC itself has a huge inflation initially (the first 1000 BTC become only 50% of all BTC after just 20 blocks!) which might also scare people away.

Right now you can easily get a fairly secure hashrate via GPU mining and what you wnat to have is I think a quickly working money system, not a bootstrapping economy, right?


In the end, if you want to have something VERY similar to BTC, use BTC - and if you want to have something that just uses a blockchain, make sure that you do NOT have to limit participating miners in any way artificially.

[AntiVigilante]

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Drop the reward according to a stretchy rule applied to difficulty ratios and there can be no take overs.

[Sukrim]

As far as I understood, difficulty 1 blocks would yield the most money and the higher difficulty gets, the lower the payout?

This means the more secure the network gets, the fewer money is produced (if I understand you correctly).

Also on-off attacks are possible (mining a lot for ~10 days weeks, waiting 3-4 weeks (as the next round will take MUCH longer) and mining a lot again) as well as supply shortening attacks (drive up difficulty so nearly no new money is produced after you've mined a lot of money via on-off attacks).

This would again make towncoins quite unstable and trust can be lost very easily.

[sacarlson]

Sounds like the LETS model might work here and maybe using the Freecoin newchain as the method of tracking and distribution of the LETS model.  If you need help with Freecoin setup I would be glad to help.   I guess you would still need some central site as the LETS has to start the initial distribution, but could continue operation even if the central site went down.  Or just manualy have a distribution point from some trusted party or group.  And as far as Sukrim is saying about attacks that make development of money more difficult, my model with WEEDS creates all the  coins that will ever be produced in the fist 50 blocks in it's trial case it produced 10million coins in 50 blocks and no more after.  then you distribute initial loans from your central point and continued distribution continues on it's own.  It's all ajustuble in Freecoin for ajustable inflation

[torbank]

If you run it over a VPN it would add an extra layer of security.

[FinShaggy]

Working on Starting a Bitcoin town here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=216139.0

[Sukrim]

This thread was about something different, necroing it was not really needed!

[FinShaggy]

This thread was about something different, necroing it was not really needed!

Well, it is the same idea. I figured since this project never seemed to get completed, anyone still interested can read about a newer similar project.

[ISAWHIM]

You fail to see the point, if your intentions are this...

1: Use overly-priced CPU that requires TONS of electricity to MINE to create a WORTHLESS coin that you intend to GIVE AWAY for a BARTER-ITEM.
2: Limit those who can participate, to being the ONES WITH THE FASTEST CPU, that WASTES THE LEAST POWER.

You will not be able to control any "pooling", which would hide the mining-tools. Thus, you would have to MANIPULATE/CONTROL the market/mining, to people YOU BELIEVE deserve the coins they mined...

Here is what you want to do...

1: Make a coin that represents a individual "offering" of a bartered item. This simply requires a "bank" system to "accept" that JOE gave SUE x-coins worth of things. (But now you are back to money. Thus, not a barter.) SUE is the one who decides what JOE gets for coins, not YOU.
2: JOE should be able to give those coins to SUE for the GOODS that he gave her. (But that makes the coin useless, without any "value". JOE would have to get LESS than what he gave to SUE, or SUE did not make anything, she just wasted his time in the process, and SUE still has no food in the end, only her worthless coins back. If she KEPT some food, thus, giving JOE less food for the coins then SUE made money/value/coin.)

Thus, what is the point? You just like wasting electricity, thus, loosing value with every coin you make, giving DOLLARS to the power-company, instead of to those who are bartering? You want them to constantly loose, the more they trade?

Why are they getting coins? They just give stuff to the person doing nothing... then have to spend them on what... electricity?

You do realize "bartering" is a taxable "gain", right... Only you have to pay taxes on the "value" that the IRS thinks is the value, which is MSRP, not "Actual traded value". Only unprepared food can be bartered without taxes, because it can be SOLD without taxes. (Thus, you are just creating more waste.)

Do you work for the power company? Is that why you want this horrible system in place?